Queens Couple Captures Pants-less Prowler On Nest Home Security Camera

A pants-less man recently broke into a Queens home while its owners vacationed in Florida, apparently just wanting to root around a bit without anyone interrupting.

Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how comfortable you feel with watching a bottomless intruder have his way with your home while you watch from a thousand miles away—Marie and Andy Katsihtis had installed Nest security cameras throughout their Bayside house. Last week, as they conducted a routine, remote review of the camera footage, they noticed that one of the cameras had been obstructed. Unsettled, the couple took a closer look at the history, and discovered that an intruder had been prowling their halls in his underwear.

"It was almost like a scene from 'The Ring' where you're approaching out of the water, it was really surreal to me and unreal," Marie told WABC. I don't remember that scene, myself—the one where the stringy ghost girl climbs out of her very haunted well??—but because WABC published the footage, I can confirm that watching it imparts a distinctly bizarre feeling, because why is this adult man crawling around on the floor like a diapered baby? And why did he make his job appreciably more difficult by shrouding his head and shoulders in a tangly fabric trap?

The sheet, as you may have guessed, served as a cover for the camera: In the video, you can see the man bumble up the stairs on his hands and knees, rising gingerly to his feet to throw his makeshift cape over the Nest device. "And then from that point on, we don't know where he went inside the house," Andy told WABC.

Because the burglar wore a mask and bedclothes—but not, and I can't emphasize this enough, any pants at all—the Katsihtises could identify neither his face, nor his motives. But the couple was rattled to return home and find absolutely nothing disturbed. They suspect the man entered their yard through an unlocked gate, then power-tooled his way through a basement window. Yet he meticulously repositioned the decor items on that windowsill when he made his exit, taking nothing with him when he left. Police are reportedly investigating nonetheless, because as WABC points out, even if the half-naked man didn't rob the couple, he still stole something from them: "Their security in their very own home."

Andy also said that "every cop that [they] talked to has said, 'I've never seen anything like this,'" but in fact, bottomless burglars do surface from time to time: On the severe end of things, the Golden State Killer sometimes shed his pants when breaking into victims' homes, as did this man who tried to creep into a Waffle House through the restaurant's ceiling. (For less dastardly purposes, I hope.)

Meanwhile, in Irving, Texas, home security cameras captured a fully clothed criminal drilling his way into an apartment through the front door. And in Vallejo, California, a woman recently checked her camera footage to find that a man in a red hoodie had been sneaking through her house, checking in on her slumbering children before stealing her electronics.

Sometimes these interlopers make their presence known, but sometimes they just slink quietly around while we sleep. Just think of all the pants-less miscreants who went undetected before WiFi-enabled home security came into existence!