Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of apartments turns out to be a slug

Posted by robin_reala 9/8/2025

Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of apartments turns out to be a slug(www.theguardian.com)

273 points | 152 commentspage 2

rsynnott 9/12/2025|

Okay, I can see that maybe this could be a funny story in the local paper, but it's quite strange that it ended up as _international news_.

Zobat 9/12/2025||

I think it's quirky enough to be amusing, maybe even better that it's from "another" country.

Pre internet age I worked in a store where one "unlucky" guy out of reflex asked the king of Sweden for identification when buying with a credit card (fully aware of who was in front of him, it was a toy store and the king used to shop there once a year for Christmas). A colleague told the story at dinner, the colleagues father worked at an evening news paper and wrote a small blurb about it. The following two days news papers from (literally) around the world tried to get an interview with the guy.

Anything can become international news.

stavros 9/12/2025||

Hey, we can't just go around accepting credit cards without ID from anyone who just happens to look like the king!

usrusr 9/12/2025||

It's regional "news" to me, but I have no doubt that I would not have heard of it if it had not somehow eddied it's way onto hn.

Regional media is dead, it's attention bandwidth has been taken up by spacially distributed, but otherwise super narrow opinion bubbles. And unfortunately I don't see any substitute for the kind of local information that we should have, like communal level politics. For a while it looked as if Facebook might survive filling that gap, but that's not really what happened.

petercooper 9/12/2025||

Over the years, I've had a few instances of spiders causing a related issue with our Ring doorbell camera. Like getting a notification of someone at the front door in the middle of the night, then you load it up and a giant spider is just sat right on the lens. Never had any bell presses, but I guess in this case it's one of those conducting plates.

adityaathalye 9/12/2025||

Sadly it is not a new species, otherwise what a name it could have slagged...

Nacktschneckecus Klingelstreichus

Also mysterious... why did nobody just... walk downstairs to look? Use them peepers? At least we know no software engineers are to blame. Along with the slug, we are the one group most reluctant to walk.

lexicality 9/12/2025|

> It kept ringing even as we telephoned and despite the fact no one could be seen at the door.

> Together residents and police discovered the slug

they did?

stonemetal12 9/12/2025|||

If they could tell no one is there why didn't they ring the electrician rather than the cops? Doorbell going off? No one there? Must be crazy invisible teens next door, not a short in the doorbell.

lexicality 9/13/2025||

Maybe Bavarian cops double as the town ghostbusters?

stavros 9/12/2025|||

It sounds like they called the police first before going down to check.

eptcyka 9/12/2025||

I had a similar experience. It was a dark summer night, 03:00 o'clock. Me and my partner were semi-asleep when suddenly a loud noise from the kitchen wakes us up. It sounds eerily electro-mechanical. And then some seconds later, it happens again. And again. And again. We had no pets, no one else living with us, so we were concerned someone had broken into our apartment in the middle of the night. I mustered up the courage to enter the kitchen. There are no people there, not even a small animal. I turn on the lights and confirm that. But I see the lid of our bin is open. It was a stupid purchase from costco, this household bin with an automated lid that used a depth sensor. Turns out, there was a slug walking all over the sensor. This is how we figured out we had a big hole somewhere under the kitchen furnishings that was a source of slugs. We moved away in less than a year, but boy was it not fun to think about the slimy mess that may have been left on the countertops.

dingdongditchme 9/12/2025||

I went through several emotions reading this article.

It has to be said, that I probably have the habit of most people: skim the title, skip to the comments, skim the article, skip back to the comments, and maybe if I am intrigued enough (as I was this time) read the article.

Well, the more I skipped back and forth the funnier it became. Realized it wasn't the UK started trying to find that abandoned feral children apartment and what not. Then I decided to the read the whole article when a depressing thought mixed with indignation hit me.

The article reads like the following llm prompt: "translate this article from BILD to english make it short and funny" voilá. I still hold the Guardian in a little higher regard than other online media, but this ended up being a small gut punch. But I had fun, thanks chatgpt.

firefoxd 9/12/2025||

If the slug violates the terms of release, there is a DIY Perks solution for that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oAA9nCqNfR4

koolba 9/11/2025||

> At first they had suspected the so-called klingelstreich (bell prank), a sometimes popular pastime among German youths.

Does German sound funny to everybody or just the English speaking world?

flowerthoughts 9/12/2025||

Probably in large part because all after WW2, German has been used exclusively when making fun of a certain dictator, in English. You've been taught that it's funny, if you're in the Western world.

Of course, before the radio, making fun of languages couldn't spread that quickly, so German was probably the first language to lose a war (or two) after globalization had started.

kragen 9/12/2025||

I don't think that's it; the usual stereotypes about Hitler and Nazis is that they were brutal, evil, and demanding, which in fact they were, not that they were silly, ridiculous, and goofy. If German sounds funny to English speakers, it's in spite of WWII associations, not because of them.

I've thought about this question a lot, and I think the answer comes from the history of English as a creole (or nearly so), consisting of a Germanic substrate being gradually displaced by a Romance prestige dialect, as the nobility all spoke dialects of Old French after the Norman Conquest. Moreover, even after that period, French was the language of diplomacy, while Latin was the language of academia and, until Henry VIII, the Church. Newton published Principia Mathematica in Latin, as was the well-established practice, and for generations studying at Harvard required learning Latin (and Greek) first. English's propensity for accepting loanwords rather than calquing them as is usual in Chinese and German has given us a large vocabulary of Latin words for use in formal contexts. New German loanwords, bu contrast, have largely come in through Yiddish, a language of desperately poor immigrants: schmuck, for example.

So it's common to have synonym pairs in which the Germanic term is informal or vulgar, while the Romance term is a formal term, sometimes an inkhorn word. Sour:acid, stuff:material, fuck:copulate, piss:urinate, cunt:vagina, cock:penis, prick:penis, shit:defecate, want:desire, fart:flatulence, balls:testicles, turd:excrement, everyday:quotidian, men:personnel, manly:virile, worldly:mundane, motherly:maternal, house:residence, big:grand, night:nocturnal, twilight:crepuscular, ass:posterior, better:ameliorate, schmuck:prepuce, water:aquatic, water:irrigate, king:monarch, armpit:axilla, cow:bovine, dog:canine, spit:saliva, rot:decay, whore:prostitute, tit:mammary, young:immature, worm:larva, enough:sufficient, grow:develop, sick:infirm, eye:ocular, think:cogitate, reckon:calculate, and so on. Pairs in the other direction are so rare I can't think of one, though I'm sure some must exist. There are cases in this list where a formal Germanic word exists, such as "breast" and "buttocks", but I can't think of a more informal Latinate synonym in those cases.

"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits," which got Carlin arrested in Milwaukee, is Germanic from beginning to end, even "suck". So is Lenny Bruce's list, even though "ass" and "balls" have cognates in Romance languages.

All the most taboo words in English except "nigger" are Germanic, and the taboo on "nigger" is recent enough that it's shaped by quite different history—but note that English speakers, to convert the Spanish negro "naygro" into a deprecating term, assimilated it to a more typically Germanic phonetic structure, ending it in a syllabic coda that is common in German and prohibited in French, Spanish, and Italian.

(To be fair, "twat" is another possible exception; nobody knows where it comes from. Although a Latin origin is improbable—literacy in Classical Rome was sufficiently broad that we know the word "landīca"—there could easily be some unattested Occitan or Sicilian word from which we get "twat", even if it sounds Germanic phonologically.)

And there's an established idiomatic way to dismiss something by reduplicating a word, the second time replacing the onset of its first syllable with the characteristically Germanic onset cluster "schm-" as a form of ridicule: "Police, schmolice!"

As a result, to Anglophone ears, German (both phonetically and in its recognizable vocables) sounds like an over-the-top vulgar version of English with words that sound a lot like "schmuckrotfart". 'What do you mean, the word for "oxygen" is "sour stuff"?'

So I suspect that German sounding silly and foolish is particular to English speakers.

koolba 9/12/2025||

This is a fantastic explanation.

kragen 9/12/2025||

Unfortunately I can't edit it further (perhaps due to having said "fuck", "Hitler", and "nigger" in a single comment) but I need to add that "crap" turns out to come from Latin by way of Old French.

Also, this page is fantastic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yid...

ahartmetz 9/12/2025|||

By the way, The German words in Yiddish are not bastardized standard German, but bastardized Pfälzisch, basically the dialect where I grew up. "Gefilde Fis[c]h" is how one would pronounce "Gefüllter Fisch" there, etc.

In the middle ages, the Mainz-Worms-Speyer region was the center of Jewish life in Germany.

I think I even found a wrong explanation on that Wikipedia page, simply by knowing Pfälzisch: A "Schnook" is a housefly. It doesn't match the Yiddish meaning that well, but it's the exact same word.

kragen 9/12/2025||

Hmm! I wonder if you can correct it.

kragen 9/12/2025|||

(The above second comment is also edit-locked, but at least at the moment this one isn't, even an hour-plus later, so evidently it wasn't "landīca" that triggered the logic, despite being by far the most offensive term in the whole comment.)

My wife, a native speaker of Spanish who doesn't speak German, reports that to her ears German sounds angry rather than silly.

NobodyNada 9/13/2025||

For what it's worth, your initial comment showed for me as dead (i.e. shadowbanned) until I vouched for it (within an hour or so after you posted it). It would appear you managed to trip some filters with this thread :)

kragen 9/15/2025||

Thanks!

pavel_lishin 9/12/2025|||

Wait 'til you see Dutch.

Mordisquitos 9/12/2025||

We hebben een probleem.

breakingcups 9/12/2025||

We hebben een serieus* probleem.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-hebben-een-serieus-problee...

decimalenough 9/12/2025|||

A nacktschneckelich Crimespree like this is no Laughingmatter.

hcs 9/12/2025|||

There ver zwei Slugs, valking down der Straße, und von vas assaulted

fsckboy 9/12/2025||

slugs worry about getting a-salted

aitchnyu 9/12/2025|||

Two ape babies with sign language education invented "waterbird" on their own when they saw a duck. English speakers should have more compound words.

wan888888 9/12/2025|||

Wait till you see Swiss-German

English vs. German vs. Swiss-German Nut vs. Nuss vs. Nüssli Mess vs. Durcheinander vs. Chrüsimüsi Rascal vs. Lausbub vs. Glünggi Chicken vs. Huhn vs. Güggeli

scns 9/12/2025||

T-Shirt > T-Shirt > Libli (Leibchen in German)

pessimizer 9/12/2025|||

We think German sounds too direct, and it makes us laugh. If it were serious and important, it would be in French.

coldtea 9/12/2025|||

It mostly sounds authoritative, unemotional, and sadistic.

robin_reala 9/12/2025||

You’ve been watching too many WW2 films.

coldtea 9/12/2025||

I've been having actual WW2 Nazis occupy my country and kill family back in the day. Not everybody gets their history from movies.

But I'm talking about their regular everyday speaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghRKZRcxeI4

stavros 9/12/2025|||

I've had Germans kill family too, but the video above is a non-native German speaker making fun of German words. I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language to hear spoken, but that video isn't evidence.

coldtea 9/12/2025||

No, but it's a funny reminder of how it's perceived. It's not supposed to be evidence, nor I linked it as if it was some scientific proof settling the matter.

Basically captures that part you said "I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language".

stavros 9/12/2025||

For me, Dutch is even worse. Turkish I also dislike, for some reason, I think because of the throaty "l" sounds.

Sorry, Dutch and Turkish friends.

coldtea 9/12/2025||

Dutch is kind of like fake-english sounding to me, but not as harsh as German.

Turkish does have some harshness.

stavros 9/12/2025||

Whaaat, every second sound in Dutch is a throaty "ch", as that's the sound their "r" makes! It's there all the time.

dpassens 9/12/2025|||

You... you don't actually think we talk like that, do you?

coldtea 9/12/2025||

I don't have to think how Germans speak there's no shortage of Germans passing around these parts.

That's how it sounds in everyone's ears, in countries with more melodic languages like Spanish or French.

(It's not even the pronunciation overplayed in the video for comedic effect, many words are already threatening sounding by themselves, just the letters on page invoke either threat or bureaucracy).

furyofantares 9/12/2025||

Imagine not speaking English and reading "ding dong ditch".

zahlman 9/12/2025|||

Or, for that matter, speaking English fluently and not being from whatever part of the US it is that that idiom is specific to.

manarth 9/12/2025||||

Imagine learning English in a country without that idiom, and reading it. Not to mention "knock down ginger"!

jimnotgym 9/12/2025|||

My wife and I grew up about 10 miles apart. She knew those phrases, I didn't. Why? She lived in a town, I lived in the country. Playing that game where I grew up would have been pretty unproductive. Walk a mile>Open gate>dog barks as you walk up drive>farmer comes out and recognises you>says Hello x...

stavros 9/12/2025|||

Yeah, knock down ginger was the one I went "wtf?" on, for sure.

Dilettante_ 9/12/2025|||

"Please to not be ditching your ding dong in front of peoples houses"

p0w3n3d 9/12/2025||

OMG I've been telling a joke about a slug that rings a bell. This used to be so unreal

throw310822 9/12/2025|

A joke about a slug? That rings a bell.

gitaarik 9/12/2025||

To me it doesn't, tell the joke!

looperhacks 9/12/2025||

A man opens a door after the bell rang. Outside is a snail, asking if they can use the bathroom. Annoyed, the man picks up the snail and throws it back to the street. A few weeks later, it rings again - when the man opens the door, the snail asks "what the hell was that just now?"

... That's German humor for you

Dilettante_ 9/12/2025|||

>German humor

To be fair, the joke scans better in german, where "snail" is something you call someone who is being slow, and the Snail will often appear in jokes as the archetypal "slow" character, like the clever fox or the wise owl or the dumb blonde.

p0w3n3d 9/12/2025|||

Almost the same in Polish. But the beginning was different - a man was talking up the staircase when he noticed a snail on the stair railing and flicked it so that it fell down 3 storeys"

stronglikedan 9/12/2025||

I have a spider named Billy (Silly Billy) that lives behind my doorbell and occasionally sets off the motion sensors when he ventures out. Thankfully, mine is still the physical push button, so he hasn't managed to ring it yet.

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