8-foot alligator found lurking in attic during home inspection in North Carolina
An inspector went into the attic of a Wilmington, North Carolina, home to see if the new development had any code violations.
Instead, he found an 8-foot alligator lurking in the shadows.
“Have you ever seen an alligator in an attic?” county officials asked in a Facebook post.
The inspector, Dean Brown, said the builders arrived at the home on March 6 and noticed mud in the house, but they didn’t know where it came from, New Hanover County spokesperson Alex Riley told McClatchy News.
Riley said the site foreman had the mud cleaned up and that they thought someone had come in over the weekend “possibly goofing around” and didn’t see the alligator.
It was another day-and-a-half before Brown arrived to inspect the home, WECT reported.
“I go in, start looking around, it’s three stories to get to the attic. And when I walk up to the attic, I didn’t think nothing of it, I turned the corner, I’m looking around at the work, and I noticed what I thought was a fake, stuffed gator of some sort,” Brown told the outlet. “And then I started continuing doing my job, then I looked back at him and realized he was moving and breathing.”
Brown said he thinks a door might have been left open at the home over the weekend, and since the property backs up to wetlands, that was probably how the alligator got into the house, according to Riley and WECT.
But, it’s still a mystery how it got to the third-story attic.
Riley described the house as not having a “traditional attic,” meaning there wasn’t a ladder pulled down from the ceiling to access the space. Instead, the attic was more of an unfinished third story that the homeowner could one day turn into a completed space, and a full set of stairs leads up to the space.
“The workers having lunch sitting the next room — I asked them to leave,” Brown told WWAY. “They kind of laughed at me when I told them why, and I said, ‘Well, you might want to look because there’s an alligator in the attic.’”
Riley said animal control was called, and the gator was safely removed from the house.
“Thank you to our officials who work hard to make sure buildings and homes are #SafeHealthySecure for our residents – and ‘gator free!’” the county said in the Facebook post.
