Woman wakes up to find drunk man passed out in a dog bed next to her 150-pound mastiff

A homeowner in Waukesha, Wis., started the new year with the fright of her life when she woke up on Jan. 1 to find a strange man fast asleep on her living room floor — with her so-called guard dog snuggled up right next to him.

“Normally when somebody walks by or somebody comes in the house, he does a lot of barking,” Lynn Sarver told local ABC affiliate WISN of Benton, her 150-pound mastiff. But for some reason, Benton was off his game in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, when the stranger, heavily intoxicated after a night of partying, stumbled into the house through an unlocked door and curled up in the dog bed. Because of Benton’s size, he uses a twin mattress as a bed.

At about 5:15 a.m., Sarver — who had fallen asleep on the couch watching television — awoke to discover the intruder passed out just a few feet away, with Benton sleeping partially on top of him. The man had even taken off his shoes and placed his glasses and wallet on the mattress, according to local NBC affiliate WTMJ.

“I was a little disoriented to see that because he kind of looked like maybe he was my son, but my son was out of town,” Sarver told WTMJ.

A startled Sarver and her roommate made a beeline to the kitchen to grab a knife and call the police.

But officers were quickly able to assess the situation: The 24-year-old man lived two doors down and had been too drunk to realize he’d walked into the wrong house at about 3:30 a.m.

“It seemed like he was just an inebriated, nice young man, and it was an honest mistake,” Sarver told WISN, seeming to take the whole thing in stride, though she admitted, “Seeing somebody sleeping with my dog was … weird.”

“He looks like a big, mean dog, doesn’t he?” Sarver, a registered nurse, joked to WISN while explaining that Benton is a Boerboel, a type of South African mastiff that’s notorious for its overly friendly demeanor. “They’re known for letting people in the house, and not out,” she told Fox 6. While Benton certainly lived up to that reputation that morning, the American Kennel Club describes Boerbels as “intimidating but discerning guardians of home and family who learned their trade while protecting remote South African homesteads from ferocious predators.”

The intruder, who Sarver said was “very apologetic,” told WTMJ he was so intoxicated he has no memory of anything that happened after midnight, and that he later found out he was dropped off at Sarver’s front door. Sarver told Fox 6 that the entire incident did inspire one unexpected New Year’s resolution: to make sure the door is locked at all times.

Yahoo Lifestyle has reached out to Sarver for comment and will update this post with any new information.

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