A woman was trapped under the floor of a dilapidated house in Melbourne for days, with residents claiming it was probably as long as a week.
Neighbours went to investigate the “Halloween house” after hearing scratching and murmuring coming from under the house.
It took eight firefighters two hours to cut a hole in the kitchen floor and rescue the 37-year-old – how do you get wedged that deeply under a floor!?
Well no one quite knows the answer yet, with the woman “extremely dehydrated and incoherent” and unable to explain how she ended up there.
Not surprising seeing as Melbourne has hovered around a brisk seven degrees overnight for the last week.
Despite the exterior appearance of the house, emergency services said it appeared someone lived there and the amount of furniture inside actually made the rescue operation difficult.
“There was furniture in the house, quite a lot, paintings on the walls, tables and chairs, couches, so it certainly wasn’t a vacant house,” said Metropolitan Fire Brigade Commander Roger Chitty.
One neighbour, Janis, told The Age said she saw a blonde woman picking off fence palings to get to the property a week earlier.
“Last Sunday, about midday, I saw this lady coming up the street looking in, and then she went down the laneway,” she said.
“She pulled a couple [of fence palings] off. I assumed she was trying to get in.”
“I was in my bedroom when I saw her. My partner came in and I said, ‘I don’t know what she’s doing’ and he said, ‘I reckon she’s a squatter’.”
Janis said the woman she saw was the “definitely” the same one pulled out from under the house.
“The firefighter said she’d been there for four days, and I said, ‘Mate, she’s probably been there since Sunday because that’s when I saw her.'”
Multiple other neighbours described how they’d never seen any sign of life in the house.
“We’ve never seen anyone come or go. The curtains are never open, it’s really strange,” one said.
“My kids call it the Halloween house – they’re terrified of it.”
