Sep 12, 2025 17:00:00

The culprit behind the late-night doorbell scare that caused trouble for apartment residents was a slug.

Ping-pong dash is a prank in which a prankster rings the intercom of someone's house and then runs away before the homeowner can find them, causing trouble. When police were called to a late-night ping-pong dash incident that occurred in an apartment in

Bavaria , southern Germany, it was discovered that the culprit was, in fact, a slug.

Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of German apartments turns out to be a slug | Germany | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/08/doorbell-prankster-that-tormented-residents-of-german-apartments-turns-out-to-be-a-slug

One night, residents of a Bavarian apartment building were woken up by the sound of an intercom ringing, which caused them to get upset and run out of bed.

Lisa, a 30-year-old resident of the apartment, said she received a call on her intercom late at night, but because she doesn't open her door after 10 p.m., she ignored the call and went to sleep. She initially thought it was a 'klingelstreich' (ping-pong dash) by young people who were gathering in the vacant house across the street.

However, Lisa's house wasn't the only one to have the intercom ring; her sister-in-law, who lives upstairs, called her to say that the intercom wouldn't stop ringing. Lisa said, 'The doorbell at her house wouldn't stop ringing. It kept ringing while I was on the phone, even though no one was at the front door. I got really worried, so I decided to call the police.'

The doorbell continued to ring even after two police officers arrived, even though no one was at the door. So the residents and police decided to work together to find out why the intercom was ringing.

Upon investigation, they found a slug crawling on a metal plate at the entrance to the door. As the slug crawled on the door plate, it pressed the intercom, causing it to ring even though no one was at the door. 'We could even see the mucus trail the slug made as it crawled on the sensor,' Lisa said.

'The slug was disarmed and shown the boundaries of its territory before being released back into the nearby grass,' a police spokesman for Schwabach, Bavarian city, said in a statement.