On the long list of “American person needlessly calls police on thing” stories we’ve seen this year, this one is easily the funniest and most purely wholesome.
A man in Austin, Texas frantically called police after encountering a body dangling precariously from a two-storey house’s gutter, with CCTV footage capturing his fervent attempts to help.
Only problem is the body did not belong to anything living and was, in fact, part of the house’s Christmas lights display.
Chris Heerlein hoisted the dummy up to the roof of his house in northwestern Austin, a nod to Chevy Chase‘s iconic Clark Griswold moment from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, in a bid to tip his light display over the edge in a neighbourhood competition.
The dummy came complete with a propped up ladder and a string of lights trailing from its foot.
Enter: retired veteran Alfred Norwood Jr, who happened to be passing by what he thought was an incredibly perilous scene. Old mate wasted no time springing into action, with the whole thing – audio too, crucially – captured on security cameras.
How’s that entire news bulletin, just quietly? Incredibly powerful local news areas.
Remarkably it’s not even the first time something like this has happened. An almost identical decoration at a house in Colorado last year attracted scores of 9-1-1 calls from concerned passersby, with the decoration revealed to be the work of a husband playing a practical joke on his wife.
Legit though, decoration so good it makes international headlines? If this thing doesn’t win the neighbourhood award now, we riot.
