RHUL student catches ‘attempted intruder’ in mask casing their student house

They spotted him through a camera connected to the doorbell

| UPDATED

RHUL student Lily French was watching a film with her housemates when she received a notification at 1:40 am on her phone from her Ring video doorbell, a motion-activated device that notifies users when someone is at their front door.

“Our initial reaction was “has anybody ordered food?,” the 23-year-old resident of Nobles Way told the RHUL Tab.

It turned out that nobody had ordered food, and when Lily checked the Ring video doorbell app to see what the device had recorded, she and her friends were startled by what they saw.

“I felt the blood instantly drain from my head as I saw a hand clearly covering the camera. The hand then pulled away, revealing an eerie figure staring into the camera.

“We called the police straight away, who told us to make sure all windows and doors were locked; they were going to send a car out to patrol the area,” said Lily.

Although Lily did spot police patrolling the area, she and her friends were so shaken by the incident that they were up all night until sunrise, when they felt it was safe to sleep.

Lily said that: “Hopefully our video doorbell did enough to deter this thief from returning, but we never know.

“If it wasn’t for this, we would never have known about the attempted intruder, and it may have ended far worse.”

Lily laughed at her housemate when she told her that she had bought the doorbell for £120.

She isn’t laughing now.

Instead, she suggests that everyone should buy a Ring video doorbell.

“It turned out to be an invaluable piece of equipment. I’d absolutely recommend people make the investment,” said Lily.

However, crime is not a major problem in the area surrounding Royal Holloway.

Just 62 burglaries were recorded last year, according to statistics from crime monitoring website police.uk, the fifth-lowest number of burglaries per 1000 residents in U.K. university towns.

Lily informed us that, although police are not looking for the man involved in the incident, they have promised to visit the house and collect collect security footage from the doorbell. Officers have not called to visit yet.

Surrey Police confirmed that they had attended to an incident in Egham this morning, but had not located any suspects.

“We carried out a search of an area in Egham at around 1.45am this morning (29 May) after we were called to reports of someone seen acting suspiciously. No one matching the description of the person acting suspiciously was found in the area,” the force told the RHUL Tab.

Head to The Royal Holloway Tab Instagram story to check out footage of the intruder!