I called the cops when I found a guy living under my house — people are calling me racist

What was hiding in this Southern California woman’s crawl space is enough to make anyone’s skin crawl.

When Ashly Guardino was woken up by unusual noises at her Lake Elsinore home last Saturday, she assumed it was her landlord, making needed repairs to the roof. 

But much to her chagrin, rather than finding the property owner tinkering atop the rental residence, Guardino was stunned to see what she described as a “f–king dirty ass arm” reaching out from underneath the home.

“There is a whole ass man living here for months … living underneath the house,” the professional house cleaner lamented in an eye-popping TikTok tell-all. 

“Do you know how creepy it is to see a f–king arm come out of [a hole in your house]?,” she asked. “Imagine being half awake and seeing an arm, a dirty arm come out of this hole.”

In the shocking clip, which has scared up over 6.2 million views, the freaked-out mom shared footage of police removing a shirtless man from a small opening at the base of the residence she shares with fiancée Savannah and two children.

Officers escorted the perp, covered in dirt, into a waiting police vehicle.

The unwelcome discovery is part of the ongoing “phrogging” phenomenon, which sees gate-crashers sneak onto a property and secretly live there indefinitely.

The trend, named after a frog’s habit of leaping from pad to pad, is said to be a growing concern for law enforcement. Lifetime even covered a particularly harrowing case out of Hawaii in the true-crime production “Phrogging: Hider in my House,” released in July.

The phenomenon appears to be more popular in places with both housing shortages and good weather. Last month, a 30-year-old man was discovered phrogging in an underground vault beneath the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

Guardino offered more details on her unnamed space invader in a subsequent series of snippets. 

“He’s a 26-year-old and on parole. Apparently, he burned his baby mama’s house down,” she explained, adding the man was a drug addict with a history of seeking shelter underneath other people’s homes.

Still shaken after discovering the unwelcome guest, Guardino went on to discover that the guy — once he was released from prison for setting his ex’s abode ablaze — had been living below a house across the street from hers. He was ultimately found out by the owners and wound up back in jail. 

Once he was re-released, the repeat intruder returned to the neighborhood — only to make his new nest beneath Guardino’s dwelling. 

Officials could not confirm how long the man had lived there. 

Guardino, however, offered a guesstimate. 

“I don’t really know how long he was [here],” she said, estimating the unwelcome visitor had been residing subsurface for at least three months. 

Guardino had noticed that the screen covering the crawl space’s access point had been removed several times over the past few weeks. But as a pet owner, she assumed that one of the animals was responsible. 

“We remember hearing some knocking and whistling and different noises going on in the house,” she said. “But we’d just brush it of [thinking it was] the TV, the wind or whatnot.”

Guardino went on to explain that before the authorities came to her aid, she angrily confronted the violator, once he revealed himself.

“I’m yelling at him, ‘What the f–k are you doin?…Get the f–k out of our house,” she recalled. 

Cops eventually arrived on the scene, but Guardino claimed in a post that the officers only casually cased the home at first, doubting there was a man living below the property.

Once the authorities spotted the trespasser, however, they sprang into action. 

“They threatened [him with] dogs and guns because he [wasn’t] responding. He was just quiet,” said Guardino. “And they’re yelling at him to come out, and he’s ignoring the police.”

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After a 30 minute standoff, the man exited the crawl space and was placed under arrest. 

Rather than empathizing with Guardino and her family following the traumatic event, side-eyeing skeptics accused her of being insensitive, and even racist for reporting the offender.

“Did dirty mean black?” questioned a commenter, assuming that the squatter was African American.

“The microaggressions of, ‘seeing a DIRTY arm at 6am in the dark while half asleep’ and then THE REVEAL of the individual. You’re shameful,” another armchair critic spat.  

Guardino did not reveal the ethnicity of the offender.  

In a follow-up post, Guardino was left to defend herself against the astonishing claims.

“Whether he was white, black or Mexican, it doesn’t really matter…his arm was dirty, and that’s why I referred to his arm as dirty,” she said.