The events in this story are true. Only the door’s motives remain unknown.
Picture it. A cold and stormy night in West Hollywood. OK, fine. Last night. It’s 1am. You’re jolted awake by noises coming from your bathroom. Sleepy-eyed and confused, you watch your bathroom door open and close by itself. You grab your phone and call 911.
What happened next started like any other call on the West Hollywood Sheriff’s dispatch frequency: deputies needed, respond Code 3 (lights and sirens), possible 459 (burglary) on Huntley Drive.
The issue? A bathroom door that “opened and closed by itself.”
Deputies arrived. They didn’t find a suspect. Nothing was heard. They cleared the scene, logged it Tag 9 (no report required), and moved on with their overnight patrol, because that’s what they’re trained to do when confronted with a possibly — haunted bathroom. They show up, they check it out, they leave. Quietly heroic. Saving the day, once again.
Welcome to the other side of the West Hollywood Sheriff’s call log, the one that doesn’t make the crime heat map but most definitely makes the overnight shift, shall we say, more interesting.
Deputies who work in WeHo respond to everything the penal code can throw at them and then some. Burglaries, assaults, traffic collisions, or worse. Those are the calls everyone pictures when they think about cops on duty. But the job also includes the less dramatic, the less dangerous, and yes, even the bizarre. Things like wellness checks on neighbors nobody has seen in days who turn out to be fine and slightly annoyed, noise complaints about wind chimes that only one person on the block can apparently hear, and even a possible ghost — in the bathroom.
The Huntley Drive call had everything a good dispatch sequence needs. There was the initial alarm, a possible 459, respond Code 3, followed by the unit designation drama, with 91 Henry first placed in District 7 before a correction came through mid-response putting them in District 2. In the time it took to sort that out, the bathroom door had presumably closed and opened itself at least once more.
West Hollywood keeps deputies busy with the full range of what this city produces. Some of it’s serious. Some of it winds up being closer to a bathroom door developing opinions about privacy. They respond to all of it the same way, and honestly, that’s the part that doesn’t get said enough.
Kidding aside, we thank our law enforcement for treating all calls seriously, because you just don’t know until you get there. And good on the resident for calling. You should always report anything suspicious. As the old adage goes, better safe than sorry.
In the end, this story has a happy ending. Deputies cleared the Huntley Drive scene without incident.
WEHOonline reached out to the door for comment but, so far, no word.
Thank you for writing this. Most of the comments about law enforcement in this blog are negative and don’t really understand all that the sheriffs deal with every day.
People think that LE officers should be omnipotent and be everywhere all the time. That just isn’t possible.
They do the best that they can and deal with so much more on a day to day basis than people acknowledge. Kudos for this article.
A trick using the bathroom before leaving? A ghost who was lost? A window left open and a breeze moving the bathroom door? An earthquake and the reporting party not knowing about it? Could be any of these the cause of the moving door.