A hungry raccoon tried to invade the kitchen of a Bushwick apartment the hard way — crawling through the light fixture to the horror of the occupants.
The critter’s paw can be seen reaching out from the ceiling, as the tenants shriek in horror, in a moment caught on video and posted to social media Thursday.
“F–k this, I’m calling 911!” Yesenia Irizarry, a 21-year-old student at the Fashion Institute of Technology says on the video, as her three roommates scream.
Despite it looking like an alien, she asked for animal control.
“Some of us thought it was a raccoon. Some of us thought it was I don’t even know,” she said.
The critter’s identity was confirmed when it pushed harder to get into the kitchen, opening up a bigger gap in the ceiling medallion surrounding the light fixture and revealing its head.
“We could see the stripes,” she said.
The police officers who arrived were at a loss, telling the terrified foursome that “Eventually it will give up, just try to sleep through it.”
But Irizarry said no one got any shut eye that night.
When the building’s handyman arrived the next day, he admitted that raccoons had been frequent visitors to the three-story rowhouse, telling her that was why the fireplace was plastered over.
“The past tenants would come home and find raccoons in the living room,” she said.
Irizarry said she had also seen the creature, but outside.
“There had been multiple occasions where I had seen raccoons looking into the living room from the fire escape,” she said. “We never thought they were trying to get in. it was a shock to all of us.”
Irizarry said the roommates continued for several weeks to hear the raccoon and its babies, scratching in the crawl space above them. She filmed the video in November, but posted it only this week.
Tamika Alleyne, 21, a student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and one of the roommates, said she never expected this kind of animal invasion in New York City.
“Like rats? Yeah. Roaches? Yeah. A raccoon coming through your chandelier? No,” she said.
The four roommates were so traumatized by the close encounter they moved out in early February. Irizarry and Alleyne are now living in Crown Heights.
“We haven’t seen any animals,” Irizarry said.
