Found a phone in my garden - isolated property - shit scared

[ScarredBunny]

Name changed for this - Sorry if this seem trivial, I know people are dealing with far bigger things at the moment.

I found a phone lying on the ground, about 5 yards from my house.

We live in an isolated property about a mile away from the first road. We have not have any visitors , maintenance people for many weeks (obviously). Delivery drivers, yes, but they would not have any reason to go to this part of the garden/couldn't access it during daytime without us seeing something.
At first I assumed it belonged to one of us, but no!
Phoned the police, have a ref./case number, etc. but they're busy and will get back to us when they can.
The police said to take the phone indoors and wait for their call/visit.

I am worried that the next visit is going to be from whomever the phone belongs to.
The phone is dead as a dodo but I assume it still can be found?

What should do?

Do you think the Police's response was over the top too

Yes. Completely. Though I suspect theyll have done nothing more than lodge it as found properly

Do you think that people who say they have experienced trespassing, burglaries or whatever are generally telling a lie

Well trespassing isnt a crime here so that's irrelevant but when a burglary is reported theres usual some actual evidence that a crime has been committed

It seems spectacularly obtuse to not understand why the prospect of potentially having an unknown, unwelcome individual in the garden of your remote home in the middle of the night would be worrying and something of interest to the police. Either that or incredibly naive.

People rent remote farmhouses to make cannabis farms - could have been someone checking it out to see if the house was empty.

Do you have large stone gateposts and ornate gates to your driveway/ track to your house. Then burglars.
Do you have no gate and a rough track - then cannabis growers.

I too want to know where the armpit of France is

I suspect near the immigrant camps.

It’s not that remote and she found the phone in the morning so might have been there ten minutes.

5zeds a mile away from the nearest road is remote. The dog was barking in the middle of the night which suggests this is when the fox/person/phone dropping drone etc was present

Do you know what, I just went to the kitchen and I heard a rustling behind the utility room door. I didn't think, I got a knife out and yelled ' Right I'm coming for you I'm f,,,, coming for you!' kicking the door open,... and saw my poor dog! The look of worry on his face!
This is mad it's 11am for goodness' sake, is it how it's going to be now? grin / sad

You got this @ScarredBunny, sorry it made me laugh 😆 & also awakened a memory from long ago. I was balancing on top of a ladder trying to paint a high ceiling when someone knocked on my door, I ignored the knock thrice before deciding that they weren’t going away. Peering through the spy hole I saw 2 strangers, as I whipped open the door they ran & so did I whilst shouting in my best Sham 69 accent “Come on you bastards I’ll ‘ave yer”. No idea why I did the accent 😳. They escaped, looking back had they turned on me I’d probably have ended up racing off in the opposite direction screaming for help like some sort of comedy act.

I whipped open the door they ran & so did I whilst shouting in my best Sham 69 accent “Come on you bastards I’ll ‘ave yer”

Well, that's certainly one way to get the Jehovah's Witnesses to stop calling.

Maybe a postman or delivery driver needed a wee, used your garden & dropped his phone.

CSI - a mile or two miles away from nearest main road? Seems unlikely.

Doesnt Op get post then? Lilactree

bruffin I’d guess that postie doesn’t deliver late evening but I’m linking all this to the barking dog.

@ScarredBunny I’m sorry to see some people are being shitty here. That’s awful.

I know you are joking about agreeing with the fox stories etc but it must have been very scary thing. I would have reacted the exact same as you.
I think logic and a gut feeling tells you some thing is off.

You won’t get anything from the police if it’s an iPhone- with all their encryption etc.
As a PP poster said, IF they can get it turned on and the person has registered themselves as a contact it will say “this iPhone belongs to xxx”
I have an iPhone 10 XR - you would need to know to press the side button - not the typical home button.

Please step up security and do whatever it takes to put your mind at rest. It definitely sounds like someone was too close for comfort and with bad intentions.
Sending hugs and handholding 🤗

@ShagMeRiggins @LadyEloise, imo, Les Landes, the beaches are stunning but you can't swim, or sail, or do anything as the sea is too dangerous. Inland is a swamp drained in the 19th c., a completely characterless landscape, the population has the highest consanguinity coefficient in the country. Lots of midges too.

It's not nice to think that someone you don't know might locate their phone inside your house.

Since your house is so remote, it's irrelevant whether they "locate" their phone inside or outside your house, isn't it?

If these are somewhat bad people and their phone seeking devices take them to your house (which you think they have been to before anyway, so not sure why they need to follow the phone seeker, but anyway) then if the phone isn't lying in the garden where they were before, they're going to break in and get it. I'm not sure the seekers are quite so precise as to show whether the phone is inside or outside the house.

Course, they might not be bad people. The owner might trace it and just knock on your door and ask if you've seen it.

I suspect it's stolen. Maybe part of a haul and they realised it was a dud, or couldn't charge it, and just chucked it over the fence, not realising it was a garden.

Lots of drugs activity and theft happens in rural areas.

Dear OP

Its awful how rude and uncaring some posts have been on here. I understand why you feel freaked out.

Sending a big hug.

5zeds a mile away from the nearest road is remote is it? I guess it depends if you normally live in an urban environment.

OP do you feel more settled? I hope so.

@EdwinaMay just very plain tracks both ways. With the cars parked at the front, it's obvious the house is inhabited.

@5zeds, good point, I wondered about that, it took me 3 trips back and forth to notice that phone. But the dog was with me and not bothered by anything.

@GREATAUNT1 - Very funny. Plus at least yours were real people.
@ThatLibraryMiss

@CSIblonde, did I forget to mention? In that spot, unlikely + please don't insult our Postie.
@bruffin - Letterbox at the gate.

Left my phone in the garden earlier for a bit and got distracted. Was paranoid in case a Fox came and got it!

5zeds I split my time between a large city and rural highlands, a mile away from the nearest road is remote. The OP has repeatedly described her property as isolated, noted it was hard for the police to find and stressed the distance from other houses and roads. I'll trust her description.

@doorbellringer Thank you so much, you are very lovely.

Most people are really quite nice! Just a few rabid ones who just won't take the salient points on board but still assume they know better. I wonder what it really is, that enrages them so much.

Bashing this out with Mumsnetters has really helped, it's great to have so many points of views, even the more hostile, to apprehend the ??? and try and to make sense of it all.

You are so right about gut feeling, it's there for a reason.
I don't expect much will come back from the Police, their duty is probably more to get on with their jobs than to answer my questions and they seemed to be quite busy.

I don't know about the foxes, it might seem out there, but they do do odd things apparently. I'd rather it was a fox. At some point I'll check that corner in the shadow that the dog was barking at, to see if it a big enough for a person, or not. I have to say the police never mentioned animals, they assumed it was an intruder from the start.

Maybe not tonight though, or I would have to ask DH to come with me and he's already done his bit today by helping set up little booby alarms. He's very much, 'what do we need to do, this, that, done, okay let's move on' kind of chap, probably why it's been so nice to talk here.

a mile away from the nearest road is remote. I’m old and fat and can cycle a mile in much less than ten minutes, so not remote to me at all. Not that it matters really. OP feels anxious about the distance so SHE feels it’s remote, though I think she said there was a house closer across the fields???

Foxes nick everything in central London. One took my Child's shoe for a week and then returned it to the front door.