I know that clearing a room/house is incredibly dangerous and generally considered a bad idea in the event of a home invasion. Due to a handful of bizarre circumstances over the weekend I did it and am very curious to hear what some of you would have done. Also, what do you do to balance preparedness and paranoia especially around children.

TL;DR upfront: Two adults, one baby staying at a huge house in the woods with no cell reception and closest neighbor 1/4 - 1/2 mile away. Thought I heard a person rummaging in a lower level bathroom behind a closed door. No exits upstairs where my family was at, only on main level and lower level (where I heard noise). I moved quickly to upstairs where my family was and drew my gun once I was up the stairs. Baby was sleeping which complicated things, because if they wake up, they will cry. My partner and I waited at the top of the stairs from a decent vantage point and listened while I stayed aimed down the stairs. At this point I'd gone from being 95% sure there was a human intruder, to maybe 75%, but still very concerned and full adrenaline. We waited 30 minutes and listened and heard occasional noises, but couldn't say for sure that they were not just the sounds of this unfamiliar house. At this point we had to decide to either make a dash to the level below us with the baby, out a side door, and around the house to the car and leave the property with all of our shit inside, which we need to check out of at 10:00 a.m. the next morning. Possibly for no reason. The other option was to clear the house and confirm that I was wrong and heard a house noise and my brain just filled in details in a way that made me sure there was an intruder. We settled on the second option as we started talking and felt the rising possibility that it was just a strange house noise. I cleared the house, there was nobody. I slept horribly and felt very uneasy until we drove away from the property. What would you have done? When do you treat a situation as an active serious threat? How do you manage this all in front of children of any age?

Long version:
My partner, our baby, and I stayed at a huge rental property in the woods with no cell reception and no neighbors in sight. It was a full moon and the main level had huge windows with no coverings that looked out into a pitch black field that led into 200ish acres of woods. So basically just picture an ideal horror movie set. The only exits were on the lower level and main level. My partner and child were on the upper level. On our third night, at about 10:00 pm I went to the lowest level to grab some things we'd left when coming in earlier. After grabbing the bags, on the way up the stairs, I heard what sounded like someone walking/shuffling on the bathroom floor behind the closed door at the bottom of the stairs I would need to walk up to get to our bedroom. I paused and listened and heard it again and then it stopped. Because this small moment is the entire impetus for the following events, I'm going to go into more detail here for a second.

The house was a newer construction building with all drywall walls so sound carried like crazy and it sounded sort of like a big empty house. It made little noises all weekend. The fridge would make a noise like someone quietly knocking on a wall and occasionally made a muffled noise like a woman screaming from the field or woods outside the house in the distance. I think this was just the ice maker? Anyway, point is: I was aware of weird noises and although they all made me pause, nothing scared me. This noise sounded so clearly like a person shuffling on the bathroom floor that my initial reaction was less like, "I think there's something in there" and a lot more like "someone broke in and is hiding in the bathroom". Additionally, I did check the entire house on our first night, just because I don't like sleeping in a new space that I haven't checked out. Carrying on...

So I moved as quickly and quietly as I could up the stairs trying not to make it extremely obvious where in the house I was going. I made it up one level to the main level, and up one more level of the zig-zagging staircase to our upstairs suite where we were set up. I got to the top of the stairs, drew my gun which was on my waistband from hiking earlier, and whispered to my partner that I thought someone was in the house. Some details about our "room". The room we were sleeping in/set up in was the top floor. There was a balcony, but no exit. The only way out was back down the stairs to the main or lower level. The stairs walked right up to our room with no door, so you walked up half the flight, turned and walked up the other half and you were standing ten feet from the foot of our bed.

I kept my gun drawn down the stairs looking over a wooden bannister and listened. There was another small noise that could have been HVAC clinking or a door rattling or just about anything. After waiting like this for ten minutes, my partner asked what the plan was as it was starting to feel like nobody was immediately going to walk up the stairs. I gave her the car keys and explained how to get out of the house if she needed to. If we moved the baby, we needed to have a good plan because she would cry when we woke her up. At this point, she asked me to be really clear about what I heard and asked if there was any chance it came from the house.

HERE'S THE BIG PROBLEM: at this point there were two possibilities. Either there was a person in the house and we should proceed like we're in serious danger, or I'm wrong and the sound came from anything else. If there's a person, and I act like there's a person we have good odds. If there's no person and we act like there's no person, we just carry on and don't look like idiots. If there's a person and I act like there is no person, we could be in real danger. If there's no person and I act like there's a person (i.e. grab just the baby and bolt to the car leaving all of our belongings in a vacation rental that we need to check out of the next morning) I basically need to leave and not return without calling 911 and probably notifying the owners who may just discover that a towel fell down off a rack or something, thus making me look like a paranoid lunatic.

We waited a total of 30 minutes listening and waiting and decided I was probably wrong. It was probably a house noise that just happened to scare me worse than anything else has ever scared me in my life. It was hard to get my adrenaline soaked brain to consider this possibility, but once we waited and talked about it, it started to feel likely. We went over a couple of options and decided I would clear the room I thought I heard the noise come from, and then clear the rest of the house. For the record, I know that clearing a house is a big "no," but given our isolation, limited options, and the growing possibility of a false alarm, I went with it. I wanted to do it alone, but my partner said she wouldn't have it and would go with carrying only pepper spray and a knife so if I was ambushed she wasn't totally unarmed, although in this specific circumstance we were considering I made it clear that I thought pepper spray and a 4" knife was almost nothing.

We walked silently down to the lowest level bathroom and waited and listened. We heard nothing. I made sure she stood on the stairs in a blind spot so she would have a good vantage point if I was attacked and wouldn't get shot if I were shot opening the door. I threw the door open and fanned my gun and flashlight across the bathroom from a crouched position. Nothing. No sign of anyone. I looked in the sink, it was dry. Shower dry. Clean floor. No sign that anyone was ever in there. We proceeded to clear the whole house in a similar fashion. There was nothing. I checked all windows and doors, everything was closed and locked. I cleared the house a second time. We went upstairs, talked for a long time and decided that we were still glad that we were semi-prepared and ready to respond to a threat. I don't think I fell asleep until 4:30 and felt completely on edge until we left.

So mostly, just here to debrief and see what other people who would rather be safe than sorry would have done. FWIW, I don't think I'm an especially paranoid person. I carry most places. I've installed motion lights and security cameras at our house. But, I generally subscribe to the opinion that this is all just having things in place for a problem that will 99% never happen. I think it's good to be prepared, but it's probably not good to live like you're under siege and fail to just enjoy life while feeling stressed all the time. So now I'm left here trying to balance my need for defense and safety with my need to enjoy things. In one light, I just responded to what I thought was a threat in a way I feel 80% good about. In another light, my paranoia got the better of me. After all this, I realized that I'd been keeping a little nightmare-scenario list in the back of my head: the deadbolt doesn't latch, there are no window coverings on the main level so at night we can't see out but anyone could see in, was this place too cheap for how huge and new and maintained it was?, There's a trail-cam on a tree at the beginning of the public land at the edge of the property that could see if someone was going to the house or leaving, there's no cell reception, no bedroom door. I also had a few thoughts, like, what would we do if we pulled up and someone was parked on the property (almost certainly leave, but it's bowhunting season and we're off of public land). At one point I thought I saw a person in a bush when we were driving up, but I immediately realized it was just the shape of the leaves overlapping in the dark. To sum it up, this place sort of creeped me out from the start. Anyway, how do you manage paranoia?

Like I said after the TL;DR: What would you have done if you were in this identical situation? When do you treat a situation as an active serious threat? When does your gun come out? How do you manage this all in front of children of any age? Also, I feel ok (some room for improvement, but not too bad) in my self-assessment of how it was handled, but would love to hear what other people, especially parents, think about the whole thing.