DEAR ABBY: There is an 8-foot privacy fence all around my backyard, except for a small path that goes from the corner of the driveway around the side of the house. You can’t see the path or the backyard from the street.
The other evening, I was grilling dinner when a pair of young women walked right up inside the fence. One of them introduced herself as a college student from Europe. At first, I thought they were hurt or something and needed help, but then they said they were selling magazines.
I asked them to back off my property and told them that strangers needed to use the front door to people’s houses. I wanted to add that, at least where I live, it can be dangerous to trespass, and they were lucky my dog was inside.
It seems obvious to me that backyards, especially fenced ones, are private, and they should have known better. Then I got to wondering if that is true everywhere. Are there places where letting yourself into a stranger’s fenced yard would be OK? (As an aside, I know they were probably not college students or legitimately selling magazines — that’s an old one.) — PRIVATE PROPERTY
DEAR PRIVATE PROPERTY: You are correct on every level. What these young women did was foolish, rude, illegal and potentially dangerous. In Europe, just as in the U.S., a backyard is sacrosanct, and strangers should never enter without an invitation. These “students” were playing dumb because they got caught, and every part of their story is pure malarkey.