Deer swims in motel's pools
By Andy Steinke, Dells Events
In an incident fitting of Friday the 13th lore, a deer jumped through a closed window, swam in three pools and left Mayflower Motel unscathed this weekend.
"The front desk called me, and there was only an hour left to Friday the 13th," Manager George Zapuchlak said. "The phone rings at 10 (minutes) to 12 and I said, 'You've got to be kidding me.'"
According to security guard Thomas Murphy, he was on his way to lock the pool area for the night when he startled a group of deer.
Three of the four deer ran across Wisconsin Dells Parkway, but one deer ran into the motel pool area.
"They always cross from the woods out of Noah's Ark and work their way through my yard, and end up behind Copa Cabana," Zapuchlak said. "This thing was going full speed up the hill and turned hard right for some reason."
The deer's sex is undetermined — Lake Delton police officer David Kopp reported it as a doe, and Zapuchlak thinks it may have been a buck because of its size — but all agree that it was a large deer.
Murphy and Zapuchlak estimate it was between 150 and 200 pounds.
The animal jumped through a closed sliding glass window. Because of the metal beam in the middle of the window, the deer had to squeeze through a hole approximately 2 feet wide.
"It was a perfect shot," Zapuchlak said. "It went right through."
The deer landed on the 25 foot wide pool deck between the window and the children's pool. It wasn't long, though, before the deer found itself in the pool.
Eighty to 90 percent of the glass landed on the deck, but the children's pool and the larger pool had to be drained to clean up the rest of the glass, he said.
The deer got out of the children's pool and went into the larger pool. Murphy said the deer swam to the pool stairs and "climbed out as well as a deer can climb out."
There was no one in the pool area except for one gentleman who was sitting in the whirlpool enjoying a drink, Zapuchlak said.
"He said he heard the crash, and thought it was robbers at first," Zapuchlak said. When he saw that it was a deer, he left the whirlpool.
After the deer got out of the large pool the deer saw the large window near the whirlpool and tried to jump up and over the whirlpool to get out. The animal missed, however, and went for its third swim of the night.
After climbing out, the deer nudged his way through a door into the first floor lobby, Zapuchlak said.
Once in the lobby, Zapuchlak said the deer was relatively calm. Zapuchlak put blue tape across some windows so the deer wouldn't jump through them, and a plan was devised to escort the deer from the premises.
Three officers and Zapuchlak blocked a number of windows and doors to get the deer to climb down a set of stairs and out of the building.
"I sat down and we stared at each other for 10 minutes," Zapuchlak said. "At one point, he got up on his hind legs, and I bopped him on the nose. And he looked at me like, 'What are you doing?'"
After 10 or 15 tries the animal went down the steps and returned to the wild. The motel was left with a $1,000 bill, but no one was hurt, including the deer.
"The only thing I didn't get to do was charge him $20 for using the facilities," Zapuchlak said. "So he got away with a free swim."