It's hard keeping a clean kitchen with a busy family. With teenagers constantly snacking, pets chowing down in their food bowls and a husband preparing late night snacks, it's enough to feel behind all of the time.

That's why after putting everything away at the end of the night, and coming down to a mess in the morning, Cori Linder would start pointing fingers.

"For the past few weeks, I've been blaming certain family members for making mysterious nightly messes in the kitchen. That is, until the real culprit was discovered. And I was shocked by its true identity," Cori wrote in a post.

While her husband was out of town, she heard rustling downstairs and came to a mess of snack food on her kitchen counter.

She immediately blamed her teenage boys, since they were the only other people in the house.

"I snapped a quick photo and confronted them about it in the morning "” but of course, they both denied it," she wrote.

This wasn't the only instance of waking up to a mess in her kitchen. Over the following weeks, she'd find cracker crumbs, or bits of granola in the kitchen. No one was admitting to making the mess.

A few weeks later, she discovered her giant bag of dried dog food, had been literally ripped to pieces.

"My second suspect? Our sweet 18-year-old Rat Terrier, Luci Loo. And I'll admit, I was way less harsh on her," she writes.

Cori transferred the dog food into a lidded container and thought her problem was solved.

Then she discovered this:

In order to make this happen, the container had to be pushed off the counter and then the lid removed. Too complicated for this pouch.

"I started thinking about some other recent developments, like the fact that Luci had been barking at her doggie door repeatedly, and without explanation. Just one new spontaneous behavior to add to the list of recent changes she's been undergoing, I thought. Like she's been peeing all over the cement patio lately, instead of the grass," Cori wrote.

After blaming her sons and dog for weeks on end, she was at a loss. Until her husband woke her up in the middle of the night.

It was a raccoon. Apparently this bandit had been sneaking through the doggy door each week and helping himself to everything in the kitchen.

After scaring it back outside and blocking the doggy door, he hasn't returned.

What a rascal! Have you experience anything like this before? Share it with us!