This happened years ago in my current house in Bend, Oregon.
I had gone to bed, but I don't think I was fully asleep yet. I heard a noise out in the hall -- a kind of scuffling sound, and I assumed that my then-cat (an accomplished hunter) had brought in some still-living creature through the cat door and the noise was their struggle. Thinking, "Kitty, why don't you leave those little guys alone!?", I swung out of bed, turned on the light...
...and saw a skunk amble into my bedroom!
It must have come in through the cat door, attracted by the smell of cat food.
I couldn't believe it! Was I dreaming?!? All I could think of was, "If this thing 'goes off' I'll have to burn the house down for the insurance money!".
It hopped up on my bed -- WHAT!?
It sniffed around and then jumped off.
It snuffled its way around the perimeter of my bedroom while I stood out of its way ("Please don't go off...oh god, PLEASE don't go off!!").
My bedroom has a sliding glass door that opens onto a small balcony. I opened the slider a bit. When the skunk, following the wall, got to the open slider it went through it out onto the balcony. I closed the door.
I heard the skunk walking around out there for a couple minutes, then it must have jumped off into the bushes below.
It was gone!
And I was saved the bother of arson and insurance fraud!
A couple of surprising things about this:
- The skunk never emitted any odor or even raised its tail to threaten, so I thought that maybe it was somebody's de-scented escaped pet. But you'd think that even if it didn't have anything to spray that it would still have the instinct to try/display-threat. I concluded that it was a wild skunk, but it just wasn't threatened enough to feel the need to threaten me.
- This was a spotted skunk, not the more-common striped skunk, and I didn't know that we had any of that species in central Oregon -- another reason that I initially suspected that it was a pet. But I later looked it up, and the western spotted skunk is found throughout most of the West from Mexico to southern B.C.
All's well that end's well!