VIDALIA — Maybe it was Dasher, Dancer, Prancer or Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner or Blitzen.

But whoever it was, a deer delivering a moment of holiday panic made a surprise visit Thursday morning to a Vidalia house.

Ricky Lee was driving down Myrtle Street when he saw a male deer — he said it was possibly an eight-point — dash across the street near his house. Lee was in his father’s new truck, and didn’t want the animal to crash into it.

“I stopped in the middle of the road, and that was when I saw the plate glass shatter,” Lee said.

The plate glass was at his house, and when Lee ran inside he saw the glass strewn across the floor, a hole punched in the front door where the buck had collided with it and blood splattered across the room.

A friend who was in the house had been sitting on the couch when the deer made its entrance, and the animal had dashed past him into the kitchen.

“I screamed for my daughter and told her, ‘Lock your bedroom door and don’t come out,’” Lee said.

In the kitchen, the confused deer had slipped on the floor and kicked a hole in a glass door there, but then bolted into a den area, where Lee had been working on a motorcycle. After kicking the bike, the deer hunkered down into the corner.

Going outside, Lee saw an animal control officer driving down the street. The deer had apparently already gotten the attention of the police.

“I hollered, ‘Y’all got a tranquilizer gun?’ and he yelled, ‘No, I ain’t got time for that, I’m looking for a deer,’ and I said, ‘He’s in the house,’” Lee said.

The residents were finally able to get the deer to leave the residence after moving a car parked behind a door out of the den.

“As soon as we moved that car, he bailed out of the house,” Lee said. “He ran and ran into the fence in the backyard so hard I thought he would have broken his neck, but then he jumped up and jumped over the fence and ran toward the river.”

In the end, the only one hurt by the ordeal was the deer, Lee said.

“You can’t believe it would happen in the middle of town, but it did,” he said. “If it had been a doe, I might have been willing to tackle it, but I wasn’t going to mess with those horns.”