Anna Smosna of Crafton said there's nothing like a rooster crowing to startle you out of a sound sleep, especially when it sounds like he's right there in the bedroom with you.

She said cock-a-doodle-doing has awakened her about six times in the past two weeks, and always at 12:59 a.m.

She put a 90-minute tape into her tape recorder the other night and turned it on when she went to bed shortly after midnight.

Sure enough, right at 12:59 a.m., the rooster started crowing. Its two "cock-a-doodle-dos" can be heard clearly on the tape.

"It is getting to be a real annoyance," said Mrs. Smosna, 78, a retired nurse. "It has crowed as often as 18 times in a row."

"We don't know what's going on," said her husband, Andrew, 83, a retired LTV steel worker.

Before I drove to the couple's two-story home on Fountain Avenue, I asked Mrs. Smosna if she had any clocks in the bedroom. She has two small ones, neither of which has a rooster-crowing alarm feature.

When I got to the home, I listened to the tape recorded crowing.

Mrs. Smosna wondered if a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reader might have an idea of how the bantam-braying is being projected into her bedroom so that it sounds as though it is coming from the wall directly across from her bed.

She has a copy machine in front of one of the two windows in her bedroom, but it was unplugged. There was no other electronic equipment in the room.

The wall where the sound appears to be coming from is an outside wall. It has no window.

At Mr. Smosna's invitation, I climbed a narrow set of wooden stairs to an unfinished attic. I opened the small door at the top and looked in. There were no roosters up there. There also weren't any signs of Foghorn Leghorn, the animated Looney Tunes cartoon character with a voice that matches his first name.

The couple, who have four children and four grandchildren, have only one companion in the house -- Morgan, a peppy 7-year-old schnauzer.

The Smosnas said they get along fine with their neighbors. They said they don't know anyone who might want to play a practical joke on them.

"We called the police the other day, but they said there isn't anything they can do about it," Mrs. Smosna said. "We'd like to get to the bottom of this."

If you have any ideas on how the sound of a crowing rooster might be transmitted into Mrs. Smosna's bedroom, send me an e-mail and I'll forward it to her.

Scam man

A guy wearing an undersized rolled-up cowboy hat, tan shirt and blue jeans ran up waving his arms and started talking before I got out of the car in the Giant Eagle parking lot last week.

He pointed to a white pickup truck parked about 80 feet away. He said he was out of gas and had left his wallet in Cranberry. He said his AAA membership had lapsed and that he couldn't reach anyone on his cell phone. He said he had spoken to the night manager inside the store at Murray and Loretta avenues, but she couldn't help him.

He offered to leave some of the lawn care equipment he said was in the back of the truck as collateral for a loan.

I said his story sounded familiar, very familiar. I said scam artists, especially "sobbing" young women, had been scamming all-too-generous Pittsburghers in parking lots in recent years with stories just like his.

He appeared to be at a loss for words. I said I would ask the store manager if she was sure there wasn't something that could be done for him.

When I came out of the store a few minutes later, he was gone.

Maybe there was more gas in the truck than he thought.