When Christina Bingman heard her dog, Alexa, barking at around 2 in the morning, she immediately got up to see what was wrong.

“It was the ‘something’s out there’ bark,” Bingman told .

The family has chickens, so Bingman ran straight outside to check on them, but after thoroughly checking the whole yard, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She had no idea what was making Alexa so upset, but since everything seemed OK, she went back to bed. Alexa continued barking throughout the night, causing her mom to get up several more times before waking up for the day several hours later.

Bingman wasn’t able to figure out what Alexa was barking at — until one of her kids woke up and finally cracked the case.

“I discovered that she was actually barking at the bag of cat food once the family had woken up for the day,” Bingman said. “My youngest told me to look at the window and laughed at how real the cat on the bag looked, and how giant it was. Then it clicked for me what Alexa had been trying to tell me. There was a giant cat staring in the window at her all night.”

The cat food bag doesn’t normally live outside, but the bin it goes in was broken and Bingman didn’t want any of her pets getting into it, so she left it on a table outside the window. The bag leaning against the window definitely creates the illusion that there’s a giant cat outside, and apparently, Alexa was not at all a fan of that.

“I immediately started to laugh,” Bingman said.

All along, Alexa had just been trying to save her family from the giant cat, and didn’t understand why no one would listen to her. Luckily, the mystery has been solved now, so Alexa can relax, and her mom can finally get a good night’s sleep again.