The astonished sun-seeker, who wished to remain anonymous, heard a crash as two men came wriggling down from a hole in the wooden ceiling of her cubicle at the Brun og Blid (‘Brown and Happy’) salon in Åsane, newspaper Bergensavisen reports.

“That’s when I leapt up from the sunbed,” she told the paper.

But before she had a chance to identify them, the men took to their heels and left the building.

Prior to their undignified descent, the men had been hiding in a crawl space between the ceiling and the roof of the building. It was unclear if they had kicked the ceiling in or if the wooden planks had simply given way under their weight.

“I don’t know what they were looking for. Most likely, they were on the hunt for valuables, but you never know,” she said.

Salon manager Stein Walle confirmed the woman’s story and said the company was taking steps to avoid any repeat incidents.

“We’re putting up barriers that will make it impossible for anybody to get into the spaces where the men found themselves,” he said.

Walle added that the security measures would be replicated at several of the company’s other salons elsewhere in the country.

The two intruders were caught by surveillance cameras but the poor quality of the images meant they could not be identified. The salon has pledged to invest in new monitoring equipment.