Bats in the Attic

In the future, I will write more about how we dealt with my daughter’s situation because I think it is important for people to see how we processed everything. I feel we handled things as well as could be expected, but today I think we need something a little lighter.

In my childhood home that I’ve posted about before, there was an attic. Although, I dared to traverse the tunnels underneath the house, I never dared go into the attic. We knew the attic housed bats and while I am very afraid of mice, bats are even scarier to me – mice with wings – yikes! The entrance to the attic was located in the ceiling of the upstairs bathroom. I dared to look into the attic from the opening, but I never entered it. Now as an adult, I wish I had. We could see an old typewriter that some previous owner had left and the remnants of old wall paper on the walls when we poked our head through the square hole in the ceiling. The hole was covered with a board – much like you would see in homes today.

One day a bat flew down from the attic and landed in the bathtub. We were a house of full of girls – all of us deathly afraid of anything creepy, crawly, or that flew in the night. The bat just sat in the tub in a stupor of sorts. Mom closed the door and stuffed a towel under the door to keep the bat in the bathroom until our stepfather came home in the morning from his other wife’s house. Sometime in the middle of the night, the bat got out of the bathroom and flew around inside the house. I don’t know if a child got up to use the bathroom and forgot about the bat in the tub or if the bat somehow squeezed through under the door – but anyway the bat was loose and was no longer in a stupor.

The bat flew around making a clicking noise that all bats make. Mom called to us to get up and help her catch this bat. Of course Ann being the obedient oldest child got right up to help her. I am not ashamed to say that not only did I not get up, but I pulled the covers up over my head and tucked them neatly around my head and body and held them tightly so that the bat could not get into bed with me. The thought of a bat anywhere near my hair of skin made my fear far outweigh Mom’s need for help.

I listened to Mom and Ann fight the bat from the safety of my cocoon. They chased the bat with brooms trying to get it to leave the house. At one point the bat landed on Ann’s back. I was cringing in my bed for her, but there was no way in hell those covers were coming off me until the bat was out of the house. Mom took her broom and hit the bat off Ann’s back knocking it into the wall where it fell senseless to the floor. She put it into a bucket and put a heavy object over the top of the bucket. It soon regained its senses and tried to fly in the small bucket. It was about 4 a.m. or so.

Although the story was incredibly creepy, it was funny to hear Mom and Ann tell about frantically chasing the bat through the house, Mom hitting it off her back, and it dropping like a rock – knocked out from hitting the wall. I know some you may be bat lovers and think they were awful for hurting the poor little creature, but their fear was pretty intense that night. Yes, it was probably just as afraid as they were, but at least it didn’t have to worry about catching rabies from them.

When my step-dad arrived home, he let the poor creature go. It flew off into the dark of the early morning. We had no idea that medical professionals recommend getting the bat tested for rabies if it has been in the same room with sleeping children. We had no idea that we may have unknowingly been bitten by the bat and probably should have undergone the rabies vaccine, but we were lucky once again. No one contracted rabies from the bat that evening, but we will all remember the clicking as it flew and the creepy feeling of knowing a bat was loose in the house.