Critters in the House

I’m a zombie today because of the horror movie-like scratching in our walls around 3:00 am. We have a critter that seemed to be trying to tunnel through the wall of our bedroom. Since we live in a townhouse, we have neighbors on either side. From the direction of the sound, Tom thinks the critter was on our neighbor’s roof and got in/was trying to get into our house from there.

I hate critters. At least when they’re in my house.

A few weeks ago, I kept hearing noises like there was someone in the kitchen or the dining room. When I looked out there, of course, there was no one. But I kept hearing the sounds. When I finally decided to investigate – because the grease trap from our George Foreman Grill took a swan dive onto the floor – I found what I believed to be mouse poop on top of our refrigerator.

Great, I thought. We have a mouse on top of the refrigerator.

So after complaining about it on Twitter, Tom called me from work to make sure I was going to be okay. It was distracting, and I was a little freaked out about having a rodent on my fridge. I’m not exactly sure what possessed me to stand on a chair to check out the top of the refrigerator again while I was on the phone with him, but I did. And I came face to face with what appeared to be the biggest mouse I’d ever seen. Its beady little eyes were staring straight at me.

The rodent squeaked, and I screamed like a little girl. At the same time, the battery in my cordless phone died, and the line went dead. Yep, I screamed just like the women from those old Tom & Jerry cartoons. Up on a chair with a mouse in the house. I wasn’t wearing a house dress and apron, though.

If you were Tom, you would’ve heard me scream just before the phone cut out. Had we not already discussed the rodent in the house, he might have believed I was being murdered by pirates or something. (“Murdered by pirates is good,” comments a young Fred Savage.)

Instead, we re-established phone contact, and he asked me if I wanted him to come home. Previously, the answer had been no. Now that my heart was racing due to the demon mouse on top of the refrigerator that tried to steal my soul with its glowing eyes, I needed him to come home with some method of getting rid of the thing.

My knight in shining armor arrived home about 20 minutes later with glue traps in hand, still laughing over the phone incident. He had assumed that I’d dropped the phone when I screamed, and that’s why the phone cut out. And since he’s my big, strong, brave man of the house, he climbed up on that chair to face the beast himself.

“Oh,” he says nonchalantly. “It’s a chipmunk. And it’s absolutely terrified.”

Chipmunk. That explained why it was so much bigger than I thought a mouse should be. We had a freaking chipmunk in the house. And it had scurried back into the wall after seeing Tom.

Tom laid the glue traps by the hole in the wall the chipmunk had squeezed through to end up where it was. When we had bought the refrigerator, we had the dimensions mostly right, but the delivery guys had had to cut a small hole in the retaining wall for the hinge on the freezer door or something. That’s how the chipmunk got onto the fridge. We’re still not sure how it got into the wall from outside in the first place, though.

The chipmunk was still at large when we went to bed. But it apparently woke up the next morning while Tom was helping TJ get ready for school, and Tom disposed of the glue trap in the dumpster before I even got out of bed. The chipmunk was still alive, and I’d like to think it’s living happily at the landfill, where it can eat as much garbage as it would like.

My mom seemed to think we killed it. “You killed it?” she accused me when I told her about the glue trap. “I offered you the have-a-heart trap we used for the squirrel.”

“You’re upset about it being killed?” I replied. “You told me I should get a poison trap!”

“That’s when you said you had a mouse!”

“So it’s okay to poison a mouse, but not a chipmunk?”

We had a laugh about this. Oh, and for the record, it’s actually illegal to kill squirrels, which is why they had to get the humane catch and release traps when they had squirrels in the attic. It is legal to kill chipmunks in New York State, but as I said, I like to believe that our chipmunk is scampering around the landfill.

We had to I made Tom disinfect the top of the refrigerator and dispose of the box of cereal the chipmunk had chewed on. I was creeped out about anything from the top of the fridge for about a week.

And now we have something else in the house. Something that was making a tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-scrape-scrape sound while we were trying to sleep this morning. I was freaked out by the thought that something was trying to bite or claw its way into our bedroom… I had visions of chipmunks finally breaking through and falling from the ceiling onto the bed. This is the stuff of nightmares. (It was 3:00 am.)

I can’t hear the critter now. I don’t know if it got in, if it found its way back out, if it gave up, or what. I just don’t want another critter terrorizing me in the house.

Christina Gleason (976 Posts)

That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.