Where the Wild Things Are

Last week, when I was visiting my sister and her husband in Wellfleet, I was awoken at about 2:30 in the morning by something terrible and violent taking place less than 20 feet from where I lay me down to sleep.

Kath and Rick were awoken, too. It would have been hard to miss.

I couldn’t see what was going on – just some rustling in the bushes – but the noise was pretty fierce. Furious yipping, lots of growling.

Rick’s theory is that an owl made a late dinner out of a bunny rabbit. I was thinking fox, but what do I know about nature?

Anyway, when the kill was finalized, something weird happened in that, all around the surrounding wilderness, other animals were chiming in with their own yelps, including coyotes. It was as if they were passing the word that one of their fellow creatures was no more.

A separation of 20 feet – and a solid wall and windows – are about as close as I want to get to where the wild things are.

In town, I do see an occasional critter: a bunny rabbit, a hawk, a wild turkey. But most of what I experience are pigeons and the odd rat I see scurrying around after dusk.

That is until the other night. Hell night. A night that will live in infamy.

There was something in my bedroom wall. And that something didn’t sound like a mouse, either.

Mice in the walls I’ve had. Earlier this year, in fact. They scurry, they scratch, you plug one of those weird sound makers into an outlet and they take off. Of late, most of the folks in my building have had mice in their apartments on occasion. Not me. In the 26 years I’ve lived here, we’ve had one – count ‘em – one mouse. We caught him in a glue trap and I had to put him out of his misery. So now, when someone in the building sees a mouse, I put out snap-traps: much kinder and gentler. But I haven’t caught any mice. And they seem to go away.

But last Thursday night. That was something else.

It began with whooshing noises, maybe a half hour apart. Odd and infrequent enough at first that I was able to convince myself that it was just someone whooshing by, out in the hall.

Then it got more frequent, and the whooshing was accompanied by thumping, as if “it” were hurling itself upwards looking for a way out. Which may well have been what “it” was doing. And the frequency increased.

I pounded on the wall with my fist, I whacked the wall with a yardstick, hoping it would take off. I yelled, I swore. Get the f out of here!

But it didn’t.

Sometimes it scratched a bit. But mostly it was the whooshing/thrashing and the jumping/thumping.

A complete and utter hellscape.

I plugged in a couple of those little sound-emitting devices, but no dice. Whatever was in there was impervious to it.

Whoosh, thrash, jump, thump.

Pound with fist, whack with yardstick. Curse.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Since I wasn’t sleeping, I googled and found that rodents are put off by ammonia. If you drill a small hole in your wall, and syringe some ammonia in, it just might vamoose.

Now, I wasn’t going to get my drill out at 3 a.m., but, behind the bookcase, there was an old phone jack with something that looked like a hole in it. I do have a syringe around here somewhere – one that’s actually smaller than my turkey baster – but I wasn’t quite sure where. But I did have an eye dropper. And ammonia. It was lemon scented, but ammonia just the same.

So there I was, at 3 a.m., squirting lemon-scented ammonia into a phone jack, and then squirting some more along the baseboard for good measure.

Well, maybe it was the lemon scent, or maybe it was the fact that the phone jack wasn’t exactly a hole, but the wild thing wasn’t any more bothered by ammonia than it was by the sound-emitting device.

Rats! Or was it squirrels?

It wasn’t making noise, so that pretty much ruled out cat or bird, no?

During one of my Googles, the subject of paranormality came up.

I suppose that a building that’s well over 100 years old could be haunted. However…

Now a sensible person, by 8 a.m., after a sleepless night, would have called Billy the Exterminator. But pretty much all Billy the Exterminator does is put out traps for whatever. So I thought I’d check in with my fellow condo owner and jack-of-all-things-around-the-house-trades, Joe. I texted. He texted back. Yes, he would come by after work

I was out for much of the day, and then came home around 2:30 p.m. to peace and quiet and a cat nap.

At dusk, shortly before Joe came by, I heard a couple of whooshes. That bastard was back. (It, not Joe.)

Anyway, Joe and I listened to the recordings I had made the night before (Wall Noise 1 through Wall Noise 4) and it definitely sounded like the whoosh was wings flapping. His conclusion was that it was possibly a bat, but more likely a bird that had likely come in when someone left the back door open and had somehow made its way into my wall.

He took out the phone jack housing (turns out, the ammonia I squirted landed in the housing), and a socket plate, and looked around, with flashlight, for droppings or whatever. And found nothing.

No sign. No noise.

It did occur to me that someone might have been gaslighting me. But who might that be?

Joe left, and I decamped to the living room couch for a good night’s sleep, leaving the radio on (WGBH – public radio, of course) in the bedroom.

I was hoping that, in the morning, I’d have a Norwegian Wood moment:

And, when I awoke, I was alone. This bird had flown.

But, no…

I could hear it, noising around in there.

I decided to decamp even further, to my sister Trish’s in Salem for a couple of really good nights sleep.

Before I left, Joe came by with some sort of scope device – the kind you use to check for cracks in pipes – to see what he could see. (This, alas, required cutting a couple of holes in the wall. Sigh.) He could see nothing. Fast forward a couple of hours, and, just before I was leaving for Trish’s I heard some scratching. Fortunately, Joe was still around and I hailed him. This time, the magic scope found a mouse, of all things.

Joe told me he’d take care of it, and I decamped. Then over the weekend, Joe – bless him – put the little critter down with some nitrous oxide, and, come Monday, came by and fished the corpse out. I got to supervise, offering gloves, a hanger, and a bag for the nasty little thing. Late, but not lamented

I set a couple of traps around. And so far, noises off.

Was this some sort of crazy circus mouse making all those noises?  Was there a bird/bat in there for a while before finally making its way out? Was the mouse just a coincidence?

I wanted to embed the audio of the noise, but it was a no go. So I you’ll have to take my word for just how alarming the noise was. We’re not talking modest mouse scratching here.

Guess we’ll just have to let the mystery be.