Facing the Bat

Peaches and Lydia Chanterelle were sisters who were my age. They were each blessed by having beautiful voices. At the time, I had a gospel singing group which toured the northwest corner of the US, and the Chanterelles sang with me.

Being in their 20s, Peaches and Lydia had moved from the family farm to live on their own. The home they found was an old farmhouse which sat on a hill overlooking the town of Ferndale. The house, while still livable, was at least 100 years old and was one of Ferndale’s originals.

I was invited over for a tour of the home which the girls were proud to live in. The downstairs was nice, and nothing had been remodeled to change the period look. There was a large kitchen, living room, and parlor sitting room. A door next to the living room opened to a staircase which went to the second floor.

We climbed the stairs to the top of the landing. At the top of the stairs was a narrow hallway which went past two bedrooms. The walls and ceiling had original wallpaper on them, and the air in the hall smelled acrid and old. I noticed what appeared to be water damage along the whole length of the ceiling. Walking to the end of the hall I noticed a three-foot square hatch going into the attic.

“You know, I’ll bet that there are all sorts of cool things up in that attic,” I said. “Let’s check it out.”

There was no step ladder at the house, so we found a bench, put a chair on top of it and a box on top of the chair. This gave enough height for me to climb up and lift the hatch to expose the dark attic. The first thing I spotted was a large sepia portrait of the original family from the early 1900s.

“This is so cool!” I excitedly said to the Chanterelles. “I’m going up.”

Grabbing the hatch frame, I pulled myself up into the darkness of the attic. There was an odd insulation on the ceiling between the rafters. It was sticky and smelled like urine.

“I can’t see a thing. Do you have a light?”

While one of the girls left to find a flashlight, I sat on the sticky rafters listening to an odd chirping sound. Not one chirp but chirps from all over the attic. Crickets, I wondered?

Just then Peaches arrived with a flashlight and handed it up to me. I took it and stood upright with my head nearly touching the peak of the roof. Flipping on the light, I aimed it down the length of the attic. The beam did not travel far. It stopped right in front of my face. A rather large bat was hanging upside down staring at me. This was not the only bat though. The attic was full of bats — hundreds of bats.

The sudden light in the attic caused them to panic and fly. It was a blinding storm of fleeing bats like leaves swirling from trees on a windy fall day. Panicked bats were chirping and flying into me in their attempt to escape through a hole next to the chimney.

“What do you see up there?” one of the girls asked.

All I could come up with was, “Ba, ba, ba, bats!”

I straightened my legs and jumped straight through the frame of the hatch to the hallway below, landing on the floor with my makeshift ladder in a pile around me.

The insulation in the attic was bat guano. The bats had lived there so long, it was at least five inches deep. The apparent water damage to the hall wallpaper was from bat urine soaking through from above.

Technically, the house belonged to the bats. It had been theirs for who knows how many years, but the girls did not want to share the house, so the next night with the help of some friends, we removed them.

Two of the guys went into the attic in the dark with a shop-vac. When they were ready, they started the vacuum and flipped on the light to see. Immediately, the bats scattered. The panicked screams from the two bat collectors drew worried looks from the women in the hallway below.

“There’s a big one! Get him!”

“Look out! There’s one in my hair!”

One by one, they sucked the bats into the shop vac.

Meanwhile, I was up on the peak of the roof patching the hole at the chimney where the bats were entering the attic. In the dark I heard and could feel the angry bats fluttering around my head.

After the attic was emptied, the two bat trappers climbed out of the attic looking slightly worse for wear. Their nerves were shot for the night.

The shop vacuum canister was taken further out into the country where we knew of an abandoned farmhouse and we released them to make a new home.

The little brown bat and the large brown bats are quite helpful to man. They feed mainly on flying insects such as mosquitoes at night. White-nose syndrome has been spreading across the US killing thousands of them. They can sometimes carry rabies and should never be touched.

Truthfully, using a shop-vac was not the most humane way to remove them from the house. Scientists have proven that mounting speakers in the attic and continuously playing accordion polka music, or the acapella singing of a women’s soprano trio, will also drive them from any building.

Caution to humans though is advised against excessively listening to this music. Permanent psychological damage can result.

It is a syndrome called, “Going Batty.”

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