It’s an unsettling thing to hear a crash in your kitchen at 5am when you live alone. Just at the precipice of dawn I was reaching for consciousness anyway when the sound of something falling launched me up and out of bed in a single move. Convinced that a serial killer had finally come for me, I looked around for something with which to bludgeon the intruder and, finding nothing, decided on hand to hand combat. 

I stepped bravely down the hallway, and just before turning the corner into the living room, in the ambient light of my city apartment, I saw a dark shadow swoop across the arched opening. Somehow, in the cruelty and banality of life, a bat had made its way into my home. 

In my last apartment—a corner of a large, old house in Buffalo, this would have been less of a surprise. In this fancier, urban setting with its brick walls, large, sealed windows, and no direct outside access, it was harder to understand how we arrived here. Considering my options, I ducked down the side hall into the bathroom where I closed the door with a bit too much enthusiasm, stuffed a bathrobe into the crack, and made preparations for battle (used the bathroom, washed my face, and brushed my teeth). 

Eventually, I got the courage to return to the bedroom, looking both ways in the hall and ducking comically as I made my move. By now it was 5:30 and it was time to make some phone calls. I quickly located the number for animal control and selected the option for after-hours bat encounters. What I didn’t expect, after several phone trees, was to be transferred to the Monroe County Coroner’s Office. 

More surprising were these menu options: “To request the results of an autopsy, please press one. To request release of personal items, please press two. To report a death, please press three. If you have a bat in your dwelling after hours, please press four.” In my panicked state, I can tell you I didn’t appreciate options three and four being in such close proximity.

Selecting option four I expected to be greeted by a brooding sylvanian accent but was greeted instead by Gary, a surprisingly cheerful overnight municipal employee who quickly quipped, “I know, bats and dead bodies don’t seem like they should go together, but I answer all the phones overnight.” Gary transferred me to Rachel, who had clearly been awake for about four minutes but was perfectly lovely until she said, in what I’m sure was a helpful tone: “so the good news is they aren’t that hard to catch, especially if you can knock them to the ground.” 

I could almost hear the cognitive tires screeching as I tried to process what this woman was telling me. Here I was, barricaded in my bedroom with a towel stuffed under the door, and she was suggesting that I venture out and simply knock it to the ground before trapping it under a Tupperware or garbage can. It is hard for me to articulate how much I did not want to do this. I also, as a taxpayer, couldn’t understand how we don’t have a guy for this. 

Unwilling to admit my terror in the face of Rachel’s calm, I agreed to bring the bat to the health department offices when they opened at eight to have it tested for rabies (given that I sleep like an actual dead person and didn’t know how long the bat had been swooping around looking for blood). Hanging up, I decided to enlist reinforcements. This is where Jeff, the on-call maintenance employee comes in. 

If you are trying to bond with a total stranger, you might consider inviting them into your home in the wee hours of the morning so the two of you can catch a bat. Jeff will probably be at my wedding some day. He had some experience catching them with shop vacs, and when he arrived, we approached my flying friend, who was hanging from a wall in the living room, clearly ready for a good day’s rest. Our approach was like that of firefighters managing an unwieldy hose—I rolled the shop vac, Jeff held the hose high in the air, and in a blink, the bat was sucked up. I will admit here, that despite my terror and deep desire to be free of the bat, I did feel a twinge of pity for its tumultuous ride into the vacuum canister. 

Bidding Jeff a bat-free morning, I taped up every hole through which the bat could escape, made a cup of tea to steady my nerves, and carried the canister to my car. What followed were several very tense minutes as I drove to the health department, picturing with every block how comical it would be to see a woman locked in her car with an escaped bat. Thankfully, that mental image was never realized and we made it to the nondescript government building right at eight a.m. when they opened. 

Hoping to quietly transfer responsibility for the bat, I was discouraged to find that this building was not only home to the health department, but to multiple government services agencies. This meant that after passing through a metal detector, I was seated in a surprisingly crowded waiting room with a shop vac canister that rattled intermittently. A moment like that will really have you considering how you came to this point, as total strangers give you more than a little side eye.

Thankfully, two very helpful employees came and relieved me of my vacuum and its contents, and you will all be pleased to know that the test came back negative for rabies. I did, for good measure, sleep in a tent in my living room for the next week just to be sure, but after a trip to Home Depot and the help of the maintenance team, I seem to be bat free, at least for the moment. 

In a later reflection to my parents, I shared that one of the great downsides to getting older is that you discover new things to be afraid of. In the same turn, perhaps, you also develop new skills to manage novel situations, and consistently find that there are helpers along the way. And also, life is weird, and sometimes you have to call your boss to explain that you’ll be late to work because you had a traumatic morning involving a bat and need some time to eat breakfast and watch an episode of The Office (you know which one) before you’ll be ready to face the day. 

Ansley Kelly

Ansley Kelly (’16) makes her home in Rochester, NY, where she delights in short, sweet summers spent sailing and long winters spent skiing at her favorite mountain. Between outdoor adventures, you can find her buying books more quickly than she can read them and indulging in mid-morning naps. She works for Wegmans Food Markets where she finds purpose and joy in feeding her community and the wider world.