Tag Archives: animal in the attic

Ghost Busted

There’s an animal in our attic, I’m not sure what it is but I know that it’s big and it has babies up there with it.  It must have only gotten up there in the last two weeks because that’s when my husband and I left for vacation – aka that’s when Tyler put his golf clubs through the floor and probably opened up space for an animal to get inside.  He was trying to get a suitcase (playing with his driver)  when he caught one of the beams with a golf club, staggered backwards, and put the butt of his club through the thin wall separating the outside world from our unfinished attic.  I assume that’s where the animal tore an even larger hole through the wall and got in.

The problem is (besides the fact that there’s an animal in the attic) that we were leaving for a 10 day trip to Mexico to celebrate our anniversary and left our house in the hands of the neighbors 16 year-old son.  He’s the one that called us about 2 days after we left, terrified by the ghost haunting our attic.  I brushed him off and told him the house wasn’t haunted it’s just old so it creaks and that he shouldn’t worry.  But 3 days after that he called again, in hysterics that there was, in fact, someone in the attic.  He went up there to investigate the sounds and was met by horrible screeching and howling, which is when he sprinted from the house and nearly called the cops.  Basically, I had to find someone else to water my plants and I spent the rest of my vacation restless to get home and solve the problem.

Now that I think about it, it’s very likely that the animal in the attic is a raccoon.  If she just had babies she would have been very defensive when Xander climbed into the attic hollering at the disturbed spirit that “needed to go into the light”.  But, that leaves me with another problem.  I have no idea how to handle a raccoon problem, especially if babies are involved.  I need someone with a little more experience, preferably a trapper and NOT an exorcist.

Out of Ideas

We’ve tried everything to get rid of the raccoons in the attic, but at this point it seems impossible.  They’ve been there for what, a couple of months now?  I can’t pinpoint an exact time because we actually didn’t know they were there until a month or so ago, which is when we first saw the mother raccoon go into the attic.  Before that, we just heard the occasional bumps and creaks that we gave the old house credit for.  We would have been none the wiser if our neighbor’s cat hadn’t gotten into a tiff with the raccoon, leaving us to investigate the commotion and catch the raccoon crawling through a gap in the soffit.

After that we listened carefully to the sounds from above the ceiling, and it became fairly clear to us that there was more than just one raccoon in the attic, she had babies, so we started to do our research.  Anything we could think of we looked up: how to get rid of raccoons in the attic, trapping raccoons, the most effective raccoon removal methods; all of it.  After we made a list of possible solutions, we started to check them off one at a time.  We turned the lights on in the attic, we started playing loud music during the day when we were gone, we set traps outside where we thought we might catch the mother, and we even put ammonia soaked rags up there with a fan to blow the smell around.  We took every step possible, and we thought it had worked.

Not long after we had started harassing the raccoons, I saw the mother leave the attic with what looked like a baby in her mouth. We were ecstatic! After we celebrated for a minute, my husband went out and sealed off the gap we saw her entering and exiting through.  We went to bed happy that night, thinking all was well.  Of course, happy endings are for fairy tales and the next night the raccoon came back, tore the soffit open again, and has been hiding out there for the last 4 days (she hasn’t left once).  We can’t hear any babies anymore, but we don’t know what she’s doing up there and we have nothing left to try.  Please, we need some serious help to get rid of the raccoon in our attic, I can’t keep doing this.

What’s Living in the Attic?

There are raccoons in the attic of our rental home.  My family has lived here for about 7 weeks now, but before that it sat empty for 2 years; I think they probably started nesting here during that time.  The first 3-4 weeks we didn’t even notice them because of all the racket we were making trying to get settled in, but after that we started to hear sounds almost every night and we started to suspect that we weren’t the only renters in the house.

It started as just small thumps from the ceiling, and at first I just attributed it to the new heating system, I figured everything was still adjusting.  Then we started to hear scraping and thumps in the walls and the sounds of baby animals whining and calling out to their mother.  That’s when we figured out who our house guests were.  Obviously we couldn’t call anyone in to confirm our suspicions until our landlord approved it, unless we wanted to pay for the inspection out of pocket; so we called him and let him know what was going on.  He told us he would take care of it and set out some live traps hoping to catch the raccoons himself, but no luck. We suggested that he call a professional Wildlife Removal Technician, but he wanted to try everything else first; so, we waited.

It wasn’t all that bad, we knew that the landlord would take care of any damages caused by the animals so that didn’t bother us.  The problem was, my daughters were terrified of the sounds they would hear at night.  They’re 6 and 8, so their imaginations are vast and even though they knew what the animals were, they were so afraid that they were trying to eat them while they slept.  Cue sharing a bed with my kids for two weeks. BUT, last night my landlord called and told me I could call in the big guns, so there’s an inspection scheduled for later this afternoon and hopefully the raccoons in the attic will be long gone by the end of the week!