To the Batcave: Flying Rat in Mather 317

Halloween came early to the four men of Mather 317 this year. Unlike “Christmas in July,” “Halloween in early October” was not a welcomed event because its mascot happened to be a furry, flying rodent. Yes, a bat, not the baseball kind, but the fruit-eating, blood-sucking, flying mammal from Transylvania. A visit from this tiny animal has left 317 with a new appreciation for rustling noises, glue paper, screens and rabies shots.

The bat was first sighted by Greg Gagnon ’04. “Well, I wasn’t quite sure that I had seen it right. I saw it scurrying in the corner and didn’t know if it was a mouse. After a few seconds of processing, I just started laughing,” he explains.

Gagnon’s laughter, described by his roommate Nat Myers ’04 as “manic,” was perhaps due to the coincidental fact that Gagnon is currently directing “Dracula” at the Loeb. Bats turning up in his room, bats turning into people and sucking blood...the comedy is all there. “My roommates thought I was cracking up [because of the laughter] and that the stress of the show was getting to me,” he says.

Following the laughing outburst, Gagnon alerted Myers and Marcel LaFlamme ’04 to the situation. The bat had crawled into the laundry pile of the fourth roommate, Will Holmgren ’04. “I ran down and told the super about the bat. He sent someone up who couldn’t find it and assured us it must have left,” says Gagnon. Professional pest controllers returned a few times, once supplying the room with glue paper with which to trap the bat.

Later that evening when Holmgren returned and was informed of the visitor, he jokingly commented that it would be funny if the bat were in one of his shoes. Holmgren then proceeded to pick up his shoes one by one to prove his point. When the bat actually did flop out of the fourth shoe he’d grabbed, one of the roomies let out with a “girly scream.” “I’m not going to say it was me,” Holmgren attests.

After this sighting, the room spent some days in the grips of terror. They kept outside doors to the bedrooms closed, Gagnon and Holmgren even went so far as stuffing socks in the crack between the floor and the door hoping to confine the bat to the room’s common areas.

Reality struck one morning when Gagnon woke with small, red, swollen spots on his finger, cheek and shoulder. It was only after a bit of thinking that he associated the spots with the bat and high-tailed it to UHS. “They told me they weren’t bat bites, but that I could get rabies from even sleeping in the same room as the bat,” says Gagnon. He is now getting rabies shots which he describes as not so bad.

After the UHS visit, Gagnon informed his resident tutor, who in turn informed Mather Acting Senior Tutor, Kira Petersen, of the health situation. In an e-mail sent by Petersen’s office, the residents of all rooms that might have connections to 317 were recommended to seek rabies advice from UHS. However, Gagnon is still the only one with any sort of treatment.

There was some intra-room dispute when faced with what to do about the bat. “I was threatening to catch the bat and keep it and release it outside,” says the humanitarian Myers. Dissent came from LaFlamme and Holmgren who commented that he was ready to go after it with a lacrosse stick. But then one night . . . “I heard this rustling noise, so I was a little wary,” says LaFlamme. He and Myers proceeded to enter his room and search out the critter. The noise came from behind a French dictionary, so LaFlamme proceeded to smash the book into the back of the bookcase. No luck. “Then we thought it was in the heater, so we kicked it. And nothing happened. So then we decided to smoke it out using some clove cigarettes. The fumigation was a resounding failure,” LaFlamme recounts. The sound remains a mystery.

The bat was last sighted in 317 when it was headed for the fire door connecting to 302. “The bat is probably still in our room,” says Conor Black ’04 of Mather 302. Even though the bat flew at his head last Saturday, Black doesn’t really mind that the bat might be a semi-permanent resident. He argues “they just get a bad rap from the same following that said wolves were merciless killers throughout the twentieth century.”