My freshman year, I decided immediately that I would never live in Caples. This was not because Caples is arguably one of the ugliest buildings on campus, and also not because I had high hopes for sophomore year housing (which only a first year can foster). No, it was because I am an avid believer in ghosts, and I heard Caples was haunted. There was no way I was living in Caples. None at all.
Fast forward to the beginning of sophomore year, and I am moving into a Caples double. Despite all of my negative feelings toward Caples, I was actually a little excited about my living arrangement. I was rooming with one of my best friends and we had a room that felt five times bigger than my McBride double of last year. We were on the first floor and I had friends in nearby rooms. Eventually, the anxiety in the back of my mind over phantom dead guys wandering around my room at night eased, and I began to love living in Caples.
Little did I know that the true menace was awaiting me in November.
The week after Thanksgiving break was when I had my first encounter with it. I was sitting alone in my room. My roommate was out, and I was doing some homework in silence. I was totally absorbed until I saw it out of the corner of my eye — a tiny dark thing scuttled across the room from my desk to under the very bed I was sitting on. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew exactly what I had seen. My wonderful room had been invaded by a mouse.
I thought that the worst I had to worry about was ghosts. Oh how wrong I was, because believe me, this is so much worse.
I immediately sprang to action (after leaping off my bed and retreating to my friend’s room to freak out for a solid thirty minutes, of course). I got some snap traps from campus safety and even ordered a few humane traps off of Amazon because I’m not about killing animals, no matter how evil they are for invading my home. That night I lay awake, anticipating that awful snap that told me the nightmare was over. I didn’t hear it that night, or the next, or the one after that, though. I still checked the traps compulsively, but it seemed like our mouse was a clever little fellow. He had licked the peanut butter out of the traps without springing them. I couldn’t help but feel grudging respect for the little guy (who my roommate named Mort, by the way).
I had expected that he would be caught within a week and I could stop listening for scurrying little mouse paws and looking for things that he had eaten in the night. Alas, Mort was a genius. He evaded all of the traps and made a meal out of some of my roommate’s best food. We had also learned that he was not only living in our room, but in everyone’s rooms on our hall. There was no stopping him. But winter break was coming up, and I wouldn’t have to worry about this for a month. I left and presently forgot about the situation until I received a call from my roommate a few days before I got back to campus.
She had to come back early to train to be a CA, and upon return to our room she discovered that Mort had eaten her cactus. She actually wrote a really hilarious post about it for The Thrill. Mort had survived the unheated, desolate world of Caples over break and lived to tell the tale. I knew this was a mouse to be reckoned with. But beyond setting traps that he was too smart to fall into, there was nothing we could do. Campus safety and maintenance were unhelpful other than providing more snap traps. It felt like Mort had won.
That is, until another girl on my hall presented me with my salvation. It’s this little box-like thing that you plug into the wall. It sort of looks like a night light and has this green light on the top, and every once in a while you can hear it click faintly. It’s a device that lets out this high frequency noise that repels all kinds of pests (including mice, of course). I plugged it in, and there have been no sightings since.
I’m not so naïve to believe that Mort is gone for good. He is the smartest mouse I have ever met, but for now the nightmare is over. Still, this was definitely a learning experience for me, as somebody who has never had to deal with pests in my living space before. It took months of unsuccessful strategies before the people of my hall found something that seems to work… for now. Fingers crossed that Mort is long gone.
But this is my message to you, dear reader: never underestimate a mouse.
Image credits: Sam Roschewsk, Tumblr.com, Depositphotos.com, gifsec.com