Going Batty

It was a dark and stormy night…

Actually, no…it was dark, but the sky was clear and the air was crisp and cool. It was a beautiful October evening; the night before Halloween 1996. I swear upon the grave of Daniel Webster that the story I am about to share is true.

It was a little after 9pm. We had just tucked our Shelby and Ashlyn into bed and Connie and I had settled onto the couch to watch a little television. I can’t remember what we had planned to view because within minutes of sitting down, the phone started ringing. I stepped into the kitchen to answer the phone and barely started the conversation when I heard Connie scream.

Our kitchen at the time had a door on one end that opened into the hallway that led out of our living room to our bedrooms. The other end was open to a small dining nook and back into our living room. Essentially, you could make a circle through our kitchen into our living room and back.

As I looked up in reaction to the frightened yell of my usually calm and rational wife, I heard the strange flap of wings and came face to fangy face with a large bat. It swooped past my head and flew through our kitchen, making a wide turn through our living room and back past my face again.

This was not one of those little bats that you see flying out of chimneys and caves at twilight. I’ve seen those before. I don’t like them, but I’m not completely freaked out by them. This was what I call a “movie” bat. The wingspan was over a foot wide and its head looked to be the size of a tennis ball. It looked like the thing that Gilligan turned into in that weird vampire episode I watched growing up.

I know what you are thinking. I am obviously exaggerating the size of what was simply a regular bat. Or maybe it was even a bird that I mistook for a bat. In the hysteria of the moment, I could have only thought it was a bat. That is logical, and if I were alone when it happened, I would tend to agree. However, as I said, my very logical and clear headed wife can confirm my story. It was a bat. It was big. And it was in our house.

I hung up the phone (after politely saying I would have to call them back) and told Connie to run back and close the kid’s bedroom door. Crawling quickly through the flight zone, she did just that, and locked herself in with the girls.
I dodged the next pass of the bat and ran to the front door, unsure of what to do except hold the door open and hope that it would fly out on its own. From behind the glass of the storm door I watched as it circled, again and again, and wondered how long I could wait. Looking once again at the wingspan and the pointy ears on its massive head, I decided I could wait a good, long while. It was a beautiful night and I decided that the fresh air would do me good.

After twenty minutes of watching and carrying on an anxious conversation with Connie through the window of the bedroom where she was trapped, I saw the monster bat finally fly through the opening and disappear into the night sky. I hurried inside, closing and locking the door.

We checked all the windows and access points (upstairs, downstairs, attic, and basement) and could find no obvious point of entry for the creature. We never found a sign of its existence. No scratch marks on the walls, no little bat droppings. We had no idea how long it had been in the house before it made its presence known. It could have been hiding under our bed or in one of our closets for days or even weeks. It was more than a little un-nerving.

The mystery has never been solved.