This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/BlairDaniels on 2026-07-31 04:17:06+00:00.

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On Wednesday morning, I woke up to an alert no parent wants to see.

RABIES ALERT

Animals in the vicinity of Brookhaven in Franklin Township have been testing positive for rabies at a rate higher than expected. We recommend the following tips for staying safe:

Do not touch wild animals.

Stay away from wild animals, especially raccoons, skunks, bats, and foxes.

If you see any animal exhibiting the following symptoms, contact Franklin Animal Control immediately: [REDACTED].

We only moved to Brookhaven two months ago. It seemed like the perfect neighborhood. Safe. A little off the beaten path, out in the woods, but that was the way we liked it.

“But, like, a rabies outbreak?” I whispered to my husband David as he put frozen waffles in the toaster. “Has that ever even happened before?!”

“Bill says there’s an alert every summer. It’s just that time of year,” he muttered to me. “Like, it’s like Alpha Gal and Zika and all the things. You know, people are playing outside, animals out of hibernation…”

“Okay, but we never got anything like this is Sawyerville.”

“Yeah, 'cause they sprayed a hundred pounds of insecticide every year.”

“Maybe that’s better than rabies.”

“Rabies is really rare.”

He was right. As I brought up Google, it told me only 3 Americans die of rabies per year. A hundred thousand, though, got the rabies vaccine after an exposure.

You couldn’t wait for symptoms.

If you already had symptoms, you were dead.

So we just get the vaccine if a wild animal bites us. That’s fine. We’re fine. And we’ll fence in the backyard like we’d been planning to do anyway.

Unfortunately, our problem was not in the raccoons or skunks or whatever was in the woods.

We had bats.

I’d never looked for them before. It never even occurred to me. But that night I looked out the window, and saw no less than ten fucking bats swooping out of the eaves of our family room.

You will likely not feel it if a bat bites you, the website read, next to an up-close photo of the horrible, smushed-pug face of a little brown bat. Simply picking up a bat, or finding one in your home, is an exposure.

If you find a bat in your home, and cannot capture it to test it for rabies, immediately head to the nearest ER to receive the rabies vaccine.

I set my phone down and froze, staring out at the darkening sky, and the little silhouettes swooping and swerving mere feet from the window.

No, no, no.

***

“Well bats, you know, can’t be removed between July 1 and August 15. That’s the roosting season, and the pups can’t fly yet, so they will die if we install the grates and their mothers can’t return to feed them.”

“You… you can’t remove them?”

“Not until August 15, no.”

“Listen. I have a five year old girl and a seven year old boy with autism. They will not know if a bat bites them.”

“It’s federal law, ma’am. They’re a protected species.”

Like fuck they are!

“We’re in the middle of a rabies outbreak, and you’re telling me you can’t remove the bats in my house?!”

“It’s not a rabies outbreak, it’s just that time of year.”

“What happens if they get in the house?”

“If they’re in your living space, you need to call animal control.”

“But they could get in at any time! I can’t wait until it’s too late!”

“It’s only…twenty-two days until August 15. Just sit tight. Call animal control if you find one in your house. Try to catch it with a box or something, like a Tupperware, so they can test it and you don’t need to blow ten thousand dollars on the shots for no reason. It’ll go by fast. Promise.”

You expect me to… catch a bat… in the house… with Tupperware?

What the actual fuck?!

“So that’s it then. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Nothing you can do.”

Nothing I can do, my ass.

I’m all for the environment. But holy fuck, I’m not going to protect an entire colony of bats sitting in the eaves of my house. Risk my kids’ lives to save some baby bats. That’s right—the colony was probably a lot bigger than just ten, with all the babies sitting somewhere inside the walls, growing, waiting.

“You can go to jail if you kill them, you know,” David said behind me.

I turned away from the Amazon listing for wasp spray. “Well, I can’t just sit here and do nothing!”

“Okay. But also, if you spray them, it says they can burrow deeper into the house and actually maybe get inside,” he said as he looked at his phone. “I looked it up. They can’t chew through drywall like mice and squirrels can. If they could get in the house, they’d be in already. They’re just in the eaves or soffits or whatever. For the time being, we’re safe.”

“This is a nightmare,” I said, slamming the laptop and hiding my face in my hands.

“It could be worse. My parents, when they bought a new house, found all this black mold that the inspection missed. Had to fumigate the whole place.”

“Wait—shouldn’t the inspector have looked for bats?”

He shrugged. “They’re not in the house. Not really.”

Why am I the only one taking this seriously?!

*****

We found the first bat on July 25th.

It was clinging to the outside of the chimney. I found it while the kids were playing outside. My head pounded and I screamed at them to go inside and tell David to bring out some Tupperware.

It wasn’t in the house.

But it had been where the kids were playing.

Such a small little thing I almost missed it. Wings all twisted and bony, clinging to the brick with its little claws. Fur almost blending in with the red brick. David managed to put the Tupperware over it, and drag a chair over to lean against it so it wouldn’t fall. We had captured it. Sort of.

We called animal control (who I’d put in my contacts as soon as I was done talking to the bat removal guy.) The woman reached out and grabbed it with her gloves…

And peeled it off the brick.

It was dead. Had been, for at least a few days. Fried in the heat wave.

“It probably died in the heat,” the animal control officer assured me. But I spent four sleepless nights googling, reading that rabid bats were more susceptible to heat death. Why did only one die? Not all ten?

When I got the voicemail, I felt like I was going to faint.

“The bat we removed from your home tested… negative,” the woman said, her voice sounding strange, uncertain almost. But I was barely paying attention.

The backyard was now off-limits to the kids. My husband thought I was being extreme. But the kids go out barefoot. If any of the bats were rabid, they would fall out of their roost (our FUCKING house) and be in the grass (to be trampled barefoot) or cling to the side of the house where my kids would touch it.

I cannot check every square inch of the yard for fallen bats every day. I just can’t.

***

I bought three 1-acre-rated bug zappers and set them up around the yard.

Bats eat bugs. Take away their food source, I reasoned, and they will leave.

When doing my research, Google’s AI helpfully told me “Bug zappers mostly kill beneficial insects. A better alternative to removing mosquitos from your yard is to attract bats.”

Fucking hell.

You’re killing beneficial insects! Pollinators! the results screamed at me. I’m sorry but at this point I don’t fucking care. Cut off the food source of the bats and they will go somewhere else. The end.

Do I sound unhinged?

Well, yeah. I am unhinged after finding a fucking bat on my fucking house and interrogating my children about whether they saw or touched a bat every single day.

I’m tired of telling my kids they can’t go outside and taking them on all kinds of impromptu field trips just to get them out of the house.

I’m tired of not feeling safe in my own home.

I’m tired of my husband refusing to move because it would cost too much. It would. We don’t have the money. He’s right. But we do have the money to buy bug zappers.

After having the zappers set up for a few days, I watched the house at dusk as I sat in the car in the driveway.

I watched them swoop out of a hole between the chimney and the house, plummeting down to the ground before swooping up at the last second. Their movements were wild and twitchy, every direction absolutely random as they scoured the yard for insects.

But the bug zappers hadn’t worked.

It was about a dozen, maybe more. Fucking hell.

So the next night I tried a new slant. I kept the outside lights on all night and set up a plastic owl on the deck. Owls eat them apparently. They’re afraid of owls.

Nope, did not a thing.

How to attract owls into your yard? I typed frantically into Google.

Green spaces, shelter, treeline... all things I already have.

“At least they’re not in the house yet,” David kept repeating.

He kept adding that word on the end now. Yet. Like it wasn’t a matter of if, but when.

*****

After the kids went to sleep, I was in the kitchen, trying to do a quick load of dishes. As I stared out the window over the sink, into the darkness of the backyard—

Something swooped upwards, inches from the window.

I froze. Was that a…

No. It had to be a moth.

A big moth.

I turned off the faucet and walked over to the sliding glass door. My hand hovered over the light switch. Taking a deep breath, I flicked it on.

Something swooped wildly away from the light, and into the darkness.

That was a bat.

I stared out, waiting. At the scones outside, washing the deck in yellow light. The pitch blackness beyond. Nothing moved. All was still.

Maybe the light scared it away.

I turned off the light...

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