Oberlin’s Uninvited Guests

by Maddy de Vise, Contributor

Illustration by Ferd, Ferd

In terms of non-human entities, I share a living space with three: a fluffy and beloved cat named Tasia; a caterpillar in chrysalis named Chunker; and whatever has been eating my smoked deli meat. All things considered, I find the arrangement acceptable. It will be a sad day when Chunker emerges as a butterfly and is released, as I suspect he will be, into the great outdoors. 

Woodlands is apparently wealthy in fire hazards, but compared to other Oberlin housing, I’d wager we’re lacking in non-human guests. I’ve seen nary a spider or cricket, not even a lone ant in Oberlin’s newest residence hall. After talking with tenants of other dorms, I feel like I’m missing out. 

I’m thinking in particular of a pair of roommates I interviewed for this article. Suzie and Isla have a village apartment in a building shared with two other units. They do their laundry in the basement, which they describe as a cavernous, labyrinthine backroom perfect for squatters. 

Suzie was doing her laundry one night when she had a disturbing encounter. At the time, the basement lights were out of commission; so on top of everything else, she was making do with the flashlight on her phone. 

“I was down there, and then I heard, like, movement in the abyss. I was like, ‘You’re fucking lying.’ And then I turn on my flashlight, and I see these little eyes. And I was like, ‘You’re actually lying.’” When Suzie lifted her flashlight, a little raccoon stared back at her. “It started coming towards me — like, very gently — and then I had to scream really loud, ‘cause I was like, ‘Please don’t come towards me. Are you rabid.’ But I also was out of underwear, so I had to get all my underwear out of the dryer. And then I went upstairs, and I called Isla. I was, like, hysterical.” 

At this point in Suzie’s story, Isla was nearly in tears. “I thought it was so funny.”

Suzie and Isla called Facility Operations, but they believe Animal Control ultimately handled the raccoon. Isla showed me a picture of him clinging to his cage. 

“So cute!” she said. “Super confused!”

We debated whether the raccoon was a perv for trying to get into Suzie’s laundry, but Suzie didn’t think so.

“This is, like, a baby raccoon. I feel like it was looking for somewhere to be safe. I didn’t get ‘creep’ from it.”

“It was coming toward you, though,” said Isla.

“But it was doing it daintily. I was just very scared.”

Animal Control left a catch-and-release trap on their front porch in case another raccoon was tempted. “They were like, ‘It’s probably gonna happen again, so we’re gonna leave this thing out,’” Suzie recalled. “A couple days later, there was a possum in the cage. Like, a large possum with beautiful brown eyes.”

Suzie and Isla remember scratching noises emanating from the kitchen walls before the possum was caught fleeing the crime scene. At first they’d chalked it up to mice, but “then there was, like, a big scraping sound. Bigger than that which a mouse could make.”

The roommates called Fac Ops again, and they took care of the possum right away. “Through all of this, they’ve been great,” said Isla. “Fac Ops, Campus Safety, the whole team.” 

Resoundingly, students found the “whole team” effective in their efforts, but some squatters could not be reasoned with. Down the street from Suzie and Isla, Steph and Zoe share village housing with a menagerie of critters. Though Fac Ops has set traps on the property, their noisy neighbors in the attic continue to bother them.

“I wake up because they’re making noise, so it’s just freaky,” said Zoe, who lives on the top floor of the house. The squirrels share a wall with Zoe. “It’s just, like, weird noises.” When I asked Zoe to mimic the noises to the best of her ability, her imitation resembled the knights who say “Ni!” 

I asked Zoe and Steph whether the squirrels are welcome in their home. Steph’s response was diplomatic:

“I’d say they are. I gotta be politically correct. We like to coexist with nature.”

Zoe asked, “Do you wanna switch rooms?”

There is at least one squirrel living in Zoe and Steph’s attic. Maybe two. Zoe speculated whether sometimes “what I’m hearing is two of them going at it.” However many squirrels are living above Zoe, their presence is so ubiquitous that Zoe’s friend calls them Walter, “for the wall of it all.” Steph and I thought that was pretty clever. 

“I don’t want to evict him, and I don’t want the trap to kill him, but I don’t want him in my wall.” Zoe added, “I feel like this is just storage for him. We can hear the acorns rolling around. It’s like a whole ecosystem in there.”

In the unit below theirs – under the porch stairs, I mean – live two perfectly polite groundhogs. One of them is named Quercus for the oak tree in Steph and Zoe’s backyard. Quercus is fond of persimmons and generally keeps to himself, while Quercus’ roommate – or partner, I don’t know – has yet to formally introduce themself.

“The groundhogs are chill,” said Zoe. “It’s just the noises that are really getting to me.”

I see groundhogs loitering around Woodlands, but squirrels are the more common neighbor on campus. It could also just be that they’re noisier. Maddie, an off-campus student, alerted me to an Oberlin-native squirrel that bears no resemblance to Yeobie.

“There are these types of really small squirrels specific to Oberlin, and they live in people’s houses,” she told me, paraphrasing her exterminator. “They look like they’re baby squirrels. They’re not baby squirrels.”

Maddie’s squirrels were less tenants than squatters. The video she shared with me, shot in the dark and basically terrifying, captures a typical night from last fall. If it had been me, I’d have chalked it up to paranormal activity. 

“It was a two-month saga between me, the squirrels, and the piles and piles of walnuts above my room,” she said. One night, Maddie “heard a really big screech, and I heard a section of my wall come out. I was like, ‘Oh! That’s really interesting.’ And the screeching got louder. The squirrel had, like, broken through the wall.”

Maddie cites her landlord as a big help. “We have a photo of our landlord holding one of the squirrels he caught in our traps. He was great — no complaints.”

Another student was less fortunate. Rhys, who lived on the third floor of South, did not have the chance to meet his upstairs neighbors when they were alive. 

“I never encountered a live frog,” said Rhys. “I’ll tell you that.”

Yes: Rhys had frogs living – and dying – in their ceiling. But, said Rhys, “The real problem was the spiders. And the spiders started eating the frogs.”

These were no garden-variety spiders. When I asked Rhys how big the spiders were, because I could not fathom a spider eating a frog, he groped a softball-sized shape with his hands. Giant House Spiders, he said. 

Then I asked how big the frogs were.

“They were, like, that big.” Rhys’ hands made a slightly smaller shape. “They were the little ones. Nothing crazy.”

I said, “That is not little.”

Rhys described the grisly scene to me, which I will paraphrase here: There were three frogs in all. Two lay dead in the corner, while another hung suspended in a giant web. 

Callously, I asked Rhys if he would have felt comfortable having the frogs up there without the spiders. 

“Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, frogs are fine.” 

On the other hand, Rhys said that “the frogs really did it for me, because it felt like the Twelve Plagues of Moses at that point.”

Rhys told me they heard ribbiting for weeks before Fac Ops discovered the source. In fact, Rhys only called Fac Ops to take care of the spiders, who – in addition to Rhys’ ceiling – had also colonized their bed posts.

“They had moved in. It was time for me to go.” Rhys has since moved to Price, which they strongly prefer. “I like it there. There’s no frogs. No spiders.”

Overwhelmingly, the students I interviewed prefer respectful, unobtrusive neighbors. Noisy sex is one thing, but is it so much to ask that the attic tenants refrain from killing one another?

In the case of Talcott, there may be more at stake: The bats have lived among us for so long that it begs the question of where they’re coming from. Are they breeding in the walls? Are they recruiting outsiders? Or could it be that they’re inducting our very own? Talcott, I haven’t forgotten about you – I am determined to get an interview with a vampire. In the meantime, stock up on garlic.