Lou’s View – July 17, 2014

Haunted Horses and Vampire Squirrels

by Lou Bernard

Seems I can’t even do home repair without encountering half a dozen local legends.

To be completely accurate, I can’t do home repair, period. I’m a terrible homeowner. I prefer to ignore anything that can’t be solved by shining a flashlight on it. If a wall falls down, my plan is to tell my wife that they’re supposed to do that.

But I’m kind of geared toward thinking about things in terms of local legends and history, which works out well enough—People always tell me they enjoy articles about ghosts and mysterious legends.

My house has a history to it. Built in 1881 by Civil War veteran Harrison Yost, it was where his grandchildren lived. His granddaughter, Ida Yost, killed herself on my back porch on August 19, 1905. She’s still haunting the place; we hear a lot of noises in the night. I’ve written about her before.

It’s theorized that repairing a house causes any ghosts inside it to act up. People have often asked me if Ida makes more noise when I do repairs. We’ll never know. There’s not a lot of danger of me deciding to fix things.

But I couldn’t ignore this one. Not too long ago, we had a panel fall out of the exterior wall, just above an old chimney. This opened up access to a crawl space inside, and a couple of squirrels decided to make our crawl space a squirrel hotel.

I’ve discovered that people are always willing to share horror stories about what animals can do, just so it’s not their house. I envisioned these squirrels chewing our rafters down to nothing; I’d wake up in a pile of sawdust that was once my place.

Plus, what if they were vampire squirrels? Laugh if you must. This is Clinton County, home of the vampire squirrel. An old legend, written down by Robert Lyman in his book Amazing Indeed, tells of flying squirrels attacking a man in a tree and trying to suck his blood. Probably mine were average squirrels, but you never know.

Either way, I had to get them out of my house. I’m still paying off the place, and they weren’t paying any rent. Plus, my wife kept bringing it up, as in,”When are you going to fix the hole in the wall?” I’d promised to do it, but my wife was sort of on edge about it. I’d already agreed to do it; I wish she’d quit reminding me about these things every six months.

So I called the best home-repair guy I know. This guy is a retired electrical engineer who can fix anything. One night, I finally broke down and dialed his number. “Dad,” I said.

I explained what was going on, and asked for his input on how to remove squirrels and repair my house.

“I’d shoot it,” he said. (The squirrel, not my house.)

This was about right, for my dad. Dad lives on a thirty-acre farm in the Lehigh Valley, and has grown accustomed to shooting any creature that causes him a problem—Groundhogs that eat the garden, snakes that get too close to the house, a few of my ex-girlfriends, etc. This was not really a viable solution for me.

So I chose to try to bait the squirrel outside with Payday bars. A Payday bar is made from, basically, nuts and syrup, so I thought these would be good squirrel bait.

I bought an industrial-sized pack of Payday bars, brought them home, and left them on the counter while I checked the mail. Then I went back inside, and discovered that my dogs had helped themselves to the pack of Payday bars. So at least I had confirmation that some animal likes those, though there’s not much my dogs won’t eat, including cardboard and mop heads. So I went back to the store for more Payday bars, hoping that these would lure the squirrels outside of the actual house. So, if you’re keeping score, so far I’m losing to both the squirrels and the dogs. That afternoon, the squirrel helped himself to a Payday bar and disappeared. Maybe they are vampires. But I adapt to a learning curve better.

When I noticed that the squirrel seemed to be spending more time outside, looking for Payday bars, I informed my wife of this. “Great! What do you do with it now?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t planned this far ahead.”

What I finally decided to do was to call a general contractor, and ask him to come in a big hurry. Actually, first I climbed the ladder up to take a look myself, and then I remembered that I’m terrified of ladders, heights, and home repair, so I went back down and called. The guy very kindly agreed to come out and hammer a board up to block the hole, and he also very kindly didn’t charge much. (In my years as a homeowner, I have learned that “Bring this up to code” is a contractor term that means,”My child is going to Harvard!”)

So the contractor came out, and climbed up the ladder, and covered up the squirrel access to my attic. He did this much more easily than I would have—In spite of the fact that I spent my childhood playing with toy tools and Tonka trucks, I cannot be trusted with any item more dangerous than a paper clip.

So all’s well that ends well. And, squirrels not being into paranormal investigation, I figure the outside of a haunted house is just as good as the inside.