I moved bedrooms in my house in April of 2021. Immediately, I began hearing strange scratching and movement right above my bed, in the ceiling and in the wall. It was especially bad at night. I swear to fuck I was hearing raccoon chirps in my sleep. One night, as I was just about to pass out, I could hear the faintest PURRING on the other side of the wall.

No one else in my house (six housemates at the time) really took me seriously. It kept up for about six weeks—I could hear Bertha follow me from place to place, she usually sat directly above me, wherever I was in the house. Either she liked me or thought I was a threat idk. I was pretty sure she had babies from the noises I was hearing. On Mother’s Day, my ceiling absolutely erupted in chirps and started shaking. I finally convinced my housemate to call the landlord, who sent a pest control officer.

Pest control guy was a sexist POS who called me “honey” and told me it was probably rats. I told him that I had lived with rats, I heard no chewing—just a lot of heavy movement, purring, chirping, etc. He spent a whole week ignoring me and setting rat traps. At this point, my friends and family began making fun of me, not really believing it was a raccoon either. I started to doubt myself. The whole time, Bertha was still making noises at night, sometimes waking me up with how loud they were. I began having dreams of my ceiling collapsing under the weight of raccoon piss.

It wasn’t until I sent my (dude) housemate into the crawlspace to take a picture that FINALLY the PCO believed us (and stopped calling me pet names, but that’s because I was being a cunt and regret nothing, he let me live with a fucking raccoon for two months). There was another frenzied incident where I dragged my housemate into my room at 5:30 AM bc I could finally show her the noises. Though he had finally accepted that we did indeed have a raccoon in the crawl space, PCO was still half-assing it for a week or two. What we needed was a wildlife retrieval specialist, not this clown.

The end of the month was coming up, I told my housemate I would straight-up not pay the rent until they sent the right people for the job. That finally did the trick. A tiny little dude, nicest person ever in the dirtiest coveralls ever, and his slightly larger protégée showed up to trap the sucker. While they were on the roof, they told us they could smell decomposition. I had noticed it being fairly quiet in the last day or two.

My birthday was the next day, we were watching a movie and the smell just got worse and worse. Retrieval specialists came by first thing the next morning. Bertha had gotten stuck trying to make a hole in the ceiling to the kitchen. She left behind three babies, who thankfully survived. We named them Harold, Maude, and Raccoontekente. No idea if the rescue let them keep those names or what.

Anyway my birthday party got fucked because half our house smelled like dead raccoon for a week. My housemate and I nearly killed each other bc we could only hang out in our bedrooms and had to spend way too much time in close proximity. Bertha continues to steal silverware, she is the primary suspect, anyway. The end.