Attack of the Evil Ant Creatures: A True Home Improvement Horror Story

The refrigerator had been slowly listing, leaning backwards further and further over the years in the decrepit single-wide mobile home. It was time, we decided, to give the sagging kitchen a new floor. It was what lay beneath that haunts us to this very day.

Gingerly removing the old fridge, we could see the extent of the damage - severe rot of some kind, probably due to moisture during the 40+ years of the trailer's existence. We were so naive.

We cleared out the rest of the appliances and furnishings, then prepared to bully up the cracked, scarred linoleum. I spotted a few large black ants wandering out of a small hole where the refrigerator had been, their slow, random movements no threat.

"Grease ants," I thought to myself. I knew their kind. They smelled horrible when crushed, like angry turpentine, hence the nickname. Their biting black bodies were a familiar sight in the trailer, and we did not question from whence they came, or where they were going to.

I called my husband over and pointed out the handful of creatures crawling out of the hole. "This is where they've been coming from, I guess." He nodded and turned away toward the tools, then returned with a hammer.

Before I could ask what his motives were, the hammer fell with deadly force, a bull's eye in the center of the ant hole. I smiled, amused and incredulous, as he yanked the hammer back out of the damage with difficulty, and opened my mouth to speak.

But I was rendered speechless by what happened next.

From the wound poured dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of the black creatures, like a living oily fluid. The pool widened to three feet in diameter, then four, and my husband and I looked at each other. I gasped, realizing that we had no defense against this alien entity that was quickly filling the kitchen. We stepped backwards in horror, then frantically looked around for something - anything - to stem the evil tide of biting insects.

At last I stumbled upon some window cleaner, and was able to keep them at bay long enough for my husband to scramble for the insecticide like a mad man. Finally, judgment rained down - the hoards were defeated, even as some of them managed to escape into the adjacent chocolate-colored living room carpet.

It was only later, after the corpses and poison of the battle had been cleared away, that we were able to cut out the floor between the framing and assess the damage. We knew then what we had been dealing with all those years. The scourge was a nest of carpenter ants, something we hadn't understood before that fateful day. The vermin had made lacework out of the layers of plywood under where the fridge had stood, and if not for the linoleum, it would have fallen through the floor years earlier.

If you have the misfortune to encounter a situation like ours, may you be more observant and prepared than we were, and avoid a similar grim fate. Beware the sinister carpenter ant!