We Shared Our Home with a Wild Possum

I hate rodents, and it doesn't matter if it's a small mouse, large rat or an overweight possum. There is no way that I would have willingly shared my home with one, but at the time we had no choice. At first, we didn't know what was living in our house; we merely knew that something that shouldn't have been there was. I always stayed up later than everyone else, since I didn't typically arrive home from work until after midnight, and I'd always hear a scratching sound coming from beneath me. It's not like I was going to go and investigate, though, because first of all, we didn't have a basement in our rental house, and secondly, even if we did, I don't think that I would have been brave enough to try and find out the source of the sound.

I heard the sound on a regular basis and when I informed my landlord, he claimed that he had a guy check it out but didn't find anything. How could he not find anything? Surely I wasn't just imagining the sound, was I? If I was, then I was just as mentally unstable as the patients that I worked with at the psychiatric hospital. To prove to myself-and everyone else-that I wasn't imagining things, I stayed up late one night that I didn't have to work, and as soon as I heard the sound, I woke my husband. Irritated and groggy, he came into the living room where the noise was loudest, and heard the sound for himself. He was immediately awake and no longer grouchy as we tried to figure out what the heck was underneath our house.

One cold night as my mom and I returned from the store, we were totally shocked; we saw exactly what had been living under our house: an extremely fat possum! Despite its beauty, when I saw the possum's sharp claws as it quickly and expertly squeezed under our house, I trembled with fear. The very next day, I contacted our landlord and told him about my discovery. I asked him to please get animal control out to the house so that the huge possum could be returned to the wild where it belonged. Imagine my shock when he laughed at me and said that possums didn't live inside people's houses. He said that there was no way that a possum could be in the crawl space living. I don't know what planet he was from, but anyone can look in the phone book and see advertisements for pest control companies that specialize in getting rid of possums. If possums can't live in homes, then why do these companies specialize in it? No matter how much I tried to convince my landlord that I wasn't making it up, he refused to have anyone else come out. Besides, I only heard the possum late at night, never during the day, and it's not like someone was going to come to our house at one in the morning.

Many nights I'd sit there at the computer, scared to death as I imagined the huge possum bursting into the house and attacking me. It thank goodness, never did get inside the house, but that didn't stop me from worrying about the possibility. After checking with pest control companies ourselves and being given astronomically high prices for services, we decided to move. Before we actually moved, though, we no longer heard the scratching sound, but instead began to smell an extremely putrid odor emanating throughout the house. We assumed that the animal had died underneath the crawlspace, but it wasn't our problem, it was our landlord's. We informed him of the odor, and even had him come to the house to see for himself, but he still refused to believe it. We moved out soon after that, and now live on a slab, so hopefully no more rodents can find there way into our home.