For several nights, two little girls kept telling their parents the same thing: something was moving along the wall of their bedroom in the dark. Monsters under the bed, a bad dream, an overactive imagination… Their mother didn’t take it seriously. Until she saw it with her own eyes.
“The kids were right”
The story happened in Ohio and was shared on Twitter by the girls’ mother, Caitlin Burch, before being picked up by Fox. Her daughters had been reporting a “creature” moving in their room, usually at night. It turned out to be very real: an opossum had been living in the children’s bedroom and closet for three days before the parents believed them.
The family waited until the animal crawled into a storage bin in the closet. The father pinned the lid, covered the bin with a cookie sheet, carried it outside and released the opossum, which was still hanging around the yard the next day. “If I had known it was in the house, we would have been in a hotel for sure,” the mother admitted.
Why opossums move in now
Fall is exactly when it happens. As nights get colder, opossums look for warm, dry, quiet shelter. According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, they settle in attics, chimneys, window wells, sheds and crawl spaces. An open pet door, a gap under a garage door or a hole in a vent is enough for them to end up in a house.
The opossum is North America’s only marsupial. It is usually docile and would rather play dead than fight, but it is still a wild animal: it can bite when cornered, and like other wildlife, it can carry diseases and parasites.
If you find one inside
- Keep kids and pets away and close the door of the room it’s in.
- Open an exit to the outside if the room allows it, turn off the lights and give it time and quiet: it usually leaves on its own at night.
- Never grab it with bare hands. If it’s cornered, injured or with babies, call animal control or a licensed wildlife rehabilitator.
- Find the way in once it’s gone, and seal it.
How to keep them out
The DNR recommends removing what attracts them: pet food left outside, bird seed, open compost, uncovered trash. Seal holes with hardware cloth or metal flashing, cap chimneys, trim branches that touch the roof and close pet doors at night.
The limit
This story is from a few years ago, but it repeats every fall across the country. An opossum in the house is rarely dangerous, mostly frightening: the real risk is trying to catch it yourself.
Opossums aren’t the only ones looking for shelter right now: rats move in for winter too, as do stink bugs. And for smaller visitors, see the leaf mice avoid.
Listen to the kids, close the door and leave the way out open. That’s the lesson.
