www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall HELP!! Poltergeist or animals

ALICE:

Christ is in our midst!! He is and always will be!!

Don't sell yourself short. These little mice are dirty little pests and may even bit if cornered. There's nothing more disconcerting than to be relaxing in your living room and seeing one run around the perimeter of the room and duck into some little crevice you wouldn't even think would be possible to enter. Seems their skeletons are flexible enough that they can crawl under a quarter inch gap under your external doors if given the chance--something to watch for in the fall. In fact, I even had a higher threshhold installed in my kitchen because the old one had a gap big enough that I watched one squirm under the door to escape. Well, if they can leave that way, they can come back, too. So you might want to have those sorts of things checked, too.

As for the other possibility, I have an old German custom I observe--learned from my great grandmother and grandmother. Every night, every room is blessed with holy water before everyone retires. A simple, "Lord, bless this room and this whole house and all those who dwell here" is enough.

BOB

Alice

Did you ever solve your demon / critter problem ?

Well, the exterminator came and found no evidence of any critters!! He said to wait and see if I heard them again.

So for a week after his visit all was silent.

On Pascha morning at the break of dawn, 5:30 A.M. exactly, I was awakened after only one and a half hours of sleep (got home from the after Liturgy meal at 3:30 A.M. and didn't fall asleep until 4 A.M.) by my critter demons who decided to start making ALOT of noise in the wall right next to my bed!!

I announced outloud to them that 'Christ is Risen', to which they immediately fell silent for a few minutes, only to start up a ruckus again for fifteen to twenty minutes, and then they disappeared.

It seems that my critter demons like the Protestant tradition of celebrating Easter at dawn over the Orthodox tradition of celebrating after Midnight!!

Anyway, I haven't heard a ruckus since, though I did hear some faint noise elsewhere (though not that type of noise) last night, so I am going to call the exterminator back and have him go to his Plan B, which was to apply a deterrent around the base parameter of the house which sticks to any critters upon entering, and because they don't like it, after a couple of times, the smart, disgusting rats and/or mice put two and two together that they stuff comes on them from the house, and supposedly, that keeps them from visiting again.

Since it doesn't cost too much, and since my nerves get frayed, and I am thorougly disgusted and scared by the idea of rodents, I am going to call him on Monday...and hope that it will work--if they do indeed exist!!!

Ofcourse it works out that my husband is always away on business when all this excitement transpires!

Thanks for asking,
Alice

Alice,

X. B.

Sorry the critter demons are back. If they were Protestant don't you think they would have celebrated Easter last month? If they were knocking at their sanctuary door at dawn last Sunday they must be Greek Catholics.

Well, I said that they may like the Protestant tradition of dawn, but they obviously like to bother Orthodox, because they started at precisely the beginning of Forgiveness Vespers the evening before Clean Monday (Orthodox calendar) and made their presence known again at precisely the break of dawn on Pascha morning (Orthodox calendar)...

Anathema to them!

We heard gnawing for a while and then discovered that the huge eight inch (not including tails) Norway rats had eaten a whole into our bedroom. We were covered with flea bites. It was a horrible site.

We caught them all and sealed up the hole and the area from which they came. Then we had to get some sticky flea traps from the Pest Control. The circular traps with a red light bulb (Christmas ones) work the best.

Here in California, the rats do carry bubonic plague and people have died from it.