Last spring mr rampy and I were sitting in bed one night watching Adult Swim when we started to hear these weird scratching and thudding noises. At first I thought it was our cat pulling himself along under the bed on his back (as was his wont before we closed off the bedroom to keep him out of the baby's bed), but then we realized it was coming from the left side of the room.

We both leapt out of bed and huddled by the wall discussing whether the noise was coming from under the floorboard, inside the wall, or the ceiling. It was tapering off at this point, so it was hard to tell. I immediately thought that there was a squirrel (or god forbid, a rat) trapped in the wall, just because my parents had some problems with that before they redid the top floor of their house. Then we thought maybe something had fallen into our window well (which is this depression that goes into our back deck so that you can still see/get out of the window on that side of the basement). The top of this depression was "covered" with a half-circle of plastic and a few planks of wood, but I at least had heard stories of animals falling into even covered window wells. For example, the family that woke up to find a deer blundering around in their living room--that deer fell into their house through the window well.

So mr rampy went around back to look around, but saw nothing. Then he struck the ceiling of our bedroom a few times with a stick, and that noise convinced whatever was moving around to shut up because then everything was dead quiet. But we went ahead and shut the door to the basement because I had this fear that there was some animal in our walls--say a rabid raccoon--and that it would blunder into the basement and then up the stairs to bite our cats or, say, us.

The next day Animal Control came by to check out the situation, and the guy discovered a hole (about two feet or so in diameter) in the roof above our bedroom, just by the gutter. Apparently a raccoon had eaten its way into our attic, looking for a good place to nest and breed, and the noises we'd heard were bits of shingle and wood falling into the wall. Animal Control Guy said that he could set a trap for the raccoon, but if he caught it he could only a.) kill it then and there or b.) release it at the edge of our property...whereupon it would most likely trot back up onto the roof and disappear back into our attic. All this because it's illegal to transport raccoons.

It wasn't in the attic at that time, so we just had him tack down some roofer's felt and then we asked our neighbor to trim his tree (Raccoon HWY 1) back a bit. We've since mended the roof, and there haven't been any more incursions, but who knew that it was absolutely normal for a raccoon to plant itself on your gutter and chomp its way--through WOOD and SHINGLES--into your house. They didn't mention that in our "Welcome to the 'Burbs" packet.