I’ll agree with that and raise you the sounds of mice crawling around inside my walls beside my bed.
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I’ll raise you the sound of mice crawling around inside the walls ABOVE my bed (damn slanty roofs!) quickly followed by a dachshund jumping on my head to bork like a maniac at the wall.
That is a hell of a way to be woken up in the middle of the night let me tell you!
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I’ll see that and play “raccoons between the walls in my old apartment”. And also living on top of the closed fireplace damper. And also peeing from the overhang onto the balcony, right outside my bedroom window, this Niagara Falls of yellow, reeking piss.
I hate raccoons. But they are also creepy.
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When we went camping in Montana we seriously creeped out our camp neighbours when we told them tales of city raccoons in Toronto. But what really did it was the idea that we weren’t allowed to kill the raccoons that came into our homes. “Just shoot 'em” - “LOL no guns!” - “poison 'em” - “not legal” - “well what do you do then?” - “Usually we grab a broom and sweep them outside” - they could not believe that we had giant vermin in our homes and we weren’t allowed to do anything about it. Which, when you put it that way is kind of weird. LOL
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I suspect there are raccoons living in the eaves of my house; there’s large things moving around up there, and to find out what they are, I’d have to move a roomful of built-in shelving. So far there’s been no peeing. Just large shuffling noises and footsteps.
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Was Toronto built on sacred raccoon grounds?
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A friend of mine’s birthday is in August. She was having a party, and since her house had no AC they had the back door open to let in some air.
This was the year before I met her, so I wasn’t there, but everyone who was agrees it was a large house party – 30 people in one smallish living room. So it’s noisy, and crowded.
Which didn’t stop this raccoon from walking right in and helping themselves to the buffet table. He got swept out, but just the nerve!
I’m all for protecting wildlife, even urban wildlife, but raccoons are something else. They do incredible property damage and make things filthy, and city officials just shrug it off.
I mean, we started culling deer long before they reached raccoon levels of damage. I have lots of friends who are horrified at the idea, yet having grown up in the country, I know rural folk don’t put up with nearly the amount of critter crap (both literal and metaphorical) that urban folk do.
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If you hear ungodly screeching, they’re having sex. And then you’re in big trouble.
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I used to have a beautiful container pond in my backyard, with shubunkin
And water plants of all kinds. After two incidents of finding the pond completely upended-rocks moved, fish missing or injured, we installed a camera. What looked like damage done by people turned out to be done by family of raccoons. My pond had become their watering hole and buffet, they ate all my pet fish and plants.
I live in the middle if the city.
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After the purchase of our house was finalized, the former owners regaled us with the charming story of the raccoon that died in their chimney. They discovered it when they were having a dinner party, opened the damper to light a fire, and the maggots started dropping onto the hearth.
Toronto is sacred raccoon grounds.
But in keeping with the topic, if you want to be creeped out google “raccoon roundworm”. Something to think about while cleaning up the droppings in the backyard.
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We also had a beautiful koi pond! For years the raccoons just ignored it! We had snails that were 8 years old and winterover in the silt! A beautiful flowering lily and 3 lovely gold fish!
Then the raccoons found it. They tore up the lily and ate the bulb! Smashed all the snails and ate all the fish.
We tried to rebuild, and tried various cages of chicken wire to keep them out. But it never worked. They have long memories the little buggers, raccoons will always come back.
@gadgetgirl - I think I’m your friend! Our old house didn’t have AC but it did have North and South facing windows and patio doors that I would leave wide open in the evening to catch the evening breeze.
This is the result:
That cupboard is where we kept the catfood see, and when these SIX siblings were babies they could ALL fit in the cupboard together. Here they are teenagers, totally unafraid of me, and very very well fed. Only the best kibble for these guys! LOL - I literally would have to get a broom and physically sweep them out of the cupboard and out of the house. Cute clever little buggers.
Just to get back to the topic, these fuckers creeped the shit out of me several times because they were the same size and colour of our cat. And more than once I reached down to pet what I thought was the cat and no, it was a fat raccoon.
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Rats are what we worry about in my area of the world. And wolves have been spotted in some of the suburbs nearby. I see a fat possum going up my driveway, once in a while, when I’ve driven home at night. And skunks are about once in a while. But the only mammal that’s been in the house that I know of, and I’m not going to speculate on others, has been of the feline variety. Oh, and we had pet mice, once.
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Last year, I had a crazy amount of spring weeding to do in the yard, so one evening I found myself at the edge of the yard digging up dandelions by the roots at dusk. There was a somewhat distracting scratching noise, but I waited to look to see what caused it for a minute as I was digging. When I looked up, there was a big raccoon sitting about a foot in front of me, digging into the soil with its fingers just like I was! Apparently, it thought that I was digging because I had found a tasty meal of some kind, and it wanted in. But when I offered it the dandelions, it wasn’t interested. So I finished my weeding and left it to scavenge.
I wasn’t so much creeped out by the raccoon itself, as having read that rabies is endemic to their population around here.
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You know what creeps me out? Hearing people moving around hotel hallways in the middle of the night. For some reason it never bothers me in cities, but in hotels it does (probably because I’m already less comfortable).
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That’s absolutely horrific – and has probably happened more than once in my neighbourhood.
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OMG that’s awful. And yeah, they are totally fearless. It’s like they know about the law.
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I used to help a friend out with his arcade; we’d go around and buy old arcade cabinets at auctions and people’s basements. We once hauled a Dragon’s Lair out of a barn. We were so jazzed to get an awesome-condition cabinet for a few hundred dollars that we didn’t open it up until getting it back; a family of raccoons had been living inside. A cascade of raccoon poop poured out along with what used to be an animal of some type.
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We have an indoor cat who likes to slip outside. One night, the cat escaped, so my daughter’s boyfriend went out in the dark to bring her back in. He saw a furry shadow on top of our garbage can and made a grab for it. The very irritated raccoon hissed back.
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Reminds me, a very long time ago in my first apt. It was a little second story unit of a house. I left the kitchen window open since it was a hot summer evening. In the middle of the night I heard a noise in the kitchen and went to investigate without bothering to put on clothes or turn on the lights. The doorway had some old hippie bead curtains. As I was moving through the beads into the kitchen, there came a low feral angry guttural sound from between my legs. In the dark I couldn’t see what was below me. All I knew was it was alive and angry I had disturbed it and my delicate bits were in the bite zone…
As my girlfriend at the time would later say in the many re-tellings. First she heard the tomcat make his late night yodel sounds and then there came forth from the dark such a wale, such a cry of fear and confusion, that surely this was the sound one made when they suddenly unexpected had been disemboweled.
For the record I do not recall making this sound but have a feeling the events may have occurred roughly as retold.
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This was going to go off-topic, but for those creeped out by raccoons, they’ve now infiltrated Pearson Airport (Toronto’s major airport):
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