The tale of my haunted house

The frost is definitely on the pumpkin. It’s the time of year when Linus starts to think about the patron squash of Halloween while the other kids and some adults, including me, begin to wonder about hauntings, witches’ brews, buying trick-or-treat candy, and graveyards.

Apparently it’s also the time when certain species of the animal kingdom start to feel a fascination with the macabre as well. The variety of mice that populate the Butterbean neighborhood seem to be especially fascinated with finding a place to die, and they seem tothink that inside my house is the place to do it.

I understand why mice would begin to come inside at this time of year if they are trying to keep warm. Considering the frost on the gardens, etc, and the fact that they can apparently squirm through an opening the size of a gum wrapper, I would be surprised not to find them inside. But if they were coming inside to get warm, you should be finding them arranged around the space heater like I am.

But I think that there is something else going on.

Maybe mice and elephants have more in common than just a mutual mortal fear. Maybe mice are also compelled by instinct to find the communal graveyard of the rodent world and make a strange pilgrimage there every fall.

Or perhaps there is a mouse version of the Ghost in the Graveyard game and they double-mouse-dare each other to see whether they can enter the graveyard and return. These mice tell scary stories to their children which proclaim that no mouse has ever come back, and well they should, because they never do.

If you think that I am luring mice into something as commonplace as old fashioned mousetraps, you are wrong. I do have a few of those, but I don’t catch many mice. There probably aren’t ghostly mouse legends about the Butterbeans’ mousetraps.

But the graveyard from which no mice ever return happens to be in a deep and dark crevasse into which they mysteriously seem to be compelled to jump or fall without the encouragement of any kind of mouse bait. Somehow they have found a way to die a dramatic death inside of the west wall in my kitchen. I promise that I haven’t lured any of them into that wall with amontillado, or beer or cheese or cake or anything else for that matter. What their fascination with the graveyard is I don’t know, but mice tread the trail of no return year after year, never to see their families again. Apparently there is no way for a mouse to climb out of the “pit” once he is in it.

Believe me, I don’t want dead mice a-moldering away inside of the wall. I prefer not to have the smells of rotting carcasses, no matter how small, emanating from behind the telephone. Nor do I want trapped live mice inside of the wall either. They get hungry and they aren’t able to survive on insulation, electrical wiring and plasterboard. Besides they are afraid of the dark, so they try to scratch and chew themselves out of the wall all the while making highly disturbing noises.

One almost succeeded. I was a little disconcerted to walk into the kitchen one morning and see a snuffling pink nose protruding from a hole at the top of the baseboard. Thankfully the hole was only half the size of a gum wrapper. I’m sorry, but we had to plaster up that hole with little Fortunato trapped inside. It was an evil deed for sure, but I would be very happy if he had not gotten himself into the wall to begin with.

After a few days, when we were pretty sure he was dead and the Halloween games were over, we (we here means Mr. Butterbean) decided to open up the wall to see whether we could find a way to discourage the mice from enacting their death throes inside of it. I am sorry to say that we didn’t and that we removed eighteen little skeletons from inside the wall, all of those from between only two studs.

It’s one of the mysteries of the animal kingdom, but I’m not going to tear down this wall to try to solve it.