The Visitor
On Wednesday morning, we came into the kitchen to find an orange slice on the stove and a tomato that seemed to have exploded. This was obviously troubling.
My initial thought was that one of us had sleepwalked, and acted out some rage issue against fruit. I realize this is a strange explanation to reach for first — maybe I’m the culprit! — but it may explain why I’m a screenwriter.
The much more reasonable instinct would be to assume we had some sort of visitor. A mouse, a rat, a squirrel. Or possibly a raccoon — our housesitter had mentioned seeing one over the holiday. We set a peanut butter-baited mousetrap on the counter, and sure enough, at 4:50 a.m. Thursday I heard it snap. There was no critter under the bar, however.
I know through friends that a raccoon has to be handled differently than a mere mouse or rat, so I was determined to figure out which kind of varmint we had. I set my MacBook’s built-in camera to shoot one frame of video per second, and left the lights dimmed in the kitchen. I also re-baited the trap, this time with hummus.
This morning, I came downstairs and saw with disappointment that the trap hadn’t popped. But scrubbing through the video, I got my answer.
Fans of The Nines may recognize the kitchen, and the accuracy of Margaret’s “they live in the palm trees” line.
UPDATE: Conventional rat trap worked. It snapped four minutes after leaving the room. Cleanup was bloodless, but still more unsettling than I anticipated. Rat Guy comes Monday to figure out how it got in.
FURTHER UPDATE: Here.
Filed under: Los Angeles, Meta, Projects, The Movie, Video
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January 9th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
so cool! how did you program you isight camera to do that?
January 9th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
This felt like one of those gag videos where something really scary pops up into frame right at the end to make viewer jump…I was almost afraid to watch.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Uhm… is it a rat? Or a squirrel? I saw something move in the corner, but I’m still no wiser.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
@Kevin:
That’s a rat. Squirrels have fluffier tails.
It won’t be around long.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
At first, I thought your post was going to be about a Syrian musician and his Senegalese girlfriend, living in the US illegally. Mice, though, can be a real problem. We bought an old house and immediately started a few renovations. At first we had no problem, but after a few months, we started seeing a mouse or two. Being an animal lover, I set a few live traps with absolutely no luck. We figured there was only one or two, so it wasn’t a big problem. I even managed to capture a few myself (they move fast!) which tipped us off that it was not just one or two. Well, then their extended family moved in. It was a full infestation and after finding mice droppings in my children’s dresser drawers a couple of times (meaning we had to wash ALL their clothes), I gave up and called an exterminator. That was two and a half years ago and we haven’t seen one since.
By the way, I’m assuming that was a mouse I saw on the video. It was a little difficult to see.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
The built-in camera can shoot one frame per second? Ooh.
Maybe you could use one of those CSI-type zoom-in-any-video-and-render-to-HD-quality softwares to identify the intruder.
January 9th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Oh, I just saw your post that it was a rat. Well, at least that means you don’t have mice.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Ah, I couldn’t see it clear enough. You do realise once you have one rat you most certainly will have another. A breeding pair usually move inside out of the cold. So, expect to get both. We just go rid of two that were in the wall space and driving us nuts. Good luck.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I don’t know why, but that video is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a long time.
January 9th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
i’ve had better luck with the humane mouse traps than regular springloaded ones. you have to make sure you put traps against the wall, that’s where rodents like to run.
also keeping a clutter free room helps, it looks like you’re pretty clean. but keeping objects a foot off the floor and away from the walls can help, because they then don’t have anything to run behind and they don’t get brave. :)
i’ve done a lot of research on rodents lol, i used to have a mouse problem when i was a messy (messier) teenager…
January 9th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
I predict a great horror/thriller on the horizon: It Came for the Hummus
Ch-ching! ;)
January 9th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Wow, does your computer naturally shoot such a wide frame?
January 9th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Great minds think alike, John. Several years ago I left my camcorder on in night-vision mode to find out if I had a rat in my kitchen, and captured similarly damning (and cringe-inducing) evidence.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Like Will up there, I was expecting something like a late night (nude) stroll to the fridge. Hahaha.
Have you seen the new ‘My Bloody Valentine 3-D’ e-card? It’s frightening. On a similar note, Fangoria magazine has ‘the first-ever gay horror blog to be featured on a major non-gay horror website…’ written by Sean Abley.
http://www.fangoria.com/blogs/gay-of-the-dead.html
January 9th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
@Dave:
You could probably whip up a script to shoot the one frame per second, but I used SecuritySpy, which I already had for another internet camera.
@Matt:
I cropped it in QuickTime Pro.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
The city where I live was doing work on the water pipes a couple of years ago, and that sent rodents looking for new places to go. It was at least two months after we got rid of them, and I still couldn’t look at my kitchen counters without wanting to be sick. My condolences.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
There is motion detection software for Macs that will record a video once a certain threshold of activity is detected. I’ve used it to record video and FTP it from my iMac in case it’s stolen while I’m on vacation. It could let you watch the rats in action too.
January 9th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Spooky stuff… makes for a great premise… guy sets up webcam to investigate strange kitchen occurance, assuming it’s a rodent… and ends up taping eerie figures or poltergeist activity, realizing his house is haunted… or the portal to some dark dimension utilized by shadowy figures to enter our realm. Hm…
January 9th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I can’t believe how calm you are.
When we had a mouse in our apartment I slept with a glass bottle by my bed (I guess I thought I would bludgeon the thing to death?) and would routinely scream and throw drink coasters in it’s general direction whenever it wizzed by me on gross little germ-infested mouse feet.
January 9th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
John,
Are you sure it’s a rat and not a mouse? Mice can stand up like that, can’t they?
January 9th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
“There’s a rat in the kitchen … what I’m a gonna do … there’s a rat in the kitchen what I’m a gonna do … I’m gonna fix that rat, that’s what I’m gonna do … I’m gonna fix that rat …” UB40
January 9th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
“No Animals Were Harmed”® – But, stay tuned for more. When we return, a lonely rodent mother, hungry and desperate to feed her starving family, breakes into the kitchen of a Hollywood star… A tragic encounter awaits her that will change her life forever. (Rated R for bloodshed).
January 9th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
@Anonymouse:
By the relative size, I’m calling it rat. It looks like a rat you see at the pet store, not a radioactive super-rat.
@J:
I was much more freaked out by the idea of raccoon, because they are smart, cuddly and mean. And I wouldn’t be able to kill it.
January 9th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
You live near Pacific Palisades?
The famous rat-ladies: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/02/ratowning-animalhoar.html
January 9th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
I already told you, John: Fork lives in your cutlery drawer.
January 9th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Just a thought, isn’t it better to call pest control than to wait around to catch it with small traps, seeing as you have a little girl at home? Personally, I’d want to get rid of them as soon as I can, even though I haven’t had such a problem yet.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Trouble with calling pest control is that they usually use poison, which means you end up with a dead rat in the wall and a room you can’t use for 5 weeks. Happened to me twice. I swear by these: http://www.ratzapper.com.
January 10th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Rats slice oranges before they eat them? Cool.
January 10th, 2009 at 9:36 am
iMovie lets you capture time lapse too. There’s a button to record from iSight right in iMovie, and the option BELOW that in the menu is Time Lapse.
You’ll be presented with a dialogue box asking for how many frames you want to capture for every frame of video shot (24 frames in a second, right?, so 1 in 24 is once a second. 1 in 48 is once every 2 seconds.)
Bonus – you’re already set up to edit it after the fact :)
More actually related to the post: I find rats are trickier than mice, but you’re probably looking at less of them. You’re very lucky they’re not raccoons. They’re a major pain.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
be careful. there’s usually more than one. good luck getting rid of those things. my parents had mice. they would fill a big bucket up with water, put some cheerios in it, and place it in the cupboard. The next morning there would be mice floating in the bucket. it’s pretty disturbing, but it worked.
January 10th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Hope you manage to get rid of the visitor soon. I heard what sounded like mice running around in the ceiling a few weeks ago but thankfully the sounds have disappeared since.
Also, the movie The Visitor is really, really good, so if you guys haven’t seen it yet I would highly recommend checking it out! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0857191/
January 10th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
@Andreas–I liked the Visitor until the mother showed up–totally took me out of the story…
January 10th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
OMG it’s huge!
January 10th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
John,
I would call the pros. I had mice in my house and they did a pretty good job of getting rid of them. The first step in dealing with pests is to seal off all points of entry into the house. The second step is to eliminate the pests that have made it inside the house.
They like to use snap and glue traps the most, because the dead pest will be where you can find it and not decomposing in some wall as will happen with poison.
January 12th, 2009 at 4:53 am
Please post a follow-up to this as soon as the rat is caught or killed or otherwise removed. I lived in a place that had mice, once. That was creepy enough. Thinking of you having a rat in your house is really unsettling. And, while I may find it hard to live without ever seeing another episode of The Remnants, the “rat cliffhanger” on this blog would be much harder to live with, without a resolution.
January 12th, 2009 at 7:13 am
I love the bit “this time with Hummus”…the hunt goes on.