Annual Mouse In The House
Or, “The Familiar Smell of Death and Why I Should Probably Get a Damn Cat Already”
Mouse 1
The first dead mouse smell occurred in the fall. It was the first time in my life I encountered such a smell inside my home, but it’s strange how the smell of rotting animal is this thing we innately recognize as humans.
It is the smell of death, universally.
I think the smell showed up all of a sudden, without much graduality. I could be wrong — it’s hard to remember now — maybe the smell slowly grew from nothing into something, I’m not sure, but this I know: the first dead mouse smell was the worst.
The smell started off strong and terrible and I knew immediately it meant there was a dead animal in the wall. After it first appeared, the smell intensified for a few days and I began to wonder whether or not it was a mouse at all. Could it be a bird? Could it be a squirrel? Could it be a whole family of mice? I couldn’t believe a single mouse body was capable of producing such a putrid smell.
Let me describe now the location of the dead mouse so you can understand why it was so horrible.
My bathroom has a stall type of shower — not a shower/tub combo and not a tiled shower built into the wall. It’s one of those plastic insert things and a fairly shoddy one at that. Let me also, at this point, make clear that this is not my home by purchase. It is my home by rent. It’s a pretty good place to rent. It’s in a good location with a good price, but a downside is it has a really shitty shower.
A big problem with the shower is that when it was installed, it wasn’t placed flush against the wall, so there is a gap between the shower wall and the bathroom wall, a gap of…oh I don’t know…maybe two or three inches wide? This is obviously a terrible design because that means there’s this crevice between the shower and the bathroom wall, spanning the whole height of the shower and serving as prime breeding ground for mold, dust, mildew, mildew-type smells, and I don’t even know what else. I basically ignore the crevice and it’s fine most of the time anyway, except sometimes in summer when it’s humid and there’s a mildewy smell, and I take a bottle of bleach and I reach above the crevice and spray some bleach down there. And I know introducing more moisture into the crevice is probably a bad idea, but I assume the bleach will make up for it. And it usually does.
So problem number one is this crevice that is behind the shower and it is always (or at least always potentially) a little bit smelly.
Problem number two is the wall behind the shower. By itself, the wall is not a problem. But what is a problem is the fact that on the other side of the wall is my bedroom. On the bedroom-side of the wall, there is an electrical outlet.
I never thought anything of this wall or of this outlet until the first dead mouse smell appeared. See, the dead mouse smell seemed to be coming from inside this wall, the odor sneaking out through the outlet (in addition to however it seeps through the wall itself). So the dead mouse was obviously either in the crevice or somewhere in the wall between the crevice and my bedroom. Either way, having dead mouse smell in your bedroom is not a great thing.
It occurred to me, at the time, that maybe there was some way to get into this wall considering there was an outlet there, but at the same time that seemed like a lot of work and this isn’t actually my home, it’s just the place I rent and I don’t really know anything about electrical stuff and I wasn’t about to go digging into walls to figure out what sort of dead animal was in there. And so, for this first dead mouse, I just waited it out. I’d say it took a good solid week for the smell to go away entirely. But it was definitely really, really bad while it was there.
It was so bad that for a couple days I showered at work. It’s pretty nice that my office has a shower in it, so I went to use that shower so I wouldn’t have to deal with the putrid dead mouse smell wafting up from the crevice. One of my co-workers noticed I had used the office shower and asked why. I said my hot water heater was broken, which seemed like a totally fine excuse whereas saying, “Oh, there’s a dead mouse behind my shower” is a much more embarrassing reason.
So anyway, like I said, I dealt with a dead mouse smell for, I don’t know a week or so, and eventually it went away and I just hoped it would never, ever, ever happen again.
That is the story of Mouse 1.
Mouse 2
The next fall rolled around and one day I was in the shower and I noticed a funky smell.
It smelled familiar.
It was the smell of death.
It was only very faint and I had to take a few deep whiffs to truly convince myself of what it was, and even then I tried to ignore it and pretend, “Oh, maybe that isn’t dead mouse smell. Maybe that is some other smell. Maybe that is mildew smell or maybe that is a lingering food smell of some kind.”
But, the next day, the smell was still there in the shower, and then later that day I could also smell it a little bit in the wall area where the outlet is in my bedroom and I knew oh fuck there is another dead mouse in the wall.
The smell was pretty faint compared to Mouse 1, but I knew from my first experience the smell was likely to get worse before it got better. So I was a little bit nervous and I was worried and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do about the mouse this time. Maybe I should try to look for it in the wall, or maybe I should tell my landlord my house smells like rotting mouse. But before it even got to that point, there was a lucky coincidence that isn’t really a coincidence because it’s definitely related.
Later on the second day of the dead mouse smell, all the outlets in half of my bedroom stopped working. This seemed like a legitimate thing to bring to my landlord, so I did. And my landlord immediately brought an electrician in to figure out what was going on in my bedroom.
In the process of fixing the electrical stuff, the electrician had to remove the outlet cover on the wall where the dead mouse was and since he was in there poking around at the wires anyway he found dead Mouse 2 and removed it!
So, much to my surprise, when I got home from work and talked to my landlord, she said the electrical guy fixed it all. She didn’t know what exactly the electrical problem was, but I’m convinced what happened was Mouse 2 ate through some wires, was electrocuted, and then died in the wall. I don’t really know. That’s speculation. All I know is the electricity was fixed and the dead mouse was gone.
It was practically a miracle. Problem solved.
Mouse 3
The following fall, I was in bed sleeping and I woke up in the middle of the night to a noise. The noise was coming from the wall. Yes, the wall with the outlet, the wall that abuts the bathroom.
The noise was a scratching noise — a very loud, annoying scratching noise, loud enough it kept me up most of the night. I walked over to the wall and banged on it and the scratching stopped and then I got back in bed and lied down and then a little while later the scratching noise started back up.
I obviously knew by now what was going on: there was a mouse in there. This time, though, I was sort of happy I could hear the mouse before it died. I thought, “Maybe it will find its way back out. I don’t know how the hell these mice are finding their way into this part of the wall, but this one is still alive and so maybe it will find its way out!”
It scratched and scratched and scratched all night. In the morning I got up and decided I couldn’t just let it die in there and deal with dead mouse smell (AGAIN), so I found a screwdriver, removed the outlet cover, and took the outlet box out of the wall. As soon as I removed the outlet, I saw the little brown mouse’s face looking back at me. It was sort of cute, but it was also sort of gross and terrifying**.
I aimed my flashlight in the hole in the wall to try to see where the mouse may have gotten in, but I couldn’t see very much in there. I sat for a moment next to the wall with the outlet open trying to figure out what to do. I found a shoe box and placed it at the opening of the outlet, propped up so that if the mouse decided to crawl out of the hole he would fall into the box. I even put some cheese in the box and some peanut butter. I don’t know what mice like to eat, but I figured cheese or peanut butter, one of the two, would probably suffice.
The mouse was scared and he obviously wasn’t going to just crawl into my hands or into the box with me sitting there, so I left the box there and went about my business for the day. Every once in a while, I’d check the box to see if there was a mouse in it and there wasn’t and I’d peek in the wall and see if I could see the mouse and sometimes I could and sometimes I couldn’t. But I left the box there all day. At night, I went back to check the box and there was no mouse in it, though some of the cheese was gone. I turned on my flashlight and looked around in the wall and I didn’t see the mouse in there either. So I went to bed and I left the outlet open all night and the whole next day, and to this day I don’t know where that mouse went.
I don’t know, but I never saw Mouse 3 again. All I know for sure is it didn’t die in that wall and that rocks.
Perhaps it crawled out of the outlet when I wasn’t there. Perhaps it climbed out of the box and was wandering around my house, maybe it even snuck out the front door right behind me, I don’t know. Maybe it found its way into the garage, maybe it found its way to the basement, maybe it found some other little teeny tiny mouse hole I don’t even know about that let it enter the outside world. Maybe it crawled back out via whatever it means it took to end up in the wall in the first place. I have no idea what happened to that mouse, but it didn’t die in the wall.
I never heard the mouse in there again and that was the end of Mouse 3. This mouse was my favorite one.
Mouse 4
Mouse 4 showed up much like Mouse 2. It started off as the same recognizable smell while I was showering.
Again, the smell of death.
I wondered how it was possible this mouse died in the wall and yet I didn’t hear it scratching. Mouse 3 had been such a success that I thought this system could work, ya know? Like the mouse gets stuck in the wall and it scratches and then I open the outlet and I let it out and then all is fine, and I would have no more dead mice stuck in the wall!
But Mouse 4 obviously didn’t know how things work and it just died in the wall without even giving me an opportunity to help it escape.
It occurs to me that I could easily remove the outlet cover, reach in the wall (with a heavily-gloved hand), and pull out the carcass. But the thought of doing that is more repulsive than just dealing with the odor. What if I reach in and there are maggots? What if I pick up the mouse and it’s mushy? What if I tear off a body part and then I need to pick up mouse pieces? It’s all so horrifying that the smell is manageable by comparison. And then there’s also the possibility it’s not in the wall at all, but on the other side of the wall in the crevice.
Mouse 4 is a recent situation in my house. It evolved into a bit of a Mouse 1 type situation where everything got worse before it got better, but I’m happy to report that in a mere five days’ time, there is now little to no indication of decaying animal in my home.
Open windows and fans help. Scented candles help A LOT. The odor neutralizer spray I purchased on Amazon does not help at all and, in fact, has a scent even worse than dead mouse smell.
If, for any reason, you are considering buying a “Professional Strength Stain & Odor Eliminator” spray from Amazon, please contact me first so I can advise you which brand you should definitely not buy ever. Instead, you could save your $19.97 and buy yourself a bottle or two of wine to help you sleep through whatever odor you are trying to eliminate. Alternatively, you could send me your $19.97 so I can deposit it in my savings account and slowly grow a down payment on a house that does not have an annual mouse problem.
Anyway, thus concludes my tale of the Annual Mouse In The House.
I hope you enjoyed it. But more than that, I hope this really truly is the end of this story forever. Four is a nice even number, after all. Let’s keep it that way, okay mice?
** As an addendum, I feel it’s important to note Mouse 3 is the only mouse I’ve ever actually seen with my own eyes inside my house. It’s not like they’re hanging out in corners or inside my pantry or anything like that. I don’t, in fact, live in squalor, despite what this story may otherwise indicate. Just one mouse, once a year, that’s all. I swear. In other words, this is all pretty much #firstworldproblems.
