Scariest Night Ever

After a whole day of being relatively studious, I decided that I deserved a late night movie. So I set up my lap top and put in “Pride and Prejudice” (my all time favorite). Christina ended up joining me mid-way through the film…only to end up falling asleep on the couch. Steph came home and went straight to bed as well so when the movie was done I decided to just leave Christina sleeping, brush my teeth, and go to bed.

As I was walking to my room I noticed that Steph had left the outside door open…but that’s no big deal. We always leave the door open. Always! I just shut it and went into my room to find that my light was not working again (Sorry Dave, but you didn’t fix it). My light has this thing where sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not the bulb…it’s the fuse or something. I told the workers to fix it, but they always just put in a new bulb and say it’s fixed. They can’t comprehend the fact that the bulb is just fine and dandy. Oh well. Generally, when my light doesn’t work I just light a candle…but since I was already wearing comfortable sweat pants and it was close to midnight, I decided to just close my door and jump right into bed.

For some reason, I couldn’t fall asleep like I normally do. I was just dozing in and out and I never fell into a deep sleep. Eventually, I just got to the point where I refused to open my eyes thinking that would help my body fall asleep more quickly. But I think God was keeping me restless for a reason because at around 1:30-2:00am I felt something jump up on my bed and I could feel it crawling quickly up toward my face. I jumped up to see this hissing at me:



That is a black African mongoose. They are night animals and, as a rule of thumb, mongooses hate people. They will not come anywhere near people unless they are rabid…then they have a tendency to attack. It is likely that the mongoose that jumped on my bed was rabid. I usually sleep through absolutely anything too…so it really is a miracle that I couldn’t sleep well that night and that I woke up when I felt something creeping on my bed. It’s also a miracle that the mongoose started at my feet, not my head and it is a miracle that I didn’t scream (the biggest miracle of all) because had I screamed, the mongoose might have bitten or scratched me and I would currently be at the hospital getting rabies shots left and right. God was definitely protecting me and all of those little miracles together led the mongoose to leap off my bed and under it the moment it saw me jump.

I was so terrified, but I knew I had to get the mongoose outside…so I gathered up the courage to run off my bed, open my door, open the outside door, and run back on my bed (I did that all in about 2 seconds). Then I jumped up and down on my bed to scare the mongoose. It worked…and the mongoose left my room. I couldn’t tell whether it went outside or not, but I was so frightened and relieved that it was out of my room that I shut the doors and tried to go back to sleep. I couldn’t…

About 20-30 minutes later I thought I heard another noise….like a purring noise…under my head. I couldn’t decide whether it was a real noise or just my body trying to play tricks on me…so I jumped up and decided to turn on my light and look just to be safe. I felt like Junie B. Jones in the book I’m actually reading to my kids right now (no joke) about how she thinks she has a monster under her bed and she can’t sleep at night because of it. But anyways…I turned on my light (which worked this time…imagine that) and carefully peeked under the bed to find that the potentially rabid stray cat that has been roaming Bingham was sleeping under my bed! Again, I was terrified. One animal was enough…two animals made me tear up. I opened my door and the outside door quickly and decided to try the same “jump on the bed” technique that seemed to work with the mongoose. It didn’t work. Plan two: I got an umbrella and decided to hit it until it ran out. It worked.

At this point, I was so terrified of sleeping that I decided to try to calm myself down by inspecting my room and the house for animals. So I grabbed my handy dandy umbrella (just incase) and searched the house up and down. I found nothing…and that seemed to comfort me just barely enough to get a few hours of sleep (if that).

In the morning, I woke up to find Christina and Steph in the living room. I told them what happened and I was shocked to find that they had very similar stories (kind of…it might be more appropriate to say that our stories “meshed together”). Steph woke up around 2:30-3:00 am (right after my little animal endeavor) to go to the bathroom. While she was up she found the mongoose. Plan one didn’t work entirely after all, I guess. So Steph chased the mongoose around the house with a metal rod and eventually got it into the attic (not outside, but better than inside our house at least). While she was chasing the mongoose…she also found ANOTHER cat – not the one that was in my room. The cat that Steph found was the one-eyed stray cat. Steph chased the rabid cat outside after another lengthy chase with the metal rod.

Meanwhile, Christina was sleeping in her room and dreaming of a girl chasing rabid cats around the house with an umbrella (no joke).

So that was the scariest night of my life. God definitely protected me because things could have gone much differently. And needless to say, I am never ever going up into our attic again (Zenesh, our house worker, will have to get my laundry from the attic clothes lines for me) and I am never ever going to leave the apartment door (or my door) open again.

Lesson learned.
Life spared.

-Nicole