Throughout the first few weeks of this semester, residents of Saylor-Ackermann (SA) have reported sightings of mice on the third floor.
Sophomores Carly Briggs and Courtney Koosman began to notice inexplicable sounds not long after settling into their room in SA.
“The first night that we moved in, I heard some sort of rustling in my trashcan,” Koosman said. “We thought that it was just one of our fans … but the next night, I kept waking up, and I turned on the flashlight on my phone and I saw a mouse.”
Briggs said that the experience was quite jarring and that it was terrible “…knowing that there’s a critter in the room.”
The students called facilities the next day, who put a glue trap out for the rodent. Ohio Pest Control, a third-party business the university has partnered with for pest-control services, was alerted next and sent in to set real traps. A few days later, facilities found a dead mouse outside of a trap.
“For a few days, I didn’t hear anything,” Koosman said. “It was gone … then there was another one.”
The students’ mouse problem continued to persist, so new traps were set. However, this past week, the encounters have seemed to have stopped completely. Neither student has reported a sighting of any mouse. This has come as a relief to Koosman, who experienced issues staying asleep while the mouse rustled and ran around in their room.
“Keeping the traps out helps me get sleep at night because we haven’t seen it in a while,” Koosman said. “Now I know how to not let it bother me. So even if one were to come back, I’d be okay knowing that maintenance is quick to get here … and that if anything were to happen, they are there.”
There have been no other reports of mice or any other rodents within the dorms this semester. Paul Matthews, director of facilities management, said that it is just a concentrated area of the third floor of SA that has been having rodent issues.
“We don’t have a rash of incidences; we have one area of three rooms [where] we are trying to figure out what is going on,” Matthews said.
Ohio Pest Control, which routinely visits the university every Thursday to provide pest control maintenance, is currently investigating the affected area of SA for mouse tracks and for potential ways that the rodents could have gotten in. The company has been monitoring the third floor of SA every week since the first reported sighting.
Currently, there have been no markings or any other indicators of rodent activity other than the dead mouse found in Briggs and Koosman’s room and the sightings reported by other residents.
“We are doing proactive inspections to make sure that there aren’t larger scale problems,” Jon Geyer, director of residential and commuter life, said. “When a mouse is reported, we do inspection beyond that room to ensure that there’s not a larger infestation somewhere … We’ll have our pest control folks checking … to make sure that it’s not it’s not a small piece of a larger puzzle.”
Matthews said that the whole situation “…is strange because it’s on the third floor, and we have no activity anywhere else.”
Ohio Pest Control will continue working with facilities and providing weekly checks to the affected rooms until the issue is resolved.
Matthews said that students can help prevent vermin problems by maintaining the cleanliness of their own rooms and by being aware that animals can get into rooms through opened doors to halls, the opened doors of the buildings themselves and through opened windows.
If a student should happen to see a mouse or have a pest control issue, they can log on to www.myschoolbuilding.com, or for emergency aid, call facilities at (614) 236-6211 during the day or (614) 746-6068 during nights and weekends.
