February 29, 2024 | NEWS | By Anya Potsiadlo
As the squirrel encounters of Blocks 4 and 5 waned in frequency, it appeared as if the halls of Loomis were finally at peace. That was, until the mice arrived.
“Loomis 318 might have had one of the first mouse sightings of the Loomis mouse epidemic,” said Dillon Fowle ’27 proudly.
After watching a climactic Superbowl in the Mathias movie room, Fowle and his roommate returned to Loomis expecting to be done with the day’s drama after the Chief’s victory but were instead greeted with the first hints of Loomis’ next great rodent scandal.
“I think it might have been there for a while because sometimes I just felt like I saw things darting across the room,” Fowle says. “Could have been paranoia. Could have been a mouse.”
Despite Nolan Diffley ‘27’s claims that Loomis 318 is too clean and tidy for a mouse to find sufficient nutrients, the hungry mouse had no problems doing so: it began by sampling the pecans on the floor of Diffley’s closet before settling on the Cajun flavored Hot Nuts from Outdoor Ed that were left over from a Block 2 camping trip.
As Josephine Louis ‘27 would soon discover, the mice problem was hardly specific to the third floor. While sticking around campus for a track meet over fifth Block Break, Louis and her teammate, Molly Vance ’27, discovered multiple rodent intruders scurrying around Louis’ second floor room. Louis and Vance were present when Diffley and Fowle found the mouse in their room, so they quickly understood this problem as one that necessitated professional help.
“They didn’t let an exterminator come until she had video proof that there were mice in her room,” Vance said, “so she spent thirty minutes trying to get a video.”
Now that the residential coordinators have been made aware of the problem, which the exterminators told Vance is “extra bad this year,” efforts are being made to spare Loomis from the unwanted intruders.
“I was talking to a friend on the phone,” Olivia Harris, ’27 said, “and all of a sudden, some guy stopped me in the hall, and he was holding a jar of peanut butter and a mouse trap in the other hand. He was like, ‘Excuse me excuse me,’ and I had to pull out my Airpods, and he was like ‘have you seen the mouse?’”
The reaction to the peanut-butter-footed rats in the Loomis basement where Harris lives is no short of a cultural revolution. Harris and her roommate have resorted to storing their Trader Joe’s Taki-style chips in the microwave while a whiteboard sign further down the hallway reads “the mice don’t run this hallway—we do.” A fellow resident of the “nunnery” was even forced to vacate her room due to the persistence of the mouse invasion.
Professional extermination teams, however, are not the only ones taking a solution-oriented approach to the epidemic. After being told by Loomis front desk staff that he shouldn’t be worried about the mouse that he saw in his room, Trey Pena ‘27 opted to head to Home Depot instead, buying some glue traps, which were successful in trapping two live mice.
“So, I had them in a glue trap and didn’t really know what to do with them, so I just put them in a box and went outside and saw Sophia Murphy and she took them, and I don’t know what she did with them,” Pena said.
Murphy has a similar account of the story, with a surprisingly similar conclusion of mystery.
“I was walking into Loomis at 8 a.m., and Trey was standing outside with a box looking really confused, and he had to go to class, so I took it from him,” she said.
While she was standing inside wondering what to do, Loomis desk coordinator Grayson Wilson entered the building and took the mice into his own hands, leaving Murphy also unsure where they ended up.
“They got tossed in the dumpster,” Wilson said. After shedding some light on the fate of Pena’s former roommates, he requested that residents be “very, very careful when interacting with vermin,” due to their reputation for carrying diseases. The Catalyst would like to extend a similar word of caution for its readers to stay away from any dumpsters near Loomis for the time being.