I Have So Many Questions About This Completely Bat-Infested New Hampshire Elementary School

Plus two incredible stories about my own run-ins with these majestic hellraisers

It’s not often that a minor local news controversy really gets my brain churning, but I have to say that I am transfixed by an article on the website of Boston’s ABC affiliate, WCVB, headlined “Hundreds of bats inside Richards Elementary School in Newport, New Hampshire; to be closed Monday for inspection.”

I have so many questions!

What Is It Going To Be Like For These Students To Go Back To School, Knowing Just How Many Bats Are Around?

This subject hits a bit close to home for me because of my own history with bats. There’s a famous bit of family lore that goes like this: I was a baby in the 1980s. I was in my crib. My dad was leaning over my crib, tending to me, when suddenly a bat flew in the room. My dad responded by. . . running out of the room. In some versions of the story, he closes the door behind him, and in others he doesn’t, but the running out of the room part definitely happens.

Over the years I convinced myself I had a memory of this — my dad’s face, the bat shooting across the background of my field of vision behind him, Dad darting out. I now know that this sort of memory is likely much more constructed from retellings than real, which is depressing because I wish I remembered more stuff from childhood, and it would be cool to be able to remember being an infant experiencing his first in-person encounter with a bat.

Either way, this story was never told with malice, but rather with gentle ribbing — it was a gut reaction on my dad’s part and didn’t reflect on his character or anything. But between that incident and two others in which bats got into my childhood home, I came to really dislike having bats invade my living space. I mean, it’s not like there are a lot of people who say “Oh, cool, a bat flew into my house!” but I have a particular squeamishness about it.

This makes me wonder what it would be like to be an elementary school–aged child in an elementary school that had been colonized by bats. The WCVB article explains that the school district’s superintendent, Donna Magoon, was first alerted that something was off when “some staff noticed they weren’t feeling well.”

Magoon said she later arranged an air quality test for the building.

“So, I’m hearing there’s no type of mold or anything in our air, so what else could it be,” Magoon said.

After another round of inspections, Magoon said a major discovery was made.

“They were hiding in poles, they were hanging from ceilings, they were everywhere,” Magoon said.

Magoon said the discovery revealed there are hundreds of bats that are hibernating in the Richards Elementary School.

“I think people are thinking its [sic] little, tiny black bats. It’s not! It’s huge," Magoon said.

I really like that last quote. There’s a certain very New Hampshire guilelessness in a superintendent not trying to play down the bat problem: Now, some of you are probably thinking that this is a minor problem involving bats that are small in size and number. Make no mistake: You are incorrect. These bats are large, are numerous, and yes, they are in close proximity to your children.

And they aren’t just hibernating — as reported by Boston.com, in a January 3 Facebook post Magoon informed everyone that “Yesterday, one of the bats was observed flying inside the school. Ensuring the safety of our students and staff is our top priority, and we are taking this situation very seriously.”

What does this knowledge do to the kids? Yes, the school is being shut down Monday, but just Monday — after that they’re reopening it, and while they’re going to try to seal the holes allowing the bats into the parts of the school occupied by, you know, schoolkids, no one seems to think the problem will actually be fixed by then.

From Boston.com:

“To address this issue proactively, we will be contracting with someone to look for any signs of bat movement,” [Magoon] said. “This will be happening roughly every 2 weeks. Also, our facilities team will conduct inspections to ensure that all ceiling tiles remain intact, and any damaged tiles are promptly replaced or repaired.”

Magoon said a “bat eviction process” will start in March, which will see the entry points for the animals sealed off and a one-way exit door installed to allow the bats to leave.

Imagine being a little elementary schooler (perhaps a Jewish one prone to bouts of anxiety) and being told by your parents, Honey, just so you know, there are hundreds of bats in your school. And one of them was flying around the other day. Anyway [reaching across and opening car door], have a nice day! Remember that you have hockey practice right after school.

Can you imagine sitting there in class, 6 or 10 years old, learning the alphabet or long division or whatever, knowing that any moment thousands, if not millions, of bats could burst out of the ceiling tiles, envelop your teacher, and leave behind a grimacing skeleton?

How Many Stories About These Bats Have Been Passed Down And Lost Over The Ages?

Except maybe the kids are used to it. This elementary school has been a veritable Batville Batopolis Batlanta for decades, it turns out:

School officials said they found out about the issue in mid-December, but it wasn’t until Thursday that a staff member had to duck multiple times from a bat swooping in on them.

“When it came down on her, she had to drop down basically almost to the floor,” Magoon said.

A former student who attended Richards Elementary School in the 1980s told News 9 the bats have been in the school for decades. Her grandchildren now attend the school.

“We had one land on a student’s desk when I was in third grade,” said Dawn Whitehouse. “Sometimes, a student would get to go up [to the attic] with a teacher to take a glance at it.”

Don’t get me wrong: As a flesh-and-blood human, I don’t want this school — or any school, really — to be infested with bats. But as a journalist, as someone who enjoys and tells and responds to stories for a living, you have to admit that having an elementary school be taken over by bats is objectively awesome. And Whitehouse’s quote suggests that generations of New Hampshire students spent some very formative years inside a gigantic bat cave that occasionally doubled as an elementary school.

Can you imagine the stories that haven’t come out? Can you imagine the combined psychological and perhaps socioeconomic effect of all these interactions between bats and very young humans? We need some sort of Works Progress Administration–style federal effort to collect these stories while the oldest graduates of Richards Elementary School are still alive.

What Are The Positive Effects, If Any, Of Being Constantly Surrounded By Bats?

As I mentioned above, I had some negative early experiences with bats. But when I was 13 or 14, my family took our one big international trip — to Australia and New Zealand. Australia, as everyone knows, is an uninhabitable wasteland in which every single species either kills or takes delight in the suffering of humans. (Seriously — look up stinging trees.)

We started out in Queensland, a northeastern province that is home to the Great Barrier Reef (or what’s left of it) as well as a bunch of jungle. And where there is jungle, you will often find bats. More bats, even, than in Richards Elementary School.

At some sort of roadside — I don’t know what. Petting zoo? Tourist trap gift shop? — we interacted with a domesticated bat. It was hanging from one of those perches you might buy for a pet bird, and it was surprisingly cute! There’s a huge difference between a chill, friendly bat that you can pet and feed fruit to and one freaking out inside your house, trying desperately to echolocate itself back to the great outdoors and its bounty of summertime mosquitoes.

This story — which is almost as good as the crib story, and at least as well-told — does make me wonder whether, over the years, there were any positive relationships between Richards Elementary School students and the bats that have always outnumbered them by (rough estimate) twenty-thousand to one.

I’m imagining a lonely, bullied student who runs off to the bathroom one day to cry. While there, he notices a small black speck of something in the corner: a young bat rejected by his family, for some reason or another, whimpering and alone. The student takes the bat under his wing (as it were), hiding him in his sweatshirt and stroking him gently whenever things get tense in class.

In addition to mercilessly attacking the student’s tormentors, serving as a valuable self-defense mechanism, the bat teaches the student various lessons about Being Different, and the child in question goes on to move to Silicon Valley and launch a billion-dollar start-up focusing on humane approaches to pest management.

While I have no evidence this happened, I’d like to think it happened.

What I’m saying is maybe keep the bats, Richards Elementary School?

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Questions? Comments? Your own favorite experiences with rabies-infected rats with wings? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com, on Twitter at @jessesingal, or on Bluesky at @jessesingal.com. Image via ChatGPT: “horizontal image, an elementary school classroom. the students are listening intently to their professor, who is a giant bat.”