When spring arrives in Williamstown, you might see squirrels prancing around Frosh Quad lawn or hear sparrows chirping — but what about bats? It turns out we have those too.
In fact, the College owns 70 bat houses to shelter the critters and lure them away from the center of campus. While bat sightings are rare, some students have had firsthand encounters with the small, winged creatures. And they have stories to tell.
Director of Campus Safety Services (CSS) Jeff Palmer said that CSS has captured just over a dozen bats in the past year. “The most frequent locations are typically older stone buildings, but not exclusively,” Palmer wrote in an email to the Record. “We have responded to [sightings in] some of the [College’s] rental housing, [and] even the President’s residence.”
Santiago Christ ’27 was on campus for the Summer Science Program before his first year at the College when he confronted one of the campus’ bats.
Christ was assigned to live in Wood House for the summer. On his first day, he walked upstairs to his dorm room. “I open my door… and [there] was like a tiny black ball, just huddled up,” he said. “I don’t know, it must have [just] been writhing in pain, but it was just dead and I couldn’t see anything.”
Since his room had another entrance, Christ went through the other door to get a closer look at what was on the floor. “I just took a picture of it because I didn’t want to walk up to it,” he said. “Sure enough, I zoom into it… It’s a dead bat. I’m like, ‘Oh, my god, this is like a bad omen.’ I don’t know what’s happening, because it’s my first day at Williams, and there was a dead animal.”
After Christ called CSS, officers cleared the winged intruder from the area, but the respite was only temporary. Wood residents were plagued by multiple other bat-related incidents that summer — mostly caused by students leaving their windows open, according to Christ.
“Someone in the third-floor bathroom kept having this bat just going through the window,” Christ added.
Jules Gaskin-West ’25, who lived on the second floor of Wood last year, experienced an unanticipated bat encounter right before going to class one morning. “I had looked in the house chat, and someone was like, ‘There’s a bat on the third floor,’” she said. “I was … going about my day because I was running late to class, and then I opened my door, and there’s a bat just doing laps in my common room.”
“I screech so loud, and I slam my door, and I’m texting the house chat and all my friends very frantically,” she said. “Then, I’m just frantically calling [CSS] like, ‘Please, please come get it.’”
It took around 20 minutes for CSS to come to Gaskin-West’s rescue. “But it was a harrowing 20 minutes,” she said. “I could hear it flapping, and I was like, ‘What if this is it?’”
“I’m just sitting in my room, shaking in terror, until Facilities comes and knocks on my door, and they show me the bat in the trap —I [felt] so bad because it’s so tiny and it look[ed] so scared,” she added.
Gaskin-West even took a photo of the bat, since she was worried that people would not believe her story. “I’m like, ‘Can I take a picture of this? I have to show this to my professor because they’re not gonna believe that I’m late because there was a bat flying around,’” she said. “I still have that picture.”
For Brodie Leo ’25, his startling encounter came in the spring of his sophomore year. He went back to his dorm in Morgan after working as a caretaker in Hopkins Forest, only to hear odd noises coming from his recycling bin.
“I was doing work at my desk, and I felt this rattling behind me,” he said. “At first, I thought it was a mouse or something, and then I realized it was coming from my big blue recycling bin.”
“So, I went and looked in there… and there was a bat curled up in my pizza box,” he said.
Leo heroically decided to handle the issue on his own. Rather than calling CSS, he took the bat out of his room himself. “It was already in my bin, which was nice — so I just put a throw pillow over [the can], took it outside, and without touching it… I put it on a branch in Science Quad.”
After the incident, Leo decided to get a rabies vaccination as an extra precaution. “I didn’t know how long [the bat] had been in my room… So I went to Southwest Vermont Medical Center and did a four-course rabies vaccination,” he said. “I do outdoor work, so I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna need this eventually, anyways.’”
To prevent direct contact between bats and the College community, CSS uses butterfly nets to capture them, following protocol from Massachusetts Environmental Health and Safety. If CSS is confident that the bats have not had contact with people, officers release them outside, Palmer wrote.
Bats that have been in contact with humans aren’t released until they pass additional examination, according to the College’s website.
“During weekday hours, captured bats are transferred to Greylock Animal Hospital and then to the Massachusetts state rabies laboratory for testing,” it reads. “On nights and weekends, bats are stored in a designated cold room in the Science Center for transfer to Greylock Animal Hospital.”
While the College has procedures in place to handle bat encounters, the goal of the bat houses is to keep the critters away from humans. According to Landscape Ecology Coordinator Felicity Purzycki, most of the bat houses are installed in residential spaces by Property Management Specialists Shaun Howland and Crystal Frusciente. The College has spent around $1,450 on the initiative, with each bat house costing around $30, Purzycki wrote in an email to the Record.
“In 2015, the Architectural [Carpentry] Trades Shop purchased 25 finished wooden bat houses and an additional 30 bat houses were purchased the following year,” Purzycki wrote. “The bat houses were installed to reduce reports of bats in residential rentals.”
Though bats still occasionally enter dorm buildings uninvited, they have yet to do worse than frighten occupants and often leave students with a good story. “I’d like to think I became Batman,” Christ said.
