From Odd Tales in Wisconsin
One summer night in 1856, something fluttered against Sophia Robinson’s head as she fell asleep in her family’s log cabin in rural Waupaca County.
“I instantly recognized it was a bat,” she recalled according to the Standard History of Waupaca County, “and was about to raise an alarm, but it soon escaped through the half-closed door into the hall and from thence into my brother’s room.” She heard noises, but “as it soon became quiet, I concluded that it had been captured.”
Her brother had not only caught the bat, but had secretly stashed it in a trunk containing his sister’s favorite books.
Later she heard him tussling with another one. “As he neared my door I heard him say, ‘It beats me where all those confounded things come from.’ I ventured to ask him the cause of the disturbance, and he said the house was swarming with bats.”
Her brother spent half the night catching them, carefully tucking each one inside her trunk without letting any of the others escape. “It was his intention to send me there the following evening, that I might have the benefit of a surprise.”
But the joke was on him.
In the morning, Sophia pointed out that the trunk had a small hole which he had overlooked in the dark. She laughed as he slowly realized he had spent the night catching the same bat over and over again.
“He said he thought they were getting tamer all the time, as he had no trouble at all in catching the last one.”
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