True story, or urban legend in the making?

On a recent visit to Southern California I heard a story from a claimed first hand source that was just too funny to simply let it drop. The story goes that there was a lady who heard about a construction project (near LAX) in a large empty field and took it upon herself to save the wild rats living in the field from being crunched by the construction machinery. So she got a bunch of humane traps and trapped dozens of rats and adopted them. She got cages for them in her house in Westminster (Orange County, CA). After a while the rats started reproducing, as rats often do, and so she got more cages, and still more cages.

Pretty soon she had dozens of cages and hundreds of rats. Still later, she was up to hundreds of cages, in every room in the house, and in the garage too. From the time she got home every night she spent the whole evening feeding the rats until it was time to go to bed.

Eventually, some of the rats escaped from their cages, as rats often do, and took up residence in the walls of the house. They chewed the wiring, and chewed through the walls and floors. At one time when they chewing on the telephone wires they apparently shorted out the wires and ended up accidentally calling 911. When the police showed up she was puzzled, and, stepping through the door so as to prevent the police from entering the house and seeing the hundreds of rat cages, assured them that she had not called 911. The second time it happened she just had the phone disconnected. By that time all the wiring had been chewed through and the phones no longer worked anyway.

Finally, she had to have the power turned off too because so much of the house wiring was chewed through. After that she moved out and lives somewhere else now. BUT, even now (as the story goes) she returns to the house (which she still owns) every evening to feed the rats, whose cages still fill the empty house and garage to the brim.

The rest of the story is that many neighbors have noticed a large number of rats invading their homes, but so far nobody has put two and two together and discovered that one of the houses in their neighborhood is jam packed full of hundreds of cages holding thousands of rats, with hundreds more rats living under the house and in the walls and in the attic. And still, to this day, the lady comes back to the house every evening to feed the rats.

Rumor has it that when she moved, she took a few dozen of her favorite rats with her to her new house. I imagine that her new house will start being overrun as well in the near future.

So that's the story. If you know anyone in Westminster who has been having a rat problem lately, maybe one of their neighbors is the fabled rat lady of Westminster.

(The very few people who know the truth don't want to rat the lady out because "she's such a nice person".)

who says the "rat lady" is much younger than that, and is or was married, and her husband assisted with feeding the rats. My source said they would put me in touch with a past landlord of the rat lady who could verify some parts of the story, and perhaps add some details about when he (the landlord) evicted the lady for trying to move dozens of her rats from the infested house into the rental home.

I've also requested more details. Perhaps I can even get an address, or at least a street name to check out. I've also suggested to the source that if the story is true as claimed (the source claims to have seen the house full of rats first hand) that the rat lady should be turned in to the authorities.

urban legend all the way...

1. What about giving the rats water?
2. What does she do with the rat shit and rat pee?

1. Unless she constructed a very sophisticated plumbing/watering system, she's have lots of dumped water bowls because I'm sure previously wild rats are not dainty drinkers. Lots of water spilled on floors makes for lots of housekeeping plus moldy and rotting floors.

2. Add the rat pee to the dumped water bowls and you get really bad smelling moldy and rotting floors, unless she heavily papers the bottoms of the cages. That makes for a lot of nasty smelling garbage to put out every week. Doesn't anyone get suspicious? Plus, for hundreds of cages, she'd have to carry in a large stack of newspapers every day. Don't the neighbors ever notice and wonder?

2. (continued) For dealing with the rat crap, well, that just makes even more newspapers and more bad smelling garbage.

I really don't think so.

I'm awaiting an email from another claimed first hand eye witness referred to me who can possibly answer some of those questions.

Also, if I can convince my original source (who knows the address of the house full of rats) to make a call to Orange County Vector Control we might just see the whole story on the news in the near future. I'd make the call myself, but I don't know the address, and I don't actually know for sure that the story is true.

Looking forward to seeing it on the news, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least. People will hoard all kinds of animals, why not rats?

For one thing, I highly doubt rats chewing through the phone lines would somehow "short" the wires and call 911. I'm no expert but I really doubt phone lines work that way.

Take the two phone wires connected to your phone jack, and tap the bare wires together 9 times quickly, then pause a second and tap once, pause again and tap once. You've just dialed 911. Old style dial phones, before push buttons, worked by making and breaking the connection a number of times depending on which number was dialed. The phone networks still support dial phones, and making and breaking a connection some number of times WILL dial that digit. You can get the same effect by tapping the hang up button 9 times, one time, and then one time.

Suppose the rats chewing shorted the wires together a random number of times. If that happens enough times you get random strings of digits being dialed. It wouldn't take that long before one of the random strings of digits started with 911. So it IS plausible.

The rats chewed the phone lines in such a way that they weren't disabled, but called the number 911 instead?

Um, no.

Pulse dialing, dial pulse, or loop disconnect dialing, also called Rotary or Decadic dialling in the United Kingdom (because up to 10 pulses are sent), is pulsing in which a direct-current pulse train is produced by interrupting a steady signal according to a fixed or formatted code for each digit and at a standard pulse repetition rate.

Dial pulsing originated with a rotary dial integrated into telephone instruments, for the purpose of signaling. Subsequent applications use electromechanical or electronic circuits to generate dial pulses.

The pulses are generated through the making and breaking of the telephone connection (akin to flicking a light switch on and off); the audible clicks are a side effect of this. As a result, all that is really needed to dial a number with pulse dialing is a switch. Each digit in the number is represented by a different number of rapid clicks. In most countries one click is used for the digit 1, two clicks for 2, and so on, with ten clicks for the digit 0. Two exceptions to this are New Zealand, with ten clicks for 0, nine clicks for 1, and so on, and Sweden, with one click for 0, two clicks for 1, and so on.

more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing

The wires could be chewed through, disconnecting the phone from the incoming wires, and even then, shorting the incoming wires together in the manner described COULD, in fact, dial any number. There is nothing even remotely far-fetched about the claim. Don't forget that the rats could have shorted the wires together just by brushing by them as they scurried about. They might have "dialed" thousands and thousands of random digits until they, just by chance, happened to "dial" a nine followed by two ones.

CORRECTION: I originally posted that this took place in Westminster. My bad. I remembered the name incorrectly. According to both of my sources (I've been put in touch with a second source), the Rat Lady is in Westchester, not Westminster. The house is reported to be about a mile from the Los Angeles International Airport.

One source writes in an email: "The story is NOT an urban legend!! We know her personally and she's talked with us about her "children" on several occasions and how she just couldn't bear to kill them - for whatever reason she chose to confide in us - maybe because she was a close friend of (name redacted owner of a pet store) and loved animals she feels we could somehow understand her love for these poor, defenseless rats."

The other source is willing to provide me with a name and address which I can then turn over to Orange County Vector Control via their anonymous snitch form on their web site. It will be interesting to see if source two actually gives me the specifics as promised, and what will happend if and when I forward the info to OCVC.

Both sources quoted to me the same first name of the alleged Rat Lady.

Will keep you posted on the latest developments in this breaking story. :)

My sources are Orange County and I assumed it took place in Orange county. My bad. So I guess it Los Angeles County public health that needs to be informed.

My sources both gave me the same name and street address, and the information has been forwarded to the proper authorities. It will be interesting to see how the story turns out.

rats need a lot of water, consequently they pee a lot. large numbers of rats STINK. you could find the house by smell. nevermind the natural dispersal of the escapees.

and distorted. Like maybe a lady was saving a few stray CATS from the field.... That I could believe.

http://ktla.trb.com/news/ktla-palisades-rats,0,6392522.story

House of Horrors: Palisades Sisters Accused of Hoarding Rats
KTLA News

August 6, 2008, 11:00 AM PDT

House of Horrors: Palisades Sisters Accused of Hoarding Rats PACIFIC PALISADES -- There's a legal cat-fight of sorts underway in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and it's all over rats -- thousands of them.

Two elderly sisters in the Pacific Palisades are being sued for $500,000 by their next door neighbor after the women allegedly kept thousands of rats as pets inside their home over the years. The lawsuit also demands a mandatory injunction to never have rats at the home again.

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