Mystery Animal In a Tree

04.21.2005 - I have a very strange customer. Her name is Hilda. She calls me all the time. She won't leave me alone. She has problems. She hears things. She sees things. Then it becomes my problem, because I hear my phone and I see that it's her number calling me yet again so that she can talk my ear off about her latest wildlife problems. "David, David! This is Hilda! I am hearing them again, they are keeping me awake, they are making so much noise, David, you must come help me David!". Except that her voice is much more annoying than the voice you used in your own head when you read that last sentence. That's one of the problems with text - everything you read comes across in your own nice personal voice, the one you've no doubt grown accustomed to over the years. But no, if you heard the real Hilda, you'd have winced by the second "David" out of her mouth. Here's the problem that Hilda keeps having: she not only hears mystery noises in her attic - months of trapping and tracking and all sort of inspection and test have conclusively revealed that she has no animals in her attic - but she also SEES mystery animals.  Her bedroom is adjacent to a streetlamp, between which is a tree.  So she sees the shadow of the tree projected on the wall of her bedroom at night.  She looks at this shadow, and she sees things.  Oh, how she sees things, and oh how she calls me every few days to tell me what she sees.  Most of the time, she sees normal-looking critters.  However, she recently saw something that bothered me. The phone call went as such: "David David!  Last night in the tree, I see a little man!  It walk up the tree, a little 2-foot man, with hands and arms, it's in the tree, David you must help me!"  So I went to her house and I investigated.  I looked at the shadows on the wall.  I described the wildlife of Florida.  I eventually learned that this little man had a long skinny tail that was curved at the end.  I waited until the shadow re-appeared and Hilda said, "There it is!  The little man!"  I shone my light on the tree and took this photo.  Hilda is not convinced that this is actually the shadow she saw.  She will call me again.

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