It almost always starts the same way. You’re in bed, the house is quiet, and then you hear it — scratching over your head. Sometimes it’s faint. Sometimes it sounds like something is running back and forth across the ceiling. You lie there wondering whether to go look, and by morning you’ve almost talked yourself out of it. Then it comes back the next night.
When someone calls me about a noise in the attic, the first question I ask is: what time of day do you hear it? That one answer tells me more than almost anything else, because different animals keep different hours.
If you hear it during the day, it’s usually grey squirrels. Grey squirrels are daytime animals. They leave in the morning, come back in the evening, and in between they move around up there — scratching, scampering, sometimes rolling something that sounds a lot bigger than a squirrel. If the noise starts around sunrise and again before dark, squirrels are the first thing I suspect.
If you hear it at night, it’s usually flying squirrels or rats. Flying squirrels are nocturnal, and they’re smaller and lighter than grey squirrels, so the sound is more like light pattering than heavy running. Rats are also active at night, and they scratch and gnaw. Nighttime noise that goes on for hours, night after night, points toward one of those two.
There’s a third sound worth knowing about. If what you’re hearing is heavy — thumping, dragging, something that sounds too big to be a squirrel — that’s often a raccoon. Raccoons are bigger animals, and they move like it. They tend to show up around dusk and during the night.
The time of day is the starting point, but it’s not the whole story. When I get up in an attic, I’m looking for the signs that confirm which animal it is. Droppings are one of the biggest clues — their size and shape are different for squirrels, rats, and raccoons. The entry hole matters too. A squirrel can get through a gap about the size of a golf ball. Rats need even less. I look for rub marks around gaps at the roofline, chewed wiring and insulation, and nesting material tucked into corners. All of that tells me what moved in and how long it’s been there.
Here’s what I tell every homeowner: the noise is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is the hole. An animal is in your attic because it found a way in — a gap at the roofline, a vent with a bent louver, an opening where a cable comes through the wall. Until that opening is closed, the noise will keep coming back, because even if one animal leaves, the next one finds the same door.
That leads to the two mistakes I see most often. The first is sealing the hole before the animal is out. If you close up every gap on a Monday, you might have a trapped animal in your wall by Wednesday, and then you’re dealing with a smell instead of a noise. Animals have to be let out first, and then the openings get sealed. The order matters.
The second mistake is going up in the attic yourself to take a look. I understand the urge, but attics hide chewed wiring, droppings, and insulation damage you can’t see from the hatch, and a cornered animal is not something you want to surprise. Let someone with a flashlight and a ladder do that part.
So when you call, tell me when you hear it, what it sounds like, and where in the house it seems to be coming from. Then the inspection does the rest. I go up, find the entry point, take photos and show you exactly what I found, and lay out the plan: get the animals out, seal the openings, and clean up what they left behind. No guessing, no mystery animal.
The sooner you call, the less damage there is to fix. Animals in an attic chew wiring, stain insulation, and leave droppings behind, and all of that gets worse the longer they stay. If you’re hearing something over your head, don’t wait for it to go away on its own. Call (678) 722-5533 or Request an Inspection.