A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of seven senior women who experienced a “horror movie” fright while renting an Airbnb vacation home in northern Michigan earlier this summer.
The women rented the Victorian-style house – nicknamed “The Castle” – to celebrate their 50th high school reunion in late July, and enjoyed the first three nights of their stay. On the fourth night, their pleasant experience turned into a scream-filled horror.
Two of the women sleeping in a turret room woke to screeching sounds and a dark shape flitting around the room. They ran screaming to the hallway, and stuffed blankets under the door to seal off the room.
The women gathered in the hallway and tried to laugh off the event when more bats flooded the hallway. They tried to escape the house but the stairwell was soon consumed with bats.
They fled back to their bedrooms and attempted to shut off all doors with pillows and blankets, but the bats kept entering through the aging lathe walls and gaps in the baseboards. They were continually hit with the bats, finding them tangling in their hair — and one woman had bite marks.
The women were trapped in their bedrooms cowering under blankets until sunrise and the bats retreated back to their roosts in the attic.
An exterminator was called and quickly found a large colony of Michigan Brown Bats living in the attic. There was “inches upon inches” of bat guano caking the attic floor as well as bat urine running down the basement walls, leaving the exterminator to estimate the colony had been present for multiple years.
The women were all instructed to undergo the series of rabies vaccinations.
The lawsuit names Airbnb as well as the homeowners and maintenance workers who “had a responsibility to ensure that the home was safe when renting it.”