Parking garages don’t need any more reasons to be eerie, but one Houston woman just added getting bit by a bat to the list.
While she was walking in her apartment’s sub-level parking garage along Memorial Drive near Buffalo Bayou Park, a woman says, a rabid bat bit her on the hand, KHOU reported.
“It was about the size of a frog, and I felt it hit my hand, and I flung it away,” Katie Koenig told KHOU.
After snapping some pics of the bat, Koenig said, she called the Houston Fire Department, which trapped the bat in a coffee can and had it tested for rabies.
The next day, Koenig told the news station she got the call: The bat was, indeed, rabid — which meant that Koenig immediately had to start getting rabies treatment. Koenig, who said she didn’t have health insurance, said the treatment cost $4,000.
Asked about the frequency of bat bites, Houston Health Department spokesman Porfirio Villarreal told the Houston Press, “Human contact with bats is rare. Most years we don’t do any human/bat investigations. Last year 11 bats that we tested came back rabies-positive. This year so far we have had seven.”
In any case, perhaps it’s a good idea to think twice before heading to the Waugh bridge at Allen Parkway to marvel at the hundreds of bats that take off at dusk — or at least be extra vigilant.
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2017.
