Hundreds of Bats Swarm Out of Office Walls in Creepy Viral Video

As we fast approach Halloween, TikTok is providing some creepy viral videos, including one which those with Chiroptophobia will not be a fan of.

In the clip shared by TikTok user Ashley Michele, @baebaespice, hundreds of small bats swarm from the walls of a California building, all visible through the safety of the window. The video appears just like b-roll from a Halloween movie and wouldn't seem out of place at the Addams Family residence.

Using the popular TikTok audio, "It's freakin' bats, I love halloween," the video captured the TikToker's office building, which previously doubled as a home for the bats. "Hundreds of bats used to live inside our offices building," she explained in the caption.

Uploaded on August 15, the video has gained over 500,000 likes with users split on whether it's adorable or outright scary.

"I wanna live there. I swear I would name them all," vowed one TikTok user.

"I love bats but if I saw that without warning, I would still be screaming," commented another.

For those agreeing with the former, the update provided by the TikToker isn't a positive one—the office removed the bats. "Someone told the building about the bats and they put up the mesh wiring," she wrote in a comment. "It was super heartbreaking because every night we would watch them fly."

For the building, bats are pretty harmless, according to The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; they don't make much noise or smell, and their dropping "soon crumbles away to dust." Nor do they use bedding or bring any prey into the building.

The video can also be seen in full here.

Reportedly, the only real potential harm is the risk of histoplasmosis if a person comes into close contact with the bat droppings. The disease can cause a list of symptoms including shortness of breath, fever and vision problems, and infects the host when they inhale the spores released by the decomposing droppings.

As pointed out by many commenters, the benefits of having bats in your building however are more than just a nightly show—they eat mosquitos.

Across the U.S. some bat species are federally protected, and so professionals should be consulted if you wish to remove bats from a building. Like in the case of this building exclusion is the main method chosen for the removal of bats, which involves placing netting or tubes at the entry points, meaning they can leave but can't re-enter.

After a few weeks, and enough time for all the bats to have left and given up returning, the entry points are sealed off.

Various organizations advise not to remove the bats by exclusion between May and July, when the babies are still too young to fly by themselves and will often get stuck and left behind. It's also not advised to do so in the winter in regions where the bats don't migrate elsewhere, as the bats are hibernating and can't fly out, leaving only early spring and late summer.