My MIL wakes up in the middle of the night saying she hears someone or something banging on her bedroom wall.
Then she says she saw the front door is open by about 4 inches. So she calls me to make sure I am not outside.
I look outside, advise her it must have been deer running by or the cats were just running around the house playing... but everything is okay.
I sit with her while she drinks her soda and assist her back into bed.
This is happening more frequently...any suggestions?
What she sometimes hears is a pounding sound on her walls. It is not an every night occurrence but does happen.
These sounds are very real to her. I try to alleviate her fear by telling her things are alright, that it is probably just an animal. (We live in the country, bears, deer, opposums, foxes, owls, eagles, cats, etc are common.) This helps her to relax and go back to sleep.
Im contacting her physician tomorrow. I am hoping he can assist in a positive way.
I just didn't realize this was a symptom of dementia or alzheimers.
Or perhaps spend a night on a mattress on the floor next to her. There may be actual noises. We have now had rats in the ceiling space twice in 20 years, including when we got back to Alice Springs 4 weeks ago. They made quite a lot of noise. Baits up through the ceiling hatch sorted it out in a couple of nights.
Possum can do the same in Australia, it’s like they’re having a noisy party. Possums are protected so you have to search for the gap in the eaves where they get in and block it off.
We took this as a "one-off" - maybe a very realistic nightmare. As it turns out, this was the start of dementia manifesting itself via auditory and visual hallucinations. There were other similar events, (she convinced my father that people stole the registration out of his locked truck, she heard non-existent rats in the attic) then security would call me after they got reports. It was a downward spiral as time went on. My Dad passed away last November and Mom is now in a Memory Care Unit with fairly advanced dementia.
Maybe you can set up some video surveillance (at least outside) so YOU can know for sure that these things are not happening. The suggestion to install a white noise machine is also a good one.
Good luck and God bless.
There may be some actual noises, raccoons in the attic in my parents' case. You might hear what she is saying or when she is waking in the night. I don't know if this might apply, but I wonder if she wakes around the same time.? With young children night terrors would occur around the same time. It was helpful to wake them and let them go to sleep to disrupt the cycle.