Students have been getting a bit of a surprise the last few weeks.

“My house was ‘attacked’ by a raccoon tonight,” senior Mike Sado began in an e-mail. “It followed my housemate as she was coming from Reid and it stayed at our door for about an hour while we all ran around screaming like little children.”

At the beginning of this summer, Associate Professor of Chemistry Allison Calhoun rescued a 5-week-old raccoon that had been orphaned near her house. After consulting a wildlife rehabilitation vetewrinarian, Professor Calhoun decided to raise “Pan” in her home.

During the summer, Pan continued to grow. At the same time Whitman students began arriving back on campus in mid-August, he began to venture farther away from home.

Students began to see Pan stalking the night streets and lurking around their porches. Several reports were made to Campus Security about students being followed and even chased by Pan.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Pan was his completely fearless attitude towards humans.
Senior Brett Muckler recalled his first interaction with Pan as confusing.

“This thing is flashing its eyes at me and I can’t see three feet in any direction around me, it’s so dark,” said Muckler. “I see these two animals, sparring or playing. ‘Oh, cats!’ I say. It’s a raccoon.

And it’s not walking away from me like it should, it’s walking towards me, with a grin on its face. We fled. We ran so hard keg cups were dropped, items were abandoned at full speed. The raccoon pursued.”

Though Professor Calhoun had sent an e-mail about Pan to the student listserv, the many students who don’t read the listserv were left in the dark as to his identity. Pan’s unusual behavior prompted many students to believe that he was rabid.

Stories continued to circle around campus about run-ins with Pan.

According to Professor Calhoun, “unconfirmed reports tell of his attendance at many fraternity parties, a night spent in the Phi house, an attempted breach of the Olin Hall perimeter and several incidents of uninvited participation of student meals and rest time on Ankeny.”

Although not all of Pan’s wanderings could be confirmed, he did in fact spend a night in the Phi house with senior Forrest Carver.

As Carver said in an e-mail, “One night I saw the raccoon in question wandering around near my house… I sat on my stoop and he actually crawled up on there with me… I decided to bring him inside and show him to another East Coaster that would be very surprised to see such an atypical raccoon.”

The night didn’t end there.

“After that, I brought him up to my room, where he promptly fell asleep. I couldn’t put such a chubby, cute little varmint outside, so I just went to bed. He woke me up a few times during the night by trying to pick at and eat my ears, nose and eyes, but he wasn’t very rough or vicious,” said Carver.

Pan’s reign over campus concluded last week when he was released back to the wild.

As Professor Calhoun wrote in an e-mail, “His new home is graced with a cascading stream, a small pond and plenty of trees and bushes. At the time we left him, he was prying rocks out of the stream bed in search of crawdads and other tasty treats.”

Forrest Carver didn’t get off so easy.

Said Carver, “general acquaintances haven’t looked at me the same since. I think they might have taken ‘slept with a raccoon’ too literally.”