For 33 years, Tom Starai, of All Animal Wildlife Eviction in Crystal Lake, has been helping people deal with a problem that appears to be on the rise in the Chicago area: Bats getting into peoples’ homes.

Brian Smith and his family ended up being some of the latest victims.

“We saw it Saturday night, I was doing laundry, all of a sudden it just flew out and scared the heck out of me,” Smith said.

Starai and his crew searched the home inside and out to find where the bats might have gotten in.

Starai says the bat population has grown.

“We used to handle one to three cases a year and that started about 25 years ago,” Starai said. “And then the next year we did five and then the next year we did 15, and it has just excelled from there.”

In Elmhurst, late last week, several bats delayed the first day of school at Jefferson Elementary.

School officials hired a pest control company to remove the bats and fully disinfected the whole school.

Rebecca Fyffe works for ABC Humane Wildlife, which helps educate the public about how to handle bats. Fyffe said the number of bats invading homes has been going up.

“The number of bats we’ve captured are up,” Fyffe said. “In 2015 from January until now we captured 33 bats and in the same time this year, we’ve captured 42.”

Starai and his crew discovered that just a couple of bats may have gotten into Smith’s home—and Starai stresses that people should use professionals to handle those bats.

“You make the wrong decision and it can affect somebody’s life,” Starai said.