Getting Rid of 1950s Bedbugs

The last Bedbug infestation that I can remember like the one they are having in New York and other metropolitan areas in the U.S. was around 1956 or 1957 or thereabouts. I was 8 or 9 years old and my parents ran a church in Los Angeles. So our house almost always had someone either rich or very well educated staying with us like a traveling minister or someone who needed help who was usually very poor or out of work. They usually stayed less than a few days or a week. On one of these occasions my mother gave her own bedroom to someone poor and down and out and stayed in Dad's room for a few days but when she moved the person out and changed the sheets this person had left bedbugs in her bed.

For the first week or so Mom kept getting strange bites on her body until she killed some of the bedbugs by rolling over on them by accident in her sleep and squishing them. Then she asked people what they were as she had never seen them before. She was told to get several electric heaters and to take everything out of the room but her mattresses and to take them off the bed and lean the mattreses up against the wall so the bed bugs have no place to hide and get insulated from the heat and then to take the temperature up to over 140 degrees Fahrenheit for a few days in her bedroom. This worked. All the bedbugs dried up and died as they can't live in that heat. They seem pretty impervious to sprays of all kinds and insecticides so that doesn't work. Only heat can kill them besides finding them and squishing them generally. So, if you find them make sure you heat your bedroom up to 140 degrees for a couple of days and tape all the doorjams and windowsills and closets so the bedbugs have no place to hide or escape to. The sooner you do this the more likely you will keep the bedbugs isolated to the first room you see them in which is almost always a bedroom. Once you do this watch for them in other rooms in your home for the next few months. If any show up duplicate the 140 degrees Fahrenheit treatment in those rooms as well. Hopefully, you will move fast enough and kill them all in the first bedroom you find them in. Also, they generally don't carry diseases so that isn't a problem usually with bedbugs.