(WHAS11) -- Bedbugs feeding on the blood of senior citizens.
It's a scary situation that residents of a local apartment complex say has them living under stress and in fear.
The elderly folks are just one group being plagued with the pests here in Louisville.
Pest control experts say Louisville is now one of the most infested cities in America.
The Rowan Place Apartments are relatively new and they're clean, but somehow bedbugs have managed to creep into and infest several apartments here in the past month.
But this is far from the only place dealing with the bedbug problem.
“You itch. You itch. You don't sleep. You’re constantly feeling things crawling on you,” Jo Ann Johnson, who says her apartment has been infested with bedbugs, said.
The golden years have lately become a time of itching and scratching at Rowan Place Apartments in the Portland Community.
“I know I'm getting bit every day. Every single day,” one woman who doesn’t want to be named said.
The problem?
“There are bedbugs,” Johnson said, showing dead bedbugs she saved in a medicine bottle.
The bedbugs first turned up in two chairs in the lobby then spread through the halls.
“We do know we are infested. all three floors,” Johnson said.
“They were hid, down under my mattress. They were hid in the sofa,” Rosetta Winston, who also had bedbugs in her apartment, said.
Since spying the first bedbug on her curtains, Jo Ann Johnson has been at war. Spraying alcohol and doing lots of loads of wash.
“I was up until 7 o’clock fighting bedbugs,” Johnson said. “Bedbugs were everywhere,”.
Exterminators spotted the initial problem, but it will be Monday before they can come back to treat all the floors with chemicals.
That's because the company is too busy fighting other bedbug emergencies.
Blanton House Apartments, a 16 story senior citizens' hi-rise building near downtown recently fought off a bedbug infestation.
A local exterminator told us they've responded to bedbug calls at a movie theater, a five star hotel, day care centers and a fire station.
Several exterminators we contacted were too busy to do interviews on Thursday.
Last month, Louisville ranked 13th in the country in bedbugs in a report released by Terminix.
We called the management company to get a comment, but they didn't call us back.
The bedbug outbreak is being described as the worst one since before World War II.
