bats in the belfry

idiomatic phrase

variants or chiefly US bats in one's belfry

informal + old-fashioned

: mentally unsound or very eccentric

They might be strange and deranged, but The Addams Family isn't the only domestic unit with bats in the belfry.

—Brian Kelly

They might say he's not quite all there. Or, he is a few bricks short of a load. They used to say he's got bats in his belfry. Or, he's not playing with a full deck.

—Mary B. Olsen

Examples of bats in the belfry in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

The presence of bats in the belfry, as a metaphor for disordered thinking, is usually taken to refer to the way bats would flutter around the upper stories of distressed churches, but a larger madness, Eklöf thinks, is responsible for their absence. —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1897, in the meaning defined above