Theres something in the attic

I woke up in the middle of the night a couple nights ago to a faint scratchin above my head. As I woke further, the noise got louder, and progressed to thumping, and then a lot of scurrying. Now this was no quiet thing. It was quite loud enough to keep me up, and I'm convinced that it's got to be a rat. But for the sake of my sanity, we'll call it a squirrel. I'm not sure what its doing up there, it sounds like either it is trying to dig up some hidden treasures in the rafters, or he is merely keeping fit by doing laps around the attic. scurry scurry scurry across the ceiling. We tried knocking on the walls, then hitting, then literally banging on the walls to try and scare the critter out of our attic. But all that accomplished was a short pause between scratches, pauses that got significantly shorter as it realized nothing was coming for it. Finally the episode culminated with boyfriend standing on the bed and banging on the ceiling with the maglight. That seemed to work, and we fell asleep, only to be woken by the same sound (and probably the same critter) 2 hours later. We went straight to maglight, and it worked, but last night there were critter noises yet again. Boyfriend wants to kill whatever is, I'm hoping if we keep hitting the ceiling it will stop coming back, but I dont really want to wake up every night just to attend to a restless critter. I'm not ready to be a mother, and definetely not to some ocd'ed out squirrel.