Step 29: Begin to Suspect Your House is Haunted

This morning when I woke up, I noticed my slippers were placed neatly on the foot of my bed. I'd noticed them there last night, too, but it didn't occur to me that this was odd until this morning when, despite a rough night of tossing and turning and at one point thinking I head the slippers hit the floor, they were still on the bed, albeit just slightly askew, presumably from being kicked.

Alone, it would mean nothing. I could have put them there and forgotten. I mean, I can't imagine any circumstance under which I would put them there, but it could happen. However, it is one more thing on a growing list of peculiar things that have happened in this house, all since I moved down to the basement. So, here we go, from the first thing to the slippers:

1. WHen I first moved down here, I needed to clean the bathroom. The toilet, in particular, needed attention, as most of the water had evaporated out of it, and what was left was really yellow. I scrubbed it down, then went to flush it and...nothing happened. Awesome. I pulled the lid off the back to investigate the issue, and discovered that the whole gut system of the toilet needed to be replaced, beginning with the plastic arm that attaches to the chain that pulls the rubber stopper, and thus, flushes the toilet. Turns out the plastic was cracked, and so the screw, rather than grabbing hold of the lever and pulling it up, was just twisting in the cracked casing. Cool. I pulled the broken lever off and leaned it against the...floaty ball thing...put the lid back on, and bought a new gut-kit. (These are technical terms, by the way.) Anyway, a few days transpired between the initial assessment and the installing of the new innards, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. Until I pulled the lid off the back of the toilet again. Instead of seeing the plastic lever either still propped against the ball float, or perhaps lying on the bottom of the tank, it was back up, reattached to the screw on the flusher. I didn't put it there, my mom didn't put it there, and no one else was in my house to have put it there (and besides, who goes into a house, attempts to fix a basement toilet, then leaves, leaving everything else untouched?)

2. A few days later, my mom and I were unpacking some boxes, and we decided to hang up my Grandmother's painting. We had it in a closet with the curtains the house came with (we took them down in favor of something more contemporary, but kept them in case the people who own this house like them...), and a cat toy we have to hide, otherwise Missy (the cat I don't think I've mentioned before, as she's my mom's) gets beaten up over it (Toes is not a nice cat, I know this). We opened the door, and there was...something..on top of the curtains. We inspected it, and it was a rusted spring form pan. Two things: We have never owned a spring form pan and even if we hadn' we would have put it in the closet on top of the curtains.

3. I've been taking piano lessons from one of our land...people...for several months. Part of taking these lessons is practicing. I have my keyboard set up in the basement, and it plugs in. Usually when I sit down to play, it's unplugged, but I chalk that up to the adapter is heavy and just falls out of the wall, HOWEVER. One day, when I was practicing, the plug not only "fell" out of the wall, but managed to land about two feet from the wall, and it came out rather suddenly. To me, it appeared to have been yanked out of the wall.

4. Again with the piano. One day, I sat down, turned the keyboard on, and tried to start my warm-ups, but no sound would play. I tried turning it off and back on, adjusting the volume (which was almost all the way up when I turned it on), nothing. Finally, out of sheer desperation and desire for my keyboard to NOT be broken, I said "Aww, c'mon! I need to practice!" and suddenly, the notes began to sound perfectly.

5. The slippers.

Also, more often than not (usually once or twice a night) there is shuffling coming from what I have deemed the "tinkering room." The guy that lived here before us, who I assume is alive and well, and living in a nursing home in town, was known to be a miser and a tinkerer, and the room the sound comes from still has little bits and pieces of his hobby strewn about. I assumed it was one of my cats, but know I'm not so certain.

Either way, it was probably a bad idea to write about all this at this time of night. I know it's all just little things that TAPS would explain away and debunk in two seconds (probably), but for me it's adding up to some very suspicious circumstances.

Also, I was right about not getting any days off anymore. I DID get called to work, but I did NOT return the call. I get to have a day off! >:| (It wasn't T this time, it was C, but it was a call to work just the same.)

I stayed home and watched DVR'd episodes of shows I like, so no money spent!

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