Exhibit C: Bells and Whistles

As if the creepy cat and creepy cable guy weren't enough to keep me up at night, there have been other occurances around the C Family Estate that are absolutely unexplainable.  (I make this claim in spite of all the possible "explanations" I've been given for the things that have happened.)

The same night I found the front door unlocked and the back porch light burned out, something else happened....probably the scariest thing to happen in our new house to date.  It was my third night in the house, my first night with the boys there, and as I was upstairs with them helping them get ready for bed, the smoke detector in the foyer outside their rooms started going off.  Figuring it was the battery, I snatched it off the wall and yanked the battery out.  I wasn't cooking, there were no candles burning, and the other two smoke detectors within a five foot vicinity didn't go off, so I wasn't worried.  I carried the smoke detector downstairs with me and set it on the bench in the main hall, so I wouldn't forget that the battery needed to be replaced. 

A little while after my house-wide search for the psycho-killer cable guy, just before I went to bed, I went into the kitchen  to get a glass of ice water.  I set my glass on the stove, steadying it with my left hand, as I opened the refrigerator door with my right hand.  When I reached into the freezer to get a handful of ice, an electric shock surged up my hand and arm that was touching the stove.  I screamed, knocking the glass of water to the ground.  Man, did it hurt!  I checked to make sure none of the stove burners were on.  They weren't.  I made a mental note to call my landlord first thing in the morning.

Shaken up, and with my arm still aching, I went to bed.  I tossed and turned until about 3 am, when the smoke detector in the main hall started going off.  "Are you kidding me?!"  I grumbled as I jumped out of bed, stumbled my way to the front closet, pulled out the step ladder, and climbed up on it with my eyes only half open.  I ripped the detector off the wall, removed the battery, and was too tired to give much thought as to why two different smoke detectors would go off on the same night.

Those thoughts didn't begin until around 6 am, when a third smoke detector, the one in my room, started going off.  I shut it off before it woke the boys, and did another quick check of the house to make sure nothing was burning anywhere and there was no smoke coming from anything.

It's been argued that the landlord probably put all the batteries in at the same time, so of course they would die within a few hours of each other.  I don't believe that.  Especially since they were all different brands.  I verified with my landlord that the detectors are solely smoke detectors, not combination carbon monoxide/raydon detectors.  The only explanation is this.....our house is haunted.  We have a ghost.  I like to call him "Jokey the Ghost", since he thinks he's so funny.

The next night, as I was doing the dishes, I heard someone whistling in the back yard.  I turned off all the lights so I could see better out the window, and spent a good fifteen minutes on my hands and knees peering out the bottom of the big picture window, looking for the culprit behind the very loud, very deliberate, very unmistakable whistling.  I saw nothing. 

I told my husband about it.  I think he thought I was crazy.  Until the following night when I was in the bathroom, right around the same time, and heard it again.  The exact same sound.  I freaked.  Then I thought about the stop light just a couple houses down, the one that goes from a four way stop to a blinking yellow/red light at right about the same time I keep hearing the whistling every night.  I considered the fact that it might be some sort of audible alert that the light is about to change for the night.  But then I decided that was just silly and way too logical.  It was definitely something else....but was it Jokey the Ghost, or the Creepy Cable Guy with the pic axe??  That's the real question.....

(P.S. Try as they might, neither my landlord nor his maintenance guy can get the stove to "shock" them like it did me, even though it's happened to me a few times since, and happened to both of the boys over the weekend....I guess Jokey's a little shy when it comes to strangers.)