Last night I moved from the bed to our couch in the family room because I was loudly snoring and wouldn’t stop and I kept waking up Sab. I fell into a half-sleep out there pretty quickly, and at some point while I was half-sleeping, Sab came out and gave me a kiss on the forehead. At least I thought it was Sab.
I got up off the couch around 5:15a and began my neurotic morning routine with a fog-filled brain after that crappy night’s sleep. Not much later, Sab called me into the pitch black bedroom and half-asleep, said, “There’s a weird noise in here.” I stopped and listened for the noise. There it was, a quiet humming sound. At first I thought it was just an annoying buzz coming from one of the ceiling vents, since we’d turned the heater on last night for the first time this year. But that didn’t seem right, because the sound, if I really focused on it, had almost a melody to it. It sounded similar to the ambient music that I listen to so often. Sab confirmed what I was hearing by sleepily saying, “There’s different instruments.”
I pressed my ear against the speaker on the nightstand, considering the possibility that my phone was still connected to it and beaming a Brian Eno album at it. This was certainly possible from a technical standpoint, and I do beam a shit ton of Eno at my household speakers. But even with my face an inch away, I couldn’t really discern if it was the source of the sound. More investigation was needed.
Using the faint glow from my phone’s lock screen as my light source, I quietly shuffled around the dark room, standing under each of the ceiling vents trying to pinpoint which one of them may be transmitting this invasive sound. Inconclusive. I peered through the blinds of the bedroom window to see what might be going on outside, and just saw a reflection of my dimly backlit face squinting back at me.
I left the room, and the sound stopped. I went back in, and there it was again, that soft hum that you had to really focus your ears to hear, but once you did, you could definitely process what sounded like a minor orchestra or a synthesizer emulating one. At this point, all my fumbling around had pretty much destroyed Sab’s attempts to fall back asleep. I pulled the nightstand away from the wall and unplugged the speaker cord from the outlet. We both listened. The sound remained. What the hell?
I went out to the thermostat in the living room and shut off the heater and then returned to the bedroom. The sound was gone. So the vent was indeed the culprit. Just a vibrating vent reacting to the hot air flow. But why was it so melodic? Or was it even? Or were Sab and I just caught up in some early morning small time groupthink where we were both subconsciously convincing each other that we were hearing music? Entirely possible. Right?
That morning when we were getting ready, I asked her how she slept.
“Pretty good,” she said.
“Oh really? I thought you might have been up a good part of the night. Didn’t you come out and kiss my forehead at some point?”
“Um, no.”
“No? Well I wonder who did…”
A slightly creepy conversation to kick off the day, considering that there’s no one else in the house beside me, Sab, and the dog. Of course, it just means that I dreamed the whole forehead kiss and then convinced myself that I had actually been half awake for it. Right?
A couple weeks ago, Sab and I played the new Taylor Swift album on my phone one evening. Around 1am that next morning, the album suddenly started playing on my phone, waking me up from a dead sleep. The specific line that I woke up to was, “Everyone’s got bodies in the attic.” Disconcerting for sure, but obviously just a Spotify glitch that caused it to spontaneously play in the middle of the night. And, while it seems weird that I’d wake up to that particular creepy line about bodies and attics, in reality, I probably half-slept through that line and numerous others thinking it was my phone alarm clock, and only dialed in on that creepy line once I was awake. Right?
And just now as I was typing this in my home office with Alice the dog laying on the floor behind me, I was startled by a sudden loud noise. Almost a croak. I looked down at Alice to make sure she wasn’t choking or something, and she was staring wide-eyed out the office door. At nothing.
Must have been just the wind outside the office window… in the opposite direction of where Alice was staring. Right?
Right.
Unfortunately, yes, right. As much as I’d love to say that these are all signs of some malevolent force that has recently decided to camp out in my house and is introducing minor disturbances to awaken us to its existence and let us know that, in due time, we are fucked, well, unfortunately I know it’s not.
My house is about as un-haunted as a house can get. It’s about 2 decades old, and I’ve lived in it for about half of that, and I’m familiar with the first half of its history, which is not creepy at all. It has a crawl space and an attic, both spaces that tend to score highest on the creep scale in one’s house. Not this house. Here, the attic and crawl space are both small, and shockingly clean. I’ve actually swept my crawlspace recently. And not the half-finished basementy part, but the unfinished part that’s just a big vapor barrier over dirt. I’ve swept that vapor barrier. I’ve had technicians tell me my crawlspace is the cleanest one they’ve ever seen, and I believe them. It’s a clean-ass crawlspace, dude. I genuinely enjoy being in it. It’s peaceful. And the attic is about the same. Clean and tidy, and I’m up there frequently enough to know that there are no surprises lingering up there. The rest of the house is also small, organized, and an open-floor model. There’d be nowhere for scary things to hide even if they wanted to.
You know when people who have seen a ghost say that the house just had a “haunted feel” to it? Mine is the opposite. It has a “definitely not haunted” feel. I felt that way upon first moving in. And that’s a good thing overall. Means it started with positive vibes and we’ve kept it going. So that’s great.
But unfortunately, when something weird happens like a ghostly kiss on the head in the middle of the night, I know it was just simply a “false awakening” dream, and not a loving peck from an old woman who was burnt alive here back in 1970. Or when we hear weird music playing in the bedroom, it’s just our brains crafting sound out of harmless vibrations in the vents, and not a little ghost girl playing some Brahms on her ancient phonograph. And when a Taylor Swift song starts playing on my phone in the middle of the night, it’s because modern technology, not ghosts, is what is actually scary.
So, despite a few wonderfully creepy little instances, it’s looking like it’s going to be another haunt-less Halloween this year for yours truly. Scariest thing that will probably happen is that some trick or treaters will show up to our door and I’ll have to small talk with the parents for a few minutes.
Anyone out there currently living in a scary house? Or spent some time in one? If so, share a story so I can live vicariously through you while I sit alone in my house playing peaceful ambient music, sadly aware that I will very likely not be screaming hysterically today as some wide-eyed corpse in a tattered night gown with the bottom half of her face missing glides towards me ever so slowly, her finger raising to her lips….”Shhhhh”…
Not in this damn ole peaceful ass house anyway 🙁
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