A new house, a poltergeist and a spoon
by Angie Vicars
Oh, hi," said the girl from across the street. "Did you buy this house?"
"Yes, I did," I said.
"Did you know it's haunted?" she wanted to know.
"No," I said. "The realtor didn't tell me that."
"The man who used to live there, he died in the bathroom. But he was really nice anyway."
Maybe that's why the TV screen turned as red as blood after a storm knocked the power out. In fact, it turned as red as the hair on the girl across the street. And a guy who drives a van stops by there to visit another guy who has a goatee. Plus, the neighbors have a dog that's afraid of his own shadow.
Jenkies, I think I've found a clue. If my life were really like a cartoon from the '70s, I'd put on a bad disguise, try to scare everyone away from my new place and bribe the dog with Scooby snacks.
But none of the places that Shaggy and Scooby ever entered with their knees knocking together like castanets were really haunted. It was all in people's heads, just like Samatha across the street.
That is, until Comcast kind of hooked up my cable TV. I requested an installation where there was no previous cable, and in days a crew showed up to not fulfill my need.
Claiming they couldn't do a full hookup because they didn't have enough cable with them, which sounds just preposterous enough to be plausible, they left me with a "partial" connection instead. A cable stretched from the back of my house, through my front yard, across the street and up into Samantha's utility pole.
What happened next is something even Comcast can't explain. One at a time, letters began appearing on my TV screen. Each time I turned it on, the letter had changed. But it was always uppercase and always white. As though the program was sponsored by the letter "P," for instance. Sometimes it would move during the course of a show: first center screen; next upper left corner; and finally somewhere in the lower right. "Perhaps it's P for prosperity," my friend Patrice suggested one night.
But it seemed more like P for possessed by the morning I awoke to the blood red screen. When I called in to speak to a service rep, she asked a very important question. "What's your cable box connected to?" I stared across the street at the utility pole and parked beneath it, the mystery van. What indeed, I wondered. Could they be haunting my house, instead of debunking it?
A few nights later, I heard a piercing sound somewhere inside my house. It was the kind of piercing that leads to wincing and crawling and bleeding ears, all in the time it takes to determine that the house alarm system has been activated.
Mysteriously activated, said the ADT rep when I called in to inquire about the problem, after deciding that standing outside in an ongoing thunderstorm was preferable to being inside my home. "I wonder if any of your neighbors have lost their power too?" As I looked across the street, my eyes came to rest on a now familiar vehicle, the mystery van. A dog behind the window looked out at me. "It's possible," I told her. And indeed it was. But it wasn't supposed to work this way. I was supposed to be the haunter, not the hauntee.
Then came the day when BellSouth connected the rest of my phone extensions, after I quit pretending I could self-install them. Off I went to work, with all the dial tones dialing. Back I came that night to the deafening roar of static from every receiver. The sound was practically paranormal in nature.
So I drove back to work and called a BellSouth rep, who asked if there was another number where she could reach me. "Oh, if only there was," I told her snidely. But I, who can short out a digital watch in the push of a button, had never foreseen that almost every frequency I use would be jammed the moment I called a new place home. Called, hah. I'd call that pretty funny.
"I wonder if any of your neighbors are having phone trouble?" the rep asked me. "Do you know if they are?"
"Well, I can't see any of them right now," I said, imagining the mystery van in its usual spot. "But I'm sure they're not."
Except, I was wrong. Dead wrong, you could say. It turns out Shaggy and the gang had a problem so frightening it went beyond my wildest nightmare. "We have a poltergeist," Samantha told me the very next night. "It threw the coffeepot all the way across the kitchen."
Dear God, not the coffeepot. "Tell me it didn't break," I said, as I felt a shiver run up my spine. The lack of a working phone line seemed minuscule, compared to a threat on my caffeine intake.
"The coffeepot's fine," she told me, shrugging. "We're used to that stuff. It takes more than a poltergeist to get us going."
So what's my excuse, I wondered. And then I realized what I was doing wrong. I was giving away the power to haunt my own house. And I would've gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.
I'm the only one, according to Comcast, whose cable box had an alphabet demon housed inside. Just like I'm the only one, according to ADT, whose alarm can deafen the living, wake the dead and still fail to alert them that anything is wrong. And BellSouth says I'm the only one who's called to have her phone lines repaired the very same day they already were.
Rumor has it my magnetic field causes these quirks and that running a spoon down my spine will reverse my polarity. So, who's not scared to spoon me? Any takers?
January 2, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 1
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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