We Have A Ghost!
Maybe.
Twice in recent weeks, doors in my home have apparently locked themselves. Both doors are deadbolts, which means they require physical manipulation to activate. How does such a thing happen on its own?
The first time occurred last week when I took my dogs out for a walk. I exited the front door without locking the door because I never lock the front door during the day, and returned to find the door locked. I knocked on the door and my son came downstairs to open it. When I asked why he’d locked it, he responded that he had not.
Nobody else was home.
The second time happened last night. My wife woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and noticed that my son had taken the humidifier we have in the bathroom into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. She knocked to ask what he was doing – he said he took the humidifier to help ease a cough he has, but he didn’t the lock. Which sounds right because he never locks his door.
What’s going on?
As many of you know, I moved to Savannah - America’s most haunted city - a couple years ago, trading in my newly-built modern Connecticut home for a brick townhouse built in 1867 by a Confederate captain who’d been taken prisoner and held in New York. When he returned to Savannah, the legend is he swore he’d never live in darkness again, which is why my home has an usual cruciform shape, with windows on three sides of every room. Could it be that Captain Hopkins has taken to locking the doors?
Do I have a door-locking phantasm?
My best guess: no. Most likely, I just have a son with ADHD.
I don’t believe in ghosts, which is perhaps an odd position for somebody who believes in a worldwide UFO conspiracy to take, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let consistency get in the way of my half-baked belief system. Not that ghosts necessarily have anything to do with UFOs but once you go down one rabbit hole, you realize there’s a whole goddamned warren under there and it’s all connected.
One of the most intriguing byproducts of “The Phenomenon,” (the loose umbrella term given to describe all manner of paranormal and supernatural occurrences) is the so-called “hitchhiker effect,” which affects people who have been exposed to the high strangeness of The Phenomenon. Viewers of the Skinwalker Ranch series on the History Channel may be familiar with this concept, in which people exposed to weirdness in one place, then carry that weirdness with them into other locations. So, somebody who witnessed a flying orb in one place, for example, might start suddenly seeing them elsewhere they go. Is this nothing more than the Baader-Meinhof effect or is it closer to what Nietzsche was describing when he wrote, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you?”
Occam and his razor surely would just tell me to call a locksmith. After all, the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one: namely that my son locked both doors. The only problem with this hypothesis is he says he didn’t, and he literally has no reason to lie about it. Nor is it likely that he “forgot” he locked them since both require, as I said, actual physical manipulation. Frankly, the locks in this house are annoyingly difficult to operate.
So maybe Occam can suck it?
The main reason I study The Phenomenon is because I love the mystery more than I care about the solutions to the mystery. I’ve had many inexplicable things happen in my life. Most of us have. The vast majority of such experiences surely have banal explanations. But some do not. Some get filed away into that mental junk drawer where we put all the stuff for which we cannot find any other home. For now, my door-locking mystery goes there, neatly tucked beside the handful of inexplicable happenings to which I’ve been intermittently exposed throughout my life.
I’ve already written about my UFO sighting here. I’ve had other, stranger experiences which I haven’t talked about publicly (at least not yet) because they walk right up to the border of Crazy Town. Not sure if you’ve ever been to Crazy Town or not, but it’s a little like being from New Jersey: once people find out you’ve spent significant time there, they never let you forget it.
So, no, I don’t think I have a ghost. I am, however, not ruling out the possibility since it’s much more fun to maybe be haunted by somebody with home security issues than to give credit to my absent-minded son. Regardless, I remain enchanted with mystery, ensorcelled by enigma. If I’m screwy, so be it. Wouldn’t you rather live a life animated with abstruseness than one in which the ordinary never rises to the extraordinary? I would. And I do. But I absolutely do not believe in ghosts. Unless it happens again.
I recently heard Thomas Lennon on a podcast talking about a ghost in his home. Could you both be haunted by Barry and Levon?
When I was 12, my mom went to the grocery store and left me home alone. We lived in a remote area of Western Washington, which is a dark, damp, serial killer-begetting sort of place, and the nearest grocery store was about 30 minutes away. This day, however, was sunny and warm and I was excited to have the house to myself, and was watching TV. At a certain point, I became aware of a cold chill that had entered the room blowing up against my back as I sat on the floor in front of the TV. It became so noticeable--and disturbing--I had to get up and investigate. Our front door, which had been deadbolted, was as open as it could be, the door folded back on its hinges. It was creepy, but I bravely closed the door and locked it up tight. I went back to watching TV. About ten minutes later, the cold wind returned. I went back to the front door. It was once again all the way open. I closed it. Locked it. When it opened by itself a third time I decided to sit on on the front porch steps and wait for my mom to return. This entire scenario--with me being home alone and the front door opening by itself with a cold wind present--repeated itself multiple times throughout my adolescence. However, after that first time, once it happened I'd just give up right away and sit on the porch. That was only the beginning of the Crazy Town that was that house.