I’m afraid that my new house may be haunted. I’m not usually one to worry about the supernatural, but when it starts to cost me money, I have to put my foot down. I can’t allow some restless spirit to run up my electricity bill just because they’re pissed off that I’m in their house. Allow me to explain.
I got home from work earlier this week and found that my house was incredibly hot. I went over to the thermostat and turned it down, but the heater continued to run. I started messing with the thermostat’s programming. I have one of those thermostats that you can program to raise and lower the heat automatically at different times of the day. I first reprogrammed it, because I saw that I didn’t really like the times that were set. The heat continued to run during this entire process. I then overrode the programming and turned the temperature down to 64 degrees. The heat continued to run. I tried to turn the heat off completely, but this was evidently beyond my abilities as a programmer. The heat kept running no matter what I seemed to try. Frustrated and upset, I decided to take a break and go change out of my sweater and into a tank top so that I could better deal with the fact that my house was rapidly becoming a sauna.
When I got to the top of the stairs, I could immediately feel a rush of cold air. It was 30 degrees up there. I started to shiver. As I walked toward my bedroom I could feel the cold air pouring out of it. I went in and found the French doors in bedroom where both wide open to the outside. Cold air was blowing in completely unrestricted. It was freezing in there. Oh well I thought; someone forgot to lock the doors and they blew open during the day. This is not such a big mystery, so I just forget about it.
Yesterday, I got up to leave for work pretty early. When I started outside, I found that the front door was unlocked. I’m not paranoid, at least not very much, but I’m pretty anal about making sure that the exterior doors to my house are always locked. It was very strange to find the front door, of all doors, not dead-bolted. I gave this a bit of thought, “It’s possible. I did go out there yesterday to shake out a rug. I might have forgotten to lock it back. That doesn’t really sound like me though. It’s possible.” I shook it off and got on with my day.
My wife called me a couple of hours later, “Why did you open the window in the guest bedroom?”
“What? I haven’t even been in there in over a week!”
“Well then, how did the window get opened?”
“Open, like barely cracked”, I ask?
“No, open like raised up!”
I do understand a little bit about Newtonian physics and the wind does not usually raise sliding glass windows. As I see it there are 3 options for this happening. Either the window has been open since we moved in; no one has had a reason to open it, in February. It’s possible that someone has been coming into my house during the day and at night, just to open windows and doors. This seems unlikely to me, just from a pure motive standpoint. Or finally, we have a ghost.
Like I said before, I’m not too concerned about this ghost living here as long as he stays quiet and doesn’t scare any guests. I’m not going to be able to deal with exterior doors and windows being opened though. I’m not heating the neighborhood after all. If this happens again there is going to be trouble between me and my poltergeist. The gauntlet has been laid down.
Note: One of my favorite things about writing this blog is that it’s helping improve my vocabulary. I often use words that are common in speech, but before I commit them to paper, (well electronic storage) I want to double check their meanings. I’m sure you knew exactly what I meant by, “laying down the gauntlet.” I wanted to validate though that this was really a correct usage of that word. According to Dictionary.com, this is an acceptable phrase, but as an idiom. A gauntlet is actually an armored glove. I would have been more correct to say, “the gauntlet has been put on”, or “the gauntlet has been raised.” To say, “The gauntlet has been laid down” is almost like saying I’m giving up. I started to change the last sentence but it just sounded weird the other ways. Damn you, Clint Eastwood.
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