Highlights of this post:
- The poltergeist
- Jill's bad day
- Conclusions on fire alarms
There's a poltergeist in my closet!Things have been known to randomly disappear from apartment 217. A pack of cards, a hat, various socks, a razor, a Nerf dart... the list could probably go on. In all of our cleaning checks since the beginning of last semester (the cards got lost fairly early on), not once have we recovered any of our missing things.
Then a container nobody claimed showed up in our fridge, containing something unrecognizable, oozing green liquid, all inside a plastic shopping bag. It stayed on the shelf for months because we didn't know whose it was, until a few weeks ago when I finally threw the whole thing away, foreign Rubbermaid container and all.
To cap it all off, I have a true story.
Once upon a time two weeks ago, I got home from school to an empty apartment. Mara wasn't due to return for another hour and Jill was out visiting her grandma, so I made myself comfortable with a big bowl of cereal (cereal makes a delicious after-school snack) and a book. I seated myself at the table in our small kitchen and began reading between bites of cereal.
There I was, minding my own business, sitting at the kitchen table, when the peaceful silence was broken by a loud CRASH!
It sounded close, too close for me to be hearing the people upstairs or next door. It sounded like something fell off the microwave, so I put down my book and looked around. Nothing was anywhere near the microwave.
I checked the rest of the kitchen. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could have fallen and made the crash. I went back to my book.
Thirty minutes later when I was done eating cereal, I washed my bowl and carried my book over to the couch to continue reading. On my way I saw my brush still lying on the cushion from where I'd thrown it in my rush out the door that morning. I set down my book, took the brush, and went to the bathroom to put it away.
The light made a loud popping noise when I tried to turn it on, and a bright blue flash sent me running for cover to the far wall. A second later, as if nothing unusual had happened, the light came on. I put my brush on my shelf and went back to the switch. I flipped the light off, then back on. It behaved nicely. No noise. No flash. I walked to the fixture and studied it closely. (Sara even came over later and also examined it.) There was nothing that would have caused the flash. The light bulbs all looked perfectly normal. There were no loose wires or anything.
I turned off the light and went back to the couch to keep reading. And then the
zombie closet started acting up.
"That's weird, it doesn't usually start knocking until later," Mara said when she came home and I told her, jokingly, about the ghost in our apartment. The closet was still knocking.
A genuinely terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day
The day before my poltergeist experience, the fire alarms started acting weird.Jill had already been having a bad day. She woke up late, with five minutes to go from being asleep in bed to being dressed, up and on the bus. (I did that once, incidentally. I was very proud of myself when I still made it.) As a result, she had no time to eat or even grab something to eat. She just had to
go.
She did fine the entire morning up until 2:00 (3:00?) when she got out of French. Getting up to leave class, she fainted right there on the floor. She wasn't out long, but when she came to she was surrounded by concerned classmates and teacher.
"Are you okay?" they asked.
Jill's vision was pulsing purple. One minute, she could see fine. The next, everything looked weird. "I'm not sure," she said.
"Where are you going?"
"Bus stop. This is my last class." (Thank goodness.)
In the end, Jill's teacher Kirby (he's also her friend, married to one of her home branch president's daughters- or something like that) followed Jill most of the way to the bus stop to make sure she was okay. Jill's vision was still acting funny and she was a little scared, but she didn't have any commitments until later that afternoon, so her plan was to go home, eat something, and relax on the couch for a while.
It didn't exactly happen that way, because when Jill got home to our apartment every single fire alarm was screaming its head off. She checked everywhere for any smoke or fire and found none, so she went back to the peaceful outside, closed the door and called maintenance.
Maintenance transferred her three times, with each person asking the exact same questions ("Is there a fire? Is there smoke? Are you sure
all your alarms are going off? Are the alarms in your entire building going off? -they weren't- ...Hmm. That's really unusual,") and then claiming they weren't responsible for the alarms and if Jill would just stay on the line they'd be happy to transfer her to someone who could help.
Finally, when the last person went through all the questions and then said, "That's actually a problem for general maintenance. If you'll just stay on the line, I'll be happy to transfer you-" Jill cracked.
"Look. I called general maintenance first, who sent me to electrical, who sent me to you. Will somebody please stop passing the buck and just send somebody out here to turn off my alarms?!"
Pause. Then, "Well, I guess we could send somebody-"
"
Thank you."
"-but the guy in your area doesn't have a key to the apartments because we don't usually do this kind of thing. If you want to wait for a guy with a key-"
"
I have a key. I'll let him in. Just send him," Jill said in exasperation.
"Okay. Please wait for him outside until he gets there."
So Jill waited about 10 minutes in the cold for the guy to arrive and turn off the alarms. At that point, she was running out of time before her afternoon commitments, so she grabbed a granola bar and hopped right back on the bus.
To make a long story short, Jill's day didn't end there. But I won't go into that.
The fire alarms curse (compliment?)
That wasn't the last time all the fire alarms went off with Jill in the vicinity. Yesterday, the Wilk had a spontaneous fire drill in the middle of her shift at work. The crew was already running a little behind because somebody misread the assignment sheet and they thought they only had a few things to do that morning when they really had more. The fire drill set them all back a good thirty minutes or so.
At the same time, I was on my way to work at the Benson building when all their fire alarms went off too. Jill and I compared notes later and discovered the buildings went off at exactly the same time. The difference was, the chemistry people scheduled our fire drill. Jill thinks the Wilk people didn't. (Apparently they had been playing with the way the Wilk alarms communicate with one another.)
(Interestingly enough, Sara was actually in the Benson when the alarms went off. Pity we didn't run into each other when she had to evacuate.)
"Maybe any time a girl from 217 walks into a building (and Sara totally counts as being from 217), all the fire alarms go, 'Oh! She's hot!' and go off," Jill joked last night when Sara came over to share yummy jello cake. (Thank you, Sara!)
"That's funny, because Mara said none of the fire alarms in her building went off," I said.
"And Mara's the hottest one of all of us," Jill agreed. "Hmm."
