It started with the Simpsons talking bottle opener.
You know the one, that plastic piece of crap that emits a distorted unreasonable facsimile of Homer's voice saying, "mmm … beer" the first four or five times you use it, then falls forever silent.
Becks has had one perched for show behind her kitchen sink for as long as I can remember. No one's ever used it in my presence, and I always assumed the damned thing worked for a bit, then didn't and was consigned to the role of kitschy decoration.
But not long before I moved in, and after untold months of not saying anything at all, Homer began occasionally voicing his passion for the hops at the weirdest times.
Like when there's nobody in the kitchen.
We'll be sitting on the sprung pink couch in the living room, Milo The White Trash Terrordog and Lady Sophie at our side, and clearly hear the instantly familiar outburst. We'll get up to investigate. The cats are never anywhere near the sink — they don't get up there anyway, they prefer the kitchen table — and the bottle opener is always right where it's been for a year or more.
That's what first got us joking about the place being haunted.
Then the TV in the bedroom started acting up.
We both like to sleep with it on (we've got so much in common!), and Becks often goes to bed an hour or more before I stop working or playing guitar or watching the sci-fi shows she hates and decide to battle my insomnia for a while. Twice now, she's asked me as I turned in if I had come in earlier and shut the TV off. I never have, but twice in the past two months she's awakened to find the tube dark and mute, and the remotes where they always are, lying neatly atop my pillow.
That's what first got our jokes about the place being haunted sounding a little strained.
A couple of weeks ago, I was lying in bed watching the suspect TV, on my back with my arms stretched up behind my head, when something grabbed my interlocked hands and tried to pull me back toward the headboard.
Look, I'll cop to having a sometimes frighteningly overactive imagination, but I'm no flake. By now, I've almost completely convinced myself I fell far enough asleep to have one of those sudden jerk-you-back-to-consciousness nightmares. I don't remember any gauzy sort of drifting away, however, and the episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that was on played right through without any hiccup or time-skip.
Last night, we whipped out the Ouija board and tried to commune with the spirits.
After more than half an hour, it became obvious that the spirits weren't interested in small talk. Or maybe the spirits in question only speak Spanish or Swahili or something; whatever the reason, nobody picked up on the other end of the trans-planar party line.
I started mentally ticking through all the things I'd seen or heard about ghostbusters doing in order to establish the presence of paranormal activity.
I thought about hunting for spots in the house where the temperature was significantly lower than in surrounding areas but dismissed the idea; Becks keeps the whole house so cold that my nipples have their own biceps.
I tried to remember if I'd seen any ectoplasm around lately; there's plenty of slimy, alternately green and clear residue samples in tissues in wastebaskets in various rooms, but that's just because of my allergies.
Recalling that strange, unexplainable shapes and forms often appear in photographs, I took some shots of the bottle opener, of the kitchen at large, of the TV in the bedroom, of the bedroom at large. Nada. Zilch. Goose egg. Bagel.
I made a compass by floating a magnetized needle in a glass of water, hoping that the presence of oddly charged air or some electromagnetic anomaly would send the needle into a confused spin. It slowly turned, only to orient itself straight along a north-south line.
I set my video camera to Night Shot, turned off the lights and slowly taped every darkened room, searching for those tiny careening points of light that the dudes on Ghost Hunters swear are concentrated supernatural energy and not just inordinately reflective bits of detritus floating on air currents. I didn't see any, but I did get a nice, solid, shivery jolt when Bagheera, the black cat I didn't know was in the bar room, suddenly looked up to stare into the camera.
Through it all, the Simpsons bottle opener remained mockingly quiet.
Becks went to bed. I had another glass of her unimpeachable white sangria, tried to think of another experiment, and came up empty.
I went into the bathroom. I started brushing my teeth. I thought, "fuck it," stepped back, reached over and shut off the light. I closed my eyes and slowly uttered the words "bloody Mary" 10 times, quietly but with a certain amount of weight.
I opened my eyes.
A bloodshot guy with long blonde hair and white foam on his lips stared back from the depths of the medicine cabinet's mirrored door.
He looked pretty embarrassed.
Real ghost hunters would optimistically label my results "inconclusive" — like theoretical physicists and theologians say: absence of proof is not proof of absence. But I'll just chalk things up to some slowly dying batteries and some partial power surges or outages (and my overactive imagination) and move on.
Until the next time Homer feels like speaking up.
Or the next time something under the bed decides to reach up and shake hands.
Happy Halloween.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.
