Ghosts, explanations, and expectations for a great Independence Day.
My sister Becky and I think our cabin in Idyllwild is haunted. Well, not haunted as such (mostly because we're not entirely sure what we think about ghosts and their actual ability to haunt). But something strange is going on.
Becky is currently in Idyllwild; I am at home. (Well, by "at home", I mean "around the city we live in".) She has been texting and calling me about this for most of the day (well, most of the day since I woke up, which was at...11, really.) She claims that, last night, she heard some pounding coming from my closet, and the door between our rooms opened for no identifiable reason.
An explanation of the house's layout - the lower floor isn't unusual at all, but the upstairs is reached through a stairway that looks wrong (the ceiling slopes at what seems to be a different angle than the stairs' incline, although it never touches one's head while going up). When you reach the top of the stairs, there is a tiny carpeted space and three doors, one on each available side and that lead to floor's only three rooms - a small bathroom and two larger rooms which take up almost half the entire floor each. One of them is my room, the other is Becky's. Both of these rooms have strange doors in them, located in the same relative position in the room as each other (they're little square storage doors built into the wall with an odd angle jutting out...this doesn't make sense. It's weird.) I have a closet, but it's smaller than Becky's. There is another door near Becky's closet; they're on two different walls, but they're towards the corner and they're about as close to each other as two doors can possibly be. (If you've seen the first episode of Doctor Who with Matt Smith in it, it's like the room Prisoner Zero was hiding in.) One of the doors leads to stairs that lead to the attic (which we have not yet explored). The other is the closet, which is a large-ish rectangular area. However, the wall of the closet (that is, what you immediately see when you open the door) has another door in it, which leads to another set of stairs up to the attic. We can't think of any reason why you would need two doors built in unusual places that lead to the exact same place. Less unusually, there is a wall between Becky's room and mine, but there is a door in it that lets you access both rooms.
Okay. That was longer than I wanted. But anyway, it's a really strange place to be in, and you know how sometimes, you feel this slight physical difference in different houses (like how each house smells slightly different)? That feeling is present in the difference between the two floors. So if the house is haunted, it's definitely the first floor.
There's always been an odd tendency of the doors to open. I used to have a joke where I would fling Becky's closet door open and yell, "Hello, Prisoner Zero! How are you today?" (Becky got incredibly creeped-out by this until she actually watched Doctor Who and determined Prisoner Zero wasn't that scary.) I stopped doing that after I opened the door and was about to deliver the line but got frightened by the fact that the inner door was wide open, with no logical reason why it should do that. It does not open on its own anymore, but that's because we put something in front of it.
Things also occasionally start by themselves. There's a heater upstairs that has been known to spontaneously start (almost always when Becky and I are watching something on my computer; we put it very near the heater, incidentally, because that's the easiest place to plug it in where we can both watch). Our father claims this is natural. There's also a loud beeping noise that infrequently occurs. It's shrill and it only beeps once. Dad claims it's part of a sound-based mouse trap (makes sense in context) or a fire alarm or something. Well, then.
This is the best part, though - Becky has heard some sounds that we've heard before. Not only does there seem to be a voice saying "Doctor Whooooo" (her description; I also have a theory as to why all of this is Doctor Who-based, read on), there are similar sounds to something we call "the Time Lord phone call". (I wrote a journal entry about it, which can be read here.) Which is quite strange.
Now, my interpretation? The whatever-it-is that's in our house (I'm not going to call it a ghost, because that may not accurately describe what it is) is likely sentient and probably in possession of some intelligence. Becky and I talk about Doctor Who a lot (heck, the Prisoner Zero joke was one of the first things I said up there). When she first watched Doctor Who, it was upstairs with me. We watched pretty much the entire Fifth Season together over the course of a weekend in Idyllwild. Meaning the whatever-it-is has been exposed to Doctor Who (including the sounds from it). If it understands English, it also understands that Becky and I like the show and it's able to get some of the references. It could then in theory make some references. Now, the cell phone mostly functions as the home phone when we're in Idyllwild, and it probably understands how we use it. What if it somehow possessed the phone for "the Time Lord phone call?" I think it's making all the Doctor Who references so Becky and I will think it's fun and not be afraid of it. In which case, it's a very nice whatever-it-is.
I don't know what it is. It's story fodder, for sure. I'm going up on the Fourth of July. After she teaches me how to party (like it's 1776 - my phrasing), Becky and I will do some investigation. This will be an unforgettable Independence Day.