Tag: writing

Power Booster

Photo of a glowing, half-closed laptop in a dark room.
Image: Martin Sanchez

When people write about weird things happening in their homes, they tend to write about things that are bad or creepy. But in my second apartment after I returned to Virginia from Long Island, the weird things were pretty neutral, and even good at times.

I had an old laptop that I kept on top of a standing four-foot CD rack. The monitor was eye-level and the perfect height for watching work-out videos on YouTube as I huffed and puffed along. The problem was that the battery didn’t charge very well, usually only getting to about 30%.

Now, see, I’m the kind of person who detaches laptops from the power cords when I shut them off. Even though I have some pretty good surge protectors, I’m paranoid that there will be some freaky electrical jolt that fires my gear. However, the laptop had to be plugged in all the time for the battery to hold any kind of charge, and half the time I would forget and unplug it out of habit when I was done working out. Then when I tried to turn the thing on the next day, it would power up just long enough to tell me the battery was at 5% and shut itself off.

Except a few times, the thing was fully charged the next day.

After being left unplugged overnight.

Whenever this happened I would turn it off and turn it back on, expecting it to say the battery was at 5% and then shut itself off.

Nope. It would be at 100%.

One time I even did an entire 60-minute workout with the laptop unplugged, just to see when it would conk out, but when I was finished, the battery had only gone down to about 70%, thus indicating that the full charge had been real. It took several hours before it drained down to 5% and shut itself off.

It occurred to me that there might be a glitch with the laptop or Windows, so I went to tech websites and tried all the tricks there, including uninstalling and reinstalling Windows updates when I learned that one of the updates had a known bug that kept the battery from charging. I also asked a buddy who worked in IT for his thoughts. He pretty much told me to try all the things I had already found on the internet and tried, and he said that if nothing worked I should just get a new battery and adapter because both of those things can and do go bad. Then the pandemic hit and I wound up moving to a new apartment, where the laptop hissed, let out a dreadful squeal, and died the first time I plugged it in.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

Random recharging wasn’t the only weird thing about my second post-Long Island apartment. Sometimes Inigo would stare in the direction of the CD rack and cock his little black Nanday noggin inquisitively, and I’d look over to find that I had unplugged the old laptop and had to plug it back in. I’d be sitting in the alcove office, which had no overhead vent, and a cool and not unwelcome breeze would sometimes blow down on me, seemingly from the ceiling. I’d be giving Inigo a bath in the main bathroom and he would start chattering happily in the direction of the door, which led out to the bedroom. Wherever I moved in the bathroom, he would just keep babbling toward the door, even if it meant craning his head and looking past me over my shoulder.

The previous tenants might have experienced some weirdness, too. They had applied some foam around the inside of the front doorframe that none of my neighbors had. That might not seem so strange, as it helped with soundproofing, but they had painted the inside of the peephole with red paint or nail polish. I noticed it when a delivery person knocked on the front door and I couldn’t see out the peephole.

I asked the property manager if anyone had ever died in the apartment or if there was a history of weird things happening there, but to her knowledge, there had been no deaths or unusual occurrences. She had only been working there a few years, so I asked some of the guys on the crew who had been there long enough to have worked for the previous owners, and one said there had been one death due to natural causes about eight years before I moved into the building, but nowhere near my apartment.

Aside from dealing with a few rounds of obnoxious neighbors, I really liked that apartment. Inigo liked it there, too. It was on a low floor, facing a side street that ended in a cul-de-sac and never got much traffic, and we had many balcony dinners there. It both angered and saddened me when management decided to resurface the pool during the pandemic and contractors started jack-hammering all day right outside my window. The cacophony made it impossible for me to concentrate on my work, and I wound up moving to an apartment that turned out to be such a hellscape that when I found my current place less than a year later, one of my buddies gave me sage to make sure that whatever plagued that place wouldn’t follow me here.

But that’s a tale for another day.

Missed Connection

Photo of a desk phone in a dimly lit room.
Image: Giorgio Trovato

Yesterday I watched Rose Red, a 2002 three-part mini-series about a haunted house. I can’t recommend it because the acting was so utterly terrible and didn’t do Stephen King’s screenplay any justice, but it did get me thinking about the vibes and weird events in some of the apartments I’ve had over the years, so I’ll share a few of my experiences over the next few entries.

For instance, when I lived in my second apartment on Long Island, I still had a landline on my desk and occasionally the receiver would fall off of the cradle and crash to the floor.

At first I thought it was because of the cord, which was long enough for me to walk across the bedroom from the desk and therefore somewhat heavy as phone cords go. But then it occurred to me that the receiver would only fall while I was alone in the bedroom. It never happened when I was in another room or not home, and it never happened when my then-boyfriend was over—and he could have some heavy footsteps at times.

After the fourth or fifth time the receiver fell off the cradle I got annoyed and replaced the long cord with a shorter cord from the box of miscellaneous cords and wires I had amassed over the years. I also started covering my (rather small) desk with a bath towel after shutting off my laptop for the day because sometimes the receiver would fall off the cradle at night and scare the crap out of me as I was drifting off to sleep, and I figured that the weight of the towel would hold it in place.

But that didn’t stop the receiver from falling off the cradle during the day. It happened again, and again, and again.

Finally I picked up the receiver to tell whoever it was go to the light, but as soon as I touched it I got the strange feeling it was my mother, who had died in 2000 after a long illness. Right before she died my father had called my phone at work to tell me she was about to receive last rites. The priest came in while we were on the phone so we hung up. My father then called a few minutes later, while I was in the ladies room composing myself, but he didn’t leave a message. He called again right after that and left a message that she had died, along with a number at the hospital to call him. Looking back on it now, I wonder if the second call, the one where he left no message, was for me to talk to my mother one last time, and even if he held the receiver to her ear so she could hear the voice of one of her daughters one last time (and ugh, heard my voicemail message instead), but I suppose I’ll never know because he died in 2005.

So there I sat, holding the receiver to my ear.

“Mom?”

Just a dial tone.

Of course.

I hung up, curled the cord so that the cord was entirely on the surface of the desk, and sat on the edge of my bed staring at the phone.

And so help me, the cord uncurled and slipped off the edge of the desk.

“Go to the light!” I barked. Oh, it came out so harshly in my fright, and I regretted it the second I said it.

“I’m sorry. Mom, if that’s you, I know you’re here, and I love you and miss you. Thank you for watching over me, but it’s okay to go to the light,” I said, this time more gently. “And if you’re not my mom, you should know that you’ve died and we can’t talk on the phone. I can’t help you. You need to go to the light.”

I lived in that apartment for almost three more years after that, and the receiver never fell off the cradle again.

With Fangs Atingle

Ah, October. It’s my favorite month of the year, fiery with autumn leaves and early sunsets, bountiful with the fall harvest, and blissfully cooler, at least at night while the D.C. area embarks on its second summer.

This year October is a wee bit extra special to me, as I’m feeling a pull back to the spooky and creeptastic. During the pandemic lockdowns I lost much of my taste for things frightening or dark. Even though Inigo kept me company—and oh, how I miss him so!—it seemed a little risky in terms of mental health to stare into the abyss while cooped up. Besides, the abyss was already staring back at me, what with the worst of humanity unleashing its lizard brain and throwing tantrums left and right about things like being asked to wear a mask, get vaccinated, and accept the outcome of democratic election.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine, thus pissing off pretty much the entire world, including Russia’s own people. Being an early Gen-Xer, I watched the Berlin Wall come down when I was 22 and then spent the following two decades of post-Cold War thawing working on deprograming myself of all the crap and propaganda I learned as a kid, so I was hoping we’d never come back to brinkmanship again. So much for that.

Then it became undeniable (to rational people at least) that all of humanity’s environmental abuse has come to its full and ugly fruition. Way to go, homo sapiens: The planet is simultaneously burning, flooding, choking, and collapsing.

Well, to me all of that is far more terrifying than any fiction the human mind can dream up. Indeed, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, fallen angels, and other creatures of the night now often strike me as preferable company to human primates, at least in a general sense.

And so here I am, giving Horrordailies a go. This month I’ll be writing about everything from scary movies to myths and legends to cemeteries to misunderstood birds and animals that people often associate with bad luck but really shouldn’t. I’ll probably throw in some photos and vampire poetry, and whatever else grabs me in a moment of nocturnal musing. To borrow the words of a friend and blogger who died a long time ago, thanks for being here.