My husband has always (half-jokingly?) claimed that we have a ghost at our house. We do hear weird stuff sometimes, but it’s an old house, and they tend to creak & make noises, so I always laughed it off.
Well, the other day the weirdest thing happened, and I have no explanation for it. I had recently left our baby monitor on a table in our upstairs hallway…we haven’t used it for a long time, and I was going to give it away. So we were all leaving to go somewhere…me, my husband, and both kids. My husband & the older one were downstairs, and I was upstairs with the baby, so he & I were the last ones to leave the upstairs, and I carried him down. No one touched the baby monitor, and it was not on. Or at least, it wasn’t making any noise. I go downstairs, my husband & daughter are already in the garage getting into the car, so I put my son’s and my coats on and go. We’re pulling out of the garage, and I remembered that I forgot something, so I run back in the house. As soon as I walk in, I can hear some loud humming/static, so I follow the noise upstairs, and sure enough, the receiver part of the baby monitor is on and turned up all the way. The transmitter wasn’t on (it needs to be plugged in), so it wasn’t picking up anything, and it was just making that static sound radios do when they aren’t getting a signal. The way the thing turns on is with one of those little on/volume wheels, and when I went to turn it off, the wheel was turned on as far as it could go. I can’t imagine that either of the kids could have figured out how to do it…especially the baby, as he’s not even 2 yet. Plus, no one was in the house when it came on. And it was REALLY loud…there’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed it when I was upstairs…I could hear it all the way downstairs and on the other side of the house.
So…what turned my baby monitor on? Was it the cat (unlikely, as it would be hard to do without thumbs…although she is always as suspect…she managed to call my parents from my cell phone the other day)? Was it a passing truck rattling the house? A home intruder? Please, help me come up with a plausible explanation.
Don’t discount the cats. Yesterday my cats figured out how to open the closet door and rip open their bag of food and gorge themselves stupid while I slept soundly in the next room. They aren’t tall enough to reach the knob (and even if they could I don’t know if they have enough dexterity to turn it) but they did indeed manage to stuff themselves until they practically had to roll back into the bedroom. Cats are sneaky bastards and could have somehow turned on the monitor without you being aware of it.
Your cat could have rubbed her face against the volume wheel.
In a not-so-great apartment I once lived in, I discovered that the pressure of the water in the shower pipes would cause the hot water knob to slowly turn itself all the way on.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the cat, because although she’s super sweet, she’s also kind of stupid and lazy. She’s also getting rather elderly, and doesn’t move around much. I’m pretty sure she never moved off the bed the whole day. Also, it takes a pretty good snap to turn the thing to the “on” position, so I don’t think she could have done it just by brushing by (she made the call on my cell phone by stepping on it).
Could have been a ghost, I guess. I’m convinced we had one at my last house. I frequently heard people walking down the stairs late at night when I was the only person awake. Not just a footstep; a series of footsteps coming down the entire flight. I’d go check on the rest of my family and they’d be sound asleep, then a little while later I’d hear it again.