Actually, as far as I know, he’s not. I think he was just quoting the movie. And I was making a rather lame joke comeback.
I was asleep in bed, with the window open, when I’m jolted awake by this “boom”. I took a look around the room, didn’t notice anything unusual, so I tried to go back to sleep. My head just hit the pillow when then there was another flash of light. Must be a thunderstorm, thinks I, so I close the window and once again try to go back to sleep.
Then another flash of light. That’s when it occurred to me that there hadn’t been anymore booms since the first one. In fact, I had heard a “zzt”. I got up, opened the window again, and saw…[spoiler]the flashes of light were coming from the power lines across the street.
At first, my sleep-befuddled brain decided that someone had been working on those lines (why they’d be doing that at around 3am didn’t occur to me) and been fried, so I call 911 then yell out the window: “Help’s on the way!”
Turns out what really happened was that someone had missed a turn at the other end of the block and nailed a utility pole.[/spoiler]
Wasn’t me, but my mom’s cousin. My grandmother had died and he had taken a lamp of hers. Soon after he plugged it in he noticed that it appeared to come on whenever he walked near it. He was convinced it was my grandma trying to tell him something. So he was a bit embarrassed when my mom informed him that it was a motion-sensing lamp!
So. Lazy afternoon, just hanging out and tapping at my computer, all relaxed. Everyone’s out doing something so the house is silent and deserted. Perfectly calm and peaceful.
I’m focusing on my Word document when I hear it. Faint noises–two strange voices, talking unintelligibly–from the empty room next to my bedroom. My heart jumps into my mouth.
The voices grow louder, arguing, then the silence returns. Maybe I just imagined things…
No–new voices, different ones, talking again in a quiet murmur. A cold shiver runs down my back and I slowly get up, slip into the hallway past my open door. The bedroom door up ahead is shut. I turn the handle, look inside, white-faced with fear, and find…
…that someone forgot to turn the television off. It’s playing at low volume.
:smack:
I’m glad you came up with this thread, **PoorYorick. ** I’m also glad that I’m not the only one who’s had a bird story to share. 
I sort of had yours figured out though. I just knew there was a vent involved somewhere but couldn’t explain why. By the way, I sometimes hear a similar sighing, only it sounds more like Darth Vader than Grandma.
It comes from the water heater in the kitchen. Or maybe the fridge.
I agree with you when you say, " People attribute to the supernatural because it’s usually a lot more interesting than real life." I can give you an example:
Across the street from a friend’s house are a couple of big pine trees. On summer afternoons while sitting in the friend’s back yard, you can often see a strange veil of pale light flitting about in the shadows of the branches about 30 feet up. Someone standing on the other side of the fence who hadn’t seen it before might be convinced that something supernatural was going on up there, something along the lines of strange lights in a swamp. However, I quickly realized that it was the sunlight reflecting off our friend’s pool. I figure at least some of those swamp stories can be explained in just the same way.
Still, it’s cool to watch.
I just remembered one…
We moved into our first house about eight years ago. Within days of moving in, we heard occasional short whirring noises. They were short-lived and erratic, but our daughter (who was seven at the time) was convinced it was a ghost. Neither Mr. Kiminy nor I had ever heard a noise like it, so it took us a while to figure out…
that it was the motor of the automatic ice maker inside the fridge. The water line to the ice maker was not connected, so we couldn’t use it, but because the low-ice detector bar was all the way down, the blasted thing was convinced that it needed to keep trying to make ice. Now we prop up the bar with other things in the freezer to keep it turned off, but occasionally it gets pushed down again, and starts making the noise–usually when DD (now 15) is home alone, and she FREAKS out every time!
Here is the response that I received from the University where I submitted my inquiry on Bioluminescence:
“The colors of fireflies have been well studied, and the genes even
have been cloned. They don’t need to be yellow - -many are greenish
blue. There is some interesting ecology there, as the colors vary
depending on whether the fireflies are active early in the evening
or later on…” {bolding mine}
http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&issn=0340-7594&volume=162&issue=1&spage=23
Don’t know if this link will work:
http://www.jstor.org/view/00368075/ap993200/99a00330/0
It is the text of the article summarized here
Ecology of Colors of Firefly Bioluminescence - NASA/ADS
This link shows some of the primary papers on the topic…
Best wishes,
{Name deleted for privacy}
I was walking down a half-dark hallway in my old college apartment. The light bulb had burned out and we’d been too lazy to replace it. Some light from the living room still found its way down this hall, and I was just going to turn on the lights in the bedroom at the end of the hall, anyway.
As I passed the open bathroom door to my left, the hair on the back of my neck stirred. Something was wrong. I got a few steps further but was finding it increasingly difficult to keep my back turned on the dark hole that was the open bathroom door. I stopped, but now thoroughly creeped out, was afraid to turn and go look into the bathroom. My mind raced…what had I sensed?
Finally I forced myself to turn and walk to the door, like a little kid going up the steps on the first day of school. without actually reaching in to the bathroom, I leaned to see in the doorway.
The sink and the mirror above it looked normal. Nothing was there.
Nothing at all.
I was standing a few feet directly in front of a mirror, AND MY OWN REFLECTION WAS NOT SHOWING!
Normally it did, too! I stared at the empty mirror with a rising feeling of anxiety…I mean, I’d been creeped out, but I hadn’t actually thought I’d see anything wrong…but my reflection was gone, actually gone, just like they say about vampires…what the?
And then…
I turned on the light and walked in, and realized that the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet was slightly ajar – the mirror wasn’t pointing straight back at the doorway, as it usually did, and I’d been seeing the reflection of a blank section of wall instead. I closed the cabinet and my reflection returned.
Sailboat
While I can’t actually access these articles, I accept on good faith that it is so.
Thank you, Count.
I was a UFO in about 1983 just outside of Scottsville NY - at the corner that used to be Hydesville - going from behind the car, streaking past my mother and I, and continuing off where it disappeared in front of us at some fair distance away.
a meteorite, near as I can figure. But since I never bothered to track it downm, it is STILL a UNIDENTIFIED flying object=)
I wonder if Leah was the inspiration for Grandmama Addams.
