It is late in the night. Your house is silent, the kids are away, the spouse is visiting the in-laws. You are reading a book. Suddenly, there is a harsh noise; you look up, and the coffee table is moving! It screeches to a halt, having moved closer to you by several feet. No cause is readily apparent.
You freeze in terror and then -
Die
Faint
Call 911 and demand the cops visit you
Browse Amazon, where you bought the table, and file a A-to-Z claim under ‘Item significantly not as described’
Call your priest for an exorcism
Don the largest cross you can find, and try an exorcism yourself
Sleep out in the cold, return in the morning, and sternly admonish your furniture not to do it again
Congratulate yourself on your telekinetic abilities. (Fame and wealth beckon!)
Note that I am not necessarily suggesting a supernatural cause: earthquakes, nearby drilling, powerful blasts and such might move or break furniture. The question is how would you react if the cause is not readily apparent.
Personally, I would probably faint, or if I dont, get the hell out and talk to somebody. I would certainly not return until the cause was fully explained. Call me a coward.
Assuming I am perfectly sober, I would get out of the house immediately. If a satisfactory explanation was not forthcoming, I’d insist on a brain scan, because if wasn’t physically possible, I’d assume the trouble was in my brain before I’d assume something supernatural.
(My SIL saw fireworks going off while she was shopping one day. Turns out she was having a seizure due to a malignant brain tumor.)
Something like this (sort of) happened in my house. My pregnant (now ex) wife was going to bed and called me into the bedroom to ask why I moved the bed away from the wall. I told her I didn’t. Over the course of the next 5 minutes or so the conversation devolved from her nicely asking me why I had moved the bed and me nicely saying I didn’t to her yelling and screaming at me for moving it (because she didn’t) and me trying as hard as I possibly could not to laugh at her because I didn’t move it, I didn’t touch it, it WAS moved, but it had nothing to do with me and this woman is yelling at me for it. I gave up, walked away, she, still pissed off at me, plops herself down on the bed…
GET UP! I said.
What?
Get up…
She get’s up.
Now sit back down on the bed the way you just did.
She plops back down on the bed (remember, she’s very pregnant).
She plops back down on the bed and the whole king sized bed slides away from the wall about an inch. I laugh, she didn’t notice it happen.
Turns out the bed was still sitting on some furniture movers from when I had painted about a month earlier and over the course of that time it had moved about 8 or 9 inches away from the wall and that was the first time she noticed it (or first time she said anything).
I’d check it out and see if it happened again. I’d probably blame it on a cat or dog and go back to sleep. If it was obvious nothing moved it and it looked to be supernatural in origin, I’d call 911 out of fear that I’m having a break with reality.
I would also jump and then look for a cause, and if I didn’t find one, and it didn’t happen again, probably just forget about it. Of course it isn’t ghosts or any such.
Happened to me at a friend’s house, only it wasn’t a coffee table.
I thought it was cool, she freaked out and jumped about a foot into the air, her son and his girlfriend were freaked out as well.
it was easy for me to think it was cool, I didn’t have to sleep there that night.
Look around for one of the critters - 5 is still fairly kittenish and rambunctious at being turned into a house cat. Then I would check for something interfering with it by knocking against it that might have been kitteh-actuated. If neither kitty-invoked movement is possible, I would check to see where I dropped my crutches, if I laid them against the table I may have inadvertantly knocked the table [or if it is a wheelchair day, see if I knocked against it with my chair.] Then if nothing mundanely physical happened, I would tell the house elf to stop mucking around, if he wanted some scotch all he needed to do was ask.
I’m going to go with option 8 - Congratulate yourself on your telekinetic abilities. (Fame and wealth beckon!) then get online, find a Montel Williams Show link, and tell him about it and hope for a gig on his show along with Sylvia Whatsherface. Or even Dr. Phil (he has psychics on - maybe he’d let me on his show too.)
I’m a 21 century individual, so first’ I’d make sure it’s a truly supernatural event, then I’d film it and start a Haunted House youtube channel, obviously. Then try to get a movie deal or a TV show out of it.
Yeah, the latest in a sad lot of Discovery Channel shows – Supernatural Coffee Table Repo.
Pretty sure that if this happened in my house, I’d spend some time convincing myself it didn’t really happen and wasn’t important if it did. But I live in a 160 year old house, and if you didn’t learn to ignore things, you’d be spending all your time ripping things apart and repairing them.
I’d move it back. If it happened again, I’d go outside and look around for any other signs my house was falling into a sinkhole. If sinkhole, remove pets and enjoy the sliding. If not sinkhole, go to bed and make my husband figure it out in the morning.
To be honest, very little on Earth (and nothing off Earth) could move my coffee table. It’s so loaded down with books and papers and blocks of wood and whetstones and art supplies that the last time I tried to slide it across the floor it caught on a grout line and the glue joints separated.
Start looking around for a logical explanation. Apparently the folks in our family are not easily rattled by weird things.
I’ve told this story before, so I’ll try to keep it short. When my sister and I were much younger, she late teens, me early 20s, there was an odd experience at our house. She had a bunch of her 4-H equestrian friends over and we were all sitting around chatting and having a good time.
All of a sudden someone noticed a large, glowing slanty pair of golden eyes staring in at us from the porch. Like eyes (as we later discussed) that would have had to have belonged to a critter around 7 feet tall.
Instead of panicking and flying out the door we all calmly (though slightly weirded out) started discussing it. “What can it be”?
Every once in a while, the eyes would change position as if the “creature” was tilting its head to look in at us. It was super dark outside, so we couldn’t see anything but the eyes, all of us except for my sister’s friend sitting in the chair closest to the window were peering out trying to see it.
After about, I don’t know, 5 minutes of study and discussion, we finally realized what the “eyes” were. My sister’s friend (the one in the chair) had a gold barrette in her hair that was causing a double reflection off of the double-paned window.
But if it had been a real “creature” we all woulda been toast had it been hostile. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’d be one of those idiots who’s the first to get eaten in a horror movie, I’d have to go check it out.
