A few weeks ago I was lying in bed, in a light doze after a long day. I had just put down my copy of an Atwood novel and I was trying to get a decent night's sleep before I taught the next morning. About an hour after I had last looked at the alarm, I woke up to see a bright, dancing blue light on the wall of my hallway. Confused and a touch scared, I grabbed my glasses from the night table and took a closer look (I'm damn near blind without my specs). I quickly realized what the strange blue light was... the TV.
There was a problem, though. I distinctly remember turning off the TV, locking the door, and crawling into bed. However, the TV was somehow still on. With the only weapon-like thing nearby me (my keys on the end of a UVic neck-dangly-thing), I slowly crept into the living room, just in case a robber or rapist had crawled in through the patio door and decided to catch some John Stewart before he ravaged my wife and I.
But there was no one and nothing to be found. I looked all over the apartment (which took about 30 seconds), shut off the TV, rechecked the deadbolt, locked the patio door, checked the closets, and crawled back into bed. K was awake this whole time since I nearly gave her a heart attack when I got out of bed, but as I crawled in, she moved in close to me so I could feel her heart beating. We were both snoring in minutes.
So, last night before crawling into bed, I turn off the TV, lock the door, brush my teeth, and get my book out. After reading for about 20 minutes, I turned over to go to sleep.
But AGAIN, I am suddenly startled awake by a dancing blue light on the hallway wall... it was the TV again. So I'm creeped out yet again, this time grabbing my phone and a shoe while slowly making my way through the apartment with the lights on (again, this only took 30 seconds). The door still had the deadbolt on, the patio was still in its previous condition, and there were no rapist-goons hiding anywhere in the place. Remote in hand, I was just about to turn off the TV when I noticed that it was on a different channel than the one I was watching before shutting it off. I had it on Superstation (some mindless movie was helping me unwind), but the TV was on channel 5: CTV. Checking again for rapist-goons, I shook my head as I hit the power button on the remote, returned to bed, and attempted to calm K down before hitting the hay. Both of us found it extremely odd, but assuming it was just static, we decided to just roll over and ignore it.
About an hour later, I woke with a start. Grabbing K's arm out of an impulse, I sat up straight after hearing an extremely loud noise immediately outside my window. "Holy calamity," I thought, "what the hell was that?" K and I both listened carefully... I was trying to figure out if someone was trying to bust into our place. However, I soon realized I was wrong. K thought it was the fan (because the sound was bouncing off the wall into her other ear nearest our fan), but it was disregarded as simply some late-night sprinkler that went off below our window. Why it was going off, I have no idea. But in all reality, the night of restful sleep was ruined. I had to get up to lock the patio door and make sure there were no goons, but I finally got to bed after tossing and turning for, oh, an hour or two.
I don't know what this all means. I guess in my haste to brush off the supernatural in my day to day life, the karmic principle of payback is coming on strong. Why does my TV turn on in the middle of the night? That's anyone's guess. But for now, I guess I'll just have to listen more carefully to the ghosts that love to watch late-night TV.
- T
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