The first time was a month or so ago.
I had just settled myself for an afternoon lie-down, when I heard a strange noise--a very loud rattling. At first I thought the sound was coming from outside, but when I got up and investigated, I discovered my battery-operated Quip toothbrush rattling around in the cup where it resides.
It had turned itself on.
This seemed strange, but I didn’t think too much about it – just turned the toothbrush off, put it back in its container, and returned to my prone position.
And then, a short while later, it did it again. This time it got my attention.
I took the toothbrush apart.
A couple of days later, I put it back together, and life went along without event.
Until --
Until a couple of weeks later, when just after getting into bed for the night, I heard a noise again. Thinking it was the toothbrush, I headed into the bathroom, only to discover that, while my toothbrush was behaving itself, my waterpik had turned itself on.
Huh, said I to myself, as I turned it off. Huh. What are the odds?
No sooner had I resettled myself, than it turned itself on again. Now, I was, shall we say, the teensiest bit unsettled. I turned it off and brought it into the bedroom, so I wouldn’t have to get up should it turn on again.
You can guess what happened next.
Yep. I lay rigid in bed, waiting for a repeat performance. Sure enough, about 45 minutes later, my waterpik was back in action. Thoroughly unnerved now, I turned it off, carried it into the bathroom, and tried unsuccessfully to open it to remove the batteries--only to remember that it didn’t have batteries. It has a wall-plug-in recharger.
Beside myself at this point, I carried the offending object through the dark house and left it in the garage, lest it should turn on again.
The next morning, after a restless night, I called my friend Linda.
Her immediate response to hearing my story: “You have a poltergeist.”
My response: “Huh. Now what?”
Was it possible, we wondered, that my body’s electrical system was out-of-whack and causing disturbances in the field?
Nah. It was a poltergeist. But, what to do?
I mean, are there really ghostbusters? Probably not. So, I put the matter behind me and went about my business.
With the waterpik safely in the garage, things were quiet for a while.
Quiet, that is, until the toothbrush turned itself back on. There was nothing for it, but to take it apart again -- and leave it apart.
The next time I saw my daughter Mara, I recounted the events to her. “Mom,” she said, without a moment's hesitation, “you have a ghost.”
I was not comforted when my friend Noelle had the same response.
We decided to do the only rational thing. That is, we decided to smudge the house. She came over the next day with a sage bundle, and before proceeding, we pondered what the poltergeist/ghost might want.
Was it someone who had recently passed, trying to be funny? Was it a warning? If so, what was the warning? Before lighting the sage, we asked the poltergeist/ghost to kindly find a less alarming way of contacting me, and helpfully suggested it might use a dream to tell me whatever it wanted to communicate.
(Oh, you may scoff. But, what, pray tell, would you have done?)
We then commenced to thoroughly smudge every room in the house, paying special attention to the bathroom.
I am happy to report that things have been quiet since the smudging, although it is true I haven’t had the nerve to put the toothbrush back together or bring the waterpik in from the garage. . .
Please share your remedies and/or like experiences in the comments. In the meantime, ponder this. While I was visiting my daughter Anne a few days after the smudging, I was startled by her robot vacuum cleaner suddenly turning on by itself. Oh, no, I thought, the poltergeist/ghost has followed me.
Anne assured me that it had something to do with its settings and had nothing to do with me, but I’m not so sure . . .
What do you think?
