Rockin' poltergeist

[Dicon]

Well that's it. I'm totally renouncing the skeptic lifestyle and accepting Sylvia Browne as my personal saviour. I'll still be attending TAM5, not as a participant but rather as a protester helping the rest of you see the errors of your ways.

What happened? I was presented with absolute, irrefutable evidence that we have a poltergeist. And he likes to rock out.

Since I know that you unrepentant skeptics get all atwitter for details, I'll happily indulge you. Plus, after hearing my story I'm sure you'll agree that I'm right and you're wrong.

About three weeks ago, my wife and I were working on a project in the garage and thought some music would help pass the time. She went and got our old basic boombox and flipped it on, only to hear silence. I realized that it has been a very long time since I had replaced the batteries (four D cells) and they were obviously dead. We continued with the project and I later put the boombox back in it's normal spot in our upstairs loft.

Fast forward to last night, or more precisely, early this morning. At exactly 3:26 a.m. we were woken up by very, very loud music. Carol instinctively started pushing every button on the alarm clock, but we quickly gathered our wits and noticed that the music was coming from outside the bedroom.

Yes, it was coming from the loft.

I went in and found the PREVIOUSLY DEAD TO THE WORLD boombox blasting at nearly full volume. At that moment, I knew that my entire worldview had been shattered for the only way this could have possibly happened was for a poltergeist to get some new batteries from the 7-11, pop 'em in and crank it up. Despite this revelation, I still managed to turn it off and go back to bed. There is absolutely no other non-paranormal explanation, and I will soon be submitting my boombox for the million dollar prize.

Now, if I still followed all that skeptic nonsense, I might ask the hoity-toity ed-u-cated intellectuals around here what they might know about how batteries can change over time. That is, in their normal chemical whatever-they-do process, could a cell actually morph from no output to finding a bit of spare power deep within its soul? The old me might have also figured that perhaps the batteries were never dead, but just slightly jarred out of position and for whatever reason they reseated themselves at 3:26 a.m. These ideas are, of course, absolutely ridiculous and would only be entertained by closed-minded dullards who don't even own the "What the bleep Do We Know" DVD.

 

[Tirdun]

I think I'll post my single "WTF?" moment where my skeptical mind was at war... briefly, with my lizard fight+flight brain.

At the time, I was working a second job very early in the AM, so I went to bed before the wife+kids+dog. I'm laying in bed and I hear breathing. Clear, regular breathing, somewhere in the dark just to my side of the bed.

Inhale... exhale...

At first I assumed it was the dog, which would occationally sleep just off the bed in that area, but after slowly waking up I could hear the wife talking to the dog out in the living room. So... no dog. No wife... no kids.

Inhale... exhale...

Ahhh crap. The rational brain is telling me to get up and turn on the *** light and figure out what's going on. The animal instict is to freak out and run like hell. So the rational wins out and I turn on the light. And.....Nothing. Not a freaking thing. No sound. No breathing. No nothing. Now... I'm a bit wierded out, but I'm going to nail this down, so I begin a slow check of the room. Nothing seems out of place, the dog is certainly not in the room... no ghosts (the rational skeptical brain says with certainty) and I'm *** tired so its back to bed.

Some time later: Inhale... exhale.... Inhale... exhale....

Boom, up, out of bed, light, revelation.

On the wall near my side of the bed (but not exactly where I thought the sound was coming from) was a picture the young'in had painted in class. Taped to the wall... right above the heating vent. The heat comes on, the paper slides up the wall at an angle, gravity wins over air pressure and it slides back down. Inhale... exhale... thumbtack... bed. G'night ghost.

 

[WildCat]

My guess is that there was a loose battery or battery connection in the boom box.

Did you actually test the batteries to see if they were dead?

 

[Pauliesonne]

Little girl : Look mummy, there's something talking to me in the tv.
Mother : Oh, really. Who is it?
Little girl : It's Sylvia Browne.
Mother : ◊◊◊◊'in hell! They're back!

 

[sat556]

Can I play?

My sister was downstairs watching tv with her young son up in his bedroom asleep. She heard a loud crash and ran up to find one of his battery operated dinosaurs had 'fallen' off his wardrobe, so she picked it up, also removing the other one, and took them downstairs.
The next morning she decided that since he never played with them any more, that she would put them in the rubbish. After putting them in the bag, she heard a clicking noise coming from it, so searched and found the one that had fallen the previous night, with it's legs moving. She switched it off and went to remove the batteries, only to find that there were none in there.

I've got no explanation for that wierdness.

 

[drfrank]

Batteries can rise from the dead when their temperature is increased, and vice versa.

I'm guessing your loft is warmer than your garage, and the additional heat breathed a little extra life into the batteries. It's also possible that the boombox won't start until the battery voltage reaches a certain threshold, allowing the power to build up before being discharged.

As an example of such a phenomenon, I have a fire alarm on the ceiling in my room. The battery was dying, and at about 3am in the morning it would start beeping loudly (which is what it does when the battery is low), but by the morning it would have stopped and so I forgot about it until the next night.

After a few nights I got out of bed and ripped the damn thing off the ceiling and removed the battery. Just as I was getting back into bed it beeped again as there was still some bloody charge left in a capacitor (probably the cause of Sat556's story). I got out of bed once more and pressed the test button and listened to the damn things death rattle. No more beeps.