Apartment Poltergeist
I used to live inan apartment on 1513 Hatcher Lane in Columbia, Tennessee. Istayed there for two years, attending a small college there.
One evening, I was cramming for a big chemistry test with my bestfriend. We were sitting in the living room, poring over our labnotes. I heard the dishwasher complete its cycle, so I went inthe kitchen and began putting away the dishes.
I had purchased a set of four teal-colored glasses that wereshort and bottom-heavy to make mixed drinks in. I thought theywere very pretty, and the low weight distribution seemed like itmight be useful whilst getting drunk. 8-} These glasses had aspecial place reserved for them in the back left corner of thebottom-most shelf of our cabinets. That way, they weren't toovisible so visitors would be less likely to drink out of them. (Itold you I quite liked them!)
I put all of the dishes away, including the snappy green ones,and returned to the living room. I had just enough time to pickup my lab journal and light a cigarette before we heard the soundof glass breaking from the kitchen.
We were the only two people in the apartment, and the kitchen,while out of sight, was just around the corner from the livingroom. I got up uneasily, remembering that there was nothingsitting out on the counters or otherwise eligible for breaking.
I saw that one of my green glasses was smashed to bits, all overthe kitchen floor. It looked as if someone had opened thecabinet, picked up the glass from the back corner, closed thecabinet, stepped back against the wall opposite the refrigerator(visible from the living room), and hurled the glass very hardagainst the refrigerator.
Glass was all over the kitchen floor, sprayed out from theapparent point of impact on the fridge, partly onto the carpetoutside the kitchen! Tiny fragments of glass and glass "dust"were stuck to the glossy, textured surface of the fridge, whereit appeared the glass had hit.
I opened the cabinet from which I could only presume the glasscame from. The remaining three glasses were sitting as I had leftthem, with a neat space where the fourth had been.
Perhaps a week later, I was sitting in the living room with myroommate. We were relaxing after a long day, having dinner, andchatting. Suddenly, we heard the distinct sound of glass breaking.
We stared at each other for a moment, blinking, both knowing thatno one else was in our apartment.
The sound of liquid flowing or being poured followed immediately.We both jumped up.
The sounds were indistinct in terms of direction, so we startedlooking frantically around the apartment for the source of thenoises. The apartment was small, so we sort of ran in oppositedirections. My roommate went into the kitchen, while I went to mybedroom.
As it turned out, my Lava Lamp had exploded. It was sitting ontop of a bookcase at the time. It hadn't fallen off; the metalbase was still sitting there neatly. In fact, the bulb was stillburning. The bottom part of the glass section was still sittingon the base, broken, with several large pointy shards of glasssticking straight up.
The rest of the glass section was all over the room. Most of theshards were on my waterbed, covering it pretty thoroughly. Theplastic top piece was across the room, on the floor, with littlebits of glass hanging off of it. Small fragments of glass werestrewn about the room with no apparent pattern.
The oil and paraffin wax inside the glass section was all downthe wall behind and beside the bookcase. Somehow, the glass wentall over the room, while the liquid splattered and ran down thewall only.
It was really bizzarre, and one hell of a mess to clean up. I'venever heard of one of those lamps exploding, before or after thishappened to me.
[An interesting sidenote: At the time, I was seeing a girl whocontinually asked to borrow my Lava Lamp. I never let her,thinking it an odd request: Do people borrow lamps?? Anyway, Idid let her borrow a fabulous book about witchcraft and blackmagic I found at a curio shop years before. Right after the"explosion" of the lamp, she called, and we wound upbreaking up. I don't hold much stock in witchcraft and itsassociated fields of study, but that always made me wonder.]
The only other thing that happened in that apartment was thatduring the week or so between the previous two occurrences, ourtelephone went wild. It used the old fashioned bell and strikertype ringer, and it managed to produce some pretty weird noiseswith it. It would ring sometimes and when we answered it, theline would be dead. Or it would half-ring, on and off, for aminute or so, and not stop, even if you picked up the handset. Orit would buzz or hum instead of ringing. I am pretty good withmechanics and electronics, so I took it apart and looked at it...everythingseemed just fine. We had decided to call the phone company aboutthe time that the Lava Lamp blew up, but after that, it quitmisbehaving.