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Spooked
The clock in our kitchen has stopped at exactly 1.04am on each of the last five nights.
I'm not religious or superstitious. I don't believe in ghosts, demons or magic carpenters, portents of doom or contact from beyond the tomb, and until a week ago I was sure there's always a rational explanation for everything if you can only find it. But you try telling yourself that when you come downstairs to the same nightmarish silence and those dead fingers of fate for five mornings in a row. Every evening I'd reset the hands and flick the pendulum*, then check it when I went to bed at about 11.30pm, and it would be ticking away contentedly. But every morning, there it was again. 1.04am.
It was Mrs Pants who first advanced the theory that we must have brought something into the house that had imported with it a malevolent spirit. (A ghost of Christmas presents, perhaps.) Interestingly, once she'd adopted this belief nothing would sway her from it. Magnetism? No, imported spirits. Static electricity? No, imported spirits. The hallucinogenic properties of that hooch brandy we brought back from Portugal? No, imported spirits.
Our neighbour, Jane, who is usually quite sensible, suggested the clock was trying to tell us something. It's trying to tell us the time, I muttered. My brother said it could be due to freak weather caused by climate change. I rejected all this foolish nonsense because there had to be a traceable cause. It's algorithms not allegory (or even Al Gore-isms) in our house. And yet...in the absense of an explanation I could accept, I started to give some thought to the ones I couldn't. By the third night, which also happened to be Twelfth Night if you really want to get all Lord of Misrule about it, I was in a cold sweat, preparing for the early morning phone call which would begin with my sister saying "It's Dad..." and end with me saying "What time did it happen?" even though I'd already know the answer.
By yesterday, it was touch and go whether to call a horologist or an exorcist. I was on the verge of Googling haunted clocks** when it all clicked. There was a perfectly simple explanation after all, which some smartarses here will already have worked out, a whole five days and seven hours quicker than I did.
So anyway, my question was this: have you ever been spooked silly by something that turned out to be nothing?
*go on, you know you want to. Have one on me
** and another
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I'm guessing that it was
that the hands were sticking so that the big hand could not pass the little.
We did get woken up regularly last winter, during the heavy snow, in the middle of the night by a strange animalistic sound. It was only on the fourth night that we finally spotted the starving urban fox that clearly couldn't access its usual scavenging sites.
If that was the case
then it should have stopped at 1.04 pm as well. Is the clock mains or battery powered?
It's a wind up
the clock, I mean. It was nearly fully wound even when it had stopped though.
That was my thought too
But if the Cap'n re-started it at 11.30, then it would have stopped at 11.57ish too... ooooh, nice little puzzler...
Clocks?
My step father was an athlete of some reknown, locally that is, but in 193something he was that good he turned professional. However his pride and joy a big wind up clock, with a big wind up key, which had pride of place on the family mantlepiece, that he won as an amatuer in the late 20's.
Anyway he died in 1975 at one fifty on a Tuesday afternoon.
When the family all got back home two days later after his death, the clock was stopped. Time? You guessed it. 1.50.
Coincedence? Abosolutely, but my sister still has that clock, and she winds it up with the big brass key every morning.
Better to be safe, etc
Chimes at 3am
In our family home, we had a Grandmother clock in the living room. The chimes had not worked for years and we never wound up that mechanism. However about once a year in the death of night it would suddenly chime very loudly to at 3 or 4 am. I never equated it with anything, but it was scary.
Have you got
mice? Do they like ascending clocks?
There's no easy way
to say this, but chances are that the Devil is coming to take you away. If so can I have first dibs on your CD's please? Ever cloud and all that, eh?
c'mon admit it
you've been listening to Led Zeppelin IV backwards, pushing a glass round a ouija board on the kitchen table, dressed like Aleister Crowley and murmuring "Sweet Satan". There is always a rational explanation for these things.
I can understand The Captain's doubts..
He knew he was going to blank the Massive Mingle, citing some paltry excuse. The kitchen clock, like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart, stopping each night, nagged at his psyche.. The guilt.. The knowing..
Bet it'd have worked fine if The Captain had been there on Friday.
So what was the explanation?
I'm intrigued.
It's
broken...
Not getting in an exorcist quite yet...
We have had many odd things happen in our house - things moving around, footsteps, lights on and off - you name it.
I'm not a huge believer in the paranormal - though me and my mum both saw a ghost once but that's another story - but Mrs F-C is and so rather unnerved by what was going on we contacted a magazine and they sent a couple of mediums round.
Both arrived one after the other, and both said the same things. We have four ghosts: a man who worked on the railway and makes his presence known when we have people round as he likes to listen in, a kitchen maid, a child who died of TB and a man attached to my jukebox.
Make of it what you will. My house is nearly 200 years old. We've only been there eight years. Think of all the things that might have happened... It's quite easy to live with and non-scary.
You can find us in the July 2006 edition of Spirit and Destiny magazine.
Spirit & Destiny
I did a few months freelancing for them around that time.
Spirit and Destiny?
Don't they mainly use ghost writers.
I'm here all week..try the veal
Hang on...
You've got a haunted jukebox? I feel we should hear more about this.
Haunted Jukebox
Great idea! What songs might we find?
Ghost Riders In The Sky
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Shake, Rattle & Roll
Someone is very attached it it
A man in a bomber jacket they said. Perhaps it's Alan Freeman. Or DLT.
I don't use it anymore (anyone want to buy it?), but it does creak an awful lot, despite not being used.
We still have my Gran's clock
similarly a pendulum wallclock which stopped at the same time as she died. Strangely one of the few things that didn't make a hasty exit after her funeral, it has stopped at the same moment on several 'anniversaries'. Pure coincidence, of course.
But please, put us out of our misery, Captain, what was the reason? Sticking hands or a spider in the mechanism?
Turns out it was HAUNTED
No, not really. The key to my confusion was that each day I restarted it in the evening. If I'd done it earlier in the day I'd have worked it out much quicker.
The hour handed had loosened slightly so it would tip a few millimetres either way relative to the clock face as it went round. Because I always set it in the evening, the low side of the hand was facing the approaching minute hand which would just brush it aside like a turnstile as it went over it every hour.
But once it had gone past the vertical, the hour hand would tip the other way, so its high side was towards the sweep of the minute hand, and it would make it stick the next time it came past, which was, of course, about 1.04am.
If I'd started the clock at 2.30pm, for example, it would have stopped at about 3.17pm. But I didn't so it didn't.
That's it. Not exactly Conan Doyle, but because I am exceptionally dim, it had me wondering if there were more things in heaven and earth than I'd previously thought.
The hand on the face
When I was still a schoolboy I awoke one night and found there was a hand across my face. I was to say the lwast pretty horrified. I reached and grabbed it and tried to pull it away. I just found I was causing my head to rock.
It turned out I had got my right arm lying under my head. This had caused the hand to go to sleep. The lower arm was bent round so that my hand covered my face, but there was no feeling in that hand, hence the heart attack inducing sensation of someone else's hand.
Every old house I've lived in
made strange noises. However, I was more inclined to blame dodgy plumbing and structural quirks.
Dodgy plumbing and structural quirks
Funny, that's how I described the FPO. Before she killed me.
Gets white sheet while cackling in ghostly fashion and rattling a few chains.
Curious. In every house I've lived in..
I've made strange noises.
I sense a witch burning coming on....
Or at the very least a cat walling up.
Lock up your moggies.
The wife and I cleaned out the attic at the weekend...
Filthy, dirty, covered in cobwebs...
...still, she's good with the kids!
(Tommy Cooper)
nothing strange here
i wouldn't [redrum redrum redrum] worry about it. Go [natas retsam ym liah lla] back to sleep....