Haunted House

This afternoon, a clock I’ve had for twenty years fell off the wall and broke. Shattered glass was all over the carpet, and the wooden body of the clock snapped in half. There was no good reason for it to fall when it did. The hook and nail were still in the wall. It had somehow been bounced off, but there was no particular bump when it happened. I would have blamed the cat, who has leaped at the pendulum before, but the cat wasn’t home at the moment (out visiting friends).

I guess I don’t mind if the house is haunted and the ghost is going to play pranks to mess with me. What I worry about is that the ghost may be watching me when I do very private things in the bathroom that I’d rather not have any one see. What if it’s the ghost of my grandmother? I really, really don’t want her seeing what I do in the bathroom.

Of course, grandma was never a jokester, so the ghost is probably not her. My father wouldn’t do that either; he’d get right in my face and tell me how I was screwing up.

What I regret about the clock is not seeing it fall. It’s a smallish clock and the pendulum is non-functional (i.e., it just swung back and forth but didn’t regulate any gear movements). It hit the curio cabinet below it and then fell face forward to the floor. Shattered glass was sent into a three-foot kill zone and the pendulum remained on top of the curio cabinet. It wasn’t bad to clean up—I put the larger chunks in a cardboard box and then vacuumed. It gives me the opportunity to install our cuckoo clock where the old one used to hang. If the ghost also knocks down the cuckoo clock, the joke will be on them because it’s already broken. Maybe looking at the broken clock (which is correct twice a day) will motivate me to fix it.

What I know for sure about this ghost is that the jokester owes me a new clock. But if they simply don’t tell everyone what I do in the bathroom, then we’ll call it even.