Hello, Anyone Home?

"Any time at all, any time at all 

Any time at all, all you gotta do is call

And I'll be there."

                                                  --Beatles song

Ghosts have various ways of communicating their presence. Sometimes they do it in scary ways; sometimes they mystify the living with strange incidents.  Sharon, who lived in an apartment in a first-ring Minneapolis suburb, told me this story.

At the time, Sharon lived on her own in an apartment building where her adult daughter also had an apartment. Another married daughter lived in a house a short drive away. Over the months that Sharon first lived in the unit, several inexplicable incidents occurred. For instance, a couple of times while she was running bath water, the taps were turned off while she was in the next room. On other occasions burners on the gas range were turned off or on while she was cooking. Since these stove knob turnings caused no damage or disruption to her cooking, Sharon ignored these incidents.

 But then something occurred that she couldn't ignore. One evening she left her apartment to visit her married daughter. From the parking lot, she waved to her other daughter who happened to be looking out from her apartment in the building.

While Sharon was en route to her married daughter's house, this daughter called Sharon's apartment to remind her to bring something with her. The phone was answered (at least it sounded like someone had picked up the receiver), and then it was dropped back on the hook immediately afterward.

Fearing that her mother might be injured or taken ill, she called her sister at the apartment building. Puzzled, her sister told her that she had seen their mother drive off only minutes before. The sister at the apartment building tried calling and got a busy signal. Concerned that someone had broken in, she called the police. Shortly thereafter, the officers arrived and used the daughter's key to get in. 

To everyone's surprise, no one was there. The apartment was deserted and untouched. All was as it had been--except that the phone receiver in the bedroom was dangling on its line over the side of the nightstand.

The police officers searched everywhere in the apartment--through the clothes closets, under furniture, in kitchen cabinets, even in the clothes dryer ("in case of Hobbit burglars")--but found nothing. The windows were shut tight and there was no sign of entry, forced or otherwise. As the search progressed, one of the officers began humming the theme from "The Twilight Zone." 

They all were dumbfounded to explain how the phone receiver could be lifted, replaced, and then lifted again and dropped over the side of the table. Sharon had to conclude that she was sharing her apartment with an unseen person--a ghost who was beginning to get miffed at being ignored all those months. Sharon decided that the phone incident was the ghost's way of saying, "Hello, I'm here. Now you know for sure."