Answering Disservice

 It's October, and time once again to tell ghost stories. This story is among the ones I collected in the 1980s.

Sharon lived alone in an apartment in a Minneapolis suburb. She had two daughters, one of which lived in the same apartment building and another married one who lived a few miles away.

Over the initial months Sharon lived in this apartment, several inexplicable incidents occurred. A couple of times when she was running bath water, the taps were turned off when she was in the next room. On other occasions, burners on the gas range had been turned off or on while she was cooking. Since these incidents caused no damage and didn't seem to be dangerous, Sharon ignored them.

 

Then, something occurred that she couldn't ignore. One evening she left the 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 same building. While she was en route to her second daughter's house, that daughter called her mother's apartment to remind her to bring something. The phone was answered--at least it sounded like someone had picked up the receiver--but then dropped back on the hook immediately afterward. The daughter tried calling again, but got a busy signal.

Fearing that her mother might be injured or taken ill, she called her sister at the apartment building, who told her that she had seen their mother drive off about ten minutes earlier. The daughter at the apartment building tried calling, got a busy signal, and then dialed the police. The police arrived shortly thereafter and used the daughter's key to get into her mother's apartment. To everyone's surprise, the apartment appeared to be untouched and deserted. All was as it had been--except that the phone receiver in the bedroom was dangling on its cord over the side of the night stand.

The officers searched everywhere in the apartment, through the closets, under furniture, even in the clothes dryer ("in case of very small burglars'), but found nothing, no person or animal. The windows were  shut tight and there was no sign of forced entry. They all were dumbfounded to explain how the receiver could be lifted, replaced on the hook, and then dropped over the side of the table. As the search ended, one of the policemen began humming the theme from "The Twilight Zone." He had apparently concluded that no flesh-and-blood person had been in the apartment since Sharon had left earlier that evening.

After the phone incident, Sharon started to wonder if she was sharing her place with an unseen person, a person who was getting miffed at being ignored for the past several months. Sharon decided that possibly the ghost was saying, "Hello, I'm here, Now you know for sure."