A Remote Chance For Ghosts?

My mother had posted on her blog this morning her musings about whether or not her house was haunted --- Strange happenings, the TV flipping on and off, the microwave turning on, the sounds of a chair sliding across the floor...

This brought to mind an incident that had happened to me before my daughter was born. My husband and I had purchased an older home back in Lubbock Texas. A few blocks away from where Buddy Holly had grown up. A neighborhood that was ransacked by a tornado in 1970, leaving behind death and destruction.

One afternoon I swung the dust rag and rearranged the furniture. After vacuuming the floor, I flopped with satisfaction on the couch and turned on the television. Almost immediately my TV started to flip from one station to the next. I grabbed the remote and turned back to my original station. After a moment, the channels began to change again. This was beginning to get creepy!

From that day on, my television would flip on and off throughout the day. Sometimes I would wake up and the TV would be on, flipping channels. Or, I'd leave the room with the TV on, and re-enter the room only to find my television off. This really started to bother me and my husband and I wondered what was going on.

I also began to wonder if perhaps we too had ghosts. One of my unspoken fears was about the previous owners. The person who sold us the home used to be our former landlords. They were a business couple who owned several properties and also an appliance store. It was well known that they had lost a daughter a few years back to an unexplained murder. In fact, their story was on a television episode of, Unsolved Mysteries. I had never asked, but had often wondered if this had been her previous home.

One day I was wrestling with my phantom couch potato by angrily turning the channels manually from the knob of the TV. As I turned around to return to the couch, my eye caught a movement...

Directly behind my couch --- through the window --- across the yard --- into my neighbor's opened curtain, I caught a glimpse of MY neighbor holding out their TV remote control!

It suddenly dawned on me that EVER SINCE I had rearranged my furniture, I had been having problems. I also realized that MY TV was DIRECTLY in front of the aim of THEIR remote control as they watched their own TV!

I immediately assigned my TV to another corner and from then on, the channel switching stopped.

After that incident, my husband and I started to aim our control over to our neighbor's house to mess with them. We laughed and snickered and horsed around like this for a few days. One morning I reached for my shoes and decided to head across the lawn to chat with my neighbor and to laugh with them about this incident.

I can still remember that smile on my face as I started to walk across the lawn. I glanced with interest at the strange white truck that was parked in their driveway. As I reached their house, I read from the side of the truck, Television Service & Repair...

Suddenly I realized that my neighbors weren't going to find their $60 television bill as very funny.

I turned around and slinked back to my house.