Some backstory: I live in a really old house that at least one person that I know for a fact has died in. In fact, that’s how I ended up with this place.

To make a long story (kind of) short, old man who’d lived here since 1967 died, wife followed about three months later, and their kids pretty much gave the place away since no one in the area would even look at it. Fred and I, apparently with “SUCKER” written on our foreheads, saw a ridiculously cheap 1800 square foot house on a nearly half acre corner lot, with a three car garage, a separate steel building, and a second driveway long enough to park a Peterbilt and grain trailer in. We knew the owners had died, but had no idea that it had been INSIDE THE DAMNED HOUSE until after we’d been here a couple of months, dealing with bizarre incidents such as our dogs charging and barking at the empty dining room table, and someone repeatedly knocking on the front door without opening the storm door first.

I eventually made friends with the neighbors across the street, an elderly couple who had lived in their house since the early 1990’s. After mentioning the weird goings on, Elderly Neighbor Lady said, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you? Dennis (the previous owner) dropped dead at the dining room table while eating breakfast. Also, years ago at the house across the street to the south, the owner fell down in a snowbank at the end of his driveway while walking home from the bar in a blizzard and no one found him until the next day. And there used to be another house where your yard is, but they condemned it and tore it down in 2008.”

Well, that certainly explains a few things.

And so begins enough unsettling, but rarely frightening incidents over the last nine years, ranging from coffee disappearing from the pot on a regular basis to smelling pipe smoke and perfume, to write a book. So much weird shit happens around here that we barely even notice it anymore. The last couple of months, however, things have started to escalate.

The door to my attic is in a bizarre spot, in the ceiling of a phone booth sized closet in a bedroom that the last owners turned into a weird giant bathroom for some odd reason (that’s another story involving my opinion that pink and lavender sand textured paint should be illegal that I’ll get to one of these days). Getting into the attic requires getting a ladder out of the garage, trying not to put it through the TV or the china cabinet while stepping around 37 cats who’ve decided that the ladder is a cat eating monster from outer space and the obvious solution is to trip the person carrying said monster so that they can kill it when it hits the floor, and then navigating around a pile of empty cat food bags (give me a break, folks, I need snow shoes to get to the dumpster right now), a laundry basket full of dirty clothes and throw blankets covered in cat barf and a Rubbermaid tote full of Salomon running shoes, Doc Marten work boots, and worn out cowboy boots to get the door open. It’s not exactly what one would call accessible.

Anyhoo, this closet is where the extra bags of cat food and litter live, since I buy both in bulk online (I really need to get the FedEx guy a gift basket or something. The last time he showed up with 200 pounds of cat litter he was looking a little stabby.) The last time I opened the closet door to grab a bag of chow for the Furbeestes, the attic access door was firmly shut, just like it has been for the last five years or so since anyone had to go up there. Last month, though, shit got weird. On the night of New Year’s Eve, I open the closet door and feel a cold draft. I look up above my head, and the attic door is open. I sure didn’t open that hatch to Hell, and I was pretty certain that the cats didn’t stand on each other’s shoulders like a miniature cheerleader pyramid to go exploring. With a hefty dose of the heebie jeebies caused by the sight of the black hole in my closet ceiling, I grabbed a bag of cat food, shut the door tight, and pushed the tub of shoes, my 20 year old Dyson vacuum cleaner, and the laundry basket up against it. Who or whatever was up there was going to have a long wait in the dark until Fred came home to deal with it in a week or two. When Fred finally got home, he refused to climb up there and see if there was a frozen ax murderer in our attic, and just levered the door shut from the floor with a broom handle. So the world’s weirdest housewarming gift may just be waiting up there for the next owners.

Skip ahead past a clock lifting off the basement wall and flying past my head like a Frisbee from Hell, being scratched on my calf through my jeans so deeply that it’s left a scar, a coffee cup rolling itself out of the dish rack as I was doing dishes and narrowly escaping death on the kitchen floor as I caught it in midair, and an exploding canning jar full of water that left pieces of glass clear out in the dining room, and we come to the latest incident: The Case of the Missing DVD Player Remote.

I bought the entire series of a sci-fi show called Killjoys on DVD last fall, and never got around to watching it. The internet went out during the latest icepocalypse this past weekend and we can’t get air TV channels because we live in Gopher Crotch, so we hooked up the DVD player that we haven’t used in about five years, and pop in Season One. The remote for this thing has always been sitting on one of the built in bookshelves that are on each side of the fireplace, next to the dozen or so DVDs that we own. Without it, I can play and stop whatever I’m watching, but can’t do anything else. I can’t skip episodes, turn on closed captioning, watch the blooper reel, nada.

Look on the bookshelf, and no remote. All righty, let’s look in the cabinets under the bookshelves. Nope, not there either. I ended up searching the entire living room, the bookshelves in the dining room, my entire desk, even the drawers in my dresser in the bedroom. No luck. So I headed for the basement, and searched every box in the spare bedroom where unloved junk goes to die. Still nothing, so we gave up for the night. The next night, I decided to go downstairs and look again. There’s nowhere else this thing can be.

There’s another room on the north wall of my basement that used to be storage for canning. We gutted all of the old rotten shelving out of there several years ago, and keep the door shut to keep the cats out. There’s nothing in there but two old brass lamps and a box of insulated coveralls. When I walked through the basement and headed for the spare bedroom, the door to that room was shut tight. Being an old house with a humid basement, the door sticks and makes a pretty loud noise when it’s forced open. With no reason to go in there, the door hasn’t been opened in months. I spent about ten minutes in the bedroom looking through boxes, and gave up. As I walked back upstairs, I looked over, and that storage room door was wide open.

I walked over, turned the lights on to make sure there were no cats in there investigating and my damned remote wasn’t in there lying on the bare concrete floor, and decided that I’m just going to go Target and buy a new DVD player. The ghosts can keep the remote. They obviously need it more than I do. One of these days, when they’re done with it, I’m sure I’ll find it in the deep freeze out in the garage or in the glove box of my truck.