Halloween, the paranormal, etc....

Anthony S. Layne over at Outside The Asylum has an interesting post up about the paranormal, here it is: http://tonylayne.blogspot.com/2011/10/things-that-go-bump-in-lab.html

Since it's "that" time of year again, I guess a lot of folks will be thinking of things supernatural, diabolic, etc. My kids are on fire about it. If I hear much more about ghosts & such I'll start screaming. Thats just me, they're normal in that respect.

I have no use for Halloween since over the years it's grown into a full blown holiday with almost all the recognition given Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. About all thats missing is having the schools shut down for it. It wouldn't surprise me if that happens soon, we live in nutty times.

My antipathy isn't fueled solely by the inordinate emphasis on the day, I've known some folks who suffered at the hands of satanists (one lady I knew up in Connecticut had been sold as an infant to a witches coven) and the tie in with Halloween is inescapable.

So I've no use for the day, even though I'll spend the evening doling out candies while my wife and kids head to the grandparents' home to show off their costumes. Big whoop. Let's get it over and done with.

Having said all of that, I've no problem in believing in the paranormal and supernatural. There are just too many unexplained occurrences in this life to NOT admit to their existence.

One very handy example is the house we currently live in. Several times over the past few years we've had unexplainable phenomena occur. Since I'm bored (and if you're reading this you're probably the same) I'll list a few:

1) We had a brief power outage once while I was using our CD player. No biggie. Once the power came back on the machine stayed off, I was doing other things by then and left it that way. Two days later, as my daughter and I played on the living room floor, the sucker fired back up with a different CD than had been selected when the juice went away. You tell me what it was all about, I have no idea.

2) The wife's wristwatch, a 24 hour timepiece, inexplicably set itself 12 hours ahead. She figured this out when the alarm she'd programmed some time before that went off in the middle of the night. Again, no idea of what might be going on.

3) I do all the cooking here so I have a pretty good handle on where my utensils are. Recently a favorite spatula went missing for a week, I searched for the sucker fairly thoroughly but with no luck. Two nights ago I opened the utensil drawer and it's sitting dead center on top of everything else. My kids don't play with the items I use and they certainly WOULDN'T put them back when they're done with them (welcome to parenthood). The wife doesn't do any cooking and disavowed all knowledge of this incident. I dunno, maybe it's mice?

These are just a few items I can cite, there are a lot more. Some of them could be attributed to memory loss, the kids getting into things, etc. But not all.

They seem to happen more frequently when some kind of spiritually themed undertaking gets going. The first two I listed happened right about the time of my men's CRHP retreat. The last occurred after I decided to seek counseling for an increase in my faith.

We once spoke to a Dominican friar the wife knows, asking him for his input about this. He opined we either had a disgruntled spirit in the house or a poltergeist. Either way, he didn't jump up and start screaming for exorcism of our domicile.

To tell the truth, it's more an annoyance than anything else. Coping with our sons' autism is more aggravating than this crap.