Strangeness

 Okay, here goes. I understand many people won’t believe me, but it’s been my life, and I cannot deny my own experiences. I don’t believe in the supernatural, in the way I don’t believe in trees. They’re there, they exist, they don’t require belief.

***

My deja-vu experiences always come in pairs. The first time, I get the profound knowledge that this situation will happen again. (Vuja-de?) And then again, months or years later, when the situation recurs exactly as foretold.

***

I have been to places that didn’t exist the next day. The most memorable was when we were spending the night at some campground. It was in the middle of a forest, and there was a lake running east-west a couple miles north of us. I got bored after supper (as a teenager does), so I decided to follow the trail behind our campsite to the nearby pool. The trail led to the far end of a parking lot, and the pool was closed. Since the sun was going down, I decided to take one of the numerous shortcuts I had seen crossing the shallow ravine between the parking lot and the trail. I found one leading directly from one corner of the pool, and thought it was a bit strange that it had tire tracks. But since I only had to to go about 50 yards to find the main trail, and less than a quarter mile to the campsites, what the heck. So off I went. And I walked, and walked, and turned left onto a different trail (in the direction of the campsites), and walked. As it quickly grew darker, I began to panic. The campsites weren’t that far away, I should have been back within 5 minutes, and it had been about 10 minutes since I left the pool. So I panicked, and started running.

I hit another dead end, and turned left again. Immediately, a stern voice ordered me to Stop! So I did, and found myself standing at the edge of a cliff above the lake. I turned around, and soon found a trail sign. I was more than two miles away from where I started, on the wrong side of a lake that spread more than a mile across my path.

It took me more than two hours to get back, where it had taken less than 15 minutes to cross the space to get there.

I went back to the pool the next morning, to see how I had managed to get so lost. I could see the main trail from the edge of the pool. There were no paths near the pool, and none of the shortcut paths were wide enough to admit a motor vehicle.

***

I had a poltergeist. We call it Murphy. It occasionally takes things, hides them *elsewhere*, and brings them back months or years later, placing them in odd but obvious locations. I was probably about 12 when I noticed this happening. At first, I blamed the dog and cat, or perhaps my parents. So when I was 15, I decided to conduct an experiment. My parents were out for the day, leaving me home to mow the yard. (We had two acres.) So I kicked the dog and cat out of the house, and placed my favorite cap in the middle of the kitchen table. Then I put on my ratty old cap to go out and do chores. When I was done with the riding mower, I stopped inside to get a drink. The cap wasn’t on the table. It was nowhere to be found. The dog and cat were still outside, and the house had been locked.

That ball cap showed up two years later. I found it under my pillow in the morning when I was making my bed. It hadn’t been there when I woke up, and I was the only one awake that early on a Saturday.

My wife heard these stories, and politely scoffed a them, until she saw it happen. We had a digital thermometer – a really cool, new gadget at the time. It went missing, so we got a replacement. When we were leaving that apartment (in newly reunified Berlin), we cleared absolutely everything out and boxed it all up. In my final sweep through the place, I found the original thermometer all alone on the shelf in the bathroom, at about chest level. Easily visible. I called her in to see, because she had already done her own sweep through the place a few minutes before. The thermometer hadn’t been there when she looked. So we found the bathroom box, opened it up, and put it in with the other thermometer.

Murphy apparently changed allegiance to my daughter when she was a teen. Now in her mid twenties, she thinks it’s an occasional annoyance. I’m just glad my things have stopped disappearing or moving around, but it’s a bit disappointing, too.

***

As a joke, I took a “Magic 8 Ball” to Iraq when I deployed there for a year. I consulted it before every mission outside the wire – which was at least 5 times a week. That means I consulted the cursed thing hundreds of times. It was correct every single time. The only times it gave equivocal answers, the mission was changed or cancelled afterwards. It got so that I was terrified of looking at the thing, but also afraid to not look. It’s the most disturbing thing that has ever happened to me. (Mass graves didn’t bother me, other than the smell.)

After we got home, I was afraid of throwing it away. I put in on top of the bookshelves, so the kids couldn’t touch it. After a couple years, my wife was cleaning the shelves, and found it had leaked out all the blue stuff and died. So I could finally pitch the creepy thing in the trash. The blue stain is still on top of that bookshelf as a rarely visible reminder.