Third party verification

Upon our return from the Peach State (more on that later...maybe), we were enthusiastically greeted by my in-laws who had been staying at our place, overseeing the day-to-day operations of getting our girls up and at 'em, off to school and back again.

My F-i-L took it upon himself to do some finishing work on the front staircase that he built and installed almost 2 years ago.

One day after several hours of working alone in the house, he yelled out "hello" to my Mother-in-law who had obviously retrurned home from a long day of shopping and running errands. The girls were at school. The TV was off, radio silent, computers at rest - he likes to work in silence.

My M-i-L's approaching footsteps on our wood floors indicated that she had entered the house from the side door, and was making her way forward towards the front entry way where my F-i-L was working. This fact alone caused him to wonder why his beloved wife of 46 years wasn't answering his initial "hello" greeting.

"Hey, you're home early..." was his next call out.

The cessation of footsteps in the adjoining living room made my F-i-L deduce that the mother of his children had stopped to drop her obviously heavily laden shopping bags.

It was at this moment that my F-i-L stood up and went to check out what damage had been done to their retirement savings account, seeing as how he wasn't getting a verbal response to any of his inquiries.

But no damage had been done. No shopping bags were filled to the brim. No purse overflowing with Visa and MasterCard receipts. No merchandise waiting to be returned now that it saw the light of day away from the bright lights of the mall.

In fact, there wasn't even a trace of my Mother-in-law.

The loud footsteps that my Father-in-law claims to have clearly heard belonged to no one in his current plane of existence.

From what my F-i-L described, he then experienced a massive case of the "heebie-jeebies."

This from the man who chuckles everytime we've talked about "Frannie," or guffawed outloud when we mentioned the myriad of footsteps heard on our wood floors and going up the hidden staircase behind our bedroom wall in the middle of the night.

Later, when my M-i-L finally did return fully laden with shopping bags of every shape and size, she apparently had to force a confession out of my F-i-L when she noticed he was not quite himself during dinner. Yet, he remained tight-lipped.

Later that night, when they were making their way upstairs to tuck the girls in, C noticed that the heavy crystal glass light fixture in the front entry way was swinging to and fro, as if someone had whacked it with a broom.

Problem is, no one had been in the front entry way for quite some time. They were all curled up on the sofa downstairs reading bedtime stories for at least an hour.

Was a window open, letting in a breeze somewhere? Nope.
Was there a convoy of trucks wheeling down the highway recreating the C.B. McCall song from the 70's, causing a 3.2 shaker up and down our driveway? Nope.
Was there a convention of 2 lb. moths making hooey inside the hanging light fixture, causing it to do the locomotion? Nope.

The phantom light swinging was apparently enough to regurgitate a confession from my normally reserved and non-superstitious F-i-L to spill his nail bucket about the equally strange phantom footsteps earlier that day.

Then my M-i-L got the heebies as well.

Today, I spent the day alone in our house, keenly aware of every noise and every light fixture.

Nothing to see here. Nothing to report. These aren't the droids were looking for. Move along, move along.