Remember theWoo-ooo ghosties?
POLTERGEISTS aren’t as popular as they once were.
Time was, you couldn’t move in bookshops for tomes about these restless spirits – although the tomes presumably moved about a bit.
That’s what poltergeists were known for, in case you’ve forgotten – chucking things across rooms while remaining unseen, only occasionally making “Woo-ooo” noises.
They were so trendy the BBC did a spoof show about them with Michael Parkinson being blown off his chair.
A Hollywood movie deterred me from ever watching TV on top of a Native American cemetery.
But today – nothing. Presumably the media caravan has rolled on to some new terror of the night. (If so, I don’t know why they’re waiting to do a piece on Kirsty Wark’s frocks. What is she thinking?)
But that doesn’t mean the poltergeists have gone away. I’m not a superstitious man – I boot a black cat under a ladder every Friday the 13th – but some things have been happening that can’t be explained by Brian Cox.
That’s the astrophysicist, of course, not the Dundonian actor.
Although there are some things
Either our house had a stroke or we have poltergeist
the actor can’t explain either, like the accent he used as Daphne’s father in Frasier.
Anyway, we bought a new fireside rug. I put it on the floor in front of the fireplace, as per the instructions. Next morning it had moved six inches to the right.
I shifted it back. It moved again. Not when I was there, of course. And don’t think I didn’t sit and watch it for a couple of hours.
My mother-in-law – an acknowledged expert in interior furnishings, she says – simply shrugs and says rugs do this, which is like saying it happens because it does. But that doesn’t explain the pictures.
In another room four pictures on the wall have been straight since the day I hung them. I looked up from Doctor Foster and they were squint.
Each the same number of degrees off, in the same direction.
I asked my wife if she’d dusted but she pointed out that it isn’t April. So I can only conclude either that our house has had a stroke or that we’ve got a poltergeist.
I’m off into the foundations to dig for dead Mohicans. If I’m not here next week, call Ghostbusters.