Last night I was alone in the house where I live, its other normal residents all being away. On Friday night while cooking pasta I decided to try a little photographic test, to see whether I could capture photographically a type of spooky event I have seen four previous times (as recorded in posts such as here and here): a stove fan mysteriously turning off while I cooked pasta. I simply made a video of the stove while I was cooking pasta.
There was no dramatic mysteriously turning off of the fan as I have previously seen. There was, however, a strange flicker in the light above the stove. This being a day in which power consumption was very high in the city where I live (because of a heat wave), I figured that there is no point publishing the video, as people would say it was just a power fluctuation caused by too many people using their air conditioners on that day. But while the test was mostly a bust, a very strange anomaly would soon unfold.
That evening (Friday, July 3) I put out the trash and put out bags of recyclables, around 8:00 PM. At about 10 PM I suddenly thought to myself: maybe they won't even pick up such things tomorrow, because tomorrow is a holiday (July 4). I looked up online whether there was an interruption in the normal Saturday morning pickup. I found out there was, and that there would be no pickup of such items. I then went and retrieved from outside both the trash can I had put out in the back of the house, and the recyclables I had put out in the front of the house. Outside it was fully dark at this time.
After having a nice sleep, I awoke and went upstairs. Alone in the house, I was very surprised to see that the overhead lights were on in the living room on the second floor (lights causing the entire floor to be illuminated). I always make sure there are no lights on when leaving that floor, when I am alone in the house. As no one else was in the house, the event is baffling.
To naturally explain this, you would have to imagine three different things:
(1) First, I would have had to have been so clumsy as to leave on lights when exiting a floor which I would always have left dark upon exiting the floor while alone in the house.
(2) Then you would have to imagine me not noticing (when I reached the ground floor, where I sleep) that the lights were on in the floor above (even though the overhead lights strongly illuminate the whole second floor, in a way that is clearly visible from the hall of the first floor).
(3) Then also you would have to imagine me not noticing (when I retrieved the garbage from the back of the house around 10:00 PM) that the lights were on in the second floor. The illumination from that floor would have been clearly visible when I returned from the back entrance, and entered the hall of the first floor, after I closed the furnace room door. As the second floor has windows on both its front and back, I would also have noticed the second floor lights on while in the back of the house, retrieving the trash can.
The combined likelihood of all three of these events seems negligible. So while I have a halfway-credible explanation for Friday's flickering of the lights, I would seem to have no credible natural explanation for finding on July 4 the second floor's overhead lights being on.
As evidence of some mysterious invisible force, this incident is not as good as what I observed last Valentine's Day, when I very clearly saw (right in front of me) lights on the second floor mysteriously turning off and then quickly turning back on, when I was alone in the house.
