A Spooky Occurrence

This morning when I woke up I lay in bed for a while, and eventually turned my head around to look at the alarm clock behind me. Very strangely, the clock was blinking, with a time of 12:20. The actual time was only about 9:30.  This is the kind of thing that you may see in an alarm clock if the power has been interrupted, or if the clock has been unplugged and then plugged back in.

I took a photo showing that the alarm clock electrical cord was plugged in all the way to the socket. The clock was switching between the state shown here (with a time of 12:20)....

...and the state shown here (in which no time is displayed):

Now, as you can see from the photos, the electrical cord is plugged all the way in. So how could the power to the clock have been interrupted, to have caused this blinking state (with the time about 3 hours off from the real time)? The clock in question is one that will reset to a time of 12:00 when the power is interrupted.  My feet were more than two meters away from the electrical outlet, facing in the other direction, and there is no chance that some accidental foot movement changed the electrical cord.

One possibility is that there was a power outage. If there had been a power outage affecting my apartment, that would explain the clock anomaly. But the same power outage would have left its mark on two other devices: (1) another electric alarm clock in another room; (2) a sound-machine with a built-in clock a few feet away from where I was sleeping, and only two meters away from the alarm clock shown above. But there was nothing unusual with either of these devices. The electric clock in the other room was not blinking, and showed the correct time. I tested what effect a power supply disruption would have on my sound machine with a built-in clock.  Interrupting the power causes the machine to turn its "power" button off, and causes the time to switch to 12:00, as well as turning off the current sound the sound machine is making. But the sound machine still had its power light on, was still making the current sound, and showed a time of about 9:30.

So evidently the power could not have been interrupted to my apartment this morning, for 2 out of 3 clock devices did not show the changes they would have had if such an interruption had occurred. Also, I could find no mention on the Internet of a power outage in New York City today.

So how is it that I could have observed my alarm clock blinking this morning, with a time of 12:20, as if the power had been interrupted 20 minutes before I took the first photo above? It would seem that we can only explain this by imagining that somehow the electric cord was pulled out and then plugged back in about 20 minutes before I took the photo above at a time about 9:30. But I was alone in my apartment  at this time, my wife having left about 40 minutes before the first photo was taken.  There was no one else around who could have performed this act of pulling out the cord and putting it back in, and I know I didn't touch the cord before noticing the anomaly.

This is one of very many spooky occurrences I have observed around my living quarters, many of which are described in the series of 36 posts here. Collectively such occurrences create the impression of some invisible presence attempting to provide signs of its existence.