Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Will you sleep in my bathtub for me?

It happened again. I woke up this morning and heard the sound of hard rain hitting the window. It startled me because such intense, direct rain is rare in this city.  It occurred to me that I should wake up and take a picture of the storm. I turned over and opened my eyes and saw it was not raining outside.

I was confused but I decided to go back to sleep. The sound of water continued. Then I remembered something that happened a few weeks back.

I literally thought, "Oh, no."

I got up and walked across the room to the bathroom. For the second time, I saw that the water in the bath was running. The hot water spigot was turned on full blast, and the water coming out was very cold, meaning it had been running for a long time.

Is this something that I do in my sleep? Do I get up and decide to run myself a bath and then go back to bed?

I've never definitively slept walked before, and I had plenty of opportunities to be caught doing so. I went to boarding school. I had a roommate in college when I lived at the dorms. When I taught at New River Academy we all slept in extremely close quarters. I can name a dozen teenagers who would have loved to describe my sleep antics over breakfast, or as a distraction in my American Literature class.

I woke up a few times last night. I went to the bathroom, I checked something in a book that had been bothering me. Each time I got out of bed the room was quiet, I turned a light on, and all the faucets were off. I did not sleep particularly deeply. This is strange to say, but I just have the feeling that I'm not the one doing this.

Someone please tell me what's going on. Am I sleep walking or am I being haunted?

Today's giveaway is a call to tell a story. Either assure me or spook me. Do you sleep walk?  Have you ever been haunted? Any suggestion for rigging the bathroom so I know what's going on if it happens again? If you got nothing, just tell me how you're doing today.

A randomly chosen comment will get a 20$ Starbucks Gift Card. If you live in Seattle, Boston or Vermont, we can make it a gift card to a local place. Now go for it, leave me a message.

35 comments:

Jessica said...

I think it sounds like haunting especially because so many of your stories have to do with water. I doubt it's a bad haunting though, everyone up there who knew you loved you, so I wouldn't worry. Maybe welcome it!
Jessie

Tracy said...

You're either sleepwalking or the faucet is just broken and won't stay off. I'd recommend asking your landlord to send a plumber to take a look and see if the faucet just needs to be tightened.

Definitely not haunted :).

Katie Paulson said...

You do have an huge connection with water in your life . . . maybe you are sleepwalking and, in a way, haunting yourself.

kelsey hoekstra said...

fun story: yesterday i wore accidentally see through leggings and when i bent down to pick up my books everyone saw my red lacy thong (i got it as a gag gift)
another fun story: i am loving HMI and dont want it to end. i have a boyfriend. hes great. i miss you

Melina said...

I love how little comments say so much about a person: Tracy, practical and reassuring, Katie very poetic...And then Kelsey in her gag gift underwear ;)

Tristan said...

Do you take sleeping pills? Sleeping pills can make yo do crazy shit! I've never taken them or experienced it myself, but I've heard horror (and funny) stories of people shaving off their eyebrows, eating everything in the kitchen, and worse. A friend of a friend's boyfriend actually walked off his roof and died after he took ambien. I'm not suggesting this sort of thing will happen to you, but at the very least keep writing everything down, and, like Tracy recommended, get a plumber to make sure all the valves are tightly in place ;)

Anonymous said...

Have you ever watched Modern Family? (If no, you should). At least you do not 'sleep-clown' ...

jackiedub said...

Here's my funny/gross sleep walking story: A couple months ago I woke up and noticed puke in my WIRE wastebasket in my bedroom, and thought that my roommate's cat had had an accident, and was thoroughly impressed that the cat knew to puke in the garbage. I later realized that it was impossible for the cat to do that, and after I looked a little closer, noticed that there were remnants of trail mix, which I did come home the night before and gorge down. I have no recollection or memory of waking up and deciding to throw up in the wire wastebasket.

Jason Tabert said...

"Do you take sleeping pills? Sleeping pills can make yo do crazy shit!"

They can also cause unwanted sexual side effects. I figure that's easier to admit here than on Facebook.

Also, do you know how many years I have longed to have you ask me to come sleep in your bathtub!?? YEARS, that's how many. All you have to do is call ya know.

kharoot said...

I’ve got it. Each night put a piece of tape or yarn or something midway up the door (midway so hometeam doesn’t run into it). If the shower’s on and the tape/string is knocked down in the morning, you were sleepwalking. If the shower is on and the string is still up, then a. you are either a very alert sleepwalker, b. you have some plumbing issues, or c. there may be some paranormal activity...

Anonymous said...

I used to sleep walk (not sure if I still do). Once I woke on the stairs. Another time I woke up taking a shower. That was weird. The mind can play mean tricks on you and sometimes you have to show it who's boss.

Dave said...

My only experience with the supernatural happened in Detroit. I lived in a house with my band and one upstairs bedroom was always hot. The furnace could be turned off, but the heat would be on in that room. And, of course, that was my bedroom. The bass player before me had lived in that room but had died in a car accident so I got that room when I moved in. After a few months in the house, I was dating a woman who wore too much lipstick, the kind of woman who leaves marks on glasses and cups and beer cans and cigarettes. Gross. Come to think of it, I hate smoking. What the hell was I doing with her? Anyway. We were on the sofa in the living room drinking Newcastle Brown Ale because it was too hot to do so up in my room. Well, after not a few bottles, we both got a kind of chill, looked over in the corner by the closet, and there both saw what appeared to be the bass player who'd died in that car wreck. He was smiling at me, almost like he was approving of me being his replacement in the band. And then after a few seconds, he was gone, and the heat in the bedroom went back to normal thereafter. It's possible that the beers contributed to it, but she saw it too. Who knows? The happy part, though, is that just like the vision/ghost of the former bass player, the woman who wore too much lipstick was very quickly gone from my life.

Surndr said...

Puppy dawg wants a bawth...

Anonymous said...

ghost are not real. you're just drunk and forgetting...

Melina said...

Why hell Chris!

Steve said...

I hate ghosts. They don't exist. That's a fact. KNOWN FACT!!

fozz said...

here's the deal. you're just making shit up. it is known that ghosts are not real. find one real haunting... of course this could just be me hoping that's the case since, well, i dislike ghosts, and if they exist i have bigger problems...

i would say i would sleep in your tub to prove my point, but tabert has that covered.

Unknown said...

I pretty strongly don't believe in ghosts, I am scared of the dark, but ghosts have been a non issue for me. I think because my mom digs paranormal spooky stuff, I'm adverse to it.

Anyway, growing up I had a black and white cat named Sierra for as long as I could remember. When I was 17 we had to put her down (bone cancer) and then the next few nights, I would hear her meowing downstairs like she always did when we went to bed. It has been the only thing in my life to make me question ghosts.

Jeff in Oregon said...

Oh...the things I've seen, places I've been, and places I care not to visit again.

Since my sinuses are acting up and I can't sleep, I'll share a story. In 1989 we moved back to Craig, Ak. Part of the deal for my folks moving up there was government housing (they were both Forest Service at the time), but the only place they had available was this old house that they were planning on tearing down, as it was built on wood pilings and was one of the oldest houses in town. Well, as soon as we moved in, I could feel something was "different" about the place. A few weeks later school started, and a few kids made mention of the house being haunted. Being a bit of a believer due to extensive research on the subject over the years, I readily accepted what may be in store for us living in that house.

Most notable occurrences included becoming overwhelmed by a sudden sense of dread that made me stand outside in the street during a sleeting wind storm until I "snapped out of it" about 10 minutes later. My mom "falling out of bed", but actually hitting the wall about 4 feet from the bed, and the apparition I saw of a man wearing a blue shirt sitting in a sunlit room that on a second look, had nothing blue anywhere in sight.

For debunking what is happening with your tub, try using a strap, hair tie, or bungee cord to hold that particular handle closed. If you happen to wake up and find that your device was no longer in place and the water was again running......then there's some further investigating to do.

Andrew said...

I'm going to guess it's more likely a pipe problem or a sleep walking thing. I like the tape idea. Ghosts, although there is no definitive proof for them even existing, are non-corporeal and cannot interact with anything in our physical realm.

My ghost story: I was driving home from Olympia one night, and swore I saw a girl walking across the highway, so I swerved to not hit her. I pulled over and looked around and yelled "hello" a few times. To be fair, it was like 1AM and the fumes in Tacoma can do a thing or two to a person.

dig this chick said...

I sawa ghost once. It was amazing. I was with a bunch of girlfriends at a forest service cabin and woke up chopping wood. I thought, who in the hell is stocking the stove right now?!. I sat and listened and it stopped and then I sat up in bed, all tingly. Looked down from my bunk and saw a woman in a rocking chair with a baby. Right there. I shook my head, wondered if I was asleep and she smiled at me. Then I looked at my bed and there was a ghosty doll laying there. Then they were both gone and I sat in bed humming.

The next morning, my friend had seen a door open. No one had been chopping wood. We dug through the cabin records and my friend said, "What did the doll look like?!" and I explained. I explained the exact doll the carpenters found when renovating a few years prior.

dig this chick said...

By the way, fun assignment. x

Alex said...

Cross yourself and have glass of wine.

Andy said...

Just take a bath already!

Anonymous said...

The National Sleep Foundation says common triggers for sleepwalking include sleep deprivation, sedative agents (including alcohol), and certain medications. It says sleepwalking usually occurs during deep sleep, but can also occur in lighter sleep and that you may even be partially awake. One problem with setting a trap to document the cause of your unexplained watery events -- they are far enough apart in time that it will be hard to set a trap for a ghost/yourself, because you’d have to be committed to setting the trap up night after night indefinitely. What if you set up a camera to record yourself? Of course this in and of itself might be creepy. Also not super conducive to reassuring any special sleepover friends that you are not weird. But possibly informative.

lorri said...

I heard a story on This American Life about a family that thought their house was haunted. The were hearing voicing, seeing people, waking up and feeling held down in their bed by some kind of force. In the end they discovered that they had a carbon monoxide leak in their house, and once the problem was fixed the "ghosts" went away. Apparently the carbon monoxide poisoning was causing hallucinations.

Anonymous said...

Try setting your digital camera or webcam to motion-activate or time lapse, then set it up in an appropriate place? Nothing better than catching yourself red-handed :)

As far as I know, I've only been sleepwalking once in my life. I was fourteen years old, and woke up standing in the lobby of the second-largest hotel in Jamaica wearing nothing but my underwear.

Danny said...

PHANTOM. Totally. I've never sleep walked in my life. I don't believe sleep walking is real.

lisanmn said...

I'm reminded of the time I came home when we were living in the Apartment of Eternal Youth and Beauty to find you writing in your journal as the kitchen flooded. Why was the kitchen flooding? Because there was a pile of dishes in them, on top of which was a cookie sheet on which you had baked your famous Peanut Butter Rock Cookies. Mmmm just like granite. The cookie sheet was diverting water from it's natural path down the drain and sending it instead to cover our floor. Normal people may have been moved to get up and turn off the faucet, or at least adjust the angle of the cookie sheet so that water once again flowed to it's rightful destination. Not you, my friend. You just wrote on with admirable focus until I got home, freaked out, and started mopping.

Therefore, I believe one of two things is at play:
1. You are sleepwalking, and have some strange affinity for the sound of running water.

2. Some poltergeist is trying to distract your focus. DON'T LET THEM. If the bathroom is flooding, ignore it, and finish your next blog post.

Manifest Destiny said...

Puttin' the spook in spookay you are!

Andrew said...

I don't know about anyone else, but that almost sounds like a reason for Lisa to be exacting REVENGE! Could it be, all this time, our ghost has been none other than our very own Lisa Niemann?! The plot thickens!

Lindsey said...

So apparently...

When my dad was in college, he and his roommate painted a big mural on their dormroom wall using glow-in-the-dark paint. At the end of the year, they had to paint over it, back to the standard dorm white. Ten-ish years later, he went back to visit his dorm and see his old dorm room. The guys in the room were excited to meet a former "tenant" and asked whether the room had been haunted back when my dad was a student, too. Turns out the glow still showed through, and ten years worth of (drunk, stoned) college boys thought the room was haunted by the eerie glowing walls. My dad didn't have the heart to tell them the truth...

UltiBlerg said...

HAUNTED. no just kidding. let's get you a fingerprint kit so you can dust the faucet handle. see if you find your own prints :-)

Brett Barton said...

Melina, you obviously need to get on ze river. Storm loves you, you love it. You missed the recent floods and you're body is still missing them. Get in your boat and stop PAYING for the water. The river is waiting.

Lee Timmons said...

feel free to skip to the 5th paragraph...