![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
AKA Goth Christmas, AKA my favorite.
My Halloween season has been lovely so far, even if it still feels like it's over too soon. Pictures from the stuff we've done will be forthcoming... eventually.
This morning, I woke up to about the most perfect Halloween morning possible:
I took these pictures around 9:00, and thought "wow, glad I didn't sleep through all the fog!" (A few days ago there was a really thick fog event in the early morning, but by the time I was up at 7:00 that morning it was all but gone.)
And then less than half an hour later, the view had changed to:
So no, I didn't miss it, haha. But very excellent spoopy Halloween vibes, 10/10.
We do theoretically have a pretty busy day to send off the holiday!
One of the local pet stores has a dog costume contest, so we're going to dress Bella up in her planchette/ouija board costume and stop by.
A local distillery is doing a "goth prom," (though we're on the fence about that one. Is it For The Goths, or for the normies to pretend to be goth? We might find out!)
Then there is a launch of a club night in a new-old venue tonight as well. (The same place used to be a goth venue, though that was before I was going out and doing things. It's changed hands several times since, and now the newest owners are reopening it and want to do at least a few gothy events again.)
It is also critical to me that I watch Over the Garden Wall today.
In honor of the holiday, I want to share the most paranormal event that ever happened to me. It's also deeply, deeply stupid.
I generally consider myself a skeptic. There's a meme I've seen on tumblr that's Mulder's "I Want to Believe" poster, but with additional text added on that says "But I'm not desperate." And that pretty well sums it up: I want to believe, and find a lot of paranormal things fascinating and fun and enjoyable, but I usually remain unconvinced.
I have had a handful of spooky experiences (repeatedly seeing a woman walking between rooms in my childhood home when there was no one there; thinking I saw or felt a cat in my college apartment even though we had no cat; Alex and I walking through a cemetery, turning to each other at almost the exact same moment and saying "this feels crushingly sad right now," and only later finding that it was a section of that cemetery reserved in part for suicides; weirdly predictive dreams, like a few months ago, dreaming our bedroom ceiling was leaking, and hours later having a leak in our kitchen ceiling from the apartment above.
While all of those things felt very weird and unexplainable to me, I know that there are potential explanations for all of them. I was a kid with a vivid imagination; I was used to seeing a cat, even if we hadn't ever had one in the apartment; we were walking through a cemetery and could have just psyched ourselves into the feeling, even if it was weird that it happened at the exact same time and didn't feel the same anywhere else; the dream was probably just a bizarre coincidence; etc. (I'm not convinced that those "mundane" explanations are necessarily the true ones, but I recognize that especially from the outside, they can be explained away, and that my own subjective experiences of those things are subjective.)
But we have one (1) occurrence that I just truly can't explain. And it's stupid as hell.
Alex and I moved in to our apartment in October of 2018. It's a very small studio apartment: only really one room, though there's a vertical half-wall between the kitchen side and the bedroom side, and there's a bathroom that attaches to the bedroom side. That's it.
I don't have a date for this, except that it was very soon after we moved in, so in mid October 2018. Possibly relevantly, we were also the first residents of our apartment. The building itself is older, probably intended to be office space, but was functionally abandoned for several decades, and then was remodeled into apartments. In addition to being the first residents of our unit, we were among the first to move in at all; no one else was on our floor for several months.
As far as I recall, this didn't happen, like, the very fist night we stayed in the apartment, but it was probably within the first week or two?
At this point, we hadn't even had a chance to get our stuff out of storage yet, so we were sleeping on the floor, on an air mattress we had borrowed from my mom. It was a smallish air mattress, definitely a bit too small for two adults and Cy, a 65 pound dog, to share, but we did it for a while, until we had a chance to get all our stuff moved.
This night, I had been asleep for a while, but sort of half woke up because I could hear... peeing. The very distinct sound of someone pissing in the toilet. Not running water in the sink, not the toilet running, not the bathtub or the shower or plumbing elsewhere in the building. No. Very specifically, someone pissing into the toilet bowl. It is a fairly unique sound!
I didn't wake up quite all the way, and was faced away from the bathroom toward the window, but did think that it was odd that it was as loud as it was (Alex always closes the door) and also that I hadn't felt Alex get up, since the air mattress tended to sink you onto the floor when the other person balancing it out got up. I sort of chalked the air mattress part to Cy just being enough weight in the middle to balance it out, and just shrugged off the apparently open door. Cy was still right behind me, and he was still asleep, and I fell back asleep shortly after that.
The next morning, Alex said that he'd slept pretty well, despite the air mattress. "But why didn't you close the bathroom door when you got up to pee? That woke me up, haha."
...
Neither of us got up to pee in the middle of the night. Both of us woke up to the very distinctive sound of someone peeing in the toilet. There is zero chance that like... someone broke in and used the bathroom. The door locks, and even if someone had a key, there's a safety latch. And even if that wasn't impossible, Cy would absolutely have reacted to a stranger walking through the room. And again, this was definitely not the sound of something going on with the plumbing or the toilet running or anything like that.
So... we had a piss ghost.
Our joke is that this was some poor guy who died sometime in the preceding decades really needing to pee, and that was his unfinished earthly business. The addition of plumbing has now allowed him to move on to the afterlife. (And as far as we know, he has moved on. We've had no repeats of the piss ghost [unless he's started closing the door, so that it's become utterly unremarkable and fails to wake us.]) We've had a few weird issues with the lights, but with one exception I do just blame on iffy wiring. There was one time when a light came on despite my having just turned it off, on a switch that has an audible and tactile click to turn it off. But perhaps it was caught right between positions, somehow. Either way, I don't think I can blame the piss ghost.
I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate that that is my most paranormal personal experience. I want to believe, but...
And sure, I'll take that over some sort of malevolent entity, but... come on. Piss ghost???
My Halloween season has been lovely so far, even if it still feels like it's over too soon. Pictures from the stuff we've done will be forthcoming... eventually.
This morning, I woke up to about the most perfect Halloween morning possible:
I took these pictures around 9:00, and thought "wow, glad I didn't sleep through all the fog!" (A few days ago there was a really thick fog event in the early morning, but by the time I was up at 7:00 that morning it was all but gone.)
And then less than half an hour later, the view had changed to:
So no, I didn't miss it, haha. But very excellent spoopy Halloween vibes, 10/10.
We do theoretically have a pretty busy day to send off the holiday!
One of the local pet stores has a dog costume contest, so we're going to dress Bella up in her planchette/ouija board costume and stop by.
A local distillery is doing a "goth prom," (though we're on the fence about that one. Is it For The Goths, or for the normies to pretend to be goth? We might find out!)
Then there is a launch of a club night in a new-old venue tonight as well. (The same place used to be a goth venue, though that was before I was going out and doing things. It's changed hands several times since, and now the newest owners are reopening it and want to do at least a few gothy events again.)
It is also critical to me that I watch Over the Garden Wall today.
In honor of the holiday, I want to share the most paranormal event that ever happened to me. It's also deeply, deeply stupid.
I generally consider myself a skeptic. There's a meme I've seen on tumblr that's Mulder's "I Want to Believe" poster, but with additional text added on that says "But I'm not desperate." And that pretty well sums it up: I want to believe, and find a lot of paranormal things fascinating and fun and enjoyable, but I usually remain unconvinced.
I have had a handful of spooky experiences (repeatedly seeing a woman walking between rooms in my childhood home when there was no one there; thinking I saw or felt a cat in my college apartment even though we had no cat; Alex and I walking through a cemetery, turning to each other at almost the exact same moment and saying "this feels crushingly sad right now," and only later finding that it was a section of that cemetery reserved in part for suicides; weirdly predictive dreams, like a few months ago, dreaming our bedroom ceiling was leaking, and hours later having a leak in our kitchen ceiling from the apartment above.
While all of those things felt very weird and unexplainable to me, I know that there are potential explanations for all of them. I was a kid with a vivid imagination; I was used to seeing a cat, even if we hadn't ever had one in the apartment; we were walking through a cemetery and could have just psyched ourselves into the feeling, even if it was weird that it happened at the exact same time and didn't feel the same anywhere else; the dream was probably just a bizarre coincidence; etc. (I'm not convinced that those "mundane" explanations are necessarily the true ones, but I recognize that especially from the outside, they can be explained away, and that my own subjective experiences of those things are subjective.)
But we have one (1) occurrence that I just truly can't explain. And it's stupid as hell.
Alex and I moved in to our apartment in October of 2018. It's a very small studio apartment: only really one room, though there's a vertical half-wall between the kitchen side and the bedroom side, and there's a bathroom that attaches to the bedroom side. That's it.
I don't have a date for this, except that it was very soon after we moved in, so in mid October 2018. Possibly relevantly, we were also the first residents of our apartment. The building itself is older, probably intended to be office space, but was functionally abandoned for several decades, and then was remodeled into apartments. In addition to being the first residents of our unit, we were among the first to move in at all; no one else was on our floor for several months.
As far as I recall, this didn't happen, like, the very fist night we stayed in the apartment, but it was probably within the first week or two?
At this point, we hadn't even had a chance to get our stuff out of storage yet, so we were sleeping on the floor, on an air mattress we had borrowed from my mom. It was a smallish air mattress, definitely a bit too small for two adults and Cy, a 65 pound dog, to share, but we did it for a while, until we had a chance to get all our stuff moved.
This night, I had been asleep for a while, but sort of half woke up because I could hear... peeing. The very distinct sound of someone pissing in the toilet. Not running water in the sink, not the toilet running, not the bathtub or the shower or plumbing elsewhere in the building. No. Very specifically, someone pissing into the toilet bowl. It is a fairly unique sound!
I didn't wake up quite all the way, and was faced away from the bathroom toward the window, but did think that it was odd that it was as loud as it was (Alex always closes the door) and also that I hadn't felt Alex get up, since the air mattress tended to sink you onto the floor when the other person balancing it out got up. I sort of chalked the air mattress part to Cy just being enough weight in the middle to balance it out, and just shrugged off the apparently open door. Cy was still right behind me, and he was still asleep, and I fell back asleep shortly after that.
The next morning, Alex said that he'd slept pretty well, despite the air mattress. "But why didn't you close the bathroom door when you got up to pee? That woke me up, haha."
...
Neither of us got up to pee in the middle of the night. Both of us woke up to the very distinctive sound of someone peeing in the toilet. There is zero chance that like... someone broke in and used the bathroom. The door locks, and even if someone had a key, there's a safety latch. And even if that wasn't impossible, Cy would absolutely have reacted to a stranger walking through the room. And again, this was definitely not the sound of something going on with the plumbing or the toilet running or anything like that.
So... we had a piss ghost.
Our joke is that this was some poor guy who died sometime in the preceding decades really needing to pee, and that was his unfinished earthly business. The addition of plumbing has now allowed him to move on to the afterlife. (And as far as we know, he has moved on. We've had no repeats of the piss ghost [unless he's started closing the door, so that it's become utterly unremarkable and fails to wake us.]) We've had a few weird issues with the lights, but with one exception I do just blame on iffy wiring. There was one time when a light came on despite my having just turned it off, on a switch that has an audible and tactile click to turn it off. But perhaps it was caught right between positions, somehow. Either way, I don't think I can blame the piss ghost.
I cannot begin to tell you how much I hate that that is my most paranormal personal experience. I want to believe, but...
And sure, I'll take that over some sort of malevolent entity, but... come on. Piss ghost???
