Who you gonna call?

"If there's something strange in your neighborhood
Who you gonna call?
If there's something weird
And it don't look good
Who you gonna call?"   Ghostbusters, 1984

As far as I know there are no poltergeist in our home.  I have never encountered anything strange or out of the ordinary. But something happened the other day that made me wonder.

I was in the house alone, standing in our kitchen, when I heard the unmistakable sound of a dial up modem.  If you're too young to be familiar with that sound, you can search it on YouTube and hear dozens of examples.  It's a sound that once you've heard it,you can't mistake it for something else. Since I was already standing up, I wasted no time trying to track down the noise. It wasn't coming from my phone, because my phone was in my pocket.  My first best guess was that the sound was somehow coming from my modem downstairs (although we have not had a dial up in many years).  When I got downstairs, it was no surprise that the sound was not coming from my cable modem that connects all of our digital appliances. At that point it sounded like the screeching was coming from upstairs. By the time I got upstairs, the sound was gone. I had never heard this sound since dispensing of our last dial up modem many years ago. So it was a little disturbing to hear it again.

Last year, my wife and I made reservations to stay in the Grand Colonial Hotel in La Jolla, California. The hotel had come highly recommended so we made arrangements to stay there.  A couple of weeks before the trip, I Googled the hotel to research its amenities and the first hit was that the hotel was haunted.  I'm not a fan of things that go bump in the night, so my first inclination was to cancel the reservation and stay somewhere else.  We talked about it and decided to be brave and to take our chances.  When we were checking in, I asked the clerk about the ghosts and she said, "They're in the old building below us. We don't have any ghosts here."   One less thing.  And in our four days there we were a little bothered by the rather dated decor,  but we weren't disturbed by the paranormal. Those twin girls holding hands at the end of the hotel hall in the Shining have sort of stayed with me. I certainly wanted no part of that.

I spend a lot of time in the Chickamauga Civil War Battlefield at Chickamauga, Georgia. This, the most visited Civil War battlefield, is only about a ten minute drive from my house. So I go there often. This battle was second only to Gettysburg in casualties.  During September 18-20 1862 more than 34,000 Confederate and Union soldiers were killed or seriously wounded. When I'm walking through the woods of Chickamauga with my camera,  although I'm not frightened, I never feel that I am completely alone. It's more of a comforting presence than anything to be afraid of.

But back to my modem.  I have no explanation for why the sound of a dial up modem would present itself in my home.  You may be thinking that I was hearing things.  Well I was hearing things.  If somebody rang the doorbell, I would be hearing things. If my dishwasher was running, I would be hearing things. If I turned on the Bose system, I would be hearing things. Whatever the sound was and wherever it was coming from, I was hearing things. Even if  it was "all in my head", I was hearing things (everything we hear is all in our heads). My first dial up modem, a 1200 baud, was  as slow as Christmas..  My 2400 baud modem was twice as fast.  Then a friend gave me a lightning fast(relatively speaking) 9600 baud modem.  They all were different speeds, but they all sounded about the same.  My modems had to locate and "shake hands" with some distant modem and that process was very noisy. I never timed it, but I was say the process took about forty seconds  to complete.  And there was something very satisfying when those last shrill noises suddenly disappeared with a connection.

We have a one year old boy in our lives.  This little boy delights us in every way possible. He's just beginning to talk and like any fledgling talker he makes up words that sound about right to him.  And, as is always the case with children, what he says is so much cuter than the actual words. He answers pretend phones, for example, with "Weh Woh!"  A few days ago we were expecting good friends to  show up around five o'clock and then the pizza delivery man after that.  When our doorbell rang right on time,  I opened the door with a hearty "Weh Woh!" The pizza  man just stared at me. As he was driving away, he probably wondered if he had seen a ghost.