The Haunted House and the Flying Ghost Car

   

I think my house was haunted.  

Was.  Like, I don't think it is anymore, but you know what they say about little kids and ghosts and stuff, so maybe it still is but my kid just can't pick up the vibes anymore.

About a year ago, I was minding my own business and waiting for the Instacart order to arrive.  When the shopper arrived, she looked at me and the house as though she'd seen a ghost and greeted me with, "I was friends with the family who lived here before.  The dad died here pretty young after being slipped something bad at a party."

Ooookay.

Actually, this explains a lot.

I should backtrack. 

When my son was  about a year and a half old, he came running out of his room to the kitchen where I was making dinner.

Don't judge.  My house is literally about 50 feet long.  Yes.  I know what literally means.  And my house is literally, not figuratively, 50 feet long.  My kid's room is, like, no inches away from the kitchen.

I digress (albeit a tad bitterly).  My darling Meatloaf came running out of his room, delayed speech and all, making super excited noises and pointing toward his room.  Being a good mom, I left dinner on the stove and walked one foot or so over to his room.

Dear Son pointed to the wall and waved his arms ecstatically.

And right there, up against the wall, his toy car was floating in the air.

I'm not superstitious.  I'm not even sure I believe in ghosts.  I did not quite believe I was seeing a floating toy car.  In fact, I just stood there and stared at it for a few seconds, my mind trying to wrap itself around this strange turn of events.

"Um.  Don't touch that.  Mommy's gonna go get her phone."  Yeah.  That was the best I could come up with.  I mean, if I could get this on social media, people would explain this to me and everything would be all right.  

My mind kind of rationalized that by the time I came back with the phone, the car would be safely down on the ground.

I'm not proud of the what happened next.  

Y'all, I left my toddler alone in a room with haunted floating car.  Mother of the Year.

You'll all be happy to know that when I returned to the room, my child's head was not spinning around his neck, nor was he crawling on the ceiling.  No need to call a priest for that, anyway.

The car, however, was still there, hovering away about a foot and a half off the carpet, perfectly parallel to the ground.  It wasn't a little car, either.  It was one of those heavy plastic Little People Fisher Price cars with a little cowboy in it.

I took two pictures and then I very bravely inched toward the car and looked behind it.  Nothing appeared to be holding it next to the wall.

I reached out one, shaking, cowardly little finger and gently and non-threatening-to-a-ghostly touched it ever so lightly.

And it crashed immediately to the floor.

No give or anything.  No tug, no pull, no resistance.  I quite almost barfed.  

Then I picked it up and checked the other side for attachment-type things that a one-and-a-half-year-old child could have devised to make a heavy toy float parallel to the ground, like he was Nikola Tesla or something when he barely had just actually figured out how to walk a few months prior.

I dumbly tried to restick the car to the spot on the wall, like it would magically jump right back up there.  I tried asking Dear Son how it got there, but he just smiled and drooled because he couldn't actually talk.

You don't believe me.  I can tell.  I didn't believe me either.  I checked my phone.  There were three pictures in it:

You're probably secretly like, "Yeah, ok, those are the worst-quality photos I've ever seen!  Why don't you go bring us a photo of the Loch Ness Monster, too, while you're at it, and that wild Chewbacca monster that lives in the woods in Oregon or wherever!"

I had an iPhone 4s at the time.  Even back then, it was pretty lame technology.  I think by then (2015), there was already an iPhone25XS!L500.  So, the quality was dubious.  Plus, my hands were shaking like I just snorted a lot of heart-rate-enhancing substances (I'm just guessing what this is like, because in high school, I hung out with friends and our idea of titillating fun was watching Liesl and that kid who joins the German army prance around a gazebo in our 56th viewing of The Sound of Music and the closest I ever got the drugs was Sudafed.  Bless the band and choir nerds.  Heart-heart!).

I of course did what any middle-aged mom in my era would do and posted the pictures to Facebook.  I asked for an explanation.  I was not disappointed.

Actually, I was.  What the actual flippin'-flop!?  People had much to say.  Invisible spiderwebs were cited as a probably cause.  Also, static electricity.  Magnets in the wall.  And boogers.  Yes, boogers.  

Let me address these theories one by one, though in a different order..  

If you live in the Midwest and it is August, the humidity is so high that the probability of a 3 - 4 oz. plastic toy car sticking to wall in a parallel position for well over five minutes is practically 0.0.  Just saying.  Even if I rubbed my stockinged feet into a carpet for 20 minutes and licked a metal bar, no sparks would occur and a balloon would not stick to my hair.

Spiderwebs?  I don't even know how that would work.  There was nothing there to attach a spiderweb to, and honestly, how would a car get in there and hang perfectly parallel to the ground?  This, I do not know.  I mean, unless a freakin' tarantula came into our home and made some sort of funnel web, this whole scenario is unlikely at best.  And even if that had happened, you'd think I would have enough motherly instincts to stop that s*** before the web got big enough to hold a car.

Magnets in the wall.  There's like, almost no metal in this car except for two axles.  If you can find a magnet in the wall and hold a car parallel to the ground by one axle, you win!  It probably will not shock you to find out I actually went back to the room later and tried to stick metal crap to the wall in that location just in case I was wrong.  Hint: nothing stuck because there is no magnet in the wall.  

And finally, boogers.  My friends, I do not know what kind of super-calcifying boogers your children have, but my little angel's boogers are not nearly E6000ish enough to hold a Little People car to the wall, let alone several millimeters away from the actual wall.  In fact, I do not think actual E6000 would hold a Little People car to the wall that fast.  Maybe hot glue, if you waited a while.

All these theories, too, are putting a lot of stock into the abilities of a very young toddler to coordinate his hands, when even getting his fingers into his actual nose holes was a feat of enormous coordination at the time.

Five years has passed since this event, and every year, on August 17th, I see this pop up in my Facebook Memories.  Occasionally, I re-post it, just for fun, to see what other theories are offered.

In the meantime, we had a few other weird little incidences where the cats, the dog, and the kid, all acted like something was there with us or we felt like we were watched, but it was never a scary thing.

Then one day, the feeling of something being there just wasn't anymore.  And that, as they say, is that.