Loren, you've sent a shiver down my spine which NO blog by ANYONE's ever hitherto done.
First of all I was born 6 Feb, my younger brother 28 April, but get this: in the '60s, (in Liverpool, in the UK), when I was 8, my school, Tiber Street Junior's, made this great display of installing what was SUPPOSED to be a brand new cloakroom.
Anyway, not long after this took place, I found myself alone in this cloakroom with a pair of twin boys from the year below, celebrated throughout the school for having extremely trendy Beatle-style haircuts.
Anyway, that day we started playing tick, and ducking out of the reach of one of the "Terrible Twins", (as me and my younger sister'd dubbed them), I inadvertently smacked into one of the coat hooks.
To the amazement of the three of us, the whole section the hook was part of seemed to momentarily come alive with cold fury and loathing - almost as if, if only it could, it would've ripped itself up by its foundations and chased us off down the street - at which point a sort of miniature lightning bolt, about two-and-a-half to three inches long arced out of the hook and shocked my hand.
Then, even as we us stood there, jaws gaping and paralysed on the spot, keeping one eye on the coat hook and glancing back and forth at each other wondering what to do next, the three of us were terrified to hear this coat hook, in the utterly hideous voice of a thoroughly nasty old man snarl, "Ah, now you didn't know we could do that, did y', y'little sh*t!" at which point I ran back to class, shaking like a leaf, and the twins ran straight out the school, their parents subsequently refusing to bring them back.
Now, whatever you make of that story, it's all very well for some people to say oh, people're always seeing and hearing things that aren't there, as if somehow that's both the explanation and the 'cure', but I'm aware of adults who, under the well-intentioned onslaught of "it's all in your head", went on to kill themselves over far milder experiences than that; but - God! - until now, it'd never occurred to me kids might be taking that option, too, (if not something far worse, given other data available to me).
alanborky
