Ernie is now sitting on my desk

Ok, so I just bit the bullet, and went rummaging through the boxes here in the basement to find the Great and Terrible Ernie. He is now sitting on my desk, facing me.

Come battery malfunction or sensor malfunction, every time he states "I feel GREAT!" we are going to be looking each other in the eye from now on.

Bring it on Ernie, bring it on.

Ernie, my constant freaky toy companion

Back in August, I blogged about the strange behavior of a Sleepy Time Ernie, packed away in a box somewhere in this unfinished basement. Unfortunately, I work down here as well, tucked in the corner of this basement where my future office room will be if I ever get a chance to start finishing this basement.

Anyway, Ernie is still going, taunting me with his exclamations of how well he feels. It's mot constant, but very intermittent.

BUT, he did just go off ten times in a row.

"I feel GREAT!"

Which caused me to kick off this quick entry. I think I'm going to have to find that Ernie this week, if not today. I will have to find him and do some tests on him to see if indeed the mechanism that causes him to speak is broken.

Sleepy Time Ernie

About 10 years ago Santa brought a Sleepy Time Ernie to my oldest daughter, Sarah, on Christmas morning.

Basically you press his belly, he tells you that he is sleepy. You then lay him down, and he begins to sing himself to sleep, at which point he starts snoring. As he snores, his chest rises and falls. Quite cute really.

And then, if you sit him back up, he exclaims, "I feel GREAT!"

As all stuffed toys go, battery-operated or not, it eventually went unplayed with and ended up in a toy bin.

Well, a few years later, and this must now be about 10 years ago, I was awoken during the middle of the night. Coming from Sarah's bedroom was the happy tones of Ernie's voice, exclaiming, "I feel GREAT!.....I feel GREAT!......I feel GREAT!"

Now, Sarah at this point was a heavy sleeper. She never got up in the middle of the night. So I knew that it was not her playing with the doll. Also, if she was playing with the doll, she would be putting him to bed by making him sing his lullaby, and the make him sit up.

My imagination, being what it was, could envision Ernie, sitting up by itself, and then laying down, sitting up, then laying down. And there was no way in hell I was going to go into Sarah's room and witness this. I rationalized to myself that it was the batteries, yep, the batteries in the Ernie that were going dead, and it was malfunctioning.

"I feel GREAT!...I feel GREAT!"

Eventually it stopped. I told Holly about it the next morning, and she thought it was weird, but thought it was batteries as well.

I never changed the batteries.

Ernie woke me up once more a few months later, in the exact same way, and still I never changed the batteries.

And it never happened again, until a few weeks ago, 10 years later.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I just recently moved my office downstairs to the unfinished basement. Its one big room of storage, with my desk in the corner. Since the house is new, it's not a damp basement or anything like that. But it does have open studs, exposed insulation against the walls of the foundation, and a concrete floor.

So Holly and I were having a conversation while I sat at my desk. And all of a sudden, Ernie piped up again, muffled, and no doubt stuffed into some bag somewhere in one of the corners in the far side of the room.

"I feel GREAT!"

We both stopped our conversation and looked at each other, because we remembered Ernie and his rudeness from 10 years back. What really got me is that, if his batteries were so low 10 years ago, and they never got changed, why are they still working to the point where Ernie would still malfunction?

Strange, but hardly definite proof of paranormal activity. But it was enough to get the hairs on the back of my neck raised up.

Yeah it's been a while

I took a break from a lot of things over the past few months because of some tragedies that have happened in my families lives over the past year. I've been having a hard time coping with things, and added stress had just made me shut down even more, so it was time to start simplifying my life. I took a break from most everything computer-related and have slowly been pruning dead branches off the tree that is my life. This blog, thankfully will make the cut.

I also took a break from the blog because I felt like I was getting to wrapped up in this ghost thing, I felt like I was getting too obsessed with going over the recordings, and too obsessed with the bumps-in-the-night.

My mom came to visit over father's day weekend, and I had a group of gamers come over my house that same weekend. And for whatever reason, the combination of those two things seemed to have calmed the house down at that point. The house felt quieter, and this continued for several months, with no noticeable activity.

One interesting thing that has happened in my hiatus is that Candace, a friend of the family, contacted a TV show that focuses on paranormal subjects. A producer of this show called me, interviewed me, asking questions about the house and the things that were going on in it. This producer asked me to not reveal the show on this blog, and of course I am complying. After the interview, the producer said he would be in touch, but I've not heard from him in several months. I'm not sure if this opportunity will pan out, or even if Holly and I are even sure we want a team of people in here, especially to make an episode of a TV show. We don't want them pissing off anything that is in here, leaving us to deal with it after they leave, capiche?

Since the weather turned warmer, I've been keeping a large an at the bottom of the stairs running. This blows the cooler air from downstairs up to the bedrooms so I don't have to turn the AC way down low. I really need to get ceiling fans installed in all the bedrooms, but this will do until then. Anyway, the fan creates so much noise, there's really no point in recording. So I haven't done any in a few months. I am going to be hating life with the weather starts to cool again and I turn the fan off. The silence will make every single bump-in-the-night seem twice as loud!

Just recently, some bits of activity has started up again. I've not been taking notes, but I'll just list the things that I can remember off the top of my head.

I've recently moved my computer desk out of our bedroom and moved it to the unfinished basement. It's more quiet down there, and I'm hoping it will inspire me to finish it. Because of this I'm going in and out of the basement door on the main floor more often, and leaving it open a lot.

So I was taking a break one day last week, and was upstairs with the girls watching Sponge Bob in Sophie's room. I heard the door to the base shut softly. I went downstairs, and Jack our dog was nearby, but after some debunking attempts, he would have really had to push that door shut hard to make it close completely. Just pushing it softly was not enough to close it, and him brushing past the door to get by was not enough to shut it. Strange.

Holly and I were downstairs in my newly-created temporary basement office just talking and we were interrupted by a Sleepy Time Ernie toy that was packed somewhere in the basement in a bag.

"I feel GREAT!" said Ernie.

Now that Ernie, by all accounts, should not have said anything at all. It should be dead. It's had the same original batteries that came with it, and it's been sitting down here in this basement in a bag for the last four years. Why all of a sudden would he just shout this out, I have no clue.

We have a long history of weird things happening with this Ernie doll, and I'll probably expound on that in a future post.