Early Monday Mornings: Week Four

To get caught up, go here for the introductory week, then you can visit week 2 and week 3 as well.

Mister Early has a penchant for playing with the appliances and lights.

When Mom and Dad moved back from England, they stayed with Grandmother and Granddad until they got a house. One night, everyone was hanging out in the living room. Mom and Dad’s dog, Kokinos, was laying in the floor.

All of a sudden, all of her hair stood up and she started growling very low and staring into the kitchen (at the other end of the house).

At that moment, the stove fan came on.

Mister continued his games after Grandmother and Granddad passed away.

Dad was responsible for cleaning out Granddad’s garage. It was crammed full of junk from one end to the other. One day, Nick was helping Dad. They were moving some very heavy sheets of plywood off of the wall, which had been there for years. It took both of them quite a while to get them all moved. When they finally got back to the wall, there was a mag light flashlight laying there, turned on.

My Aunt Chrissie did a lot of cleaning out of the house. Every night when she would leave the house, she would turn off all of the lights and lock up. Every morning when she came back, the lights would all be on.

Except one morning – they were still off when she arrived. She unlocked the front door, and as she walked into the living room, the lights all came on at once.

Grandmother and Granddad’s next door neighbor, Hans, bought their house. He is a good friend of our family’s and has been taking great care of it. He actually knew nothing about Mister Early until Grandmother’s wake, while we were all talking about him (due to the clock phenomenon that we had all just witnessed).

I was quite surprised he knew nothing of it, because Grandmother and Granddad were very proud of their “friend”. I guess they didn’t want him to be scared to buy the house. At any rate, he emailed me and told me of his (so far) only Mister Early encounter. I’ll let him tell his story:

HI Rachel,

I’ve got a type of Mr. Early story but put it into my ratronal framework.

After your grandmother had died and the house was empty, I finally decided to do some painting and minor repairs. One of the tasks on my list was to figure out the electrical wiring, for example, which fuses go with which plugs and lights.

This was tedious work since only the dog and I were doing the work. I would turn on a light or plug an appliance into a wall socket and go and unscrew fuses, and look for any changes. After doing this for a long day I noticed that some of the wall sconces were not working. I replaced light bulbs and fuses and thought I had everything working. In fact, I thought I had all the lights turned out when a thunderstorm rolled through the neighborhood.

While standing in the kitchen, it got dark and there was some thunder. All of a sudden, I see lights flashing in the dining room, as if someone were flipping a light switch.

I thought this is strange, perhaps I had not unscrewed the fuse, or turned the lights off. I went into the dining room, the wall sconces were flashing on and off. I thought this was creepy and quickly went and unscrewed the fuses. I thought for sure that Mr. Early had made an appearance. You know what the hair on the back of my neck did!

Subsequently I dismantled the wall sconces and rewired them and have not seen or heard from Mr. Early again.

Hans