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The old frame house sits high on a bluff overlooking the point where the Withlacoochee and Rainbow rivers meet in Dunnellon. A full moon, occasionally dimmed by scudding clouds was rising in the sky.
In that peculiar yellow glow that one only sees in old cracker houses where pine paneling soaks up as much of the light as it can, my wife and I were dressing to go out to dinner with the house's sole occupant, an old friend.
"What do you think of these earr—?" my wife started to ask as she walked into the room. She was interrupted by an unintelligible snarl.
"What was that?" she asked, a little alarmed, "It happened the last time I walked into the room, too."
"Go out and try again," I said. She did, and, again, an unpleasant snarl.
I had a theory (okay, I always have a theory, and only occasionally are they right).
"Sometimes household appliances, for some reason, pick up radio waves," I said. "It sounds like that."
My wife was looking at me with the look she usually reserves for my theories: a mixture of doubt, disbelief and a certain eyes-darting-for-the-exits wariness.
"No, really," I said. I told her how I once had a toaster that played music, and the air handler on my air conditioning system used to talk to me all the time. (Note to editors… it really did, and before you mess with this paragraph, you should know it doesn't like you.)
"Lucille Ball even claimed to get radio signals from the fillings in her teeth. It has something to do with resonance or induction or something." I was talking fast to cover the fact that I really had no idea what caused the phenomenon.
"And all only when I enter a room?" my wife said.
I started to explain and then thought better of it. "Try walking in again."
This time the voice was more clear. "I'm going to get you," it said in a clearly menacing tone, seeming to emanate from the floor.
I went and got our host.
"Does your floor ever threaten you," I asked, kidding… sort of.
She looked puzzled.
"Watch," I said, nodding to my wife who reentered the room.
A hysterical cackle issued from the same spot on the floor, sounding as though it had just seen somebody drop a house on her sister (in fact the house in that movie looked a lot like the one we were standing in).
I tried walking in.
Nothing.
Our host tried.
Nothing.
Again, my wife left and reentered. Again a loud growl followed by a cackle.
So there we were. Three adults, two of them educated pillars of their communities … and me, listening to a floor threaten and growl at them. We weren't afraid… exactly. Let's say nonplussed.
I had another theory.
My wife has a very distinctive tread. She calls it "determined," I call it something else, when I am safely out of reach, but we do agree that it has a distinctive and loud, vibrating sound. I can be in most buildings and tell, without seeing her, if she has entered.
Gently, because she had somewhere acquired an aluminum cane, I suggested that it had to have something to do with her pace.
I looked at her face, then at the cane, and said, "or we could just chalk it up to weird atmospherics and go to dinner."
"I'm not leaving until I find out what this is," my wife said, dropping to her knees and poking under a bookcase."
The voice cackled, growled and then said, "Who's a good dog?"
That really plucked her magic twanger (extra credit for those of you who remember the Buster Brown Show on radio) and she began poking in earnest.
Finally a small blue hard plastic ball rolled out from under the bookcase, snarling a different imprecation with each revolution.
"Oh," our hostess said, explaining that the ball was a gift from a friend for a dog who once lived in the house. It had apparently been lying there for years, only to be activated by the vibrations from my wife's distinctive walk.
I looked it up online. It is called a Baffle Ball, and apparently can say a lot of things and make a lot of noises. Ours, apparently, had its vocabulary damaged and severely limited.
Speaking of limited vocabularies, some of the research I did for this column indicated that the radio-waves thing is much more likely to happen with AM radio, where most right-wing talk radio resides. Sort of makes me wonder if there aren't a lot of people picking up talk radio on their fillings and if so, whether that has anything to do with the creation of the Tea Party.
Mystery solved, we resumed preparations for dinner, all reassuring each other, perhaps a little too often, that we never really thought there was a ghost. Really … honest.
"What should I do with this," I said, holding up the bad-mouthing dog toy.
"Why," said our host, who is possessed of a certain puckish wit, "put it back under the bookcase, off course."
Late the next night, bedding down in our own home, I thought of waiting for my wife to go to sleep, creeping up on her and growling in her ear and saying, "I'm going to get you."
Thought of it.
Just because I could no longer see the cane she had borrowed the previous night, didn't mean she didn't still have it.
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