Things That Go Bump.

It’s different in the city. There’s all that noise in the air. Every writer that ever wrote at one time or another mentioned “the hum of the city,” or some like metaphor. Once you’re used to it the white noise backdrop becomes a comfort. I’ve seen offered for sale white noise generators designed to aid the onset of sleep that reproduce the sounds of air conditioners, traffic and so forth. The hum of the city indeed, in such a context perhaps it does approach musicality, eh?

It’s different in the country as well. For all that soothing noise in the city there’s much to be said for the silence of the country. Of course, it’s only silence for the first wee bit you live out here. There’s the soughing of the breeze through the pines and junipers, in season there’s the crickets and frogs. With the dawn comes the birdsong that changes with the season, larks, martins, swallows of the summer, chickadees of the winter and with the addition of ducks and geese a happy mix of all in the spring and fall. Of an evening in the winter if you listen close you’ll hear owls talking in the trees behind the house. Then there are the ravens, crows and magpies croaking and screeching all year round oft times joined by their quieter jaybird cousins. Oh, there’s the occasional hum of traffic on the unpaved county road out front but it seems to fit with the rest. Sirens are rare enough to cause you to go look make sure it's not a neighbor in distress.

Of course that’s all outside. Once inside a well-insulated house--and yours had better be or you’ll either shiver all winter or propel the children of propane or electric company execs through college--things get a lot quieter. Well, in winter that is. With a lack of air conditioning up here in the altitude—Denver may brag about ‘Mile High’ and all that but they’re all flatlanders to us here at a mile and a half and up—your windows are open all summer letting in the gentler hum of the country. 

Still and all when things quiet for the night, just the frogs and crickets providing a soft ambiance, all those noises masked by the city creep into consciousness. Yes, stolen by the hum of the city, here in the country they still exist—Things That Go Bump in the Night.

It’s amazing how much noise there is when the refrigerator stops, the fans are off, the TV quiet. If you sit quietly, perhaps reading or just drifting, the sound is deafening. Clunk. Thump. Crash-tink-whump. Scritch-scritch-scritch. BANG. What the hell is making all that noise? 

After my wife died the kids, family and friends all went home. I sat in the living room all alone and listened not to the hum of the city but the symphony of an empty house. Some you could identify with practice—the dog scratching while in his crate, creating a whump-whump-whump noise with overtones of rattle-rattle-rattle. The soft scurry and scritch of mice and voles you understood. The romance and battles of the barn cats outside—terrifying when first heard but merely annoying once understood. The bump and hum of the refrigerator singing its measured song. All these things are accustomed, perceived, understood and ignored. Oh, you might put a mouse trap out now and again or throw something handy at a cat in a moment of pique, but by and large, like the hum of the city, you just don’t really hear it on a conscious level.

The other though. Sometimes there’s a bang as loud a slamming door out in the garage. So you go out there with a bit of trepidation, bear maybe? Probably not a mountain lion—they’re too solitary and people-phobic. Oh, shit, not a skunk I hope! You think, "how did they get in there?" All the windows are closed, the doors latched . . . thinking thusly out you go to find . . . nothing. There’s no animal foraging. Nothing seems moved; everything remains in its place. What the hell made that noise?

It’s not the only one. There’s bumps and bangs, thumps and thuds, crashes and creaks from upstairs if your down, downstairs if you’re up, elsewhere from where you are, all in the amazing talking house. What the hell is making that noise!

So then. Is this the genesis of the scary stories that we’ve heard? Ghouls, zombies, the sidhe, changelings, ghosts, nightwalkers, skinwalkers, banshees, vampires, werewolves-werebears and werewhatnots (Hm. Are there werechickens?), well, you get the idea. The human imagination that harnesses fire, invents the wheel, the lever, pickup trucks and ultralight jet-packs also invents all that scary stuff. Sorta gives credence to the eastern concept of yin and yang. Yep, it’s like, “Come to the Dark Side, Luke, we have cookies.” Ok, maybe the cookies are a bit much and it should be, “. . . we have scary crap.”

Then too, there’s the Original Slick Willie’s take in Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I cannot remember if all these noises have been a part of this house since we came in August of 2000. Honestly I cannot. In addition I am not so jaded in my aging view to think that creation exists only in corporeal form. Even in the birthplace and converted habitats of that most logical of religions, Buddhism, are there legends of spirits unbound that wander the earth. I do suspect all that we think we know of spirits and their kin are, to again quote the Bard, “. . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”

Maybe one of the things investigators of the paranormal talk about is accurate. Maybe spirits do hang around where they died and try with little success--unless you believe in mediums--to communicate with us. Maybe the clunk, thump, crash-tink-whump, scritch-scritch-scritch and BANGs are someone trying to say, “Hey! How’s it going? I’m here!” My wife Beth maybe? I don’t know. But you know even if all the noises are just the odd creaks, groans and bumps of a twenty-four year old house, somehow that thought that it could be Beth makes them a little less scary.