This post is for Deb over at
San Diego Momma for Prompt Tuesday, but also because it's October and I recently talked to a friend about me being a scaredy cat.
Regular blog readers know that I live in an apartment equipped with strange little doors, which I like to call Gnome Doors, because "Doors to some unforeseen evil" is just too scary. They are kind of creepy, those doors, but this story is not about them. This story takes place a long, long time ago (cue wavy flashback lines)....
I lived in an old farmhouse in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania, with my friend Bruce, one of the funniest guys I knew and an aspiring filmmaker. Bruce was adapting a Goosebumps-type book onto film, starring our landlord's daughter and several of our co-workers. The plot, in brief: Girl cheats on boyfriend, boyfriend drowns while the two are out on a lake late at night, girl is consumed with guilt and haunted by dead boyfriend. I won't tell you the surprise ending as it doesn't come into play here. Because the girl feels her dead boyfriend (played by our friend Matt) is haunting her, she consults her aunt, who happens to be a psychic. I was the aunt. We were going to try to connect with the dead boy's spirit and tell him to move on.
Okay, so we'd been filming all night long trying to get as many night shots in as possible. We'd filmed the drowning scene on the pond next to our house using every one's car headlights to light the scene Ala Ed Wood. We filmed a crucial climactic scene, and now at midnight/1ish, we were in the dining room of our old farmhouse filming the scene where the aunt tries to connect with the spirit. Everyone was tired. John was asleep on a window bench. Matt was heating up spaghetti in the kitchen. Aaron was doing something to help Bruce (microphone maybe) and Robin and I sat across from one another with a candle between us and a copy of the Necronomicon. Not the real one, of course, since it doesn't exist, but a book of spells purported to be the Necronomicon.
Bruce started filming and I started reading, in Latin, with surprisingly good inflection. We were going for one take, two if necessary. I continued to read; the house was deadly quiet, except for the sound of my voice in a rhythmic cadence and a slight hum from the microwave in the kitchen which we hoped wouldn't be picked up on the microphone ("we'll fix it in post"). Every one's breath was held as they listened. Suddenly, as I was about to read the very last line of some random spell Bruce had chosen because it sounded good, all of the following happened at the exact same moment:
- Bruce shouted "Noooooo" while slamming his hand on the book to stop me from reading.
- the candle blew out
- John violently fell off the window bench
- The plate in the microwave exploded
- the electricity went out
- a loud crash came from the basement
Ah, the basement. Dank dens of no good--I hate basements. This one--did I mention it was an old farmhouse?--had several rooms, including an old coal room from back in the day. The lights didn't reach all the corners. And quite frankly, after we re-lit the candle and our heartbeats returned to normal, no one wanted to go down there to check the breaker. We were sure that I had somehow conjured a demon while reading the spell, which is why Bruce stopped me from completely it. So, we ALL went down to check the breaker, creeping down the stairs with every available flashlight and candle we could find like the Scooby gang. And of course, we reset the breaker and everything was fine. But the rest of the shoot was plagued with mishaps and for years we talked about "the day Laurie Ann conjured that demon."
More recently, like last night, I painted my nails with glow-in-the-dark polish and scared myself when I woke to pee and saw my hand on the pillow.
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| Innocuous in the daylight |
