A couple of days ago I was reading dawndie's blog, totally engrossed in her Sixth Sense Part 1 story. I don't usually talk about things like that because for one I'm afraid people will think I'm nutters, and for two it seems very private. But I feel encouraged by what she wrote, so... here goes.

About a year ago, my husband and I were getting ready for work one morning after it had been raining all night. He was in the shower, I was in the bedroom. Midway through his shower, he thought I was in the bathroom because he heard the sink faucet turn on. When he got out and didn't see me standing there, he yelled at me for leaving the sink on. Problem is, I didn't turn it on. And it's not like I could have left it on and forgotten -- we have double sinks in the master bath, and it was his sink that was on. I never use his sink. We have the kind of knobs that you have to turn clockwise to turn on the water, and it was full-blast. We had no idea how it happened and discussed having a plumber come out to look at it.

When my husband was leaving, he set the alarm as usual, then went in the garage and got halfway to his car door when he realized he forgot his lunch. When he came back in the door a few seconds later, the alarm went off. The whole shebang with sirens and bells, not just that buzzing noise that it does when you open the door and you have 30 seconds to turn it off. It doesn't do that. That's not supposed to be possible. You're always supposed to get 30 seconds of leeway whenever you open a door. When I heard the alarm sound I came flying downstairs to find out what was going on. He was standing there looking at the alarm panel. He turned and looked at me with this confused look on his face and said "What the hell is going on around here today?" He told me what had happened, and I couldn't figure it out either.

I started to walk back upstairs, and when I got to the bottom of the stairs I heard water running. I yelled out, "Oh great, now the faucet has started up again." I started up the stairs, and quickly realized I wasn't hearing the faucet. I came back down slowly as my husband was coming around the corner. I said, "The faucet's not on. What's that noise then?" We stood there for a couple of seconds, and then I said, "Oh, wait. It's the sump pump. We had all that rain last night." He brightened and started to say something, probably to agree with me, when his face suddenly changed. He said, "I haven't heard the sump pump at all this morning." (Our sump pump makes this really loud THUNK noise when it switches off -- you can hear it all the way upstairs in the bedroom.)

He ran down to the basement to see what was going on, and that's when he discovered that the sump pump was broken. Water was already coming out of the pit into the basement. We looked at each other strangely, and he said, "If we had both gone to work this morning, we would have come home to a flooded basement." We looked around at all our boxes of stuff that we store down there, and we both felt a bit of a panic. Anyway, he wound up calling the plumber, and I agreed to work from home until the plumber arrived.

Right after he left the house (he tried opening the door again, no sirens this time), our dog Prudence started going nuts in her crate in the family room. Barking, whining, scratching at the door. She never does that. She was specifically trained to be quiet in her crate. Even after I said, "No" and "Quiet," she kept barking. By then I was pretty freaked out by all this weirdness, so I let her out of the crate. She ran straight into the kitchen and started barking at the stove. I've never seen her behave like that. She wasn't growling, just barking. I thought maybe someone had left food on the counter and she wanted it, but there was nothing there. Everything in the kitchen looked exactly the same as it does every day. She trotted off, and then turned around and came back and barked some more at the same spot.

I opened the fridge to get a drink, and after I shut the door I turned around and looked at the kitchen counter again. I noticed that one of the demitasse cups had been knocked over, and the water that was in it had dumped out on the counter. I am 100% positive it wasn't like that before I opened the fridge. I checked the counter when Prudence was barking! Those cups don't just tip over, they're short and squat. And Prudence hadn't been charging into the cupboard or anything -- there was no huge bump that could have knocked it over.

Then... nothing. The rest of the day, no weirdness. And nothing that strange has ever happened in our house since. I didn't feel anything spine-tingly the whole time. I didn't feel like I was being watched, I didn't feel like I was in danger -- nothing like that. I wasn't afraid. The bizarreness of it freaked me out, sure, but it didn't make me feel like the house was creepy. Actually I felt safe. Kind of protected.

I don't know who or what was here that day, but ever since then I have always knocked on the basement door before I go down there. It seems polite. Just in case.