Two Frights Don't Make Me Strong

Shenanigans have returned to our hillbilly mansion.

Sunday night, or rather the wee hours of Monday morning, I was sitting on the short couch watching True Dating Stories. I'm not a regular fan, but nothing else was worth watching. The Pony had gone to his room around 8:00 p.m., saying he wouldn't be back out until Monday morning at 8:00, to go in to work at 9:30. Hick went to bed around 8:45. Both of them had their bedroom doors closed, Hick to the left of me, Pony to the right.

At 1:50 a.m., there arose such a clatter that I must have jumped three feet off the cushion of the short couch. Okay. Maybe three centimeters. An ample rumpus is a difficult thing to levitate. The noise came from the boys' bathroom at the end of the hall, next to The Pony's bedroom. It sounded like a tornado had touched down in the shower, and was flinging assorted grooming product bottles all willy-nilly against the walls and the sliding door!

I did NOT jump up to investigate! My heart was pounding. I turned to look, but saw nothing through the open door of the bathroom and shower. I know for a fact that it was not windy inside the house. Nor were there earthquake tremors. The house sits on bedrock we had to blast to make the basement. It doesn't settle. Nobody was afoot. Nobody human, anyway. Not a sound from either bedroom. Nobody had been in that bathroom all night. Not since before The Pony retired around 8:00. He hadn't used the shower since 7:30 that morning.

So creepy. Not merely something falling, but a flurry of impacts. I figured I'd just ignore it. No need to go look, right? What could I possibly see? Maybe a shelf had fallen off the wall behind the toilet, scattering assorted collectibles that Hick had stashed there when the boys were boys. Like a St. Louis Cardinals baseball. A Blues hockey puck. The entire bathroom was done in a hockey design for Genius.

I continued sitting on the short couch. I had calmed down by the time the next episode started. At commercial around 2:10 a.m., I had a fleeting thought of going to look in the bathroom, to see if anything was on the floor.

SNICK!

That's the sound of a bedroom door opening. It came from The Pony's end of the house. I turned to look, but NOTHING HAD MOVED. The door was still closed.

Of course that spooked me, happening at the instant I had made up my mind to investigate. It was 3:15 before I got the nerve to go look in the bathroom.

On the floor of the tub was a bottle of shampoo, and a smaller bottle of soap with the pump top. I could see an empty space on the molded plastic shelf of the shower where they had probably been sitting. Plenty of room. I didn't touch them. The Pony could discover them for himself when he got up.

There was no reason for those two items to fall. And certainly no reason for them to sound like they were slamming into all surfaces inside that shower. I don't think shampoo and soap bottles bounce multiple times like a Superball.