30 Things to Do Before I Turn 30

Date of Completion: October 2009

Yeah…. I don’t have any pictures for this one. You know why? Because they ALL DISAPPEARED. But we’ll get to that.

This item was really only on my list because two of my friends talked me into it. And I put it on the list so I wouldn’t (couldn’t) chicken out, and I had to do it. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Then October rolled around, and what with Halloween being everpresent throughout the month, that’s when all the creepy freaky stuff goes down. So, Molly got us a hookup with a tour of haunted houses PLUS a tour of what is like the most haunted house in Des Moines (maybe Iowa? I don’t really know.) I tried to back out, sorta, and was met with resistance. Turns out her and my friend Maria are both super paranormal nuts so they were way excited and provided me with all sorts of supplemental information. Mostly I just stayed creeped out. 

The walking tour was fun, the guide was this adorable electic lady who actually lives in said haunted house, and she kept us entertained with stories and anecdotes and all in all it was more interesting than scary. Then we arrive back at the house and apparently we’d paid for a tour OF the house, so we all went on inside. It was a gorgeous house, but it was obviously pitch black out, and she had most of the lights off, so that made it a bit eerie. Before she let us disperse to wander the house at our leisure, she told us about all of the confirmed resident ghosties that lived (“lived”) there. She also flipped on some infrared lights up in the attic because that’s apparently where they gravitate when there’s a lot of commotion in the house. So I guess ghosties get scared too. I dunno.

We wandered the house, tried to hang out in the attic for a while, Molly tried to coax the ghosts into showing up in a picture or two to no avail, although at one point we went back downstairs and some other tourists (for lack of a better word) said they saw one of the orbs hanging out next to me. So… that was weird.

We did, however, have a sort-of “experience” – we were in the basement and we were standing around talking and just on our way to head back upstairs when a toy keyboard played a short note sequence. To which we all went “whaaaa…?” and turned around to look at it, but of course it just sat there, like inanimate objects do. We went upstairs and were telling some of the other people about it and we thought we heard it again… so a few more people came back downstairs with us and we waited and waited and then, lo! it played the same sequence, but this time lit up. I poked at a few buttons after that to see if it was a pre-programmed jingle that might have gotten bumped (even though there was no one around it and it really wasn’t that fancy of a keyboard to be able to rig up to randomly play stuff, but I’m no tech genius, so who knows.) 

Then we went and got pizza, and Molly and Maria sat and discussed the various ghost-hunting shows and our piano serenade and were trying to rationalize it and then decided it probably had to be legit. I just ate my pizza, because I know nothing of ghosties and was just rather proud of myself that I went and didn’t freak out.

Then we went home, and like I always do after an evening out, looked at all the pics on my camera before going to bed. There was nothing exceptional about the tour or the house, but I did take a picture in front of the “ghost tours!” sign for this very purpose, and we had some cute ones of us at the pizza place. Molly and Maria wanted to scour the other pics at full size, “just in case” there was something there, so I promised I’d get them all uploaded the next day.

Which is what I intended to do.

But when I stuck my memory card in my card reader the next day, they weren’t there. Absolutely NO pictures from that evening. Confused, I pulled the card out and put it in my camera, cause I knew I had JUST LOOKED AT THEM the night before. Nope, not there. The pictures ended with the dog-walking pictures from the previous Saturday. So I put the card back in the reader, and nothing. It’s not like I accidentally erased my card, because there were exactly 349 other pictures still hanging out on there. Everything from that Friday was gone. Erased. From the parallel parking picture I took before we left (I think I mentioned in that post that I had to keep trying to re-take it until I got a good pic to use), to the tour, to the house, to the pizza place… all gone. JUST THAT DAY. Wiped out.

Now, I’m not saying I believe in this sort of thing, but it kind of weirded me the hell out. And I was sad. Because I am very possessive of my pictures and that’s what I do: I take lots of pictures. So I alternated between being sad, annoyed, and creeped out. I have no explanation for it and I don’t have any pictures. I do know that now I put my pictures on my computer as SOON as I get home, so my camera doesn’t eat them overnight, but, perhaps the ghosties were just camera-shy and didn’t want to be sorta-seen. If my blog stops working after this, we’ll know why.