Alternate Title?: "I Smell Dead People" (Eeeewwww...)
Where There's Smoke...
I walked from my office into the den and smelled cigarette smoke. It was a really strong smell. Like someone just lit up right there in the room.No one in our house smokes.
No one else was even in the house.
Maybe someone's smoking out in the street? Or in the driveway? I walked out onto the front balcony and sniffed: Nothing.
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Our guest bath has an old Hoosier cabinet we use to store towels and bath supplies.
It sat in my grandparent's dining room for all of my childhood. They kept cards and score pads in one of the drawers at the top, my grandmother's ledger/journal in the other, and cloth napkins were kept on the middle shelf. I don't remember ever seeing what they stored at the bottom.
My granddad found the thing in some sort of storage shed at a house they rented once. It was old and really beaten up but he cleaned it up, stained and painted it, and brought it in the house.
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Every once in awhile, usually when it's damp out, I'll get a whiff of cigarette smoke coming off of it. (The lingering remains of the 55 gazillion cigarettes the two of them smoked in their dining room all those years.)
This wasn't a damp day. Still, I went back to the bathroom to see if I could smell cigarettes in there...but I couldn't.
It sort of spooked me because I'd been writing about Grandmother Stewart and thought, maybe she'd dropped in to dispute some of the observations I'd made about her. I smelled cigarettes the strongest by the domino table toward the front of the house. That seems like a place she'd want to show up for a quick smoke and game of 42.
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Popcorn
A week or so later I was sitting in the den watching TV. I smelled popcorn cooking. It was a really strong smell. Like when you're standing by the microwave waiting for it to ring, knowing it's close because the pops-per-second rate is slowing down. That strong.Again, I was alone in the house. I walked around, thinking it was coming from another room, or outside. But the only place I could smell it was right there in the den.
This time I had no hunches about who it might be. My dad's really into popcorn...but I don't remember ever having any at his parent's house.
Ghost?
I found a lot of information about 'paranormal smells' online. Most of the articles viewed this as a definite sign of ghosts hanging around.
I wouldn't totally discount the idea. We live in an old house, in an old area. I've heard tons of ghost stories from around our neighborhood. Still, I've never encountered one myself.
I wouldn't totally discount the idea. We live in an old house, in an old area. I've heard tons of ghost stories from around our neighborhood. Still, I've never encountered one myself.
Medical Issue?
In my Google ghost hunt I also came across the word: Phantosmia. It's a medical term for when a person smells something that is not actually there. It's an olfactory hallucination and can be caused by everything from sinusitis, to a stroke, to schizophrenia. (Fun factoid: A friend just told me a statistic about schizophrenia. Apparently people who have dogs as children are way less likely to develop schizophrenia.)
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Orville?
I've since learned that Orville Redenbacher is no longer with us. Perhaps he was dropping in to keep the hankering for his wares uppermost in everyone's minds? He seemed pretty fanatical about making everyone want his popcorn. I wouldn't put it past him.
Orville Clarence Redenbacher (July 16, 1907 – September 19, 1995) was an American businessman most often associated with the brand of popcorn that bears his name. The New York Times described him as "the agricultural visionary who all but single-handedly revolutionized the American popcorn industry."
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As I was thinking about all this, I got startled by a noise in the shelf over my left shoulder. It sounded like something had fallen over.
My heart gave an unpleasant jolt.
"Poltergeists!," I thought. But I looked and saw nothing:
I need to stop thinking about this creepy stuff, I thought.
Then I heard the noise again!
I looked up just as a little face popped up over the edge of the basket...
I looked up just as a little face popped up over the edge of the basket...
Boo!
At least one of the three mysteries was solved:
Smoke: My grandmother visiting?
Popcorn: Orville Redenbacher doing some posthumous PR?
Noise: Definitely Ella.
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