There was a chill in the air when I awakened in the too-comfortable den chair on Halloween eve. I had gone to sleep watching tv, and the only light in the house was the black and white glow from an old horror movie.
I remembered that I hadn't turned on the front yard lights, so I got up and walked to the hall, reached into the bathroom and switched on the light so that it would give me enough light in the living room, and turned toward the living room door.
As I opened the door to the darkened room, a sudden chill went up and down my spine as I heard a muffled, rasping, unintelligible voice behind me.
No, it wasn't the poltergeist that I had been imagining that was making tools appear and disappear.
I have a radio in the bathroom that is plugged into the light socket so that it comes on with the light. However, there is about a one-second delay. That was just long enough for me to turn around and open the living room door. And when I was at that door, I partially blocked the signal to the radio. That was enough to give it the rasping, garbled sound like when a radio is tuned slightly off-station.