Things That Make You Go Hmmm

My sister is back from Singapore after almost six months. She decided it would be cheaper to wait here in the Philippines while she’s in between jobs. But since she’s going back to Singapore anyway, she left a lot of her clothes and stuff there with her flatmate (who stayed) so that she won’t have to pay for excess luggage weight on the plane ride home.

Upon her arrival at the condo unit she and her husband share in Taguig, she discovered several of the clothes she had left back here were missing. Her husband insisted he didn’t touch or move anything on her side of their closet. Except for her husband’s daughter (from a previous relationship) who visits her dad now and then and would sometimes sleep over, no one else stayed in the unit during the day when he was at work.

When my sister was telling me about it through SMS, I could read her panic between the lines. A couple of scenarios entered my suspicious mind (which I’m sure also crossed hers). It’s possible that the daughter was taking her stuff, even though they may not fit her. Was she selling them off? Or worse: what if her husband has another woman? But since there was no proof, and as far as she can tell her husband was just as puzzled as she was annoyed, so she couldn’t do anything about it.

Last weekend the two came to our house for lunch. That’s when another possible explanation came up, a possibility far stranger than what I had imagined.

Her husband told us about the incidents. It first started with their television volume suddenly growing louder or softer while he was watching—with the remote on the couch but away from him. Then there were times when the computer would switch on by itself. Since he was alone in the unit most of the time, he never went to bed without first making sure that the three doors and several windows (except the ones in their bedroom) throughout the unit were locked; one morning he woke up to find all of them unlocked and opened.

During his daughter’s last visit, they were talking at the dining table and she kept glancing over his shoulder, looking towards the stairs that led upstairs. He knew even when she was still very young that she could sense things—it seems she was gifted, or cursed, with a third eye—so he asked her, “What? Do you see something?” She shook her head, but he could tell in her eyes she was holding something back. Only afterwards did he realize she never stayed overnight at their unit after that.

And one evening just last week, my sister was in the bedroom resting while her husband was in the second floor common area, watching YouTube on their computer. After finishing a clip, he stood up and went inside the bedroom to ask my sister about something. Their conversation extended for several minutes. Suddenly they heard noise coming from the common area. When they went there, a different YouTube clip was playing—a clip that my brother-in-law insists he’d never even bother to click to watch (the implication being, one had to navigate away from the page where he left off when he stepped out).

So now we’re thinking someone or something has been playing with my sister’s stuff. Then again, since all the incidents were narrated by my brother-in-law, it has crossed my still suspicious mind that maybe, just maybe, he found a rather creepy alibi to hide his indiscretions.

Things that go bump in the night? Or things that make you go hmmm?