Nighttime Kitchen Sounds After Grandfather's Death

Since everyone is sharing stories from their lives, I'll share mine too. This story happened to me a very long time ago, when I was 14. My parents left without saying a word except: "We're going out of town." The reason for their hasty departure didn't bother me, because being left alone at home meant I could put on a porno on a friend's cassette that I'd been hiding under my bed for several months, waiting for the right moment. (Yes, yes, this was back when people had VCRs at home and lent each other cassettes.) And so, somewhere in the evening, just when I'd eaten and was about to put on the treasured smut, the phone rang. A bit taken aback, I decided to answer anyway, since it might be something important. It was my father on the line. He told me my grandfather had died, told me not to get upset, that they would stay the night at the dacha. After hanging up, I sat for about twenty minutes trying to comprehend what had happened. I cried.

About four hours passed, I had dinner and was thinking of going to bed, but the treasured cassette wouldn't leave me alone. Why not watch just half an hour, I thought. After all, I'd waited for this moment for so many months. Without deliberating long, I turned on the recording and began enjoying some choice Italian intimacy. About five minutes in, when the first dumpling was shown, I was standing like the Leaning Tower of Pisa at the dawn of its existence. I could no longer hold back and started jerking my miniature little willy as intensely as my physics teacher rubbed her ebonite rod — adjusting her glasses from time to time. I didn't need much time and I erupted like Vesuvius on Pompeii's worst day. I decided that now I could go beddy-bye.

We had a dog in the apartment, a big one, with her it wasn't scary to be home alone. I laid out a warm blanket for her on the floor of my bedroom. I patted the blanket a couple of times to show her where to lie down. She, after spinning around for a couple of seconds, lay down, curling up and hiding her little nose under her leg. (It was quite cold despite the warm season.) I closed the bedroom door, undressed and went to sleep. No sooner had I covered myself than I noticed the dog had raised her muzzle and was staring intently at the wall by which I lay. Here I need to explain the apartment layout: the bedroom door opens into a corridor that runs perpendicular to the door and at the end turns toward the kitchen, meaning my bedroom and the kitchen share a wall. So, I decided to ignore the dog, who knows what she imagined, and lowered my head onto the pillow. But a second later I was the one staring intently at the wall. From behind the wall came very loud sounds: the clatter of plates against each other, the clink of glasses on the table, the scraping of forks and knives. It was a damn orchestra of kitchen utensils. To say I was scared is to say nothing. It was the first and so far only time I was completely paralyzed by fear. I was afraid to move even a millimeter. At least ten minutes passed before I could muster the courage and pinch myself for the first time (out of a dozen) that night. By then the dog had jumped to the middle of the room and started barking furiously at the door. I looked at her as my protector, as my salvation, because if she hadn't been with me, I would have died from fear alone. That racket in the kitchen didn't let up, even though an hour had passed, on the contrary, the plates clinked louder and louder, there were more cups. After a while I even mustered the courage to sit up a bit, shifting my gaze from the wall to the door and back. After two hours I was already sitting on the bed, I was still too afraid to get up. It sounds stupid, but believe me, when you're in such a situation, it's very hard to overcome fear. I understood that the most correct thing would be to leave the room and see what was happening in the kitchen. I even played out in my head several times how I'd jump off the bed, run to the kitchen, very quickly turn on the light and interrupt this waking nightmare. The problem was that the kitchen light switch was quite far from the door and I'd have to run several meters in the dark to turn on the light, but I assured myself I could do it quickly. After some time I got up, slowly walked to the door. The dog kept barking. I brought my hand to the door handle. I had already grabbed it in my fist, but just couldn't muster the courage to pull it down. In the end I went back and sat on the bed. I decided to wait for dawn, maybe then it would all end. The most important thing here is that I had more than enough time to make sure it wasn't a dream, that it was all happening for real, that I wasn't imagining or hearing things. When it started to get light, the sounds finally began to subside. By 6 o'clock it was completely quiet, the dog was calm already, she just looked at me with her sad eyes, I think she was scared like me. When it was fully light, people were walking outside and you could hear the elevator going back and forth in the stairwell, I decided to leave the room.

The kitchen was in order, everything as I'd left it after dinner. The balcony door was locked with a key from inside, the key was in the lock. Everything was as if nothing had happened. But I was sure the sabbath that lasted almost six hours hadn't been a dream or imagined, it all happened, or rather there were sounds and I wasn't the only one who heard them, the dog reacted too. A terrible feeling of guilt came over me. I thought it was grandfather angry at me. Maybe he'd asked for a couple of hours off from the afterlife to see what his little grandson was up to. Seeing that his little grandson hadn't thought of anything better than fiddling with his little pee-pee on the day of his grandfather's death — he got terribly offended.

That was the only explanation I could come up with then, but a few years later I learned the term Poltergeist. It was surprising how similar my story was to others. It happened in the kitchen and there was a teenager, and the dishes made noise. As a scientific person, I still haven't found a reasonable explanation. I long considered the hypothesis that someone broke into the apartment, but I just couldn't figure out why they'd bang dishes for 6 hours straight. And there were no traces of anyone opening doors. And yet, I decided for myself, if I didn't see the dishes moving by themselves, then there was no poltergeist, there must be some explanation even if I can't find it.

So that's the story, Antoshki. I'm curious, has anyone encountered anything similar?