The spider, the rat, and the poltergeist

William Wright's December 10 post "A Vampire's Weekend" discusses "Ya Hey" and "Step," the only two Vampire Weekend songs I know, both of which I have posted about before. He finds in them allusions to Tolkien's spider-demon Ungoliant and to a rat or mouse which he identifies with another Tolkien villain, Saruman.

So I guess it's time to talk about the poltergeist of July-August 2019.

The first thing that happened was that our phone line suddenly went dead in the middle of a call, and the phone wouldn't work after that. Eventually an electrician found the problem: A cable inside the wall had been snipped neatly in two, as if with a pair of shears. He said he couldn't understand how it had happened. He said sometimes mice will bite wires, but this was such a clean cut, and in a place that should have been inaccessible even to a mouse. And in any case we keep multiple cats, and mice are simply not an issue.

A day or two after that, an air conditioner, a water dispenser, and a television set all suddenly stopped working at the same time. In each case the technician found that a small but important component had mysteriously been cut neatly in two.

When a brass doorknob somehow spontaneously cut itself neatly in half, we began to get the feeling that something paranormal was involved.

Then classic "poltergeist" phenomena began. Strong odors, such as sulfur and camphor, would suddenly appear and disappear. Small objects, especially shoes, would suddenly jump up, fly across the room, or skitter across the floor. I had a very strong sense that I was being watched, and by something that was not human. I had a vague sense that it felt like "some kind of animal," while my wife had a much more specific apprehension of it as a spider. Sometimes a brief image of an enormous spider would suddenly flash across her mind. She began to be quite frightened and to press me to "do something" about it.

Since some sort of spiritual presence seemed to be involved, I had the bright idea of "interrogating" it with Tarot cards. "Who are you?" I asked, then shuffled my deck, and drew a card: The Devil. "What do you want?" Death.

My reaction to this was, "Oh, come on!" It was just too corny, too cartoonish, too much like something out of a bad horror movie, and it didn't seem to fit the phenomena themselves, which seemed more mischievous than evil. I refused to take it seriously. I wrote at the time, "I think we're dealing with the spiritual equivalent of a 12-year-old boy making prank calls."

The feeling that we were dealing with an "animal" presence of some kind persisted, leading me into this dangerous line of thinking:

So far I haven't tried any prayers or other exorcistic gestures because, to be honest, my hunch is that this entity has shown up at my house the same way animals in need of help always do, and that I should receive it in the same spirit. Of course, to help it I need to know what it needs or wants (besides "death," I mean!). . . . Is it foolhardy to think I might be able to housebreak this thing? My feeling is that as long as I resist the temptation to try to enslave it, I'm not in any real danger . . . .

It's hard for me to understand now how I could have thought that way even for a moment, but I did. Fortunately, I quickly came to my senses:

Here's my thinking. A devil's purpose is not to annoy or terrorize but to tempt, and I think the temptation in this case was to do precisely what I almost did: to welcome this thing, using compassion as an excuse, but in fact motivated by morbid curiosity and pride.

Obviously, anything that calls itself the Devil, and that sees ordinary Christian prayer as a hostile act, should be taken at face value and sent packing. The only thing that made me hesitate to do so was the interesting (but absurd and illusory) prospect of "taming" it, as if I were King Solomon or something, as if I had somehow become a magician just by reading books.  . . . evil seems to be required to explicitly identify itself as such -- and it doesn't get much more explicit than saying "I'm the Devil, and I want death." If I had responded with," Right, well make yourself at home, then," I would essentially have been in the position of Faust inviting the black poodle into his house (and it was perhaps this subconscious connection that made me think of it as being like a stray animal).

I began using prayer against the thing, starting with some prayers that were recommended by a pen friend who is an Anglican priest. Phenomena ceased for about a week, and then this happened:

In what was by now a familiar pattern, two solid steel components in the ceiling fan -- which should have been the strongest parts of the whole structure -- had snapped neatly in half for no apparent reason. The workers who installed the new light fixture said they had never heard of such a thing happening. My wife had been on the sofa nearby when it fell and narrowly escaped being hit.

This type of violence represented a serious escalation, and I stepped up my efforts to get rid of the thing once and for all. What ended up doing the trick was a Latin prayer to St. Michael, recommended by a Catholic friend. (This was my first experience praying in Latin, which is now something I do every day.) When I started the prayer, one of my cats went absolutely berserk, behaving as if it were possessed, but by the end of the prayer, everything was normal, and the poltergeist phenomena never came back. Later that evening, when the Taoist "ghostbuster" team I had called earlier arrived, they said the house was clean and there was nothing for them to do.

In going back through my old emails while writing this post, I found this comment from a friend:

Although it is currently a mystery; I'm pretty sure that, if you find a cure, you will find-out what it was all about at some time later - assuming you remain curious to learn.

I wouldn't say I've found that out yet -- I'm not yet at the point where "It was a character from a Tolkien novel" feels like a real explanation -- but my curiosity has been reignited. After some time, I had more or less set the whole thing aside, contenting myself, like Bartholomew Cubbins and King Derwin, with saying "it just 'happened to happen' and was not very likely to happen again." Now, like so many other things from my past, it's resurfacing and demanding to be made sense of.

After reading William Wright's post, I was going to listen to those Vampire Weekend songs again, but I somehow tapped the wrong thing and ended up instead listening to Denmark + Winter's strange reimagining of Johnny Cash (another "Man in Black" for you, Bill):

"I keep my eyes wide open all the time / I keep the ends out for the tie that binds / Because you're mine, I walk the line." Is it strange to imagine this being sung by an unblinking spider spinning its thread?

To end with a random sync wink: William Wright's introduced Ungoliant in his post "A familiar symbol, secret combinations, and Mama Ungoliant." The "familiar symbol" of the title is a circle inside, or sometimes overlapping with, a triangle. This morning, after writing most of the above but before posting it, I stopped in a clothing store to buy some socks and saw this on a T-shirt: