Poltergeists and spiders

This past weekend, we finally got around to repairing the last of the damage done by the 2019 poltergeist. (One of the doorknobs it broke turned out to be pretty hard to find a replacement for.) As you may recall, my wife had a strong sense that the geist was in some way a spider:

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.

Cleaning out one of my email inboxes today, I found an October 18 notification from WordPress that someone had "liked" a post on one of my old blogs. Here's a screenshot of the message:

WordPress suggested three posts from this person: "The Eight Stages of a Poltergeist Haunting," "The Spider in Celtic Myth," and "Fear Dorcha: Shadow Creature from the Land of the Celts." You don't see poltergeists and spiders juxtaposed too often. My posts about our own poltergeist haunting have been here, not on my WordPress blog, so it seems unlikely that my posting influenced which specific posts WordPress chose to recommend.

The post this person liked, "Why Waite switched Justice and Strength," is pretty critical of the Rider-Waite deck, which has since become the main deck I work with. (I formerly favored the Tarot de Marseille.) This is a reminder that I've promised Bruce a post about how and why the Rider-Waite eventually won me over. I'll get around to it one of these days, Bruce, just as I did eventually get that doorknob replaced!