To be amused rather than freaked out? (Woo!!)

[Elphame]

Ok to get the mundane stuff out of the way

No one but DP and me have been in the house since Friday

We’ve lived here 20 years and are the only ones with keys. All spares are where they should be

We have 2 burglars alarms which we set when we go out. They have not been activated.

We have cctv camera front and rear covering all entrances to the house and garden. The only comings and goings recorded are DP and me.

We have 2 dogs

DP never plays practical jokes.

Now the mystery. My lovely heirloom grandfather clock stopped sometime since Monday night. I can’t say exactly when but I noticed this afternoon and asked DP to wind it.

5 minutes later he came into the kitchen looking rather pale and told me that the clock has stopped as the winding chains are missing. Both of them. They are some 8ft long with heavy weights on the ends and to remove them requires some dismantling of the clock as well as knowing how they are fixed.

They are not on the floor of the clock case. They have quite simply vanished.

We’ve gone from WTAF to freaked out, annoyed and now somewhat amused. Clearly something doesn’t like my clock!

I am totalling unable to come up with a rational explanation for this. There just isn’t one that either of us can come up with

There was a lot of activity when we first moved in but it rapidly quietened down.

Apparently, my husband experienced something similar when he first moved into this house. It stopped completely when his ex moved out.

Santa is not thin and it's the wrong time of the year anyway. I don't believe in ghosts, so I give you one possibility to think about.

The clock stopped working much earlier than the last time you thought you heard it chimed, last Tuesday. As you say it's white noise, you may have thought you heard it but didn't. It's not unusual, I've woken up a few times thinking the dogs were having fun in the lounge room, only to find them sleep in their beds.

If the clock stopped working days earlier, you need to expand your search for an explanation.

I agree with the spirits of the house not liking intruders or certain objects.

Our first house together was part of a 1700s farmhouse. There were delays with the sale and the owner of another part of the building very kindly let us stay in it. I woke up one morning with a woman at the side of my bed, wearing an apron, shawl and headscarf. Her expression was literally ”get up and do some work”! I turned around to tell DH and felt her disappear. I never had a ghostly experience in our part of the building.

The tick tock of a grandfather clock is made by a cog that “walks” along the weighted chain, so without it the clock stops. The cog mechanism moves the hands and needs winding to give it energy and the pendulum gives the timing. One of my favourite childhood jobs was to “help” wind up all the clocks with DGF.

So whoever/whatever took your chain knew what they were doing.

Was there any point when your DP was in the house and you weren't, OP?

Does he have a bondage fetish?!

Reason dictates either it was your husband or an intruder or another, legitimate visitor.

Tut tut,it wasn't just any old ham, it was M&S honey roast ham! 😉😄

This. If the winding chains are not are the bottom of the clock, someone has taken them. Who has taken them out is the question you need to investigate.

I'm actually worried you'll soon start hearing the sound of chains being dragging around the floor to the house in the middle of the night... 👀

I now imagine that the op lives at Button House and is walking amongst several ghosts giving each other a rapturous applause at having summoned enough energy to steal the chains.

Do you have a functioning carbon monoxide detector? All gas checks up to date?

That can mess with your mind and cause you to do things then forget about them.

I often recount a story about how a colleague and I couldn't find a computer in the office. She told me to use the end computer, I went to it and said "oh, it's not there". She came over, looked at the empty desk and said "that's really weird - how's a whole computer gone missing?"

We were looking around the office to see if someone had moved it and someone else came in and said "what are you two doing", we told her we were looking for the missing computer and she asked which one was missing. We told her the end one, and she pointed at the desk, looking very confused and said "what? this one?". When we looked round, the computer that neither of us had seen, was sat right there where it should have been!

I've always thought it was just two of us going mad, but in hindsight, it was a very old building...! eek!

Hells bells,Flash Gordon would have nothing on me in speed if I heard that in the middle of the night!😱👻

A goddess card for advice:
Kuan Yin: Compassion.
Release judgements about yourself and others and focus on the love and light that is within everyone.

The last line of her info:
She's also a protector of women and children, and she awakens musical interests and abilities as well as psychic abilities.

Have you had any tradesmen in doing work recently ?

Maybe it was the ghost of Jacob Marley gearing up for Christmas and he decided he fancied some new chains.

I am completely intrigued, OP. I have recently been wondering if ghosts are any good at electrical engineering. I swear to god that a light switch in my (old) house now turns on a different light from the one that it used to. My kids agree. My husband thinks I’m mad - but, bless him, he’s not that observant or retentive and there’s no way he would remember which switch went with which light, in this part of the house.
Maybe I will ask the house to please rewire the switch, and see what happens 😁

😆😆😆

The exploding glass shade is not that mysterious. The vanishing cloth, meh.

The chains and weights…if the chains did not break and the chains and weights are not on the floor of the case, then logically, either you or your husband took them.

If you didn’t do it, then your husband did.

As pp said, both Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot agree that whatever possibility is left, however improbable, is the likely solution.

There are actually 4 possibilities if no one else has been in the house:
You did it.
Your husband did it.
You both did it (people do crazy things for attention or pranks or cons).
You're lying.

In other words, if you’re telling the truth to us, then your husband did it. No matter what you believe of his character. The chains and heavy weights did not disappear into thin air.

........... hmmmmmmm.........🤔

Loooooool.
Do we know what happened in the end? I lost the post 🫣 I followed till the evening when she wen t to bed waiting for “next day”

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Your DH is having you on!

I've watched too many horror things. I've decided someone is living in your attic.

Me too. The next step is going to the library and furiously studying the history of the house only to find a massive creepy back story that weirdly, noone in the neighbourhood will talk about. You'll then finally find one eccentric neighbour who will finally talk in hushed tones about who used to live there and how they died..... dun dun dun...

How completely bizarre. Aren't you scared living there, OP?