There is a phantom ghost alarm clock in my house that is actually seriously freaking me out.

About a week and a half ago, there arose a peculiar phenomenon in my bedroom, which was that an alarm started to go off every day at 7:59. Every day. Like clockwork. It would beep for about thirty seconds and then stop, which meant that it beeped much too much for the sleepers in that bedroom to go back to sleep. Which was okay on the weekdays because if we weren't up by then we really should be, but on the weekends when it is sleeping time and the gods of sleep have decreed that it is acceptable to sleep well into the AM hours, it was extremely aggravating. Plus we couldn't trace the beeping noise to its source. I would leap out of my bed at 7:59 and search frantically in the whole area where the beeping was coming from, but it was elusive and every time I looked in one place it seemed like it was coming from somewhere else. And the thing was, I only had thirty seconds or so in which to search for the beeping noise, which makes it tricky to conduct any extended searches.

So this morning I was up well before the beeping started, and when I heard it start I decided that it was a good time to hunt for it, since I was not feeling groggy and would therefore be at the top of my alarm-clock-hunting game.

And I found it.

This is the scary part. If you are of a nervous disposition, I advise you to stop reading now.

It was the alarm clock that my mother got for my sister for graduation, the clock radio that my sister will be using when she sallies forth into her new life. I am almost positive that it was the culprit, for when I removed the blankets that were covering it, the sound got louder; and when I held it to my ear, the sound got louder still and appeared indeed to be issuing from that very clock radio.

Not scary, right? Except for THIS. It wasn't plugged in at all.

It really wasn't. I was just going to unplug it and poof! problem solved! but when I went to do that, the plug was dangling loose and not connected to anything whatsoever.

Not scary, right? Because it has an auxiliary battery function perhaps, one that would allow the clock to continue to function even when it is not plugged in?

No! Wrong again! VERY SCARY because the clock wasn't doing anything. The display wasn't lit up with the time, the radio wouldn't go on when I tried to turn the radio on, and what is more, neither of the alarms were set. Neither one! How could the clock know what time it is if the clock isn't set? How could it infallibly go off at 7:59 every morning without even knowing what time it is? And how, how, HOW could it have any alarm at all when both of the two alarms were set at the OFF position? And why did it suddenly start doing the alarm thing in the middle of the summer, after not doing the alarm thing for several months since we introduced it into the environment of our room?

This is totally something out of one of those frightening stories which I've never read because I don't like horror stories but I'm sure this kind of story exists, where, ugh, the mother brings home an innocent something for her loving children and then the something proves to be possessed and begins to take over the souls of everyone in the family. Or, I guess in our case, to use sleep deprivation to drive them into insanity.

Anyway, if the clock goes off again tomorrow, I'm just going to have to bash it to pieces with a hammer and bury the pieces in several different holes all over town and hope that the demon within the clock radio isn't clever enough to put the pieces back together. Cause eek.