Do you believe in ghosts?

When I was seven years old, I inherited a cheap plastic alarm clock from an older sibling.

It wasn't digital, it was the little square kind that requires you to set the alarm using a dial on the clock face.

After tinkering with it for a while, I set it on my little desk next to my bedroom door, all the way across the room from my bed, and forgot about it.

I forgot that is, until it awoke me with a dull buzz at what must have been three in the morning or so.

I was a pretty excitable kid with an interest in ghosts and scary stories. I knew it would be crazy to try myself

to walk across my dark room and stop the buzzing. Surely my mother would hear from my parents' room

down the hall and come to my rescue. So I pulled my blanket over my head, plugged my ears, and tried to go back to sleep.

But there it was, still buzzing, and maybe at this point, alerting all the other ghosts and ghouls in the neighborhood as to my whereabouts,

so I gathered up my courage and moved my blanket aside. Just then, a figure walked into the dark room, over to the desk, and the alarm stopped

ringing. I thought I recognized that white nightgown with flower print. Mom had come to the rescue at

last, so I called out to thank her. Mom, the figure turned and seemed to look at me, and then

vanished. I wasn't a terribly superstitious boy,

but I also wasn't a hard-boiled skeptic, so in the morning I had to find out what really happened.

At breakfast, I thanked my mother for turning off the alarm clock during the night. I told her I was

sorry that it went off. I didn't really know how to

work it. Maybe she could teach me. Her answer wasn't very helpful. She asked, what alarm clock?

She had no idea what I was talking about.

You're probably saying to yourself,

Huh, Blair's mom must have been in the fog of sleep or something, forgot that she turned off the alarm.

Or maybe you're thinking that the clock had a shutoff mechanism that kicked in after a few minutes,

in addition to the little rectangular button protruding from the clock top.

...