The Curious Incident of the Shifting Shirt

Well well well… if the spooky incident involving the sausage wasn’t bad enough, now my apparel seems to be moving about the place of its own accord!

Oh damn, there I go again, giving away the punchline instead of breathlessly building up to it in a drearily predictable way. Obviously I’m just not cut out for telling these spoooky tales of the paranormal.

Were I any good at it, I would be busily pointing out that this day was perfectly normal AND just like any other, and that absolutely nothing had happened thus far that should indicate that my clothing was planning to adjust itself without my interference. I would also make it clear that although there was no reason for me to be particularly observant at the time, I still remember with photographic clarity just how perfectly ordinary conditions were beforehand, and how completely devoid of unusual or irregular influences the scene was. So maybe I should start again:

There was nothing noteworthy or out-of-the-ordinary about conditions in my room the night before this miraculous event happened.

Already, your tiny neck hairs are prickling, yes? For what builds apprehension better than an assurance of utmost normality? Bwooo-ha-ha-hahaha! … *cough* … *cough* …

So, enough waffle, on with the actual story…

The thing is, I have this really ugly blue shirt on my clothes rack which I never wear, and really it just serves as a kind of bookend for my other shirts, which I wear slightly more often. I always shove it to the left, with this jacket-like garment on the right, which I wear all the time.

Blue Shirt on the left, Jacket Thing on the right, OK?

So anyway, one night I’ve noticed that Jacket Thing is not quite dry after washing it [strange that], so I make a special point of separating it from my other clothes to let it air more, pushing it to the right and Blue Shirt all the way to the left. And then I go to sleep, alone in my bedroom.

Next morning, I wake up, roll over, and can’t help noticing that Blue Shirt is now pressed right up against Jacket Thing, exactly as I wanted it not to be the night before. How very odd, I thinks to myself, it is plain as day that this shirt has moved during the night, but how is that possible?

Now here’s where my story could get extra creepy, when I reveal that the reason the shirt is even hanging on my rack in the first place is because my late fiancée bought it for me just a week before she died, and I had not the heart to throw it away. Lucky for me I have endured no such tragedy; it’s just a cheap shirt that I bought and never wear.

But without a deceased lover to blame, what could the explanation be? The cause certainly wasn’t immediately clear. Here’s my preliminary list of possible explanations:

1. Ghostly intervention [someone else's deceased lover in the wrong house?]
2. Divine intervention [an incredibly obtuse warning about the dangers of not believing in God?]
3. Sneaky housemates.
4. Me Sleepwalking.
5. Me actually having moved the shirt the night before, and simply forgotten about it.

Were someone else telling me this story – assuming I hadn’t already tuned out – I would probably bet on explanations 5, 4 and 3, in that order. But as it turns out, none of them are true! Just like an annoying mystery writer, I have withheld just enough information to stop you guessing before I am ready to reveal the rather anticlimactic truth, which is:

I often sleep with an electric fan going (for the soothing white noise), and the slight breeze generated by it caused a tiny rocking motion in the Blue Shirt which allowed it to slowly edge its way along the clothes rack, so slowly that it took an entire night to do so.

Another mystery avoided!