Couple years ago, I was in my house when a car alarm started going off intermittently. I was pretty steamed about it too because it was 11:00 on a school night. The alarm would ring out for a minute or so and then go quiet, and as sooooooon as I was drifting off to sleep, it would go off again. Finally, I pulled on my bathrobe and went to the back door to see if I could see where it was coming from.
And I could totally see where it was coming from because it was coming from MY CAR. Which was weird because my car didn’t have an alarm.
At least, I didn’t know it had one, but turned out, it had a panic function, which would flash the lights and sound the horn over and over if you hit the button on the fob.
But I hadn’t hit the button on the fob.
I grabbed my keychain and stabbed at the red button with the exclamation mark, but the noise wouldn’t stop. Until it did—phew—and then after a random interval (three seconds to four minutes), it would start again.
I got in and started the car. The cacophony stopped! Blessed silence! That lasted until I turned the engine off. Aaaaaaaargh!
At that point, I was worried my neighbors were going to burn my house down so I drove down to the pawn shop on the corner—my neighborhood is very classy—and called Durham P.D. and told them my car was possessed.
The dispatch was like, “Uh… this doesn’t seem like an emergency,” and I was like, “No… but yeah, can you please send somebody because I don’t know what to do k thx.”
I sat there for 20 minutes with the engine running, and then within 30 seconds of each other, four officers in three patrol cars showed up. I explained what was going on and turned off the engine, and we stood there.
A minute went by.
And I was like, “Oh fuck, it’s not gonna do it. I’m gonna look like a crazy asshole who calls 911 because she’s lonely.”
Me, tugging at collar: “Heh heh, I swear it was…”
It went off, thank god. The cops witnessed my poltergeist.
One of them popped the hood, opened the fuse box, and took out the horn fuse, which stopped the alarm. He said I wouldn’t be able to honk my horn, and I said that was A-OK. I thanked all the officers profusely and returned to my house without fear of an attack by an angry mob of my neighbors.
The next day I took my car to the mechanic, and when he looked inside the fuse box, he found pieces of acorns and cigarette butts. Turns out, the squirrels that lived in my pin oak had been wildin’ out under the hood of my Subaru. Eatin’ acorns, smokin’, and chewin’ fuse wires.
I told you my neighborhood was classy. Watch out if you come over—the squirrels around here are hoodlums.
