Did you enjoy your April Fools
Day yesterday? I really didn’t participate much in the way of shenanigans. I
made one attempt at monkey business, and it wasn’t received well, so I called
it a day. I don’t particularly have much affinity for this day of tomfoolery; and I
suppose it dates back to my youth.
It was Friday, April 1, 1988.
I was seventeen years old and thankful for it every waking moment. I had a
driver’s license, a love interest, and a friend who was just as willing as I
was to drive 40 minutes into Los Angeles for a pretty spectacular hamburger. I
was confident that if I shopped my life story around to a few production
studios, it would be a made into a movie. And not just any movie, a summertime blockbuster movie. With cool
cars, loud music, and an occasion make-out scene. On the beach, preferably.
On this crisp spring evening
a group of us had gathered at my house for some holiday frivolity. As it got
late most had gone home, but my friend Steve was lingering. Probably to see if
we were going to make a run for hamburgers. Suddenly the phone rang.
It was Steve’s sister,
Shannon, who was two years older than us. Steve and Shannon’s parents were out
of town, so Shannon was home by herself. She had called to see when Steve was
coming home because she had been home alone all night and was kind of
unsettled. Steve looked at me with this kind of “the wheels are turning” look,
and he told Shannon that we were going to finish watching a movie, and he would
be home. Then he hung up and we hatched a plan to properly freak Shannon out.
Shannon wasn’t expecting
Steve for another hour, at least, so we had the element of surprise on our
side. Originally, our plan was just to sneak into the house, sneak up behind
her and scream “boo!” or some such non-life-threatening scare. But then we
reached the house…and we just sort of went with the flow.
The front door was locked, so
we snuck around the side of the house to the back, and peeked in. There was
Shannon, sitting on the couch watching television, with a perfect view of the
sliding glass door and also all the windows along the back of the house. We had
to break in, but obviously couldn’t do it with her sitting there.
“Let’s knock on the front
door and then run around to the back,” I suggested. She’ll come to answer the
front door, nobody will be there so she’ll stand there for a few minutes
wondering what’s going on, and it will give us enough time to sneak in through
the sliding glass door in the back.”
That’s what we did. We
knocked on the front door, and ran to the back.
As we cleared the corner of
the house we could hear Shannon’s unanswered “Hello? Hello…? Is somebody
there…?” We ran to the sliding glass door at the back of the house, but it was
also locked. Steve’s collie, Princess, could see movement outside though, and
she began barking like crazy. That certainly helped us with the unsettling
atmosphere.
At that point we heard the
front door slam and we knew Shannon was spooked by the dog barking and was
heading back to the living room to see what she was barking at. So we ran back
to the front of the house. We tested the front door, and much to our good
fortune, Shannon had run away so quickly, she left the front door unlocked. We
silently walked in. We stepped into the guest room off to the side of the
entryway, and waited for just a few moments to plot.
Shannon ran right past the
guest room and up the stairs. Sensing that Shannon was now a little freaked
out, we began to turn up the fright. We turned off the TV and then went all
around downstairs turning off the all the lights. Princess recognized us at
this point, so she wasn’t going crazy…but she did let a couple of barks fly.
There was a guest bathroom
downstairs, just off from the guest bedroom, so Steve turned on the shower. And
for some reason, maybe because we were seeing it from Shannon’s point of view,
but to be in a house where all of a sudden the TV has been turned off all by
itself, all the lights downstairs have mysteriously been turned off by
themselves, and your dog is occasionally barking…to have the shower suddenly
turn on seemed so unnerving, we could barely stand it ourselves, and we knew we
were the ones doing it! Like some axe-wielding maniac was washing off his axe
before coming upstairs to finish you off.
We crept up the stairs then,
and started down the hallway. We could hear Shannon on the phone in her
bedroom, talking to their other sister, Michelle, who lived across town. “I
don’t know what’s happening – but the lights have all turned off and I am
freaking out and I think I’m going to just call the police!”
That should have been enough
to encourage us to come clean, but instead we turned off all the hallway lights
upstairs, leaving Shannon’s bedroom as the only lit room in the house, and then
Steve picked up the little music box in the hallway, wound it up, and put it
back in its place, emitting this ghostly echo of a miniature piano playing. And
that was the final straw.
We heard Shannon hang up the
phone, and before she placed a call that could have made for a very bad
evening, we sped downstairs opened the front door and slammed it shut, acting
like we had just come home.
We walked upstairs and gave a
non-convincing, “Oh, hey, Shannon, what’s up?” At that point, she threw the
phone at Steve. See, some people just don’t know what’s funny.
