There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and I felt a slight urge to vomit. "Fear" would best describe my emotion. From all indications, Ron was experiencing the same feeling. Ron'’ father, who was not familiar with the phenomena, seemed to feel fine.

When we entered the house, it was quiet, too quiet. All "activity" had stopped. It was like "the calm before the storm."

Ron and I felt anxious, not knowing when, where, or how the "ghosts" would strike, but almost certain that they would. We got the impression that they were waiting for the right opportunity to gain the most reaction or shock-value from us. The phenomena usually operated in this manner.

However, the house retained an eerie calm throughout the evening. My father-in-law’s presence may have had something to do with that.

The "ghosts" seemed to scrutinize visitors before deciding on the most effective course of action to be taken. In the case of timid people, the most terrifying thing that one could possibly imagine would happen to them. Usually if someone came to the house with the desire to witness the phenomena, nothing would happen until after that person left. Then all hell would break loose. It usually reigned on us! This was especially true if we wanted the visitor to witness something. Rarely did the "ghosts" accommodate our wishes. They usually did the opposite. Really dense people usually experienced more subtle forms of harassment or nothing at all.

Ron, his father, and I sat in the living room for a while talking. All was still quiet.

It was late and Ron’s father was getting tired. Being a devout Catholic who never missed Mass on Sunday, he knew that he had to get up early the next morning. He expressed to us his desire to turn in for the night. As he so eloquently expressed it, "I want to sleep in the bed that takes you for a ride!"

Due to a prior incident that I will discuss later, he was referring to our daughter, Deborah’s bed. No problem!

Ron showed his father to the boys’ bedroom and turned back the covers on the bed of his choice. We had temporarily moved Deborah’s bed into the boys room to be used by our son for a while. It seemed that we were always moving things around in that house.

We were sleeping downstairs on the living room floor close to the exit, so it made no difference to us where he slept. Since everything still seemed peaceful, we decided to go to bed for the night, too.

The next morning, we were awakened by Ron’s father. "Have you seen my pants?" he asked.

"No. We haven’t seen them," we replied.

"Where did you have them?" Ron inquired. "Are you sure you brought them?"

"Yes. I know I brought them to wear to church this morning. You see, I wore these shorts yesterday and brought along my good pants to wear to church. I know I had them last night," Ron’s father explained.

"Where did you have them last?" Ron asked again.

"I hung them up on a hook in the closet, right inside of the door, so I could get them this morning." Ron’s father was referring to the closet in the boys’ bedroom, that same closet the school uniforms had disappeared from some years before.

"Then, they have to be there. Nobody’s here but the three of us and we haven’t moved from the living room all night. Maybe you’re just overlooking them," Ron reasoned as he went upstairs to help his father search for his missing pants.

They were gone and could not be found. Just like the uniforms, the pants had disappeared from the closet.

A delightfully impish feeling came over me. "Good!" I secretly thought with a slight twinge of glee. "It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person!"

I was glad that something benign, yet obvious, had happened to Ron’s father. At last he had, firsthand, experienced one aspect of the phenomena. Perhaps, this incident would open his mind a little and cause him to contemplate the vent, to think!

Perplexed by the incident, Ron’s father went to Mass scratching his head in astonishment and donning the Bermuda shorts that he had worn the day before. When he returned from Mass, so did his pants! There they were hanging on the hook in the closet exactly where he had put them.