Haunted Earring

This week I wrote my article for the newspaper on ghost stories in North Carolina. As such, I had to do a lot of research on the topic online. There's a lot of creepy ghost/haunting stories out there, and I admit, I started to get a wee bit scared. Then I glanced down.

I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop propped on my knees. Perfectly normal, right? Well, when I looked down, I saw something very NOT normal in the middle of my lap. A single earring. Usually an earring would not be cause for alarm, but this time it was.

The earring was a half moon with a star inside it. I'd never seen the earring before, and how the hell did it get there on the middle of my lap without me seeing it? It was like it just appeared out of nowhere. No need to panic, I thought. Maybe it was just one of my friends' earrings and had gotten mixed up in my quilt or something. Not so.

I texted a picture of said earring to all my friends whom it could possibly belong to or who had been to my house in the past three months, but none of them had ever seen it before. Then I really freaked out. Was a ghost or demon or some other kind of supernatural being (like the ones I had just been researching) haunting me? In response to this preternatural occurrence, I locked my bedroom door and sat hunched on my bed with my little black cat, Henry. (I didn't realize until later when one of my friends pointed it out to me, that I had a black cat with me--whom I thought would protect me or some such illogical hope.)

I went to work that night and shared my creepy experience with some of my coworkers. They seemed to share my trepidation about the situation, and I went to bed that night unable to fall asleep for a very long time.

When I woke up the next morning, I had a text from Hannah (my friend who's in Seattle right now working for Americorps). The text said, "Did you like the earring?" I totally forgot that I had opened a letter from her on my bed the day before when I was researching for my ghost article, and I guess the earring had fallen out of the envelope onto my lap without me seeing it. What a relief!

When I later told my father about this incident, he just rolled his eyes and passed it off as his crazy daughter's overactive imagination. Thanks, Dad.