Am I a Poltergeist or a Halloween Freak Show?

A missing $20 bill suddenly appears in exactly the spot I had searched only hours before. Though I can't account for the reason the money was not there the last time I looked, I have to agree (with myself) that I must be experiencing blackouts (without the aid of drugs or alcohol) or that my mind enjoys confusing me.

Either I keep having paranormal experiences, or I am becoming adept at placing items all over the house and then sabotaging myself by not remembering where I place them. When the items suddenly show up in the most obvious places, I resign myself to the fact that I have probably placed the item in that spot myself but have forgotten that I moved it.

The soundtrack of my life plays like a movie that skips forward, then backward, but forgets to fill in the gaps. The trailer would show me endlessly searching for missing items and finding them in the strangest of places - in obvious places - in places I had already searched - in places where they belong. I'm beginning to believe that all of my belongings wear invisible masks and that they play hide and seek with me - without my permission.

For my whole life things I have owned have seemingly disappeared. What previously sat atop my dresser no longer resides in my house. Not wanting to admit that my friends and family members are thieves or that poltergeists have invited themselves into my life, and because these situations occur with great frequency, I decide instead to accept that I am an oddity and that poltergeist activity is part of my life - very spooky to realize that the haunting you think is coming from your house is actually emanating from you.

I start to believe I am going crazy, like I might open up the door one Halloween and find myself standing on the outside looking in at myself, a mirror of a ghost masquerading as a human being.

But every once in a while a hint of reality appears in my home, though it, too, is dressed in costume and shrouded in mystery. Consider the time I bought two spaghetti-strapped t-shirt dresses, one in pink and one in blue. That decision and the events that followed introduced me to a new facet of weird - unexplainably weird.

My sister and her two sons were living with me and three of my children at the time, and when the blue t-shirt dress went missing, I asked her if she borrowed it.

"I would never wear something like that," she snapped (I have never been the fashion bug in my family).

I continued to wear the pink one. And then - one day - another pink one appeared among my clothes. I asked my sister, "Are you sure you didn't buy one too?"

And my sister said, "You probably bought two of them."

"Yes," I agreed, "I did buy two of them - a pink one and a blue one. Why would I buy two of the exact same thing in exactly the same color?"

My sister shrugged. "Because you would do something like that." She walked away leaving me to wonder if she was playing some kind of trick on me or if I was utterly insane. Needless to say (I'm saying it anyway), I was mystified. I was sure that some ghost with an annoying sense of humor was poltergeisting (yes I made up that word) me.

Admittedly, I had lost countless items in the past and they often showed up in the most obvious places. But why would I think I had a blue dress and a pink dress when what was obviously before me were two pink dresses? What happened to the blue one? Did I imagine I had bought it or - horrible thought - was I losing my mind?

As normally happens to me, one day one of the two pink dresses disappeared and I was left with only one pink t-shirt dress. Mentally I was in serious trouble. Not only had I imagined a blue dress that I obviously had never purchased, but now I had to deal with the fact that I must have imagined the second pink dress as well.

I often find myself spinning in circles searching for items that seem to just magically disappear. I have to ask myself, am I part poltergeist? Does such a thing exist? And why would I hide purchases I've made? I hate shopping. Maybe what I do to myself falls into the category of sabotaging myself. Or maybe I'm a kleptomaniac who steals my own items, then feels remorse for betraying myself, so I put them back, but to conceal my own identity, I block the crime from my mind.

You can see I've given this subject a lot of attention. But how can I not when things like this happen:

One year, long after my sister and her sons moved out and long after my own children left home and I was living alone, I purchased a very good camera to capture photographs of my growing number of grandchildren as they grew up.

Five months after I bought it, one of my grandsons broke the lens cap. I taped the cap to my camera to protect the lens for several months before I decided to visit a camera shop and purchase a new one. The shop didn't carry that particular lens cap and my online searches showed that shipping costs outweighed the cost of the cap.

My only other option was to drive 140 miles to Chicago and visit one of the camera shops downtown. Factoring in the cost of gas, I decided to live with the broken and taped lens cap.

And then one day, as I was sitting at my computer, I noticed a perfectly formed lens cap sitting next to me on the counter. Nobody could have placed it there, because I was the only one home - actually I was the only one living in the home. The lens cap I found sitting next to me on the counter looked exactly like the lens cap my grandson had broken, so I decided to snap it onto my camera. It was a perfect fit.

When I related to friends and family the unusual circumstances about finding the perfectly formed lens cap, everybody told me, "You probably only thought you broke it." Did I? Is this more evidence to prove my slide into insanity?

Whenever these things happen, I can't help but question my thought processes, my perceptions, and my logic skills. Had the lens cap never been broken in the first place? Had somebody removed the tape? Was the tape ever there? Had I perhaps unknowingly driven to Chicago, walked into the camera shop, purchased the lens cap, and had no memory of the trip or the buy?

I might have believed that I had imagined the broken lens cap until the day I pulled the camera out of its case (with the perfect lens cap still attached to it), and out popped the broken lens cap wrapped in tape. Suddenly I had two lens caps. How did this happen? How did I suddenly have in my possession two lens caps?

Even if two lens caps had arrived with the camera when I purchased it, how was it possible that one of them made its way to my computer in a different room in a completely new house while I was living alone?

Most of the time I feel as if I am living in a world of nonsense, wishing for everything to make sense. So often nothing does, and it doesn't help that these situations occur often. Just recently, while I was visiting my son in California, I had brought along my Advair medication. Knowing how important my meds were, I placed them in an obvious spot, but one day, after fruitless searches that lasted for hours, I couldn't find the Advair anywhere.

I tore apart my suitcases, placing each item from the suitcase onto the bed as I sifted through the contents of both suitcases. I turned my purse inside out. I lifted the suitcases from their spots on the floor and searched beneath them and even moved the air mattress and all the covers and pillows searching for the Advair. I searched the dressers, the kitchen counter tops, under the couches, everywhere I might have put it and everywhere I wouldn't. The Advair was nowhere.

I asked the family if anybody had seen a purple disk. Nobody had.

The next day, after everything had been placed back in the suitcases, which I had left open for easy access, my son and his family were scrambling around the house, gathering shoes and getting dressed for an outing. I had left my shoes upstairs and went up to retrieve them. Before I walked out of the room, I noticed the purple disk sitting on top of my clothes inside my still open suitcase - in plain sight.

People will claim that all of these happenings were figments of my imagination, that they had been in their obvious spots all along and that I had somehow blindly missed them, but so far nobody has been able to figure out the t-shirt dress situation, because when the second pink dress showed up for the second time, I had convinced myself that I must have inadvertently bought two pink dresses, even though I clearly remembered purchasing a pink one and a blue one. Even though I clearly remembered wearing the blue one, I had to consider the possibility that I had become God's favorite little soap opera.

Several years after the t-shirt dress experience, after I had packed and moved numerous times, I was removing clothes from boxes and putting them away in my new home. Inside one of the boxes, sitting on top of my other clothes was the blue dress. I now have three of those t-shirt dresses; two pink dresses and one blue one. I use them as nightgowns.

So the questions might be: am I haunting myself, is a poltergeist haunting me, or should I have myself committed? Do I live in the most haunted house in America or am I the most haunted person on the planet? Another thought crosses my mind - am I really alive, or do I only think I'm alive? Maybe I'm really only a Rod Serling puppet, and even you have been deceived into believing I am real.

For the logical-minded among you, another possible answer exists for the mysteries that define me - maybe these Halloween-types of experiences, combined with my incessant haunting and sabotaging of myself are actually symptoms of a disease that borders on the psychotic fringe of a mental disorder occurring only in the Twilight Zone.