Sierra MackelprangFollow

Date Collected

Fall 11-29-2018

Place item was collected

Logan, Utah

Informant

Tiffany Eller

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Tiffany is a young mother living in Boise, Idaho. She’s been living in Idaho most of her life, and has lived in a series of houses all over ADA County. She is a graphic designer and lives with her husband Danny and her daughter Henley.

Context

: I had told Tiffany about my project weeks before I started working on it and she was extremely excited to help and quickly agreed to a Facebook chat interview. I have known Tiffany for about ten years, and have spent a lot of nights looking up creepy pasta’s videos of ghosts and aliens and other supernatural occurrences. Tiffany herself is a firm believer of the supernatural, and has told me numerous stories of her own accounts and people whom she has talked to. She is a very old friend and is cherished by all who have the privilege of meeting her.

Text

Tiffany: “Alright so maybe four or five years ago, my cousin Nick who was mmm…probably like 25 at the time, told me a story about how he was house sitting for this family and this house was huge, it was like a big mansion, umm kind of in the foothills of Boise and he had house sat for them plenty of times before,… but this one time he was house sitting, and he was laying on their couch in this like…back room. It wasn’t like their main living room but this back room and it had this big high ceiling probably like…oh I’m gonna like totally mess it up if I try it-it was tall enough that if you wanted to replace the light bulbs you had to have a ladder like there was just no way…. and you had to have a tall ladder..”

Me: “Right.”

Tiffany: “There was just no way to change the light bulbs without having a tall ladder. So probably like what… what’s an average ceiling? Ten feet?”

Me: “Yeah like eight...ten feet.. Around there.”

Tiffany: “……..So it was probably like fifteen to twenty feet tall…and on the ceiling was a light,…it was one of those ones that was- oh…..can you hear me?”

Me: “Yeah, yeah….oh wait oh NO! DANG IT!!! [Clicking from me trying to fix the connection.] “The connection was lost I am trying to redial Tiffany….Right now…..We’re calling her back! [Laughing.]”

[Click from me repressing the record button.]

Tiffany: “Ok so there-there was this light and it was one of those globe lights,…so it looks like a crystal ball on your ceiling! [laughs] you know the ones…and Nick, Nick was lying on this couch and he was just looking up at the light letting his mind wander, but he started wondering ‘ I wonder if that globe is a twist on glass ball or if there’s those like little pins in it to hold it up there.’ And so this was just a passing thought he had as he was falling asleep on this couch and when he woke up that light fixture…. [Laughs] the globe was on the floor in the middle of the floor….right next to three scores all placed neatly together and I- if I remember correctly...and the light bulb so the three pieces he was wondering about were just sitting in the middle of the floor when he woke up and there’s just- there’s no way…like…”

Me: “Right”

Tiffany: “No way that could have happened by human interactions and-and even if it was it-it would have taken an elaborate- like somebody to sneak into the house… and doing that independent of knowing that he even had that thought!”

Me: “Right”

Tiffany: “So...anyway when the people like got back from there trip [starts to laugh] he had to tell them what happened! [Laughs mercilessly.]”

Me: “[laughing hard.] No! [Continued laughing.] Like some ghost...uhhhh took the light fixture off…”

Tiffany: “And he said ‘I don’t know how to tell you this but this stuff just ended up on the floor and I couldn’t put it back because the ceiling is so high.’ And they were-they were really confused and he- Nick told me ‘I think they thought I was lying to them, but…I didn’t- I didn’t know what to do!…[laughs] I just told them the truth!’ So they ended up hiring him back a-again to watch their house another time [Starts to laugh while talking] and the time after that that he went to watch their house that room was closed off and it said do not enter!” [Laughs.]

Me: “Oh my gosh…they were just so worried!”

Tiffany: “So they were just a little spooked too!” [Continues laughing.]

Me: “That’s so funny...oh my gosh…They were just like ‘we don’t want that crazy guy taking stuff off our ceiling anymore!’”

Tiffany: “Yeah! It was just really weird though…..ya know? Yeah…”

Texture

When Tiffany told me this story, she could not keep the giggles under control. You could just tell that this particular story was one of her favorites. Her and her cousin are extremely close and I think that she just could see his reaction so vividly in her head that it was just so real to her. I also just loved the description of how awkward it was for him to tell the owners of the house what had happened. I’m sure they were extremely puzzled and a little spooked by his explanation. They more than likely did not believe him and thought that two things must have happened. One, either Nick got really drunk and took the light fixture down and forgot about it. Or that he broke it and was trying to replace it with a new one for some reason.

Course

ENGL/HIST/ANTHRO 2210

Instructor

Lynne S. McNeill

Semester and year

Fall 2018

Theme

G7: Unexplainable Phenomena

EAD Number

2.1.6.8.16

Download

Additional Files

The ceiling lamp.m4a (11465 kB)
audio Interview

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