No cartoons, please
Sue Vorenberg, Orchards
The previous owner of the New England house where I grew up had planted a huge tree in the backyard that I often played in.
He died before we bought the house and moved in, but I remember somebody telling me the story of how fond he was of it.
It was the late 1970s, and we had a color TV in the living room and a little black and white television with a hard-clicking knob to change channels in the basement.
I liked to watch TV down there when my parents were upstairs watching their “boring grown-up shows.”
The basement always seemed to have an eerie feeling to it — not really dangerous, but sort of unsettling. And more than once when I was watching cartoons down there, the hard clicker on the TV would switch channels, slowly, one by one, on its own without me touching it.
I’ve always thought it was the previous owner’s ghost, hanging out down there with me because I liked his tree. But I guess he didn’t want to watch my cartoons either.
Sue Vorenberg is a reporter for The Columbian
