How I Busted the Pool Hall Ghost and Other Tales about Eerie Sounds

Things that go "whacka-whacka ungow" in the night

Pool Hall - Photo Library of Congress

An article in Curbed this week gave a plausible but not entirely satisfying answer to for the mysterious “ghosts playing marbles in the ceiling” sound that many people seem to hear, especially if they live in older, and more likely to be haunted, buildings. I’ll get to that in a moment, but now I’d like to tell you about my ghost-busting adventures.

Ojai and the Haunted Place

Pink Moment, Ojai - Photo Philip Houtz

For a number of years we rented the smaller half of a duplex in the middle of an Orange grove in Ojai. There were two other units on the property along with a tumble-down tractor barn that my daughter called “the coyote house.”

The Ojai valley is a strange place, mainly because of the way it is situated against an East-West traverse of mountains. The valley fills with golden light early in the morning. In the late evening the valley is often painted with an unearthly cotton-candy shade of light known in these parts as “the pink moment.”

I don’t know if it is the quality of light or some other factor but quite a few people see Ojai as home to an unusually high degree of spiritual activity.

The Moaning Ghost

When we moved into the duplex we were told that it was previously occupied by the family’s grandparents. We never learned what actually happened to the grandparents, why they were no longer tenants. We never asked because we never really wanted to know that maybe they had died in situ.

Then the moaning started. We couldn’t localize the sound exactly. It seemed to be coming from the bathroom. There was no pattern that we could track except that it only happened at night and it was a definite, if muffled, human-sounding moan.

The sound wasn’t enough to get us to call a priest. But it did leave us wondering if perhaps one of the grandparents had shuffled off the mortal coil in the bathtub.

Rack ‘em Up

The ghostly moan wasn’t the only haint in the Ojai house. From time to time we would hear what was unmistakeably the sound of pool balls rolling across a billiard table, starting with the sound of the “break” when the cue ball first hits a racked set of balls.

This sound came from the hallway and it made less sense than the moan - why an ectoplasmic game of Snooker? There wasn’t a room in the house big enough to hold a full size pool table, making it unlikely that the grandparents were hustlers in a former life.

Be Still My Beating Heart

As weird and creepy as these haunted sounds seemed to be, neither of them was urgent enough that we lost any sleep over them. 

The truly frightening apparition happened one night when my wife was out of town on business. I was home alone with my daughters in the quite of the orange grove. There had been some reported home invasions in the area - a couple of people dressed as Ninjas were on a burglary spree and were still at large. So I was nervous on that account.

I put the girls to bed and settled down with a book to read when I heard a very clear “lub-dub, lub-dub of a beating heart. The sound unnerved me. Thinking it might somehow be the sound of my own heart I took my pulse and found it quite a bit faster than the sinus rhythm in the living room.

Busting the First Ghost

1933 Speaker Magnet - Photo Public Domain

I walked all around the living room to try and find the source of the beating heart. It seemed to be coming from the armoire where we kept our TV set and stereo. 

I opened the armoire door and checked out the electronics. Neither the TV nor the stereo were turned on or making any sound. There was no sound inside the armoire, yet it was clearly coming from the armoire when I stood a few feet away.

After circling the room this way and that, standing on furniture, crawling on the floor, I finally traced the sound to the stereo speakers that stood on either side of the TV cabinet. Placing my ear to the speaker I could hear that the sound was actually more of a zap-zaaaap than lub-dub but the paper cones translated the sound into a more hearty tone. 

I unplugged the speakers and they kept beating away. Months later I talked with my cousin, who works at JPL and knows quite a bit about magnetics. He was puzzled and couldn’t think of a precise explanation, except that perhaps the speaker magnets were acting as capacitors and discharging at a particular frequency. Or something like that. It was good enough for me. 

Ghost=busted.

Eight Ball, Meet Corner Pocket

I busted my second ghost by accident. I dropped a razor blade on the bathroom floor and as I stooped to pick it up I noticed a fat water droplet growing on the bathtub spigot. 

I thought to myself, “ugh, maybe I need to nag the landlord to throw some new washers on that faucet.” 

As I was thinking about my landlord gripes the big drop of water released its hold on the spigot and fell squarely on the edge of the drain, shattering into a dozen smaller droplets. 

There it was - the sound of breaking pool balls. Something about the construction of the tub and its tile surround amplified the sound of tiny droplets hitting the drain and rolling down the pipe, sound for all the world like a game of billiards.

Busted.

Clog Dancers on the Ceiling, Case of the Ghostly Moan

https://youtu.be/TTqbb2fPm5U

If you’ve never sat in a house while somebody walks on the roof, let me tell you that it doesn’t take much to sound like you’ve got a family of Bavarian clog-dancers up there. 

So one night when the house started shaking like a game of Mastodon Rugby was in full swing I ran outside with my flashlight and saw - nothing. Back in the house I could hear crashing and thumping above and then banging and wailing from the bathroom (again…always the bathroom.)

I shut off all the lights in the house and looked out the bathroom window to see what was going on. I came eye-to-eye with a masked bandit…a raccoon staring down from the eaves. 

Back outside with my flashlight I discovered a small wooden door and been peeled open, exposing the plumbing and a tight crawlspace under the cast iron bathtub. 

So that answered that. In the Spring we had a bunch of horney raccoons shagging under the bathtub, and the sound echoed through the house like a ghostly moan.

Marbles on the Ceiling

I said I’d get back to that Curbed article about marble-playing ghosts. Sarah Harvey talks about a late night sound of marbles dropping on the ceiling, possibly bouncing, and then rolling along a flat surface. Some people have compared it to a ghostly game of keepsies. 

Interesting to note - this phenomena seems to be reported mostly by apartment-dwellers.

I had a similar experience when I lived in the dorms at University of Redlands. Couple times a week the whacky co-eds who lived above us would drop a wire clothes hanger on the linoleum floor. Sometimes it would be two or three clothes hangers. 

When my roommate and I confronted the women, mostly because we were amazed at the regularity of their klutziness. And they denied it.

Well, now we have an answer. Harvey believes the sound is created by the “water hammer” effect and goes into length describing the physics of the knocking-sound you sometimes hear in pipes. (Note-if you do your own plumbing it can sound like the whole house is shanking apart, and I’ve heard it can split pipes.)

“I think the marble dropping sound comes from the pipe being excited into motion from the water hammer effect, and then banging on another pipe, the floor, a beam, etc. It’s the sound of the pipe hitting the nearby object, rather than the sound of water running within the pipe,” added Wilson.

Wilson says whether the sound comes across as more like marbles or pins depends on several factors, such as how securely the pipe is attached to the building structure, how long the free run of the pipe is, what orientation it is in, and the exact nature of the water hammer.

But I’ll say that the Curbed article left me wanting more. It made a connection between marble-on-the-ceiling sound and apartments heated by radiators (Anderson Hall at UOR had radiator heating…when the boiler worked.) A plausible explanation was presented. 

But the author never caught the pipes in the act, never tried releasing air to see if rolling marble sound stopped, or otherwise truly busted the ghost. So I say there’s still some reasonable doubt here, in which case…

THIS GHOST IS INNOCENT!!!

Photo by cdn0gal

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