I’d spent way too much time writing a ghost story and, to be honest, I might have freaked myself out a little bit. Home alone, well past midnight. The Airbnb next door is empty. Neighbors upstairs are on vacation. It’s just me and my cat, Kiki.
I come out of the office and realize the hallway is dark. My room is dark. It doesn’t look welcoming. Kiki rubs against my leg, then looks down the dark hallway, gets really still and then says, “Meow?” Facing down the hallway.
It’s quiet and I listen hard because I swear I heard something, but beyond Kiki’s inquiring meow it’s silent.
I realize technology can get me out of this spooky stalemate.
“Alexa, turn on bedroom lights.”
There’s the bong sound indicating Alexa heard her name, then a pause. Then, “What are you afraid of?”

I owe Akilah a big thank-you for helping with the medical billing stuff. I miss my simple Kaiser HMO. Her expertise is greatly appreciated both here and when I get a dumb explanation of benefits I don’t understand (which is always).

“I don’t understand, though, it’s not like I had a choice about the ambulance service that showed up,” said the man on the phone, frustration evident in his voice. “How am I expected to be on the hook for this? I pay my insurance premiums to you people every month…”
“I hear you, sir,” I said. “The issue here is that the ambulance company charges whatever they want to charge. We pay what’s known as the usual and customary reasonable amount. That’s a cost determined to be what most companies would charge for ambulance transport.”
“Five hundred bucks,” he interrupted.
“In this case,” I said, “Yes, that’s the usual and customary amount.”
“So, what? Was the ambulance made by Rolls Royce? Because otherwise how can they justify charging an order of magnitude more than your usual customary amount? It was…” papers rustle, “$6718.20… minus a paltry $500 and I’m left with an angry bill from this limousine of an ambulance company owing $6218.20.”
“I see here that you already filed an appeal,” I started.
“Which was denied! The last person I talked to said all I had to do was appeal and this would take care of itself. Well, it hasn’t!” he yelled.
“Sir, can you please lower your voice. I need you to calm down if you want to–”
“Calm down?!” He yelled. “My wife of fifty years died two weeks ago and you want me to…” his voice cracked and his volume dropped by half as he tried to continue, “you want me to…” He went silent for a long moment.
“Sir,” I said after a bit without hearing anything. “Are you okay?”
I heard him sobbing quietly.
I let him cry and get himself together on his own time.
Finally, he said, “I’m sorry. This isn’t… this isn’t what I do. This is what Margaret did. Even after she got sick she insisted on making me breakfast. I tried to make breakfast for her but she said, ‘James you’re amazing with computers – always have been – but you can’t make a sunny side egg properly to save your life.’” He sniffled and took a moment. “With her black and white checkered apron with ruffles – the one Susie, our littlest – made for her when she took a sewing class. She’d still have it on and she’d sit right there,” I could practically hear him pointing across the kitchen table, “and she’d go over the budget or she’d call you folks and have it out with you about some charge y’all screwed up.” He laughed, “She had the patience of Job because, I don’t know, it always seemed like she’d out argue you guys. She should be here dealing with this. There wouldn’t be any question. She should be here. She should…” a sob escaped, “She should be here…” He broke down again.
“I’m really sorry for your loss,” I said truly meaning it. “Look, we can file a second appeal…”
“Is that going to do anything?” He said. The hope had gone out of his voice.
“I think so,” I hedged. “You should get some additional information that you didn’t have for your first appeal.”
“Like what?”
“Her doctor told you to call the ambulance, right?”
“Yes,” he said and the tone of that affirmation carried all the dread of the moment he had to call 911 and already knew his wife wasn’t coming back.
“Call their office and get a letter indicating they had you get an ambulance. It’s standard procedure, so it shouldn’t be an issue.”
“And then?”
“The form is online…”
“Another form…”
“I’m afraid so.”
“But I’ve already filled out the first appeal, isn’t that good enough?”
“I wish it were, but you need to…” I stopped because I felt a freezing cold sensation behind my left shoulder. I turned and standing behind me was an elderly woman wearing a black and white checkered apron with ruffles. I could see she was slightly translucent. Her eyes met mine and she gave her head a little shake. “Uh…” I stammered without breaking eye contact, “You know… I think I can use the information in the form and fill in the second appeal,” Margaret smiled. “Can you contact your doctor and get that letter?”
“Yeah, what time is it? One thirty… Okay, I’ll call right now.”
“Great,” I said. “Once you get that, can you scan and email it to me?”
“Yeah, I can. What then?”
Margaret’s smile faded and she arched an eyebrow at me.
“I’ll… I’ll put that with the second appeal form and… I’ll make sure it gets approved.”
“You’ll… what?”
“I’ll walk it through myself and make sure it gets approved.”
“You would do that?”
“Yes, I will.”
Margaret smiled broadly.

It started with the doorbell.
Fitting, really, as that’s where we started integrating IoT (Internet of Things) smart devices into our life. We replaced our “dumb” doorbell with a Ring video doorbell. One night the kids were asleep and in their beds and Jerry and I had fallen asleep when Alexa erupted with the fake doorbell chime followed by “Someone is at your front door.”
“What the hell?” Jerry asked blearily. He’s a heavier sleeper than me, so the chime brought me to full alert and Alexa’s announcement of someone at the door started to rouse Jerry while I was reaching for the axe handle we keep by the bed.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said, starting to put my slippers on.
“No, don’t get up,” Jerry said.
“We have to check it out!” I snapped.
“No,” he said and reached for his phone. Opening the Ring app, he immediately brought up the view from the doorbell camera. It showed our front porch and that’s all.
“Wait, how’d it ring?”
He pressed a button and the screen switched to a recording that started a minute earlier. The camera started recording as the motion sensor turned on but there was nothing on the porch – no burglar, not so much as a curious racoon. In the video the doorbell chime could be heard as the button was pressed, but there was nothing in the video to indicate what pressed the button.
It should go without saying I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
“Mom, who was at the door last night,” Alicia, my oldest, asked at breakfast.
“No one,” I said. “I think one of the racoons in the neighborhood got curious,” I lied.
“Hope you saved that video,” Andy the eleven year old started around bites of Coco Puffs, “I bet that’d get a ton of hits on Instagram!”
“Our racoons are owed a certain amount of privacy,” I said. At that moment the microwave buzzed to life. “That’s odd,” I said.
Alicia and Andy exchanged looks.
“Alexa, did you turn on the microwave?” I asked the fuzzy cylinder.
“Microwave doesn’t support that,” her computer voice replied.
Alicia, Andy, and I exchanged looks.
Before anyone said anything, though, Jerry came into the kitchen. “Morning, honey,” he said kissing me. Then “Hey gang, how’s it going?” to the kids.
“The microwave is haunted,” Alicia said matter-of-factly.
Jerry threw me a quizzical look.
“It came on by itself a minute ago. Something probably bumped it,” I said.
“That’s probably it,” Jerry agreed too quickly as he went to the freezer for a frozen breakfast burrito. “Or, it just knew I was going to throw this in and wanted to be warmed up.” He put the burrito in and said, “Alexa, microwave two minutes.”
“Turning microwave on for two minutes,” she said and the microwave whirred to life again.
Jerry sniffed the air. “Did you put anything on the smoker?”
I suddenly noticed the smell of hickory smoke. “No… Are you sure that’s us?”
“I’m not sure of anything right now,” he said, going to the sliding glass door that led to the back yard. “Holy shit!”
Everyone quirked their ears when Jerry swore, we all beelined for the yard. There his beloved Traeger smart gill sat in a smoking “V” shape. Jerry moved towards it first. Beneath the melted and smoldering cover, the barbeque looked as if the center section had melted and the remaining ends bent in on themselves. Burning pellets occasionally dropped out of the broken hopper onto the concrete.
“What the hell?” Jerry said agog. I couldn’t speak or move.
Fortunately, Alicia could as she emerged from the house with the fire extinguisher, pulled the pin and fired a white stream at the mangled smoker. The hiss of super-heated metal and molten pellets meeting foam snapped us out of our shock. “Thank you, Alicia,” I said.
“Don’t thank me,” she said halting the stream and surveying the steamy mess, “Thank the fire safety course at Girl Scout camp last summer.”
Through the steam, the electronic light of the Traeger’s information panel still shone. Seeing this, Jerry pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened the app for his now-deceased barbeque. “That’s impossible…”
“What, Jerry?”
“It says we turned it on at 3am and set it for high, but then around 7 the temperature went crazy.”
“Crazy, dad?” Andy asked.
“At that setting it shouldn’t have gotten higher than 500 degrees.”
“Looks like it did…” Alicia said.
“Yeah, try 1300 degrees.”
“How is that…” I started.
“It’s not.”
We all stared for a moment before our attention was drawn to loud rapid slamming coming from inside the house. Bang! Bang! Bang-Bang! Bang! The sliding glass door was closed and no one wanted to venture inside to investigate. Bang! Bang! Bang! Our Roomba, moving at impossible speeds, came into the family room violently ricocheting off walls, in showers of drywall (which it managed to partially clean up as it caromed around) before catching air off one of Andy’s shoes on the floor and smashing into the sliding glass door. The glass door exploded as the Roomba sailed past us, skipped once on the patio before splash-landing in the pool.
“What… in… the… ever-living… hell…?” Jerry said.
“Holy shit, we’re haunted,” Alicia said.
I almost chastised her language, but, really the moment warranted it.
After the Roomba we tried to pretend it was a normal morning. Jerry’s burrito didn’t erupt like Mount Saint Helens, so, you know, hooray for small things! The kids went off to school a little with more alacrity than they usually had, and even Jerry was quick to leave for work. That left me and the unexplained.
I called the company who had installed the sliding glass door to schedule a replacement as quickly as possible. I fished the drowned Roomba out of the pool with the net. I even loaded the remains of the Traeger into the wheelbarrow so… I don’t know, maybe Jerry wanted to give it a proper burial or something. I was in the office staring at the Ring video from earlier that morning when I realized I was sweating.
I got up and checked the Nest thermostat. It was set on 102. Because, of course it was. I turned it back down.
The Nest and I continued to dual throughout the day. 95? I set it back to 65. 108? No, back down to 65. 80? Sorry, Nest, 65.
Between the Nest and whichever Alexa was in the room randomly saying, “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear that,” when I hadn’t said a word, I was really grateful when the kids got home.
“I did battle with whatever’s possessing this place today,” I told them. “You guys are on it. Alicia, please keep an eye on the Nest – it suddenly wants to pretend we live in Death Valley. I’m going to lay down for a nap.”
“Yeah, mom,” Alicia said. Then, to Andy, “Get the GoPro – if something else goes haywire I want this on video!”
Andy had gone to the sliding-glass-door-less family room to retrieve the action camera when he yelled, “Hey, we’ve got a kraken!”
I groaned as Alicia and I headed back there. Sure enough, the pool churned and swirled as the smart pool cleaning machine whipped its hoses around wildly like a thrashing beast.
“How…” I started but didn’t bother to finish the question. “Andy, go shut off the breaker to the pool cleaner.”
“Got it, mom,” he started out towards the electrical panel.
“Don’t let it take you down into Davy Jones Locker,” Alicia called helpfully.
Jerry came home a little later. Mercifully, he brought takeout Chinese food. As he unpacked the bag of individual entrée boxes he asked, “So… anything else happen today?”
Before I had a chance to ask the lights in the kitchen went out. “Alexa, turn the kitchen lights on,” I said. The lights came back on.
“So… that’s how it went?” The lights went out again. “Alexa turn on the kitchen lights,” and they came on.
“Pretty much.” I told him about the window company I scheduled to come out the next day, and the wheelbarrow containing the corpse of his barbeque. We moved to the dining room where Andy told him about the pool kraken. The lights in the dining room went out.
“Alexa, turn the dining room lights on,” Jerry said. The lights came back on.
Alicia told him about the Nest’s hot flashes.
“Well, what do you all think? Some kind of digital ghost?” Jerry asked.
“Ghost in the machine?” Alicia asked.
“iGhost?” Andy suggested.
“That’s so dumb, Andy,” Alicia dismissed. “Everyone knows it’d be Apple Ghost.”
The lights went out again.
“Alexa, turn on dining room lights,” I said. The lights came on. “Do we get an exorcist or a hacker?”
“I know of a Jesuit priest who’s big into electronics,” Jerry said as the smart smoke detector started to blare. “That’s new,” Jerry said, opening the smoke detector app on his phone and silencing its strident wail.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes until a faint whirr coming from the other room caused us to exchange silent looks.
“That’s the Wyze Cam Pan smart camera,” Andy said.
“How do you know?” Alicia asked.
“Because I know when mom and dad are pointing it at me when I’m playing Xbox.”
I nodded guiltily at Jerry.
Now we all had our phones out and were staring at the Wyze app watching the camera. It was following a shadow in the family room. When the shadow moved into the hall, the smart lights in the hallway illuminated and the family room fell dark. The recessed hall lights winked out after the shadow passed. We sat transfixed as the lights in the foyer – immediately adjacent to the dining room – turned on. The shadow moved into the foyer as the hallway went dark. It stood there for a moment. It hovered there in the light like a puff of dark smoke. I felt like it was regarding us. Suddenly the August smart deadbolt unlocked with a click and the door opened. The shadow moved outside. Later we’d see that it was caught in the video from the Ring doorbell. The door closed and the August lock clicked again. The motion lights outside lit up… and then turned off.
“Goodbye,” Alexa said.
Months later the August lock clicked open, triggered by a Bluetooth signal. The real estate agent led a young couple into the foyer. “I think you’re going to love this place.”
“It’s beautiful so far,” the wife said. “Why is the family selling this place?”
“That’s actually a little strange. They disappeared suddenly. No one knows why… Oh, I can’t forget to tell you that it’s fully integrated with IoT smart devices…”