Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf by Christopher Balzano, Tim Weisberg

there.”
    He did not get around to putting the tools away until that weekend. When he observed the mess that Saturday morning, he noticed none of the hooks that held the tools were bent, and the tools were thrown about the basement in places they could not have naturally gotten to. “A hammer was under an old desk I have down there. For it to have gotten there, someone would have had to throw it. It’s a good 10 feet away.”
    A few days later, Carl’s wife noticed a picture had fallen off the wall. “It was on the kitchen table. I didn’t put it there and my wife had nothing to do with it,” Carl said. The glass over the picture, which is of his wife during a trip to Europe, was shattered. “There was a screwdriver right through the glass. It was like someone had tried to stab her in the picture.”
    His wife was frightened by the incident, even though the family had experience with the paranormal. “I know there are people in my house. This felt differently and we were trying to figure out who it might be,” Carl said.
    They got their answer in the next few days.
    “Uncle Webb had always liked the Beatles,” Carl said. “Radios in our house started to turn on and play Beatles songs. We have a radio in just about every room in the house. They would turn on by themselves and a Beatles song would play. They’d be on stations neither of us even listens to. Three of them have to be hand-tuned, so it’s not like someone hit the scan button or something. I began to wonder if it was Uncle Webb and what he wanted.”
    The couple decided Uncle Webb was trying to tell them that he had moved on. Tools continued to be moved and radios continued to play. After three weeks, they began to get tired of turning off radios.
    “I asked him to tell me what was wrong. If he had something to say, I asked him to say it. I didn’t really think I would get a response,” Carl said.
    That night, all of the radios in the house turned on, all playing the same song. Carl turned them all off one by one and moved to the basement to shut the last one off.
    “There it was. All of the tools were in a perfect circle on the floor of the basement. In the middle was a picture of my cousin, Jimmy, and me. That picture had been in the attic in a box of pictures. There is no way it could have gotten into the basement.
    “I figured he wanted Jimmy to have the tools. I packed them up the next day and drove to Seattle where he lives,” Carl said. “I didn’t tell him what happened. I just gave him the box and told him they belong to him. He was actually kind of happy about it. You have to put some things aside. Uncle Webb is dead, and I think Jimmy might think it’s been too long. I’m not sure if he ever uses them, but they’re his now.”
    Carl reports the music has stopped playing and the pictures now remain where they are hung in his house.

The Ghosts of Two Christmases Past
    Every year, part of the Christmas tradition in the Balzano household is to decorate with some old family ornaments for sentimental reasons.
    There is one my wife made in grade school and one my son made just a few years ago. One my father gave me goes near the top of the tree. We hang pictures of wreaths and candy canes our children made in grade school. Each has its own story that rings out across the years.
    But what if an ornament could somehow store recollections of past Christmases? More importantly, what if those memories are not all that happy?
    In the 1960s, Janet’s mother purchased an ornament of a young girl wearing a Santa hat and sitting on a sleigh. It was not handmade or antique, just a simple clay statue.
    Janet does not remember anything unusual about the ornament while she was growing up. When her mother passed away a few years ago, she inherited the ornament among other things. Eventually it made its way onto her tree and almost at once, there was something different about the holiday season. The rest of the house had a cozy Christmas feel, but the