[crabapple]

So I get ready for bed, turn the lights out and tuck myself in, and I'm honestly just hating every minute of this. I hate the bed, I hate the quiet of the house, I hate the creepy feeling of being in the middle of the desert. I guess I'm some sort of a city guy, and lights and traffic sounds are very comforting to me. So naturally I have trouble falling asleep, feels like I'm just lying in the dark there with my eyes closed for an hour. And at some point I don't remember, I fall asleep.

A while later I hear the window rattling and I kind of half wake up. The window is shaking intermittently like someone is outside grabbing it somehow. I think for a second, It's a burglar! and then suddenly I am wide awake and listening to this rattling window, but I have my eyes closed. Then I realize, this is probably the haunting Frank has been talking about. I open my eyes and look up at the window and I can't see anything, it's just dark out there. The window is still shaking now but it's calming down and now it's just sort of trembling, rattling softly for about twenty more seconds or so. And then it stops.

I think, "We're in the middle of the desert. A person would have to drive out here to even get here, if that is someone outside. And if that is someone, then they're probably freezing their ass off." I wait a while, listening for the sound of wind--there isn't any. The shaking window thing doesn't happen again. Is something else going to happen? I wait for the haunting to get worse. But there's nothing. It takes me another hour to pass out again and then I think I only nap for a little while because I wake up and the sun is just starting to come up and I feel like I haven't slept at all.

So we have toast and weak, lame coffee for breakfast and he says, "So did you hear it?"

"The window was shaking," I said.

"Yep--that's it. It happens every few nights," he tells me. "It usually happens about three or four in the morning. The first time I heard it, it scared the crap out of me because I thought someone was trying to break in. Then I realized that we were out in the middle of nowhere and if it's someone, they're crazy for being out here in the middle of the night. There's wild animals and rattlesnakes and stuff out there, and it's just not a smart place to be walking around outside at night."

"Hmm," I said. "So you don't know what it is at all, huh?"

"Nope."

He moved out of there a few years later and found a place closer to the city, so that's all I can tell you about it.