Haunted? Who knows?

 Today is the rare day that I have mostly nothing to do and most everyone in the household is gone.  

Yay?

Well, today is also the day that I head to the hardware store.

My daughter moved back home a couple of weeks ago.  This is a good thing for her because frankly, younger people in this day and age have a harder time 'getting started' at life.  Things cost more and there are less jobs that seem to pay a living wage.  So she came back to regroup and try again.  No problem.

Except...downstairs.

She's staying in the basement, which is a decently sized room itself, even if it has it's own quirks for being in the basement.  But downstairs is where I keep all my witchie accoutrements, and one of them is a small, old waterfall style armoire.  The armoire itself has a magnetic door latch and about five drawers.  The drawers are filled with various things, tools, and keepsakes that I've collected over the years.  The door is a small space which has an inserted two posts that someone placed inside with a dowel in the effort to replace whatever wire rack it might have used to be a part of it.  There's nothing in there, save the two pieces of wood, the two dowels, and two 'spirit boards'. 

The spirit boards are newer.  One is a generic kind of artsy one that I bought not too long ago, mass produced and never used.  I think it has a white owl design.  The second one is, I kid you not, a 1998 (ish?) Parker Brothers Ouija board that was marketed towards young girls for sleepovers - it's pink.  It has 'fun' question cards to ask the board and comes with it's own carrying case.  The planchette is even pink.  When it was being produced, there was such a backlash over the redesigning of 'Satan's Witchboard' into a sleepover game that Parker Bros. pulled them from the shelves and basically buried the idea, probably sacked all the geniuses that had anything to do with it as well, just to appease the Puritanical masses.  I have to give more details about it because I absolutely love the board, the idea, and the story behind it.  I also got it for a phenomenal deal in great condition and don't really use it, it lives in my house more as a collectable and the ability to laughingly/seriously say, Yes, I have a pink ouija board.

Anyway, since my daughter has moved in, the door to the armoire has been found open.

Now, the logical side of me says that this cabinet is old, the magnetic latch on the door can be weakened over the years and the basement probably slopes some so there you go, it's a fluke.  There's a perfectly logical explanation of what's happening, even if you're not an engineer or architect, it's a perfectly viable thing.  The witchier side of me says, Honey...you were hanging out in that basement since you moved into the house in November.  In all the times you did some crafting crap down there, it's never opened up.  Now suddenly the cabinet has issues after the kid moves in?  What's wrong with you?

Either way, to satisfy the logical side of me, I'm going to go see if I can't find a replacement latch.  Once that's replaced with something firm, then the witchy side of me can start it's work if it's still popping open, right?

And that's my dilemma. 

There is a certain amount of assurity and confidence that one must have for magic to indeed work.  You have to feel as if you know what you are doing and do it with single focus.  Which, for my castings is pretty much what I do.  It's always the after that I question.  Did I in all reality have effect on the situation through spell casting?  Was this outcome inevitable regardless?  Most of the time, I try not to hyperfocus on something I can't really answer anyway and go about by way with my bad self.  But I think it is the logic and reason of the age which makes me question whether or not something really happened.  While this can possibly be damaging to the mystical, the fact of the matter is that some things have to be shaved down with Occam's Razor.  Sometimes a cabinet really just needs a new latch.  Other times, you might be doing an exorcism.  Either way, I try to weigh both options.  Mainly because of the belief of the Law of Infinite Data.  There's more in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy.  I know that what I know wouldn't fill even part of a library. I'm willing to admit that.  But I'm also open to things that I can't explain and don't understand.  And I think that walking that line of embracing the mystical and being practical makes me better at my Craft.