Some Interesting (and Somewhat Spooky) Events, Concerning Clocks

Sept 2025: In the evening, my wife Helena and I were standing near the drip coffee maker in the kitchen. She wanted me to put coffee in the filter and water in the reservoir, as she wasn’t feeling all that well and thought she might spill something if she did it herself. However, she did stick around to make sure that I wouldn’t automatically turn the machine on after refilling it, as I often did, just by habit. The coffee was to be used in the morning, we were just setting it up that evening, for that purpose.

As a joke, I pretended I was going to turn it on after filling it up and pointed my finger at the on switch, as if I was about to turn it on. I said something like "now I stab at thee, on switch", riffing off the quote from Moby Dick ("From Hell’s heart I stab at thee").

At exactly that moment the clock on the wall suddenly fell down, with a loud thud as it hit the floor. The clock was in the same general direction as I was ‘stabbing’, as it was behind the coffee maker, a bit above and to the left. However, my finger was still a good foot away from the wall, as was my wife’s hand.

The timing was so precise that it was hard not to think that there was some significance to it. Helena wondered if it presaged a death. If nothing else, it presaged purchasing a new wall clock.

Some time in the 2010s: We had had a similar experience some dozen or more years earlier, while watching a TV show late one night. A comedy skit came on, featuring some black humour about a funeral. Just at that time, a different clock fell off a bookshelf near the TV. That clock had been owned by my mother, who had passed away a few months before.

Related to this was another occasion, when a book about War Brides fell off the bookshelf at another strategic time, again one that had significance my mom, who had been a war bride. Unfortunately by now my memory is a bit vague on the details around that one.

 

Perhaps all clocks are really time vultures in disguise.