Starting At Ihop

My wife and I were about to go to a friend's place but since we hadn't eaten dinner, we decided to stop at the IHOP, in Ankeny, IA. It was about 7 pm. I forget what month but it was somewhere between March-May and it was a beautiful day. The sun was shining brightly and the IHOP was busy and full of other individuals. We've been to this IHOP a number of times but nothing unusual has ever happened... Until this night.

We were chatting, nothing out of the ordinary. I was served with two plates, one plate with my pancakes and the other with my main dish. My wife was served her pancake dish and the server let us know that it would be a few minutes for her main dish. We dug-in and after a few minutes, when we both acquired our main dishes, we pushed our pancakes aside. Pushing our plates or even the wet-from-condensation glasses was a difficult feat because the table was so incredibly sticky (ever hear of soap IHOP?) that it took a decent amount of effort to push something across the table to one another.

We were facing one another, both eating our main dishes. Our pancake plates beside each of us. Out of my peripheral vision, I could see the entire table and quite a bit of the restaurant... As we were eating our main dishes (about 5 minutes into eating), my wife's pancake plate moved in a diagonal, straight line. Immediately after, we both looked up with a WTF face and asked if the other saw what had just happened. We both saw what happened and we were both so surprised and confused as to what just happened that it was the only thing we could talk about for days. The plate was perfectly still and untouched, the table was incredibly sticky, the plate's bottom was dry, and the plate suddenly moved about eight inches in a perfectly straight line, diagonally from my wife.

Up to this moment, this was definitely the weirdest thing to have happened to either of us but more was soon to follow. After we left, we went to our friend's and let them know what happened. Not surprisingly, we were met with a bit of skepticism.

The next night, we decided to "test our luck", so we decided to once again eat at IHOP. Nothing CONVINCING happened but when I spoke of what happened the night before, the ice and straw in my cup moved around... Ice melting?...needless to say, it was likely nothing.

For the next couple of months, we heard noises in our apartment that definitely didn't sound like the guy above us. We would hear knocks and other bizarre/unusual noises that we didn't notice before. Still, nothing as concrete as the first IHOP experience occurred.

Although, my wife was sleeping and while I was playing on my IPAD, she declares, "Tell that woman to get out of our closet". I said, "What are you talking about?" thinking that she is woke up and was talking nonsense. She said again, "TELL THAT WOMAN TO GET OUT OF OUR CLOSET!" At this point, I was freaked and woke her up but she didn't know what she said.

Because of the "weird" occurrences, we decided to do a smudging (sage) on our apartment. Her mother came over, on a Sunday, so it was the three of us in our apartment. The AC, furnace, fans, EVERYTHING (except lights) were off and at this point, the windows were closed and all doors were opened. As her mother and I were sitting on the couch, my wife was in the bedroom. We could hear her attempting to light the stick of sage when suddenly the door to our bedroom SLAMS! After this was over, I attempted to slam the door with my feet but I couldn't match the force that was applied to the door...

The door slammed and we ran to her side. We opened all windows and covered every cubic inch of the apartment. No occurrences have happened since but I can't get it out of my mind that I wake-up every night, at the same time. I have been waking-up at about the same time since we did the smudging. I never know what time it is because I will be too out of it to care to check and there is a very "off" feeling about things, so I try to just go back to sleep. Nothing has ever happened at night but EVERY night, I wake-up at the same time. Since I never look at the clock, I'd have to guess that I wake-up around 2-3 am.