Today is the last Saturday in September and that makes it National Ghost Hunting Day. While Iowa City is not generally known as a hot spot for haunts, there are a few places in town which you could call a little spooky. These include a place called Gaslight Village and the Black Angel. You can read about these in an article, “Who You Gonna Call? A Haunted History of Iowa City.”
A few years ago, we had a couple of mysterious occurrences at our previous house. One of them was hearing knocking, which seemed to be in our attic. We debunked that as the echo of construction workers hammering siding on a house way up the street.
Another mystery we never solved was the flipping of drain tile covers on the tile intake drain in our back yard. This went on for weeks. I even left a critter cam out to catch whatever or whoever was removing the drain tile covers. I put rocks on top of the lids and whatever or whoever was flipping them just tipped the rocks over.
It never seemed plausible that draining water pushed the lids off. Although we got rain, it wasn’t enough to overflow the tile drains. I tried screwing on worm gear clamps but that didn’t stop the flipping.
We speculated it might be animals or pranksters, but we never did catch anything or anybody in the act. The “haunting” stopped after we hired workers to screw the lids on.
We have drain tile in our yard at our new house and had the covers installed and screwed on tight. We’ve never had a problem.
You can find my blog posts on the drain tile lid flipping saga by just typing in “drain tile grates flipped.” There are several and they were all around August through October of 2022 and 2023—Halloween month.
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