Little Noises

For about a week and a half now I've heard a scritching scratching sound in my wall. At first I didn't know what it was. I thought it was a tree branch scraping on the window, or maybe it was the drain pipe at the corner of the house come loose again and swaying the breeze. The sound was like an insect chirping or a frog croaking.

A friend suggested it was my phone's battery dying--but my phone was fully charged the night the noises started. The noise are regular, not consistent, but regular. A significant amount of time passes between these noise.

The first night I hear the noises, I chalk it up to a random noise that will stop by itself. But the next night, the noise is still there. And the morning after that I still hear the noise. Last weekend in the middle of the day it was still going. At this point, I figured it was part of the house falling down around my ears. All of my electronics are either fully charged or  completely dead.

I couldn't take it anymore, the repetitive but elusive noise was driving me crazy, so today I was determined to discover the source of the sounds. I could hear it was coming from the corner of my room where my desk is. I determined that it was either one of three things: an insect/animal in the wall/crawl space dying for the last week, an outside source, or an electronic.

I didn't think it was an animal, animals are not that precise to make noise on a regular basis for a week on end without stop. I opened the window and waited for a bit, but when the sound came again, it was not any louder with the window open, than without. Finally, I decided to move everything away from my desk to determine whether the sound still came from that general area of the room. This would determine that the sound was coming from the wall or the crawl space rather than anything in my desk.

As  I was moving a small set of drawers from my desk I heard the sound come from the drawers. Eureka! Whatever was causing that obnoxious noise was in the drawers! This is a much small space to search. I opened up the three drawers and searched through their contents. Was it a long disused phone? Was it some odd or end of electronic that I had forgotten about?

In fact, it was this:

Fiendishly small unremarkable prank item, that I had bought last year to prank people in my bathroom for Halloween. When decorating this year I had simply tossed in my odds-and-ends box in my desk, battery still inserted, button pressed to endlessly play "Unidentifiable scratching sounds".

Instead of scaring other people, I found it was me who was freaking out! What a week!