The ghost in the kitchen

I went to bed last night concerned about a strange buzzing noise in our friends' home. I was imagining all sorts of disasters and thought they should call the fire department.  The mystery has been solved.

"The ghost was a stud finder buried in a pail of tools standing on a stool next to the kitchen counter."

Dave as he tells it had been installing undercabinet lights in the kitchen this past week, tackling the devil in the details of a laggard kitchen remodeling project. The stud finder had never before made a sound by itself. You have to press and hold the on-button to make it work. So, most of its life is spent lying inert somewhere, like in this pail.

But that afternoon Dave had been repairing a torn underground sprinkler system line. Last Spring they had the stump ground out for one of the aged, deteriorating silver maples that had been overhanging the house and that had been removed last winter. Dave forgot that a sprinkler head was in the vicinity and the stump grinder ground up the tubing. It was not until yesterday that he got around to finishing that repair. He went into the house to scrounge up a steel tape measure and stirred around in the bucket of tools in the kitchen, where he had left the tape measure. One of the jostled tools must have fallen against the on-button of the stud finder and it must have thought there was a stud in the vicinity, so it began doing its thing—squealing with a high-pitched squeal. They turned off every bit of electricity to the house but could still hear the buzzing. When they were searching, he tried to think of any battery-operated devices. He looked at smoke alarms and the radio/cd- players, but never thought of the stud finder. And his wife Donna found it! Now they don't have to call any fire departments or electric companies. They slept securely with no anxieties about ghosts in the kitchen. (as told by Dave)

Now if we could fix the thumping in our pipes caused by a new hose for watering the flowers.