My husband and I were watching the 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth Tuesday night. Long story short, it’s kind of a fairy tale – the girl protagonist believes in fairies and even interacts with them, and her mother tells her there’s no such thing as magic. My specific comment when I heard the buzz-killing, ever-suffering mother say this line (in Spanish), was “That may be true, but I prefer to hedge my bets.”

Rewind a few hours, and I’m sharing a trivia question from about three years ago with a friend from an old trivia recap, in which I’d mistakenly included a bit of commentary from that friend’s trivia recap. It was a neat little time capsule. The question was: What Internet-based company’s acquisitions included Skype in 2005 and Stubhub in 2007? The company has since sold Skype in 2009. The commentary the friend included with this question was, “Our people person was all over this one.” I had simply missed this little bit of commentary when I was copying his post and re-posting as my trivia recap. Which is why I “generally” prefer to just do my own writeups, rather than pirate someone else’s!

While I am in the middle of watching this movie, where the mother tells her daughter “There’s no such thing as magic,” I get a text from this same guy, who said they had THIS very question in their trivia game! I’m pretty sure I can’t chalk this one up to magic, but it’s one of quite a few strange things that have occurred in trivia games!

Once, I was having a conversation with someone about polar bears a few hours before a game. Later that night, polar bears got asked about in a trivia game. That was not the first time such a thing occurred, but this is the only example I can immediately recall. My trivia team used to play at a place in downtown Ann Arbor that’s rumored to be haunted. Once, my husband was jabbed in the side during a trivia game there – WHEN NO ONE WAS SITTING NEXT TO HIM. During a trivia tournament there in October, 2015, the answer to a question seemingly floated into my head, almost as if it were whispered to me. The question wanted the name of the composer for “Peter and The Wolf,” and the composer’s name just kind of.. showed up in my head, almost as if it were placed there by an unseen force. True, the answer probably was buried in my brain somewhere, since I have a passing knowledge of composers, but there was no way in hell I should’ve answered it THAT quickly! Strangely enough, I missed a question about a Russian composer at that place earlier in the season. Was the ghost trying to right that wrong? Who knows! My official story is that it’s just all part of the weirdness that seems to surround me and my strange, strange trivia team! Since Cthulhu is my trivia team’s mascot, is this kind of weirdness par for the course?

Later on, in April, 2016, we were playing another tournament game, and we all kind of stood up and chatted during a break. After that break, a page of my notes…disappeared. It was…gone! I looked for it under the table, it simply was not there. I joked that the ghost stole my notes!

Several staff members at this place have reported seeing this ghost. The story is a police officer was killed here during a robbery in 1935. For a bit more about this story, click here

I’ve read that ghosts do kind of get a bit feisty while renovations to the building that they’re haunting are going on. And renovations did happen to this building. This doesn’t mean I believe in ghosts – and I’ve never seen a ghost, for the record. But as I said before, I’ll hedge my bets…