Whodunnit: The Folded Shorts

After months of searching, my fiancé (Lauren) and I recently moved into a new house. It’s in a cute neighborhood with cute neighbors and a cute yard and we love it. But something strange happened not long after we moved in. Something so strange that it won’t seem strange to you at all. You’ll read it and think “It’s actually strange that they think that’s strange.” Here it is. Here’s the strange thing:

We found a pair of Lauren’s shorts folded inside her dresser.

Take a moment to let that sink in.

We found her SHORTS in her DRESSER and they were FOLDED.

Why is this so strange, you ask? Cue the context.

A couple weeks before we moved out of our tiny apartment and into our house Lauren wanted a new pair of athletic shorts. These are the shorts in question. The ones we found folded.

Since she was asking me if she could buy them, I knew they were going to be unreasonably expensive for a single piece of cloth. And folks, they were. I said yes because I love her and I want her to be happy, but more so because of how bad I would come off if I had told her no. Sometimes the fear of the negative far outweighs the joy of the positive, and this was one of those times.

Anyway, she bought the shorts and she loves them. Wears them all the time. They’re great. Great.

Then we moved into our new house which is a two bedroom, two bath. Both of these facts will be relevant at some point in this story. In fact, the two bedroom part is relevant right now. Before we moved into the house we had agreed that the second bedroom would be a dual closet for her, office for me. Going into the house hunting experience it was important to me that I have my own office after being forced to work at her makeup vanity for the majority of the pandemic. I was fine sharing the office with her as extra closet space because both of the closets in our master bedroom were objectively tiny and she has a lot of garments.

I had originally planned on keeping my own dresser in the master bedroom, but when we got it in there it was way too big for the space. This forced me to put my dresser in the dual office/closet along with all of Lauren’s things. At this point, it was becoming obvious the spare room was going to be a lot more closet than office. The hope of it being an office was restored, however, when Lauren purchased herself a new makeup vanity that doubles as her work desk. So the dual office/closet dream lived…without me. This isn’t relevant to the folded shorts. I just needed to brood about it for a moment.

What is relevant is that our old dressers didn’t fit the closet/office at all. They were short and wide, and we needed to swap them out with something that was a bit more vertical so they take up less floor space. We went to IKEA, picked our new dressers, I broke one of them moving the box into the house, I screamed, I got a new one, I screamed some more while assembling them, and eventually the swap was complete. I then put my old dresser in the garage to use as storage (irrelevant) and hers in the basement until we could find a new home for it (super relevant).

At this point we have established that we 1). are living in a new house 2). own a sassy new pair of expensive athletic shorts and 3). have a dresser in the basement. Now we need to establish that immediately when we moved into the house, we began a full remodel of our upstairs bathroom. We don’t have a true ‘master bathroom,’ forcing us to use the lone upstairs bathroom as our master bath. It was in pretty rough shape when we moved in (it still had the original bathtub from when the house was built in the 40’s which, unsurprisingly, was caked in mold when we had it removed) so it was top of the priority list. Luckily, we have a second bathroom in the basement we were able to use while our contractor worked on the remodel.

It is extremely worth noting that during our inspection of the house, we were told the basement bathroom wasn’t up to code and needed to have a ventilation system installed. Our contractor had agreed to install a fan for us in addition to all the work he was doing on the upstairs bathroom. It was a small project that was done relatively quickly.

I think the stage is set now. Here’s what happened.

The week after we moved into the house, Lauren went on a work trip to Los Angeles. When she returned, she couldn’t find her sassy new shorts. Obviously the first instinct is to assume she brought them to LA and left them there, but she insisted she hadn’t taken them with her. The second instinct is to assume they got lost during the move, but I vividly remembered seeing her wear the shorts in the house. So somewhere between the move and her trip to LA the shorts went missing.

I thought virtually nothing of this. That is, until she threatened to go buy a new pair of the shorts. I’m by no means a frugal man, but let me remind you that these things were expensive. And we had a new bathroom to pay for. I’m not saying the shorts were the same price as a bathroom remodel, but it was close.

This was all the motivation I needed. Determined, I set out to find the shorts. I checked all the usual places (laundry baskets, underneath furniture, the dog’s bed) and eventually more obscure locations (car trunks, couch cushions, kitchen cabinets). Everywhere I looked, no shorts. We then decided to check the basement. Since we had been using the basement bathroom to get ready every morning, it made sense that maybe they had gotten lost down there. It’s also where our laundry machine is, so that only increased the probability this could be where they went missing.

As we descended the stairs Lauren peeled off to the right toward the bathroom + laundry machine, but something compelled me to veer left. Toward the dresser. There was absolutely zero logical reason the shorts could be inside the dresser, yet I began going through it drawer by drawer. When I opened the first one and found it empty, I felt like an idiot that I was even going through it. The second and third drawers had the same results. But when I opened the first drawer of the second row, sure enough, there, neatly folded in the back left corner, were the sassy expensive shorts.

I yelled to Lauren that I had found the shorts and when I showed her where, she proceeded to freak out. There was absolutely no reason the shorts should have been in that dresser. When we put it in the basement, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that it had been completely empty. It was also the lone piece of furniture in the basement, since we hadn’t figured out how to furnish the space yet. We never spent any time down there other than in the mornings when we got ready for work.

The fact they were folded is also strange. These weren’t casually tossed in. That tells me that someone had deliberately put them there.

Okay, so what happened? How did this sassy pair of athletic shorts find their way into an abandoned dresser in our basement? Here are the current working theories.

1. The contractor did it, and it was completely harmless.

He had been doing work for us in the basement, so that puts him in the right place. But motive remains hazy in this scenario. If he had found the shorts on the floor, what would have compelled him to move them? And if he did for some reason feel the need to move them, why would he put them in a completely empty dresser in the basement without telling us? This leads us to theory #2.

2. The contractor did it, and he’s a creep.

Is it possible the contractor found the shorts, took a whiff, enjoyed it, and stashed them away for future use? Rather than going to the basement to work on the fan, he was actually fanning his face with the sassy shorts the entire time. On the surface this seems unlikely, since he’s an incredibly nice guy. But he is suspiciously nice. We learned through his wife (who happened to be our realtor) in casual conversation that he goes to church almost every single morning. Only a man with a guilty conscience needs to speak to God that much.

3. Lauren put the shorts there while sleepwalking.

Lauren has a history of having lucid dreams, leading to her doing some weird shit. Past events include her sitting up in her sleep abruptly, gasping for breath, and even getting out of bed once to frantically claw at the wall before finally waking up. It’s super fun and exciting going to bed every night knowing that something completely wild and unpredictable could happen at any given moment that will scare me half to death. We keep things interesting.

Anyway, the lucid dreams picked back up after we moved into the house. There’s a strong correlation between the dreams and anytime we move to a new place, so I have a theory that the two are connected. Her subconscious isn’t fully comfortable in the new environment yet which keeps her from ever sleeping too deeply. As someone who writes about hamburgers for a living and does not have any sort of psychology degree, I think I’m onto something.

Within the first week of moving into the house, Lauren sat up in bed abruptly one night and began speaking in what I can only describe as “tongues” — random syllables mashed together. At first I thought I was mishearing her. Then I thought she was having a stroke. Then I thought I was having a stroke. Here’s an attempt at a reenactment.

OPEN ON ME, BRIAN, LAYING IN BED LATE ONE EVENING READING A BOOK BECAUSE I’M AN INTELLECTUAL. MY FIANCEE, LAUREN, RESTS PEACEFULLY BESIDE ME.

SUDDENLY, LAUREN SITS UP OUT OF HER SLEEP AND STARES AT THE BEDROOM DOOR INTENSELY, AS IF SHE’S JUST SEEN SOMETHING. THIS INTERRUPTS ME FROM MY DEEP AND SMART ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL I WAS READING.

HER: Abdoal lifer tichtony buss.

ME: [terrified]: What?

HER: Menchsky pen doya under.

ME [still terrified]: What?

HER: Lifter sayun not dont.

ME [still terrified]: What?

HER: Iscus bepay yonder fallon.

ME [still terrified]: What?

HER: Yoska lavin passer week.

ME: Now you’re just being annoying.

LAUREN ROLLS OVER AND GOES BACK TO SLEEP. I GET OUT OF BED TO CHANGE MY UNDERWEAR.

This was the most dramatic example, but there were a handful of similar incidents that happened over the first couple weeks of us living in the house. I’ve never witnessed her physically get out of bed and sleepwalk before, but we started to wonder if that was how the shorts ended up in the dresser. Maybe her half-conscious brain was like “I love these sassy shorts SO much and they were SO expensive, let me put them somewhere I will remember them” and proceeded to walk the shorts into her old dresser in the basement.

It isn’t impossible, but there are some holes to this idea. The first being that I’m a pretty light sleeper and notice anytime she gets out of bed in the middle of the night. (perhaps deep down my subconscious is terrified she’ll leave me in the middle of the night keeping me from a restful slumber, but again, I write about hamburgers for a living). On top of that we have two dogs, one of which sleeps in the bed with us. Even if I didn’t wake up to her getting out of bed in the middle of the night, surely they would have. I guess there’s a chance we were all sleeping deep enough to not notice, but it seems improbable.

4. We’re haunted

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you read about the haunted apartment Lauren and I lived in a few years ago. I continue to say I don’t believe in ghosts, but there were definitely ghosts in that place. I was convinced we had shaken free of the demon’s grasp since nothing strange happened at our previous apartment, but if Paranormal Activity taught me anything, it’s that demons can lay dormant for years at a time as they plot their next haunt. Is it possible we moved into a haunted house? Or that the demon is actually attached to one of us and has been waiting in the shadows for the perfect opportunity to come back?

Folding a pair of shorts would be a bizarre way for a demon to announce their return. But in a lot of ways it’s also kind of the perfect way to announce their return? Subtle. Inconspicuous. Tension building.

Damn it, I think we might be haunted again.