The Most Unsettling Sounds to Hear at 2:17am

I must share with you a story that, in the lore of my marriage, has come to be known as "The Nanny Story".

This was fifteen years or so ago. My now-wife and I, still living in New York City at the time, had taken a weekend trip up to Boston to see a friend perform in a musical. We stayed at a Courtyard Marriott; this detail is surprisingly-essential to the story. It's late the first night, and I'm in that first blurry edge stage of sleep; I'm not fully unconscious, but definitely not lucid. She's awoken by a noise; to her, it sounds like someone is rattling the outside door handle to our room. Startled by this, she says "I think someone's trying to get into the room."

I am awoken not by the noise itself, but by this alarmed statement, which in my stupor registers only as "someone... in... room".

I turn, and in the near-total darkness of the room, I perceive a man-sized shadow on her side of the bed, the side closer to the door. This rockets me from not-awake-enough to far-too-awake, and I begin yelling loudly and furiously kicking in the general direction of the intruder. (Thankfully, in the air above her.)

(She is also yelling by this point.)

After some time of yelling and kicking, she manages to turn the bedside light on, which allows me to see that the shadow I saw was not a murderer, but instead the built-in wardrobe common in Courtyards Marriott of the era:

Needless to say, we are both wide awake at this point, an understandable reaction after nearly being murdered by a piece of casework. It is in this state of adrenaline-fueled hyper-awareness that a few minutes later we hear a sound–which, admittedly, did sound exactly like someone trying to rattle a door open–coming from the room's malfunctioning mini-fridge compressor.

(I unplugged the fridge after that.)

I have several takeaways from this story:

1. If two people start screaming in the middle of the night at the Courtyard Marriott in South Boston, absolutely no one will check up on it
2. "The sound of a door handle being rattled" is among the more unsettling sounds you can hear at 2:17am.

Hey, Scott, why is this called "The Nanny Story"?

Oh, right. We were both so rattled after the incident that we ended up turning on the room TV for background noise, and were eventually soothed to sleep by the sounds of reruns of The Nanny.

Of course, that's not the only troubling thing you can hear in the middle of the night! In fact, I've prepared a short list of The Most Unsettling Sounds to Hear at 2:17am.

Let's review.

Water Dripping

This is bad for two reasons.

First, it's annoying–just the right level of noise to wake you up and keep you from falling back asleep. Second, and much more important, it's indicative of a problem somewhere in the house, one that could be quite costly to fix.

You're definitely not sleeping now that you're thinking about that.

An Electronic Device Activating Itself For No Reason

When our kids were babies, they had a toy–a little plastic horse on wheels that, when turned on, would make various horse noises.

I must stress that it was only supposed to do this WHEN TURNED ON, but one night it turned ITSELF on in the middle of the night and started making neighing sounds. No one was even in the same room as it.

Pretty sure it went in a donation bin the next morning, because that's what you do with things that are haunted.

A Child's Footsteps

There's nothing good that can come from this.

Best-case scenario, they can't sleep and they're going to make it your problem. Worst-case scenario, they've just thrown up over the side of a loft bed and if you've never experienced that let me tell you it's not a great thing to deal with at any hour.

Now, if you don't have kids, you might think you can't relate to this one, to which I say: wouldn't the sound of a child's footsteps be even more unsettling then?

Something to think about!

A Pet Heaving

The thing is, a kid will wake you up with an "I frowed up" after the fact.

A pet? They're gonna wake you up just in time to watch it, but not in time to stop it, by making that unmistakable-to-any-pet-owner HURP HURP HURP noise.

You could live in a 10,000-square foot house with the kind of epoxy-sealed floors that I put into sensitive areas of hospitals, and it wouldn't matter. They're going to find the one area rug in the entire place and throw up on it.

The Nanny

Wait, we didn't have the TV on.

We don't even have a TV in this room.

OH GOD IT WAS HER ALL ALO-

[is murdered by Fran Drescher]

Friends, it's Friday once again at The Action Cookbook Newsletter.

This weekend, we bury February in a shallow grave and burn any evidence that it ever existed. Also, I'm making pasta! This week, your Good Things include:

• a dive into my cookbook collection!
• a reverse-engineered cocktail!
• music, book and TV recommendations!
• graphic design nostalgia, pets and more!

What are you to do? Where are you to go? It's Friday.

Cooking the Books

I've long used the first slot in my Friday newsletters to share original food creations (or at least my unique spin on less-original creations). That's not going to change, but recently I was looking at my large-and-ever-growing collection of cookbooks and realized, you know, I should cook out of these more often.