Poltergeist activity in my home?

This morning I got up to retrieve my 12-week-old daughter from her crib and noticed that she was laying perpendicular to how her mother and I had put her to bed. Each night after diapering, feeding and reading we strap her in her Cradle Me Blanket by Baby Boo. It's basically a receiving blanket with some flaps that fold over her tummy and keep her feeling snug thanks to the power of Velcro technology. I usually leave her little arms free to move around, but my wife will strap her arms down to her sides claiming she likes that best. There's a foamy plastic insert inside it that adds stability and makes it easier to pick her up and pass her around. My sister-in-law calls the device a straight jacket.

I wouldn't say it's as confining as a straight jacket (I don't know from experience; I'm just guessing) but it would take some effort on the part of an infant to wriggle out of it. Yet that is exactly what my infant daughter did during the night. The weird thing was she didn't seem to disturb the boo one bit. It was positioned in the same spot with the flaps still secure. Even odder was that the bottom half of the blanket was folded up under the rest of the thing. How she managed this I have no clue.

Strangely enough I was also awakened in the night by my wife's Palm Pilot beeping. It wasn't the alarm sound it was making. It was the sound that alerts the user to the fact someone is trying to beam something to the unit, something that's only doable if the sender is within a few feet away. The sound would chime. Then three or four minutes would pass, and it would do it again. The interval between beeps was long enough that I'd think maybe I'd heard it for the last time as a fluke and not get up, yet they were close enough together that I couldn't get back to sleep. I finally went and got it and grumpily shoved it under our bed.

Did I mention the cat was acting strangely -- well, more strangely than usual.

What's with this weirdness?

Could it be a ghost?

I know fascination with the supernatural has somewhat fallen out of fashion. A favorite movie of mine is Beetlejuice and at one point in the movie Otho, the plus-sized nelly interior decorator, says, "I was once one of New York's leading paranormal researchers . . . until the bottom dropped out in '72." Sure ghosts are passé, but is it at all coincidental that now that we've got a baby in the house AND we strap her into something manufactured by Baby BOO, we get some odd poltergeist activity going on?

I know some people get freaked out over the clown doll in that movie, and yes, he ranks up there in clown creepiness with the clown from It and Pogo a.k.a. John Wayne Gacy. But what I found even creepier was the look on actor Craig T. Nelson's face when he's screaming to the real estate developer, "YOU ONLY MOVED THE HEADSTONES!!!!" And then there's those skeletons popping up out of the muddy hole where the pool's gonna go. Yuck. Though really nothing in that movie beats the creepiness of the closing theme music. Just thinking about it gives me the shivers.

Carol Anne's ghost friend wasn't all that scary if you ask me. So he stacked some chairs and lured her into the television set. Big deal. They got her back. Now I'll tell you who had an effed up spook for a playmate was that girl from Amityville Horror. Amy, I think was her character's name, and her demon pig-eyed pal she called Jody. That was an otherworldly friend I wouldn't mess with.

You figure it was Jody who killed that priest in the beginning and slammed the window sill down on the brother's fingers. The creepiest part though was when the mom walks in and finds Amy sitting across from a seemingly vacant rocking chair that's actually rocking. When the mom asks who the little girl was talking to, she says it's her new friend Jody. Then with this spine-chilling smile on her face the little girl says, "She's nice." Yeah, sure, nice like the lowest circle of Hell from whence she came.

My wife and I haven't really had the chance yet to teach our daughter about stranger danger, so I can only hope that if she does choose to have a spectral friend, she chooses wisely. Somebody who could walk through walls would be a neat friend to have. That stacking chairs thing like in the Poltergeist movie would be cool too I guess, but if a ghost is going to rearrange my furniture I'd prefer he have a little more knowledge of Feng Shui. That business of saying things like get out in that demonic whispery voice would not be tolerated. Unless maybe he could do it on cue, like when campaigners and proselytizers come to the door.

Then it would be okay.