A bump in the night! You immediately wonder, ‘who goes there?’ We have all been in that situation at some point in our lives, and chances are that we never did find out who was there. Well, between my identical twin brother Kjell and I, nobody got away with trying to scare us. He scaring me or me scaring him? Well, that’s a different story. We got to be pretty good at scaring people. Taking our lead from our older brother, Moritz, we became rather good at scaring our parents as well.
We lived in an apartment on the second floor of a two-story villa in Oslo during the Second World War and early fifties. It had a full basement that was divided into storage rooms and a laundry room. Our mother made jam every fall, enough to last us for a year. The basement was very poorly lit, with only one old 40-watt lightbulb and we were sure there was a boogeyman lurking in the dark corners and niches. Mother once sent me down to collect a jar of jam. I went down the stairs and ran the length of the basement quietly on my felt booties while holding my breath all the way to our storage room, making sure the boogeyman didn’t hear me. I grabbed the jam and ran back, but just before I got to the stairs, a husky voice asked, “Who goes there?” The jar broke into a million pieces as it hit the cement floor. I was so scared that I dropped it and wet my pants! I swore that I would get even with my twin brother!
I thought Kjell was fetching jam, which gave me the perfect opportunity. I went down into the basement wearing my leather-soled slippers and ran as fast as I could, stopped just short of the storage room and started to slide. Sliding on leather soles on a cement floor makes a horribly scary noise. I heard two glass jars with jam hit the cement floor, while our poor mother screamed on the top of her lungs, “Who goes there?” I hurried back upstairs and put on the pure face of an innocent when our mother came back into the apartment, mad as a wet hen. When Kjell came out of the bathroom, Mom thought that he had hid in there after scaring her, and commandeered him to accompany her down to the ‘scene of the crime,’ with a strong flashlight to shine on the floor while she cleaned up.
We next scared our older brother. It was his turn to fetch a jar of jam, so Kjell and I snuck down into the basement ahead of him. We each had a small flashlight, and using the flashlights, we scared away the boogeyman and hid in a couple of dark niches. We stood there deathly quiet waiting for our golden opportunity. Moritz came carefully walking up the basement aisle, and when he was close enough, we turned on the flashlights under our chins lighting up the inside of our faces and said in unison, “Who goes there?”He screamed, turned tail and ran back upstairs. “Don’t mess with the twins!”
Our father, the police officer, had an uncanny way of knowing when we had messed up. He would read fairy tales to us after tucking us into our beds, and when he thought that we had behaved badly, he would read us a very scary fairy tale, quickly turn out the light, and close the door. Kjell and I would lay awake, too scared to close our eyes, when our older brother Moritz would slowly open the squeaking door. Kjell and I would yell out at the top of our lungs, “Who goes there?”
The following is supposedly a true story about an incident that occurred many years ago before GPS technology. The story involves the US Air Force's ultra-high-security, super-secret base in Nevada, known simply as ‘Area 51.’ Apparently late one afternoon, the Air Force staff members at Area 51 were very surprised to see a Cessna landing at their ‘secret’ base. The aircraft was immediately surrounded by the military police and impounded as they ‘arrested’ the pilot and brought him into an interrogation room, where they worked him over trying to ascertain if he was a spy. The pilot got very scared and assured them that he was not a spy. His story was that he took off from Las Vegas, got lost, and spotted the ‘base’ just as he was about to run out of fuel. The Air Force officer in charge started a full FBI and CIA background check on the pilot and held him overnight during the investigation.
By the end of the next day, they were finally convinced that the pilot really was lost and wasn't a spy. They fueled up his plane and gave him a terrifying ‘you-did-not-see-this-base’ briefing, complete with threats of spending the rest of his life in prison if he ever told about his experience. They told him that Las Vegas was that-a-way on such-and-such a heading, and sent him on his way.
The very next day, to the total disbelief of the Air Force personnel, the same Cessna landed again on their base. Once again, the military police surrounded the plane, only this time, there were two people in the plane. The same pilot jumped out with his hands in the air and said, "Do anything you want to me, but my wife is in the plane and you have to tell her where I was the night before last!"
