Last week was busy – three states in three days for four different meetings. No sweat. I learned a long time ago to sleep in hotel rooms just fine.

But in the third hotel, in Atlanta, something a little disturbing happened. I am accustomed to traveling alone. When it’s night time, I set my door guard as usual, do the before-bed needfuls in the bathroom, and either read until the book hits my face, or watch TV until I realize I’ve missed the last ten minutes of the plot.

All these things were done and I awoke in the middle of the night needing to visit the wee room.

When I entered, the toilet seat was up.

I have no further information about how that might have happened. I certainly didn’t put it up. The door was locked and bolted. There were no adjoining door rooms into my room. And I was alone.

This is what’s known in the business travel industry as “freak out territory.”

In the cool light of day, I have examined the many alternatives–aided by crowdsourcing online.

The prevailing theory is ghosts. In second place is a rat coming up the pipes. In distant third is the fact that the toilet seat was loose, inclined to shifting. Perhaps it simply flew up and I didn’t notice.

Yeah, none of these theories work well. Personally I’m willing to believe it was a ghost and move on with my life. He wasn’t noisy, and although it would have been more polite to put the seat back down when he was finished, maybe that was his way of expressing his presence on a polite but distant way.

As a friend of mine said in a musical X-files sort of way: doo-doo doo-doo