The campus poltergeist: Stice's bed as one node in E.T.A.'s object-anomalies

texture · ~Aug–20 Nov YDAU

• When: an accelerating cycle over "the past couple months," through 20 Nov YDAU
• What: Stice's moving bed is embedded in a wider, campus-wide pattern the novel treats as one uncanny weave: since roughly August, inanimate E.T.A. objects have been appearing "in wildly inappropriate places" — a lawnmower in the dawn kitchen, a ball machine in the Females' Sauna, crossed squeegees hung meters up a wall with "neither nails nor holes from nails," a pyramid of AminoPal bars on Court 6, thousands of practice balls strewn across the lobby. These have "a tektitic and sinister aspect," give everyone "the fantods," and are "studiously not talked about." The sub-14 Tunnel Club half-seriously theorizes feral hamsters as "draggers and rearrangers of stuff." Whether Stice's phenomena and the campus's are one thing is never adjudicated in-range. [Attribution note: this event frames Stice's case within the E.T.A. uncanny; it is context the novel explicitly links to his bed.]