At around 7:30 PM last night (11/2) power was lost to about one half of my workplace. Lights, coolers, freezers, hot chocolate machine, gas pumps, etc. without power. Until around 8:30 or 8:45 I thought we’d be able to have the registers running enough to do important closing paperwork. And then that turned out not to be the case. My bosses and I also discovered in the course of the night that a neighboring building was also without power, a slight concern to one resident who was on oxygen (but thankfully not on her deathbed because of it). That resident also says she heard a pop noise from the transformer. I was allowed to leave early, but as we were leaving gentlemen from the power company (whom my boss called three times) arrived to try and fix the issue. I heard talk of a blown fuse.

When it first started I was immediately overcome by the chill across my skin that tells me that spirits are present and the Otherworld is close. It is the feeling that lends itself to encounters like this. (Note: the rabbit is innocuous, but I felt the need to document it for a reason.) The feeling persisted for almost three hours, long after I got home and decided to lock the doors and not emerge until the sun came up (a decision I am still holding to in the morning). I was sitting in the darkened store with a candle, staring at the streetlights and thinking there was once a time when it would have been completely dark. No light of any kind but the fire. And we came pretty close to what that would have looked like. Waiting out the darkness with a sense of creeping shadow and cold, for it was also a little bit chilly.

Now, to be clear, I’m sure a fuse did blow. And fuses do blow. This is a thing that fuses do when they are worn out, overloaded, or both. This is a reality of modern living.

It is also folklorically attested that certain spirits react poorly to substances like iron (and most probably steel, which is mostly iron anyways). The fact that humans use steel in pretty much everything of import from cars to transformers to buildings has caused some to erroneously believe the Fae, who are intolerant to the material to varying degrees (except probably smithing Fae), are nature spirits or prefer natural habitats. And of course, it is also attested that there are beings that simply set out to cause problems, and may exploit their weakness to steel and iron toward this end. Or they may see a situation like a fuse going out and taking out power to two buildings as an opportunity to make themselves known, or cause other mischief.

I can’t say, but I felt the spirits in that Chili’s last night.