On my way out to Zen sitting tonight, I passed under my next-door neighbor's balcony. He and his wife are a young couple with two kids, and his wife said, "Oh, you live right next door? I used to live in that apartment. That place is haunted."

Haunted? Why?

"Some guy died in there, I think right before I lived there. The cabinets would always swing open. Do they swing open on you?"

Yes, they did.

"Especially the ones over the fridge, right?"

Yep.

"Yeah, that always completely freaked me out. Doesn't it bother you?"

Nope. I put an extra magnet on the metal plate part of the latch: I noticed they swung open because the original plate and magnet have been painted over and the doors don't fit, so there wasn't enough pull to hold the doors closed. Works fine now.

"Wait...what?" [men on the balcony laugh] "I feel kinda stupid now, that just freaked me out so much...nah, that place is haunted!"

What combination of genes and environment leads some of us to look for causes, and others not? And I can hardly think of a better example of how our minds create our experience. This poor woman lived who knows how long in this apartment, freaked out that the cabinets would swing open on their own. I got annoyed that the cabinets wouldn't stay closed, found it really interesting that a few layers of paint provided enough distance to break the magnetic pull, and I was really satisfied to be able to fix it with some strong little magnets I already had stuck on the fridge for no good reason.