I have two stories relating to dryers. One scary story relating to a dryer was when I was about 9 or 10. We lived in a 100 year old mansion home downtown in a major city. It was a four story home with a stone foundation. The laundry room was in the basement of this home and I never liked being in that basement. It was dark and I always worried about spiders. Being one of 8 children, we had LOTS of clothing and I was tasked to help with the laundry since the time I was 6, I was in the rotation for doing dishes and laundry. I remember washing the dished and not being tall enough to do the dishes without the water running down my arms and getting my shirt wet. I was down in the basement when I walked into the laundry room when I saw flames coming out of the dryer. I went screaming up in the kitchen and the family ran down to unplug the dryer and use an extinguisher to put out the dryer.
Since that time, I have been a bit stressed at times on running the dryer when no one is home, and on having extinguishers near the appliances in the home. My biggest issue has always been not having anything on the floor so that if there were a fire, we wouldn't trip on anything trying to get out, and that if firemen needed to come in, their path would be unrestricted. My girls all know this about me not leaving things on the floor or in the hallways ever.
The second scary story with the dryer happened when I was 15ish. We lived in a upper end suburb neighborhood with larger houses. People would call our house the "white house" as it had columns in the front and was a large home as we had 8 children in our family.
With 8 children, you would guess there were always mounds of laundry. As I shared before, we all had to do chores and I did laundry from an early age. With that, we would pull a load of dried clothes out and stick it on top of the dryer and sometimes there would be three of four loads stacked on top of the dried. With that, of course clothes would fall down behind the dryer and we would get stacks of things behind the dryer. I was (and am) fairly responsible and would often be the one to clean up areas of the house. One night, I had been out biking or doing track team or something and was wearing short running shorts. Some items had fallen down behind the drier as someone may have pulled out a load I was doing of my own items or something, so the way we had devised to get those items, was we had a metal hanger we would stretch in the bottom middle down so we could make a hook out of it by holding on to the middle lower stretch area and hook the clothes behind the dried with the hanger hook part.
One of the doors entered into the family room, and the other set was in the laundry room! I also forgot to mention that our house was situated on a corner, so everyone coming into the neighborhood would wind around the labyrinth of roads in the neighborhood to the country club that was about three houses down from our home. So, it was the main road to the country club and was heavily traveled!
I happened to be "backside" up, kneeling on the dryer, with my head buried behind the dryer pulling items up from behind the dryer and remember I was wearing loose, short red running shorts with white trim, and I was a thin, cute girl at the time. My sister happened to walk past the laundry room taking a quick glance at me going to her bedroom and did a double take and screamed!
Of course I am head down backside up on top of the dryer so her scream disarmed me in that awkward pose and she was screaming, "Lock the door, lock the door!" I jump off the dryer and hurriedly lock the laundry room door asking "why?"The dryer was exactly next to the glass sliding door so it was the door, then me on the dryer! She told me when she walked past, she thought she saw my reflection in the door but then looked again and there was a man with his hand on the door handle looking at my "Backside"!
I look outside and I see a man running through out backyard, and climbs over our wooden fence and jumps into a car that was parked on the side of the road facing the house and drove off. From the street, my backside in red was like a lighthouse for any pervert that drove past in the dark since the blinds in that room were often broken with 8 kids going in and out! The door was NOT locked as with that many kids going in and out, it just wasn't. There were a few times that we had heard people breaking in, had things stolen, and once at that home, a man walked in and my mother found him in our kitchen.
We were both really shaken up but we locked the door and put a stick in the door track and figured that was the end of it. About then minutes later, we are in my sisters room talking about it. The windows were open as were the blinds on the bottom half of the window to let air in as it was hot. A man walks up our circular driveway and as my sisters room is on that same end of that house but in the front, he could hear us talking through the window.
He called out to us and tried to get us to come down and talk to him. My sister told me to go get my dad and older brothers out of bed as we were really scared. How determined and crazy must a person to be to approach a home with many cars in the driveway and talk to us after being seen on the back deck / veranda!
He overheard my sister and started running off the property to his car which was parked on the opposite corner to our corner home. My father was asleep and by the time I got him awake and he told me to get my brothers, the man was long gone. They took several cars and went around the neighborhood looking for his car but came back empty handed. We didn't call the police thinking that he was gone and we couldn't tell anything other than he was wearing a baseball cap and was tall and darkish. We always made sure the doors were locked and blocked after that time as I was terrified that he would come back as he was so bold! Flash forward a few months, I am asleep and my sister was was not sleeping in her room anymore, my room was at the end of the hall, so for me to get to either the staircase or outside, I had to pass the laundry room.
If I had a phone in my room back then, I would have called 911, but the phone was beyond the laundry room down the hall at the other side so I didn't dare go out of my locked room! I forgot to share that I always had my door closed and locked when I slept! When I went to New Zealand as an exchange student, my host mothers didn't understand why I always had my bedroom door closed and / or locked!
I think that to this day, it is part of the reason I don't sleep well. I hadn't realized until I gave my dog away how she helped me sleep soundly because I knew she would bark if anyone or anything was a threat. The night she left, I couldn't sleep and realized this would be a problem for me. I don't sleep well and that was when I started gaining weight and being tired all the time because I think until my kids were off at school, I would "listen" all night to make sure they were safe. Once they were gone, I could sleep better / deeper.
I always felt that GOD was protecting me as if my sister hadn't walked past at that exact moment, I could have been knocked out, or abducted and no one would have known. The door may or may not have been locked and he could have come in later and taken me while sleeping etc. It was just really PROVIDENCE that she saw that man! My girls know how protective I am of them, and because of this and other situations in my past, I have been protective of them. But, there are always situations you can't train people to look out for as there are just some really evil people in the world.
Have a Blessed Day!
