During the summer of 2003 I lived in a small town in Wyoming. My-boyfriend-at-the-time was doing an internship at a golf course, and I, always up for an adventure, tagged along. Got myself a job as a “cart girl” at the same golf course and spent two long days on a Greyhound to get there. The golf course was owned by some rich dude and had been built on old farmland. My-boyfriend-at-the-time, myself, and another intern got to live in an ancient farmhouse left standing on the property. It was so disgusting and old, but it was free.

We often showered at the golf course maintenance building because the water at the farmhouse smelled like rotten eggs. We had to do our laundry there too. And we rarely cooked because all of the pots and pans were grimey and rusted. What furniture the house had was old and dirty, as were the carpet and walls. Sometimes at night I literally had bugs crawling in my bed. The moths were the worst though. At night we walked blindly to our bedrooms because turning on any light would attract a swarm of moths. We’d find them all over the walls, on the toilet, in the shower. Eventually we learned to plug in a nightlight, positioned above a bucket of soapy water, before going to bed. In the morning we’d find literally hundreds of drowned moths in the bucket. I hated those damn creatures.

But this story isn’t about moths. It’s about the case of the cake-eating ghost, of which I was reminded this morning while reading Sarcomical’s cake post. That summer, my-boyfriend-at-the-time had to get up before dawn every day, but I often didn’t start my shift until 2pm. So one morning I decided to bake a chocolate cake. I don’t cook, but box cake mixes are one thing I can handle. After baking, I left the cake on counter to cool and went to work.

When my shift ended at sundown, I went back to the farmhouse and checked on the cake. Sure enough, a huge corner piece was missing, so I went upstairs where my-boyfriend-at-the-time was sleeping.

Hey did you enjoy the cake?

What cake?

The cake I made, the chocolate cake, the one in the kitchen.

I didn’t see a cake.

Whatever, you had a piece. Wake up, are you still sleeping? Come on, the chocolate cake. You ate a giant piece of it.

I didn’t have any cake.

Then who did?

And we began to consider who indeed. It wasn’t him, it wasn’t me. We ruled out our roommate because he was out of town that week. Nobody else lived there, nobody else even came there. Moths perhaps? But they couldn’t possibly be so neat and tidy as to eat away a chunk of the cake at a perfect ninety-degree angle. Could they?

After much contemplation, we decided it must have been a ghost. And we were dead serious (wait was that a pun?). There was no other explanation for an entire corner of the cake to be missing. We lived in an old farmhouse, and apparently whoever had died there before we moved in really enjoyed Betty Crocker’s chocolate cake. We went downstairs to investigate. Yup, a piece was missing. There was the knife that was used to cut it. No fork or plate though. Apparently the ghost swallowed its cake whole.

That night we went to bed knowing there was a ghost in our house.

In the morning, we saw that the cake had not been further disturbed. Ghosty was full I guess. My-boyfriend-at-the-time left for work, early as usual, but he called me soon after leaving. When he had gotten to the golf course, he was greeted by a coworker:

Hey man, thanks for the cake. It was delicious!

Yeah. No ghost. Instead, one of my-boyfriend-at-the-time’s coworkers had stopped by our house, reason unknown, in the middle of the day. He saw the cake and thought, what the hell? He rummaged through our kitchen drawers, found a knife, and cut out a giant hunk of a freshly baked cake. At our house. In my kitchen. My cake!

Who does that?