The Haunting of Old McDonald

Remember how in Big you know the fortune-telling robot machine is possessed by Satan because it works even when it's unplugged?

A couple years ago we got a toy tractor for our kids at a thrift store. There are buttons on the steering wheel that are intended to make animal noises and play music when you press them, but by the time we bought the toy, the sounds had been reduced to a drunken mutter. Happy to have less sound produced by our children's toys, we never looked into replacing the batteries or anything.

But then a couple months ago, after the tractor had been left out in the rain one too many times, it started making animal noises and music loud and clear, except not when you press the buttons--just whenever it feels like it. At first we found this amusing, but this morning at five o'clock when outside my bedroom window I heard

OLD MCDONALD HAD A FARM, E-I-E-I-O,

louder than should be legal and over and over and over again, I was not so amused. After the ninth or tenth time and a good half hour of not being able to sleep, I stumbled out onto the patio with a screwdriver, took out the batteries, and then stumbled back into bed.

And without the batteries it didn't sing anymore, which I suppose means it's not possessed by Satan. But still, that wasn't very comforting at five o'clock this morning.