Last week, my dad was hauling our old feed pickup back from the shop on a flatbed trailer during oil field rush hour traffic, a little white-knuckled and stressed at the task.

Tired from a full day of work, annoyed at fellow drivers and maybe running a worst-case scenario or two through his head, he glanced in his rearview mirror to find a white pickup bearing down on him, looking like it was going to run him clean over.

He had a moment of panic, a few curse words and a split-second prayer to Jesus before he realized the threatening pickup was actually the one he was hauling on the trailer behind him. He freaked himself out.

And I tell ya, I can relate. Lately, I’ve been feeling a little of what I refer to as the “heebie-jeebies” around this place.

I think it started with the stray bat that made a surprise appearance in our bedroom, iced the cake with the weird creature scratching on the inside of our walls and now continues to send shivers down my spine every time the music on my office computer decides to play at random times, with no explanation or human close enough to make the command.

To top it off, I’m now literally sleeping with the light on because whatever ghost is living in this house has decided to keep the ceiling fan bulbs partially lit in our bedroom, no matter what button we push or switches we flip.

It goes along with the weird situation with the chandelier we thought was broken one day only to find it working the next.

Must be our ghost. I mean, it makes sense. Our house is new, but it sits on an old homestead. And there were people on the land long before that. So maybe one of them moved in with us and enjoys a good prank every once in a while.

I mean, it must get dull being a ghost, especially when all we watch is “Wheel of Fortune” and “The Cat in the Hat.”

Which is what I was thinking last weekend when I went riding with my niece and she discovered my missing sock out in the middle of the horse pasture. After running over a few scenarios in my head, none of which effectively explained how the thing got from my bedroom to a path of grass a mile out of the house, I decided it was our ghost.

And when I explained it to my husband — how I pulled off my riding pants and socks that morning to put on my church clothes and when I went to put them back on again, my sock was nowhere to be found — he wasn’t as spooked as I wanted him to be.

He just calmly suggested that maybe my sock was stuck in my pant leg and dropped out during our ride through the pasture. It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as runaway pickups or haunted houses, but certainly more logical, which is clearly what a woman spooked by a sock needs in her life.

That, and a little more sleep.

If you need me, I’ll be under my bed.

Jessie Veeder is a musician and writer living with her husband and daughters on a ranch near Watford City, N.D. She blogs at https://veederranch.com. Readers can reach her at jessieveeder@gmail.com.