How to drive someone absolutely insane
This is half-inspiration, half-factual research, but hopefully it's close enough.
I've got a malevolent spirit who has placed all sorts of curses on a 1921-era Bostonian academic. Specifically, the academic is a woman who's as close to a professor as a woman comfortably gets in this era. She is unmarried, and lives in a standard professional-class house.
These curses will pertain to her personal life, and cause "bizarro impressions":
- If she uses her hairbrush, she will percieve that her hair is falling out.
- If she uses tooth paste, her teeth will (to her eyes) turn yellow and decay.
- If she puts a meal in the oven, when she comes back to check on it, it appears to have become a thoroughly unappetizing mouldy-maggoty pile of green sludge.
I'm looking for other examples of household or quotidien objects that could be similarly exploited. The spirit is trying to challenge her sanity, either by simply driving her insane or by futzing with her perceptions so that her reactions seem absurd and demented to onlookers, which would wind her up in asylum. (To use the tooth paste example, when she looks in a mirror, she sees cavity-ridden, yellowing fangs, but when someone else looks at her, her teeth appear perfectly normal.)
Anyone have any ideas?
I've got a malevolent spirit who has placed all sorts of curses on a 1921-era Bostonian academic. Specifically, the academic is a woman who's as close to a professor as a woman comfortably gets in this era. She is unmarried, and lives in a standard professional-class house.
These curses will pertain to her personal life, and cause "bizarro impressions":
- If she uses her hairbrush, she will percieve that her hair is falling out.
- If she uses tooth paste, her teeth will (to her eyes) turn yellow and decay.
- If she puts a meal in the oven, when she comes back to check on it, it appears to have become a thoroughly unappetizing mouldy-maggoty pile of green sludge.
I'm looking for other examples of household or quotidien objects that could be similarly exploited. The spirit is trying to challenge her sanity, either by simply driving her insane or by futzing with her perceptions so that her reactions seem absurd and demented to onlookers, which would wind her up in asylum. (To use the tooth paste example, when she looks in a mirror, she sees cavity-ridden, yellowing fangs, but when someone else looks at her, her teeth appear perfectly normal.)
Anyone have any ideas?