This Woman Set Up A Huge Inflatable In Her Living Room And It Got Out Of Control

"I thought, Yeah, maybe I should unplug this now before it gets much bigger, but it had gotten big enough that it was now totally blocking the socket where I'd plugged it in. So I just sat back and watched the rest unfold."

This is Marie Hicks, an author and historian in Chicago.

Twitter: @histoftech

Hicks was up late writing when she realised she needed to take a break, so she decided to try out a Halloween decoration she had bought a little early: a 13-foot Ghostbusters Stay Puft inflatable.

halloweencostumes.com.au

"Normally I wouldn't be thinking about Halloween in August," Hicks told BuzzFeed News.

"But I am a huge Ghostbusters fan so I bought Mr Stay-Puft on sight. I had been planning on saving it for October but since I needed a pick-me-up I figured 'what the heck' and cracked open the box to try it out."

What happened next was slightly disastrous:

Mar Hicks @histoftech

I have made a grave miscalculation

Sun Sep 04 10:30:39 UTC+0000 2016

"There wasn't a display model up when I bought it," said Hicks, "so all I knew was what the box said about it being 13-foot tall. My ceilings are not quite that high, but I figured I could blow it up most of the way and see what happened."

Hicks thought she'd be able to control the inflation, but realised pretty quickly there was nothing she could do.

Twitter: @histoftech

"It blew up a lot faster than I thought it would, and it was way wider than I realised," she said.

Twitter: @histoftech

"Since I hadn't staked it down into the ground ... it kind of just expanded horizontally over everything, knocking stuff down in the process and narrowly missing the ceiling fan. At this point I could've unplugged it, but what would be the fun in that, really."

She "let it ride", and then the inflatable began knocking over things all over her living room.

Twitter: @histoftech

"I thought, Yeah, maybe I should unplug this now before it gets much bigger, but it had gotten big enough that it was now totally blocking the socket where I'd plugged it in. So I just sat back and watched the rest unfold."

Her tweet of the incident has already picked up over 2,000 retweets.

Twitter: @histoftech

"This is the most popular thing I've ever tweeted, by far," Hicks said. "It's a little disconcerting because I mostly use my Twitter feed for academic/professional stuff and keeping up with colleagues at other universities. I guess we don't get to choose what our 15 minutes of fame end up being for though!"