While watching a movie one evening the television switched channels several times as if someone was trying to find something to watch. Everytime we put it on the movie of our choice it would switch again. The volume would rocket to the maximum each time we muted it. It would go slowly from mute to max volume. Quite as if someone was continuously hitting the volume button on the remote. When we would watch a scary movie it would switch to anything else. The selections were seemingly meaningless....just anything not "scary." We passed it off as a malfunction in the remote so we changed the batteries and it still did it. We hid it then just to see, lo and behold it STILL spanned volume and channels even with the remote across the house in another room. We called a repair man then who said it may be the electronic eye in the television that communicates with the remote. He came and replaced it. Of course it did not do the spanning while the repair man was in the house. Yet it started again when he left. Finally tired of not getting to watch what we wanted, and having ear plugs...and being awoke by the very loud volume in the middle of the night; we stored the television away in hopes that we could fix it later. We bought a new TV and it did not seem to have the "malfunction." However we did have a rather large stereo that worked quite well, that is untill we stored the tv. Shortly after the television was gone the stereo started to come on and span stations while it raised and lowered volumes. This was at all times of day and night. We Unplugged it after a short time and stored it with the TV..in hopes again that we could fix it later. Have you ever seen the movie "Polterguiest"? There was a comment made that if anything else went wrong, like comming on in the middle of the night and going up and down in volume while seemingly selecting channels, we would just shove it out the door.
Around the same time there was a hairdryer that came on the high setting...while it was unplugged. Needless to say we threw that away too.