Somewhere in my home are hundreds of cat toys. Yes, there are a few under the washer, refrigerator, stove, etc., but many more have simply disappeared.
I have one cat, who stays indoors. She does love her toys. Her favorite is a crocheted acorn that she’s had for years. It will go missing, then show up again months later.
I envision our distant future, just the two of us in our 80s, sitting quietly on the porch, and she turns to me says “I ate the salami.”, and I know exactly what’s she’s talking about. :smack: Witch!
Since it’s the season I’ll tell you about the missing Christmas tree. One year we opened presents a day late because we were on a trip. All presents were opened and accounted for. I had the kids take out the trash while I disassembled the tree. All my ornaments were packed safe and secure. I went to put them on a closet shelf. Came back down and looked in the living room at the tree box. Said to myself I’ll send someone out to the garage with that. My Son runs in and I tell him to move the box he obediently does it. Skip foward to the next year. I am putting up decorations, kids are all happy and excited. Send my Son to get the tree box out of the garage. He brings it in, i am getting ornaments out. Lo and behold there is NO tree in the box. There’s a trash sack with last years wrapping paper and boxes and that’s all. Now I assume we hauled it to the dump with all the rest of the Christmas trash. But, I know I put the tree in that box. I am kinda anal about such things. I like to pack and store things carefully. I had that tree for more than a decade. My Son swears the box felt heavy when he put it up in the garage. Either Mr.Wrekker secretly hated the tree and tossed it (not likely)or elves came and unpacked the tree and absconded with it. Mystery has never been solved.
Moved to a new state a few months ahead of the family. Finally, bought a house and the movers hauled the rest of the stuff down. They’re bringing in stuff off the truck, putting boxes and crates everywhere and then they bring in…a fully assembled kitchen table and ask where I wanted it. I had never seen it before: “That’s not mine.” They reply, “Lady, it came out of your basement. We put it on your truck. Where do you want it?”
Me??? Uh, over there. It’s kind of a nice table.
Now, the basement in our old house was full of junk, like a lot of basements, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t ever misplaced a kitchen table. But it turns out my sister-in-law asked my husband to store it temporarily for her; he put it in the storage room, threw a cover over it, piled some stuff on it and forgot to mention it to me. And she never asked for it back for some reason (another mystery).
This one happened a couple of months ago:
My littlest kid’s electric toothbrush went missing (you know, one of those little pink and purple ones with My Little Pony all over it). First day was just like, “Meh, it’ll turn up.” But by day 2, the little girl was really missing it, and so, rationalizing that it couldn’t have left the house, we started searching.
We searched our bathroom. The spare bathroom. The girls’ bathroom. The grandparents’ bathroom. Bedrooms. High and low, under beds, inside laundry hampers, anywhere the toothbrush could have possibly ended up. There was nowhere else to search.
And so, despondent, my wife went back into our bathroom, which we had both searched thoroughly only briefly before…and the toothbrush was there, standing upright, between our sinks.
She accused me of having found it and put it there as a prank. I told her I didn’t, many many times. Finally, she started believing me, which freaked her out even more, because that would mean that someone else had put it there, and there was no one else in the house. So she starts getting scared about toothbrush-moving ghosts, to the point that our kids are getting scared to the point of crying. It is seriously a mystery. To be clear: I did not put the toothbrush there, and I have no idea how it got there. My best guess is that someone, in the process of searching, was so focused on finding the toothbrush that they didn’t even realize that they were holding it, and they put it there. It’s a psychological trick your mind plays, “inattentional blindness”: you’re so focused on finding a thing that you don’t recognize it when it’s right in front of you.
Something similar happened to me not long ago, and it still perturbs me a bit to think about it.
I was home alone one night, surfing the web in the master bedroom. I had smoked the last of my cigarettes, but I was 99% certain I had another pack, as I had bought two at once. I looked in all the logical and typical places I would have put it, to no avail.
So I started looking in increasingly illogical places, thinking I must have had a brain fart. Over time I looked in every drawer, every cabinet, under every piece of furniture, in the fridge, in the bathroom, even in my car. No cigs.
It was late at night and I didn’t feel like going out to buy another pack, so I settled in to continue my websurfing. Eventually I decided to go get a drink. When you exit the master bedroom and turn left, it’s a straight path past the living room to the kitchen. It’s an open floor plan, with no furniture or anything obstructing the path, just bare floor. I grabbed a drink out of the fridge, turned to head back to the bedroom, and there on the floor is a brand-new, unopened pack of cigarettes, right at the halfway point.
I can’t imagine how I missed it on my walk to the kitchen - I practically would have tripped over it. I can’t imagine how I could have missed it when I was tearing the house up looking for it. But somehow, in the three seconds it took me to grab a drink out of the fridge, it just appeared there, right out in the open, obvious as could be.
I have to admit I was a bit rattled…and that’s not even the only spooky thing to have happened in this house.
Heh. I’m clearing out the cubicle of someone who retired recently. I’ve gone through several strata, uncovering different drawers and file cabinets. I’ve found several caches or micro-layers of pens, pencils, and highlighters. Some of the pens are visibly empty of ink, so I’m going to have to test all of them before putting a box out for people to rummage through.
I got exactly this far…
… before laughing till I pissed myself again! Second time today, Woman! I don’t know what it is with you back-woods southern charm, but Goddammit, you’re (possibly unintentionally) funny.
You keep this up, I’m billing you for laundry detergent!
Yeah, yeah, I’m hilarious. Will no one take me seriously?
P.S.
This is the funniest thread in a while.
Remind me to tell you about the bird in the house.
Wait till my pants get out of the dryer.
Just go without, no one’s looking.
Six-year-old daughter: “Mom, I can’t find my gym shoes!”
Me: “They’re on your feet.”
Daughter: “Oh.”
I’ve got several “mystery switches” around the house. Every now and then I’ll switch them on and off a few times for no reason. I suspect they go to outdoor lighting that either no longer exists or no longer functions, but I’d like to think that someone far, far away is wondering why that one mysterious light with no switch turns on and off a few times every few days for no reason. 
“…and then I got a letter from a woman in Germany saying ‘cut it out.’”
– Steven Wright
In my last house, I had a switch in the kitchen that apparently did nothing. When we were packing up the house to move out (after 15 years), I finally discovered that it turned on an incandescent light bulb hanging in the attic.
Anyone who is at least a semi-serious hobbyist/kit-builder/scratch-builder has stories of small detail parts which are dropped (or worse yet, spring out of tweezers) as you attempt to apply them to the kit and then vanish. Lying on the floor and area-searching (with a flashlight as needed), which normally works for finding such parts, unfortunately fails in a number of frustrating cases - even vacuuming the area and checking the collected debris doesn’t always yield anything.
Generally these parts are small, light, and somewhat flexible (plastic or thin metal) so their trajectories aren’t as linear as the modeler would hope for, and there are many posts of finding parts months or years later in unexpected locations pretty far from the workbench, and theories of where the parts are hiding in the meantime.
The study of small-part real-world physics could well form the basis of a Master’s thesis, if someone hasn’t written one already.
As we do, every year on the first Tuesday in Nov, we have a flutter on the Melbourne Cup (gee-gee race). Last year was no exception, so my daughter toddled off to our local betting agency, placed the bets and by some sort of miracle she won a few bucks (app $40).
We stuck the winning tickets under a magnet on the fridge, intending to get around to redeeming them at some point. And there they stayed, for months, until one afternoon I was bored and decided to go cash them in.
Gone. Just gone. Everything else plastered on the fridge door was still there (kids’ drawings, doc appointments, out of date calendars, you know the stuff), but no tickets. Looked in drawers, looked UNDER the fridge, turned the whole bloody house upside down (I was on a mission now!!) but nada. :dubious:
THIS year I managed to win $10 (woooh, RICH) and made sure that ticket was cashed within a couple of days.
Missing TV remotes.
I have at least 2 remote controls for every TV I have. What’s odd is sometimes both or more will go missing, then show up all at once in different places!
BTW, I live alone and never have any visitors.
Never underestimate the mobility of a dropped lego. The things turn up yards away from the point they fell from, and will happily blend perfectly into a beige carpet regardless of their color. Shining a flashlight along the floor to make them cast a long shadow is often helpful, unless they’ve managed to tuck themselves away at the edge of something ten feet away.
But even then they usually turn up sooner than later, if one looks with sufficient persistence. What hasn’t turned up are some complete builds. Specifically there were a pair of buzz droid minifigs that vanished completely out of existence several years ago, never to return, and somewhat more disconcertingly some lego animals, a good half-foot long each, completely disappeared a few decades ago, leaving the lonely empty box they came in waiting forlornly for their return. I live entirely alone with not even any pets (give or take errant lego ones), and it’s not like the things could have fallen behind something. But nope - gone.
Why don’t start walking barefoot? The moment you jump up and cry ouch, you’ve got your Lego :D.