Assuming you actually know, or have known, anyone in real life who qualifies i your judgment as mysterious.
And no, people you are only acquainted with online don’t count.
Does strange count?
I know a guy. Outwardly quite normal. Married, kids, etc. Is ostensibly a freelance journalist. And yet, despite not seeming to have all that much work, he moves his family every so often to a different part of the world, where he continues his purported work as a journalist. Nice guy. Nice kids. Nice wife.
I and several of my friends are pretty sure he’s a spy. Not kidding.
Well, there’s Jimmy Hoffa living in my basement, but he’s really just a normal guy-next-door once you get to know him.
Serious answer: a guy living down the street from me has a very big house and elaborate garden and, as far as I can tell, lives alone. For no reason I can discern whatsoever, he gives me the wig.
I was a little kid and I never saw our former next door neighbour the entire time he lived there. Not once. His house was old and pretty run down, and his backyard was overgrown, and any ball that got tossed over the fence was lost forever. He moved out to a nursing home and they tore down the house, but I still kind of wonder.
I still have your ball.
:eek:
You’re looking good for someone who went to a nursing home about fifteen-odd years ago. 
I’ve written before about the neighbor who has up to two-story vegetation growing all around his house. The fenced-in yard (which you can’t see into anyway) has a “Beware of Dog” sign on the gate. He does own a mean-looking large dog. The only way to get into the house is through the locked garage. In person both the husband and wife seem quite friendly. They also harbor a large colony of feral cats which are given food but no medical attention.
Not sure if this counts, but I have a couple of neighbors whose situation I can’t figure out. The woman owns a dog. The man owns a dog. I often see the man going into or coming out of the woman’s apartment. I sometimes see her walking towards his apartment. I’ll sometimes see either one of them outside, walking – get this – three dogs, all the same breed. Sometimes I’ll see them out together walking the dogs. And lately I’ll see either both of them or just the guy, With all three dogs – and a baby. But the woman, as far as I know, was never pregnant.
Wouldn’t it be simple enough to Google for articles he’s written? Or, heck, bust out Lexis if you’ve access to it.
He got younger. Don’t ask how, just accept that it is so.
There’s a very large fenced in property in my neighborhood. Set way way way in the back is a very tiny house.
The guy in this house only comes out about 4 in the morning. When I’ve been up that early, I’ve seen him riding his bike to the local grocery and back. Apparently that is the only place he goes.
As he rides by me, he always says “Hello kiddo.”
Several.
One guy works in a bookstore. I know for a fact that when he worked there originally they paid $6.50 an hour. I think he worked part time.
He has a gigantic – GIGANTIC – house in a nice neighborhood. He bought a friend of mine a laptop for his birthday. He’s a very interesting guy, writes surreal short stories as a hobby. I seem to remember hearing his grandparents paid for the house and the car, but I kind of wonder if he’s a drug dealer.
I also have a few friends who have been in military intelligence, one of whom has gone as a “civilian contractor” to Iraq a few times in the last few years. He doesn’t answer questions about what he’s done over there.
Why drug dealer? At my last job, I met a scruffy bike courier. It turns out he was a millionaire. He had some kind of patent for some kind of telecom device that he’d invented and had retired at the age of 30. He loved cycling so got a job as a courier because he could bike around all day and talk to all kinds of people (which made him a lousy courier - he would just sort of loiter around talking to receptionists all day).
The only reason I knew he was loaded was because he got it in his head one day that he wanted to buy our company because it looked “neat” and I saw him the day he came in with a lawyer, to meet with our boss (the sole proprietor). Nothing came of the business buy-out because it turned out not to be as “neat” as he thought it looked, once he found out more about it. And truthfully, I think my boss only agreed to meet with him more because he was interested in finding out the story behind the kooky little dude.
If you’re ever in Toronto and you see a really pasty-white, short, nerdy courier, wearing wire rim glasses, who looks really, really out of shape and doesn’t seem to care if he makes his deliveries, that’s him. (Granted it was ten years ago, so who knows what he’s doing now.)
So before “drug dealer” I’d probably pick something like “inheritance” or “windfall” first.
I knew Joe Waldholtz once.
I was voted “Most Mysterious Teacher” for nearly ten years in a row.
That’s me. Well, and the guy I know who hoards like crazy and has no running water in his flat because he’s afraid his landlord will see what his house looks like right now.
I wouldn’t talk about it if this man hadn’t died years ago.
When I was growing up one of my friend’s father always frightened me. I’d go out to play on their farm and if some of us were climbing a tree way out on the fence line he’d come all the way out there and tell us to play somewhere else. Couldn’t figure out why he never wanted us by that great climbing tree.
His story was mysterious. He had come from Portugal with his family in the '20’s and settled in Nebraska. When he left home he came to southern Minnesota and worked as a hired man on the farm of a rich and well-known family there.
The farmer’s daughter, a well-educated and rebellious young woman, eloped with him. Right out of movie. And they settled on a hard-scrabble farm a mile out of town where he became very successful. As far as I know they never received any help from her family who were pretty taken aback by the whole thing.
Once as an adult I said to my friend, “You know, your dad really used to scare me.” And she answered, “He used to scare me, too.”
A man of menacing countenance and hulk-like body language and not “one of us” he had not a friend in town. Nor did he appear to want one. Everything about him said, “Stay away from me.”
I never questioned my parents about him but as an adult I began to think about how strange the circumstances were in my little neck of the woods and asked my dad how this immigrant hired man had managed to buy a farm at such a young age and become a successful farmer when he had had no experience nor friends to tell him how to grow soybeans in unfamiliar soil.
That part - the farm work could be explained by his having three husky sons and perhaps he had a green thumb. But how he acquired the farm during depression years mystified me.
My dad wasn’t much of a gossip. All he said to me was that it had been owned by a Norwegian batchelor farmer (just like in Lake Woebegon) and that the guy disappeared one day. Then he changed the subject.
I wonder. . .
Not sure if this is “a mysterious person” or just “a mystery that happened to a person”. Several years ago I lived in Phoenix and moved into a new apartment complex. There was a guy that I would see all the time riding his bike around the area, then also started running into with increasing frequency around the complex. We started chatting a couple of times a week when ran into each other at the mailboxes. He seemed like a decent enough person, nothing that really stood out as being terribly strange or unusual about him. Eventually we decided that we should get together for dinner some time.
But, he said he was leaving the next day for 3 weeks to do a job in another state. Don’t remember now what he claimed his work was, although we must’ve talked about it. So I gave him my number and waited to hear from him.
After a few weeks went by without hearing from him, I decided he must’ve changed his mind and I should just let it go. But as time went on, I realized that I also never again saw him around the apartment complex or riding his bike around the neighborhood.
Maybe 4 or 6 months went by and I still had never seen him again. Refusing to believe someone would completely change their schedule and habits just to avoid me, I found some pretext to go into the rental office and talk to one of the girls who worked there that I had become somewhat friendly with. Trying to be all casual, I asked “So, what ever happened to Dave in Apt. XXX, haven’t seen him around in a while?” I expected to hear that he moved out. Maybe the out of state job turned into a full-time gig and he ended up moving or something like that.
Turns out that he just never showed up again after his trip. No rent payments, no contact from anyone about him, etc. They said he had always been a good tenant and had been there for a year or so before this happened, so it was very odd. They told me the landlords eventually had been forced to enter his apartment, where they found what looked to be all of his stuff, undisturbed, except obviously not used in a while (rotting food in the fridge, huge layer of dust on everything, etc.) They put his stuff in storage.
A few months after I first asked about him, they ended up selling it to some place that auctioned off unclaimed property (after whatever the legal time requirement was for holding his stuff). They had never heard anything from anyone about him. No one but me ever asked about him or called about him, and they didn’t have any valid emergency contact or work information for him.
I always wondered what happened to the guy and what his story was. At first I thought maybe something happened and he died or got killed on his trip. But then, wouldn’t someone (police, hospital) try to get in touch to try to locate next of kin? Or wouldn’t family get in touch to get his stuff? Or friends or his work try call to try to find out about him? Was I the only person in town he had talked to? And surely he wouldn’t just up and move without taking any of his stuff without there being some very strange situation going on.
Was he a spy? On the lam from the law? Inherited a billion dollars and decided to just leave his cheap crappy stuff in his cheap crappy apartment and move to an island kingdom he purchased? Probably something much more mundane, but since I’ll never know I choose to imagine something interesting. Or maybe, perish the thought, I’m so scary he figured he had to sneak out of town permanently to avoid me after standing me up on the dinner invite?
Kind of bugs me not knowing, as I don’t like anything I don’t understand and tend to dig in to such things until I do understand something about them. So there aren’t too many unsolved mysteries in my life.
Anyone want to suggest any interesting theories?
My grandfather used to manage a paint store in Sacramento. After he retired, he used to get a brand new Cadillac every year and had a time-share on Maui.
I don’t think he was connected…
I know you don’t think he’s dead but that’s what I’d put my money on.