# Unexplained Personal Mysteries **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 28, 2016, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776 "2016-12-28T14:43:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2016, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/61 "2016-12-31T17:22:07Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > On the way home, we stopped and picked up a chicken on the side of the road, apparently fallen off a truckload bound for market. A few miles further on, there was nice cabbage on the shoulder, also spillage from a market truck. So we got home and trimmed our tree and enjoyed a nice chicken and cabbage Christmas feast, all courtesy of some mysterious providence. Are you trying to get food poisoning? :eek: Da’hell is wrong with you? ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2016, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/62 "2016-12-31T18:58:11Z")
> [@Grrr](#): > > Another clock story. > > One day I had noticed the clock on my wall stopped working. At the time, I figured the batteries had just ran out. > > It wasn’t until the next day I got around to changing them. Only now I notice my clock is working again. And not only is it working, it’s telling the correct time! > > So that means my clock stopped working for EXACTLY 24 hours! Five or ten years ago, I started to hear an annoying beep every couple of seconds on a Saturday. It took me a while to trace it but I eventually found it was coming from the smoke detector. I changed the battery and it stopped beeping. The weird thing was that this was _the day before Daylight Saving Time ended_ (which is when the public-service announcements encourage you to change your smoke detector battery). It was as if the thing was timed perfectly. ---
**Author:** ![Marion\_Wormer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d07c76/32.png) [@Marion\_Wormer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marion_Wormer)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/63 "2017-01-01T01:46:14Z")
> [@Rilchiam](#): > > New Year’s Day, mid-1990s. I was the least hungover person in the house, so I was designated to go out and get orange juice and hot 'n sour soup. I went down to the parking garage and saw an SUV idling, with a man and a woman sitting in it. Didn’t think anything of it then (apart from looking out in case they were trying to get out at the same time as me), but when I came back after half an hour or more, they were still sitting there. 😕 This was in Los Angeles, so there’s no way the engine had to be warmed up before driving. They can’t have been jump-starting it, since it was not hooked up to another vehicle. And they were staring straight ahead, not making out or even apparently talking, so it can’t have been an assignation. > > So I went up to the driver’s side window. “Uh, just curious…you’re not committing suicide, are you?” No, they said, so I went upstairs. Still don’t know why they, especially two people, were idling for so long, but at least I don’t have it on my conscience. Cops. Not very good ones apparently. * * * ## And for those who were curious, my $10 tip finally hit my CC so I now know about pre-auth in the restaurant business. ---
**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 7:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/64 "2017-01-01T07:44:18Z")
> [@Marion\_Wormer](#): > > Cops. Not very good ones apparently. Except, I should have mentioned, the SUV belonged in that space, and I recognized the guy as a neighbor. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/65 "2017-01-01T14:16:43Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Five or ten years ago, I started to hear an annoying beep every couple of seconds on a Saturday. It took me a while to trace it but I eventually found it was coming from the smoke detector. I changed the battery and it stopped beeping. The weird thing was that this was _the day before Daylight Saving Time ended_ (which is when the public-service announcements encourage you to change your smoke detector battery). It was as if the thing was timed perfectly. Every year, one person out of 365 will have that experience. If you maintain your smoke detector for 60 years, one person out of six will do this. In other wods, one person in six will, during a lifetime, have an annual event occur on a certain date. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/66 "2017-01-01T14:23:27Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > Are you trying to get food poisoning? :eek: Da’hell is wrong with you? What are the odds that a chicken will have been poisoned by a terrorist and left on the side of the road? Or a cabbage? The only thing “wrong with me” is that my immune system has been allowed to develop antibodies to common pathogens through repeated exposure, so I can eat anything anywhere in any third world country, and have no disconcerting effects. ---
**Author:** ![Sinaptics](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/278dde/32.png) [@Sinaptics](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sinaptics)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/67 "2017-01-01T15:36:28Z")
I’ve got one: About 3 or 4 years ago my family and took a short trip and stayed at my parent’s house for the weekend. In my (not my parent’s) house we have windows on the south and west walls of our kitchen. When we returned home, there had to be 2 or 3 hundred house flies on the western kitchen window. None of the south facing window and none in the rest of the house. They also weren’t flying around. A few hundred flies just sitting on the window. And they showed up between a Friday and a Sunday. We have no idea where they came from and nothing even close to that ever happened again. Creepiest damn thing I ever saw. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/68 "2017-01-01T15:41:47Z")
This one happened about a month ago. It is not an “unexplained” mystery, but an experience you might find interesting. We live on 15 wooded acres. My neighbor has observed evidence of deer poachers on his property, and warned they’re likely on our property, too. With this on my mind, I got up at 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning to hunt deer from my tree stand on the north end of the property. I’m up in the stand, crossbow in hand… the sun hadn’t risen yet, and it is pitch black. I was 15 feet off the ground. It was very cold, and very quiet. I was sitting there for about an hour, when all of the sudden I saw a tiny light about 90 yards away. It looked to be a flashlight. It was slowly moving up and down. I thought to myself, “Well there they are… damn poachers.” The light moved very slowly from left to right about 10 yards, and then it stopped moving. While staring at the light, I was trying to figure out what to do. Should I wait for them to come to me? What then? Or should I go to them? What if they’re armed? To be honest, I was getting a bit nervous about the whole situation. I continued to stare at the light. It was still very dark out, and it appeared the light was on the ground. I figured they were sitting in the brush, waiting for a deer to come by. An hour goes by and the sun started to rise. I was still staring at the light. After a few minutes, a structure appeared around the light. It was our house. The light was coming from a small lamp in our kitchen, shining through a window. I was floored… I could have _sworn_ the light was moving when I first saw it. Were my eyes playing tricks on me the whole time? Or did I really see a poacher’s flashlight, and my eyes locked on the lamp when their flashlight went out? ---
**Author:** ![Sinaptics](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/278dde/32.png) [@Sinaptics](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sinaptics)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/69 "2017-01-01T15:46:25Z")
I have another, but it’s embarrassing and most likely just a coincidence. About 5-7 years ago, I used to walk about 10 minutes to the train station for work in the morning. One day, while walking, a bit of flatulence came with an unexpected surprise, if you catch my drift. I had something important going on that morning and I was far enough into my walk that if I turned back, I’d miss my train. I decided to soldier on and I think I may have even pleaded a bit to a higher power, agnostic though I am. About 5 minutes later, while walking by a small park, there was a role of toilet paper hanging from the branch of a tree. The sheer odds of that find astound me to this day. ---
**Author:** ![Sinaptics](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/278dde/32.png) [@Sinaptics](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sinaptics)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/70 "2017-01-01T15:49:21Z")
> [@Crafter\_Man](#): > > This one happened about a month ago. > > It is not an “unexplained” mystery, but an experience you might find interesting. > > We live on 15 wooded acres. My neighbor has observed evidence of deer poachers on his property, and warned they’re likely on our property, too. > > With this on my mind, I got up at 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning to hunt deer from my tree stand on the north end of the property. I’m up in the stand, crossbow in hand… the sun hadn’t risen yet, and it is pitch black. I was 15 feet off the ground. It was very cold, and very quiet. > > I was sitting there for about an hour, when all of the sudden I saw a tiny light about 90 yards away. It looked to be a flashlight. It was slowly moving up and down. I thought to myself, “Well there they are… damn poachers.” The light moved very slowly from left to right about 10 yards, and then it stopped moving. > > While staring at the light, I was trying to figure out what to do. Should I wait for them to come to me? What then? Or should I go to them? What if they’re armed? To be honest, I was getting a bit nervous about the whole situation. > > I continued to stare at the light. It was still very dark out, and it appeared the light was on the ground. I figured they were sitting in the brush, waiting for a deer to come by. > > An hour goes by and the sun started to rise. I was still staring at the light. After a few minutes, a structure appeared around the light. It was our house. The light was coming from a small lamp in our kitchen, shining through a window. I was floored… I could have _sworn_ the light was moving when I first saw it. Were my eyes playing tricks on me the whole time? Or did I really see a poacher’s flashlight, and my eyes locked on the lamp when their flashlight went out? A better question is what the hell were you doing out more than an hour before sunrise when you’re close enough to see your house? That’s just masochism. I hate that part of the morning. Shadows everywhere, everything looks like a deer, not allowed to shoot anything, etc. I try to get out maybe 30 minutes before the sun breaks the horizon. ---
**Author:** ![Jennshark](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Jennshark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jennshark)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/71 "2017-01-01T18:09:18Z")
We were on a trip and had a flat tire. We got it fixed and set out again and a warning light for tire pressure came on – a different tire had a slow leak. Tires were fairly new with a warranty so we stopped at a Firestone place and got replacements. Fast forward to return trip, we’re driving behind a real sweet BMW with wide low profile tires. I remarked that while our Jeep’s tires were expensive the Bimmer’s must be prohibitive. Yes, you know what happens next. . . one of those suckers shredded all over the road. We pulled over to see if they needed help and it turns out the couple is from Vienna, Austria, and didn’t speak English. Mrs. Shark’s mom was from Vienna and she speaks that species of German; we waited with the couple so Mrs. Shark could translate for the tow truck driver. This was all the stranger because we were in BFE West Virginia and I’d bet Mrs. S. and the stranded couple were the only Austro-Germanic speakers in the entire region That was a weird trip! ---
**Author:** ![Vinum\_Lupum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Vinum\_Lupum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Vinum_Lupum)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/72 "2017-01-01T19:45:19Z")
> [@jtur88](#): > > Every year, one person out of 365 will have that experience. If you maintain your smoke detector for 60 years, one person out of six will do this. In other wods, one person in six will, during a lifetime, have an annual event occur on a certain date. Back in the summer of '86, I was babysitting my nephew for my sister, and was stuck until she got home, bored out of my skull, with nothing to do but read the local paper I’d gotten out of the mailbox for her. I read everything interesting in it, and had nothing else to read (damn, she had booooring books in her bookshelf at the time), so I read the whole damn newspaper, including the obituaries. In those obits was someone I went to school with, so he was about 23 or so by then, same age as me. I never read the obits (still don’t, unless I have nothing better to do), but there was someone I knew who was young enough for it to be surprising that he died. And I read about him on the only day in years that I actually looked at the obits. Spooky! So, being bored, and with nothing better to do, I decided to treat it as a [Fermi Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem) and calculate the odds. It turns out that the same thing will happen _every damn day_ to about 5 people in the world (to within an order of magnitude or so). The question then becomes “what’s so special about _me_ that I _shouldn’t_ be one of today’s lucky 5”? It didn’t seem _nearly_ so ‘Spooky’ after that. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/73 "2017-01-01T20:19:08Z")
> [@Sinaptics](#): > > A better question is what the hell were you doing out more than an hour before sunrise when you’re close enough to see your house? That’s just masochism. I normally get in my stand 30 to 60 minutes before sunrise when all I am doing is deer hunting. But on that morning I was also looking for poachers. My neighbor said the poachers were spotlighting deer in the middle of the night, so I got in my stand extra early. Our house is around 90 yards away from this tree stand. But there is a _lot_ of brush and a hill between the stand and the house. Even during the day I can barely see the house from the stand. > [@Sinaptics](#): > > I hate that part of the morning. Shadows everywhere, everything looks like a deer, not allowed to shoot anything, etc. I try to get out maybe 30 minutes before the sun breaks the horizon. It’s a really spooky experience. All senses are hypersensitive. Eyes and brain play tricks on you. ---
**Author:** ![Marion\_Wormer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d07c76/32.png) [@Marion\_Wormer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marion_Wormer)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/74 "2017-01-01T21:07:40Z")
> [@Sinaptics](#): > > I’ve got one: > > About 3 or 4 years ago my family and took a short trip and stayed at my parent’s house for the weekend. In my (not my parent’s) house we have windows on the south and west walls of our kitchen. When we returned home, there had to be 2 or 3 hundred house flies on the western kitchen window. None of the south facing window and none in the rest of the house. They also weren’t flying around. A few hundred flies just sitting on the window. And they showed up between a Friday and a Sunday. We have no idea where they came from and nothing even close to that ever happened again. Creepiest damn thing I ever saw. I have one like this. I came home early from work one _February_ and there were hundreds of robins covering my yard (front and back) and sitting on the branches of every tree. That’s not the weird part. They stopped at my property line. No birds in the nearby trees, fences or yards. I walked up the sidewalk and they all shifted to look at me. Very Steven King/Alfred Hitchcock. Then I opened the door and set the dog on them. ---
**Author:** ![Marion\_Wormer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d07c76/32.png) [@Marion\_Wormer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marion_Wormer)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/75 "2017-01-01T21:15:34Z")
> [@Crafter\_Man](#): > > This one happened about a month ago. > > It is not an “unexplained” mystery, but an experience you might find interesting. > > We live on 15 wooded acres. My neighbor has observed evidence of deer poachers on his property, and warned they’re likely on our property, too. > > With this on my mind, I got up at 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning to hunt deer from my tree stand on the north end of the property. I’m up in the stand, crossbow in hand… the sun hadn’t risen yet, and it is pitch black. I was 15 feet off the ground. It was very cold, and very quiet. > > I was sitting there for about an hour, when all of the sudden I saw a tiny light about 90 yards away. It looked to be a flashlight. It was slowly moving up and down. I thought to myself, “Well there they are… damn poachers.” The light moved very slowly from left to right about 10 yards, and then it stopped moving. > > While staring at the light, I was trying to figure out what to do. Should I wait for them to come to me? What then? Or should I go to them? What if they’re armed? To be honest, I was getting a bit nervous about the whole situation. > > I continued to stare at the light. It was still very dark out, and it appeared the light was on the ground. I figured they were sitting in the brush, waiting for a deer to come by. > > An hour goes by and the sun started to rise. I was still staring at the light. After a few minutes, a structure appeared around the light. It was our house. The light was coming from a small lamp in our kitchen, shining through a window. I was floored… I could have _sworn_ the light was moving when I first saw it. Were my eyes playing tricks on me the whole time? Or did I really see a poacher’s flashlight, and my eyes locked on the lamp when their flashlight went out? I can explain this because back in the 70s I operated a radar network and rural sheriffs used to call me about UFO’s. I’ve got some good stories about so-called UFOs, someday I’ll have to write them down. When you see a solitary light with no background it will appear to bounce up and down or go side to side. What’s happening is that your pulse is causing slight fluctuations in the position of your eye. When there’s a back ground, your brain filters out the motion and the light will look still. Your eye is still bouncing slightly, but the presence of the background give the brain an image to compare the light’s location to. Human vision is amazing. I wish I knew what this is called, so would hope someone can tell me what it is. ---
**Author:** ![Vinum\_Lupum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Vinum\_Lupum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Vinum_Lupum)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/76 "2017-01-01T22:39:40Z")
> [@Marion\_Wormer](#): > > I wish I knew what this is called, so would hope someone can tell me what it is. [Saccade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) ---
**Author:** ![Marion\_Wormer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d07c76/32.png) [@Marion\_Wormer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marion_Wormer)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/77 "2017-01-01T22:50:01Z")
> [@Vinum\_Lupum](#): > > [Saccade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade) Oooh Thank you! I wish I’d known that term 45 years ago! ---
**Author:** ![Vinum\_Lupum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Vinum\_Lupum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Vinum_Lupum)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2017, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/78 "2017-01-01T22:58:28Z")
> [@Marion\_Wormer](#): > > Oooh Thank you! > > I wish I’d known that term 45 years ago! 45 years ago it was unknown to science. The word would have done you no good at all. ---
**Author:** ![gallows\_fodder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/8c91f0/32.png) [@gallows\_fodder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gallows_fodder)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2017, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/79 "2017-01-02T04:35:35Z")
The summer I was 15, the empty field next to my neighborhood was bought by developers and construction began on the new houses. One evening, my dad and I took a walk through the new streets to check out the progress being made, and all along the curbs in the overturned soil were bunches of an unfamiliar weed with yellow flowers. I was interested in botany at the time [confession: I was a closet Goth girl interested in Wicca and the magic and lore of local plants], so I picked a couple of the flowers to take back home with me to identify them with my books. At some point in the walk, I decided not to bother, and I tossed the flowers off the side of the road. The next morning, I woke up and came downstairs to eat breakfast, and I passed by the open front door where my dad was doing some yard work nearby. “Hey!” he called out to me, “what’s the idea with all the flowers? I thought you weren’t interested in them.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. He came over and showed me the doormat, where someone had left a large bunch of the yellow-flowered weeds I had picked the night before. I said, “Oh, you did that, didn’t you?” but he insisted that he hadn’t, and he didn’t seem like he was joking. (He’s a terrible liar, and this really isn’t something he would have done anyway, either as a prank or as a nice gesture, because he was a pretty miserable person in those days.) I took the flowers and looked them up in my books (now for the life of me I can’t remember what they were), and then I pressed them in my giant dictionary on the page with the entry for “mystery.” I never found out who left them on my doorstep, or who would have seen me carrying them on my walk through an empty skeletal neighborhood. Naturally, due to my aforementioned interest in Wicca and magic, I assumed it was the faeries. :rolleyes: I’m kicking myself now for not saving them when I moved away from home. ---
**Author:** ![Section\_Maker\_Jupe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/section_maker_jupe/32/1424_2.png) [@Section\_Maker\_Jupe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Section_Maker_Jupe)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2017, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776/80 "2017-01-02T15:55:20Z")
I was sleeping on the beach in Hawaii, in my vagabond days, when I had a horrible dream of suffocating under blankets…the next night, sleeping under some plastic due to the rain…I woke to that same feeling, except this time a large wave had swept over my spot (new swell arriving) anded I jumped up in a total panic, and let the water wash around me…boy that was a cold sleepless night. I was convinced I had dreamed the event the night before. Self induced Deja Vu…:smack: [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/unexplained-personal-mysteries/775776.md?page=5)