The Inexplicable

[AtmaWeapon]

OK so I put this on MY BLOG but

• No one reads it
• People don't click links

so I am going to repost it here so that you can read it. I've seriously had a lot of discussion with people about stuff like this and I'm pretty sure there's been some strange stuff you've seen that you think you're crazy for having noticed; feel free to discuss any.

I figure this is a neat contrast to our giant religion vs. sciencefest because both my religious beliefs and my scientific thought agree that this event could not possibly have happened, yet I experienced it and have spent the last several hours combing my memories for some kind of situation where I could have enabled the event and it just didn't happen.

Keep discussion serious though; I give my word this is true based on a very thorough analysis of the situation and my memories. I noticed the anomaly today and after letting it sink in for several hours I am losing sleep tonight trying to figure out what happened.

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I wanted to start with something that happened to me that is improbable and work my way up to the inexplicable, but the improbable requires photo evidence and I have to get up early so it's too much effort.

What I am about to explain is seriously true and happened recently to me. My mother and I were talking about random weird things tonight and it was only when I explained this that I realized how strange it really was. This is something I will probably go to my grave and never understand.

It starts with the mechanical pencil I use, the Pentel P205. I like it because it writes well, lasts a long time, and recently doesn't seem to jam much. Also I prefer 0.5mm lead to the 0.7mm lead that many pencils use. The single disadvantage these pencils present over other pencils is the tiny eraser. Typically, the eraser lasts about a month for me; because of this I always carry around an eraser pen or one of those drafting white plastic erasers (this habit started when I was taking lots of math classes and erasing entire pages at a time).

Due to absentmindedness, I have lost something like 8 or 9 of these pencils throughout the time I've used them. I'd also frequently use one to do homework and forget to put it back in the backpack, leaving me in class with no writing utensil. My first preventative strategy against this action involved carrying two pencils; this worked for a time but ultimately led to me forgetting the first pencil, using the spare, finding out the first was misplaced, then losing the spare. My second strategy proved much better. I kept one pencil in the backpack and another in my dorm room; I'd only use the backpack pencil in classes and the dorm room pencil in the dorm room. This superior method led me to several semesters with no lost pencils.

So I recently took a trip to Austin with my fiancee on an apartment hunting mission. We successfully got an apartment we both agreed was pleasing, so all's good there. The inexplicable event revolves around the pencil I took with me to Austin. Now, the two pencils are important because there is a distinguishing mark between them. The pencil in my backpack was on its third semester and had no eraser left as I had worn it down. The pencil in my dorm room was brand new and thus had lost very little eraser. Keep this mark in mind, it is the key to the mystery.

So I took the pencil from my backpack (no eraser) to Austin with me, tucked in the binding of my spiral notebook. When I got back to school, I ran a check and realized I had never returned the pencil to my backpack. I assumed I had left it in my car, at my house, or lost it on the trip, so I tucked the pencil from my dorm room into my backpack and reminded myself to go looking for the lost pencil. It wasn't in my car, and couldn't find it in my house. So I just decided it had been lost and moved on with my life.

Until I took the eraser cap off of the pencil I had and noticed how much eraser it had. None.

I took the pencil with no eraser with me to Austin; the pencil with the eraser was tucked into my lap desk in my dorm room. I got to school, noticed I was missing a pencil, and retrieved the pencil from my lap desk. This pencil should have had an eraser but it did not. I didn't find the old pencil and put it in the backpack without thinking. I wrote 3 days of notes in pen until I decided to give up on finding the lost pencil and I vividly remember removing the pencil from my lap desk, telling myself it was a bad idea all the while.

The only explanations I can come up with involve things that are impossible. I could not have accidentally swapped the two pencils earlier; I never carry two pencils at once and only use the correct pencil based on its location. If I used the backpack pencil while in my room I would be unable to place it in the lap desk without noticing I had used the wrong pencil; in that case it would be silly to remove the lap desk pencil and replace it with the backpack pencil. It is impossible for me to use the lap desk pencil while not in my room. I cannot explain how this happened, and quite frankly it creeps me out.

[Daarkseid]

Have you been able to discount the possibility that somebody is fucking with you? Somehow knowing about your pencil system and being immature enough to switch them on you?

That said, I prefer Pentel's PD345.

EDIT: Maybe I shouldn't get this thread side tracked(removed shit about mechanical pencils).

[Glenn the Great]

I'd also say that interference from others is a possible explanation. I sometimes swiped erasers off others' mechanical pencils when mine had worn down back in grade school.

[Breaker]

I don't know about your pencils, but I think I solved the mystery of why nobody reads your blog.

[AtmaWeapon]

I'd also say that interference from others is a possible explanation. I sometimes swiped erasers off others' mechanical pencils when mine had worn down back in grade school.

See I live in a single occupancy dorm room and don't really have people over so that's pretty unlikely.

Today I found the other pencil in my car but it still doesn't really explain how they got swapped though now I guess it is a little more likely.

The next one though I think we'll all agree is pretty strange.

My fiancee gave me a neclace with her junior high class ring on it several years ago. It disappeared around the time when I was moving back from my co-op job in Tennessee. I spent hour after hour combing through every box and every spot in my room it could have been. There are two places where I tended to place it at night: one is this countertop area over some cabinets, and the other is on top of a chest of drawers. My suspicion was that the necklace had fallen into my pajama drawer, but rummaging through the drawer did not reveal the necklace. I pulled all of the articles of clothing out of the drawer, but still didn't find the necklace.

For a year and a half, I lamented my foolishness in misplacing the necklace. Every few weeks I would tear through my room hoping to find it. Several times I emptied or rummaged through that pajama drawer but never found a single thing.

One night I was getting ready to go to bed and I got to thinking about that pajama drawer. It is stuffed full of clothes I pretty much never wear and various random things I tossed in there. I was thinking about how some of the stuff has been in there for a few years, and wondered if there was anything interesting in there that I hadn't seen in a long time. I opened the drawer, pulled aside the shirt on top, and froze.

On top of a crumpled pair of pajama pants, I found the lost necklace. It was laid out in the same way I lay it down when I am getting ready for bed, not tangled in any way.

I have wondered for months now how I missed seeing the necklace during the many times I rummaged through the drawer. Even more than that I have wondered how on Earth it was laid out as if it were on display after I had agitated and removed the contents of the drawer so many times. The most logical assumption of how it got there is that it fell off the dresser into the drawer (I leave it open a lot). It would follow that after falling into the drawer the necklace would likely not be laid out as it was when I found it. The only thing I can figure is that it fell and landed in exactly the configuration that would be untangled by my later searches for it, but the odds of that happening are so improbable that I don't really know if I believe it.

This isn't the first object that has seemed to disappear then reappear to me, and everyone in my family has several similar stories.

My mother caught some wooden doubloons at a Mardi Gras parade when she was a child. She stacked them in a pattern on a shelf in her closet. At some point, she noticed they were gone. She searched the closet, but never found them. Three months later, the doubloons were stacked on her shelf again.

My brother lost his glasses on the playground at school one day. That in itself wasn't spectacular as he had just started wearing them and sometimes when they fell off he didn't notice. The teachers had students in other recess periods comb the playground in a grid pattern looking for the glasses, but 3 or 4 hours of searching passed and no one found the glasses. At the end of the day, my mother decided to look one last time (she works at the school he was going to) and walked to the swings where he said he had played. In the first place she looked she found the glasses, neatly folded as if they had been placed there on purpose.

There's several other cases of items disappearing for a long time and reappearing in strange circumstances, but these stand out as the strangest because they all have a common link:

* Each time, the missing item was of great importance to the person that lost it.
* Each time, the missing item had a relatively small area where it was likely to be
* Each time, the item was the focus of an intensive search that covered the area in which it was later found several times
* Each time, the item was found in a state that appeared as if it was carefully placed there, rather than simply left

Until this necklace, these situations seemed to me like cases where searching for something makes one less likely to find it, as you focus so hard on what you are seeing you overlook it. But it's really strange to me that the necklace was so perfectly laid out. I've read some accounts in forum threads about other people having toys mysteriously disappear then reappear months later in a place that had been searched. Other cases were thrown toys that all present witnessed the general location in which they landed (like a bush) but hours of searching failed to locate the toy.

That's the kind of thing I am ultimately curious to see if anyone else has experienced; the thread on another forum that reminded me of these things had several dozen accounts of the odd disappearance of a toy, sometimes followed by its reappearance in the exact place in which it had been lost. I am fascinated by this phenomenon and curious to read as many as I can because I am interested if it is just some anomaly in how we search for things or if there is actually some strange event that is being triggered that we do not understand.

[Beldaran]

Well, Occam's Razor suggests that you simple made a mental error and took the newer pencil with you to Austin, and your memories are faulty.

Or perhaps you took the old no erasor pencil with you, and while you were gone, someone used the erasor on your newer pencil. Do you have a roommate?

Perhaps you wore down the eraser on your newer pencil before you left and don't remember because you don't consider erasing a mistake to be a very memorable moment.

Either way, it is vastly more likely that there is a reasonable explanation for this as opposed to a mystical occurance. You could have an artificial memory at any step in this process. Similar things have happened to me before. Many times, when your mind gets some memories confused, or can't remember what happened, it creates a new memory with the available fragments and makes it seem like a perfectly legitimate, accurate memory.

Or maybe there's a little elf that follows you around and fucks with your pencils.

EDIT: ah, no roomate. Okay.

By the way, you're moving to Austin? That's bad ass. I live like an hour and half away from there. Prior to coming to Baylor I lived in Austin for almost 2 years. It's an awesome place to live.

[The_Amaster]

Happens to me all the time. Once when I was like eight, I owned a copy of the book Matilda. It was a great book, and I read it all the time until one day I lost it. I searched my room who knows how many times, never found it. So, fnally, a few months later, I just give up and go out and buy a new copy. I come home to put the new one on my shelf, and theres the old one, right next to the othes. Freaky, no? Happens with other stuff, too, like my gameboy, and a couple other books.

I'm not inclined to believe it's somthing religious, though. If God does exist, I highly doubt he goes around making stuff appear and dissapear. Could be somthing else(Insert your choice of "Twilight Zone" or "Close Encounters" music here)

[AtmaWeapon]

Well yeah on the pencil thing I'm less freaked out now that the pencil with an eraser has appeared. I could have countered the "someone wore down the eraser on the new pencil" thing because the pencil with no eraser has hundreds of scratches on it and the shape is slightly worn, which is characteristic of an older pencil.

Also erasing mistakes is a pretty memorable moment due to this bizarre quirk I have developed. I draw marks and etch designs into these block erasers I use with my pencils, and I use them to track the progress of the eraser's progress towards oblivion. There's this one big hole in the one I take to class and I am SO... CLOSE... to erasing up to that hole. Unfortunately I developed this quirk after finishing all of my math curriculum so now at most I tend to erase five or six words at a time

Anyway I was really trying to not put a religious spin on my suspicions behind what happened. It comes up when my mom and I talk about ghosts and stuff (she's seen a lot of weird things) and we are both of the theory it is some mental phenomenon that we wish we understood better. There is an intended bit of mysticism there but with me the situation is more like this:

When science can't explain something it is magic. Someone should study it and try to figure out what the magic is. Eventually, science explains the magic and it is not magic anymore. That's why I'm pretty curious about this "disappearing object" thing because I have some pretty crazy theories to explain them but it's kind of one of those things where I have a different theory that I would like to be true and if it is true than these make sense also. I think there's perfectly rational explanations for them but the necklace thing really bothers me because the logical way it could have happened has a pretty low probability in my opinion. So I'd like to collect more data on this particular type of anomaly. It's probably just false memories and coincidences but wouldn't it be neat if there were something deeper?

With the scientific knowledge I am currently aware of, all of my current theories are based on absolutely nothing and are ridiculous. But if you believe in magic they make sense!

[Pineconn]

Wow.

I have a similar story to share. About 20 or 25+ years ago, my mom's parents died (but this was too early and I was not born yet). One day close to their deaths (they did not die simultaneously, though), she decided to take a bath in a bathtub. Nothing was special about the tub; you just turn the knob and water pours out. Well, about a minute before she was going to turn the water on, the knob turned by itself and water came out. She swears that it was the ghost of her dad who did this.

Now, a possible reason to the sudden failure of the bathtub's water pipe is due to water pressure, which may have somehow opened the valve. But, why would this have happened only moments before her bath? No one will know. She is confident that it was a ghost.

[Beldaran]

Of course it was a ghost! If I were a ghost, I know the first thing I would do is turn on my daughter's faucet. Nothing makes me immediately think of ghosts like running water!

Why bother communicating with your living children in a meaningful way, when you can save them the trouble of turning on their own bath water?