Tell me about a random unsolved mystery in your life....

Perhaps she was inventing a glamorous life to cover her loneliness?

Or maybe she had had a glamorous and happy family life in her past - but which she still referred to in the present tense. Maybe her husband had died and her children had gone NC? Although the 'no family' comment might not add up, unless nobody knew about her past.

It sounds desperately sad though.

The watch is not the puzzling part to me, I was a bit annoyed about the watch but it was nothing irreplaceable. I just always wonder why this lady told me she was a completely different person to who she actually was?!?

LittleBella Odds are that nice lady took your watch. I've seen people do this, they can be very skilful and take watches without their victim noticing.

I've also never found the watch I was wearing that day!

With the phones - I wonder if the handsets make a teensy noise before it starts to ring? Our office phone make a little low buzz a couple of seconds before it starts ringing. Maybe domestic phones make a sound, too tiny to be consciously heard, but loud enough to be registered.

I always know when it rings if someone has died though - and not because of an unusual time. When I called my sister when mum died she just picked up the phone and wailed before I even said a word.

It's not a mystery as such but just gives me the shivers when I think about it. I had an elderly client at work who I would see regularly every week. She always looked well dressed and made up. She would tell me stories of her family and husband, fancy days out, parties, her beautiful house, presents from her children/husband etc. one day when she left she said goodbye and touched my hand with hers, after that I noticed my watch was missing (no idea if that has any relevance or not). I didn't see her at work again over the next few weeks, then whilst reading the local paper one day I came across a story about a woman who had died in her flat and had not been found for weeks until neighbours had reported a smell and build up of post etc. the woman had no family and lived alone in her little flat. The paper had a photo of the woman along with the article and it was the same woman who i used to speak to at work every week!

Viva, maybe your frog beanbag was caught by a passing bird of prey which was moving so quickly that you didn't notice it/sun in your eyes?

aubergines is it a CO2 detector? Possibly losing its battery. Took ages for us to work it out and it sounds similar!

Laska It's interesting what you say about hearing and knowing someone's on the phone, but I used to know who was on the phone and I have partial hearing, with the loss being mainly in the high frequencies. I've been like this from birth. Doesn't happen with mobiles, only landlines.

The first house I lived in on my own had no carpets, just laminate floor on top of the original floorboards. Very cheap & poorly laid laminate, though, and lots of cracks and gaps and holes everywhere.

Anyway, days after I moved in, brown carpet moths started to appear and the house within a few weeks was completely infested with them.

I put up with it for a while & then got pest control in. They said it was the worst moth infestation they'd ever seen and couldn't believe it would happen in a house with no carpets. They were convinced the moths had come with me in my clothes but I had no sign of them at all in the flat where I lived before. I can only assume they'd been in the clothes of the previous owners of the house and had been dormant when I saw the house on my first visit.

At about the same time I came home one day to find a pile of sawdust on my kitchen counter, and a huge nest of black ants swarming out from behind the kitchen cupboard which they had been chewing up. Again, when I got the pest control people in, they were amazed as those kind of ants don't normally eat wood and the man said he'd never seen anything like it in 20 odd years as a pest control man!

Xxxx

About 8 years ago dh and I went away for the weekend.

I wore a pair of earrings and a necklace and I took 2 pairs of earrings and 2 necklaces to wear with my evening outfits. They were cheap costume jewellery, and small discreet pieces which I worried would be lost in with my makeup/toiletries so I put them into a small carrier bag inside my toiletries bag.

On the first night I wore the first set of jewellery and the following day I changed back into my every-day jewellery. I left everything in the carrier bag in the hotel room.

That evening, when I went to wear the jewellery I'd chosen for that outfit I couldn't find the bag anywhere. I searched every drawer in the room and emptied the suitcase & all its pockets. Nothing.

Dh looked too.

I knew there was a possibility that the cleaner had stolen them, but they were cheep Claires stuff and not worth stealing or reporting. And Tbh it was more likely I'd thrown away the bag mistaking for an empty one.

About 5 or six years later I found the bag with the jewellery still inside in a drawer in my bedroom. Thing is, it wasn't in the suitcase to have come back with me. I didn't unpack it from the suitcase and I didn't put it in the drawer.

Never been able to explain it.

Alis, I used to be able to do that too!
To get to our house you had to drive down a parallel street, across the top of the two roads and then down our street and I could always tell when my dad was driving down the parallel street. The oddest thing about it was my dad didn't own his own car, he drove different vans and cars for work. Even if he'd changed cars during the day I still knew it was him.

When I was little my aunt would look after me before and after school until my mum finished work and came to pick me up.

No matter what I was doing, whether the doors and windows were open/shut, tv/music on...I knew my mum had arrived because I could hear her car driving up the street to turn back around and park up.

How? How did I know it was her car? I was never ever wrong.

My mum was on holiday in Corfu. Went for a paddle in the sea, the clear water about knee height. A man was standing nearby and suddenly bent down, picked something up from the seabed and said to her "is this your earring?" He was holding an earring identical to the ones she was wearing, and both of hers were in her ears!

My BIL, who lives in a different country and with whom I do not have a good relationship, has listed the company I'm working for as his employer on his Facebook profile. Now that is weird and creepy, and I have no idea why he's done it. He is a grown middle aged man, married with a child, not a bloody teenager.

VivaLeBeaver's disappearing frog toy has reminded me of something odd that happened to me. We have a very large playing field behind our house and when DS was a toddler we played out there for hours every day. One morning he went out with a pocketful of toy cars, ran about all over the place and discovered about an hour later that they'd all fallen out. We searched and searched in the long grass, and found all of them bar one - a particular type of silver BMW. DS was (and still is) obsessed with cars and was absolutely distraught at losing this one. We walked up and down that field for hours that afternoon and evening and all the following morning and couldn't find it. I even went back to the shop when he was in nursery and bought one that looked, to my untutored eye, identical, which I 'found' when we were coming home from nursery across the field, but he took one look at it and declared that it was entirely the wrong make of BMW. That evening at bedtime he got really upset about the car again, so after he'd gone to sleep, I left DH in the house with him and went out for one last look even though it was almost dark. I opened the back gate and found myself walking in a straight line right across to the middle of the field and stopping dead. I looked down and there was the car at my feet - I had somehow gone directly to it! Just as well - we woke up the next morning and there was a tractor out there mowing the field and the car would have been trashed.

.

I read somewhere the flying memories are remnants of being carried up and down stairs as a baby - makes sense as babies don't have a defined idea of their own bodies/where they are in space so it could seem like flying to them.

A few years ago we received in the post a book of interviews with various celebrities of the day by Anthony Clare. I assumed dp had ordered it-he hadn't. He assumed I had ordered it-I hadn't. We eventually looked on Amazon, and at our credit cards, and unless dp has a secret credit card which he uses to buy books by Irish psychiatrists, we really did not order the book.

But since someone had sent it to us, we had a closer look.

The book had a piece of paper-just ordinary white printer paper-neatly folded to bookmark an interview with Jimmy Savile. In it, Clare talks of how disconcerting he found him. This was an interview done in, iirc, the early 80s. Because that's where the paper was, that's the interview we read first. Back then he was just a slightly ick guy with a cigar penchant.

About three or four days later, the news of what Savile had actually been up to during those years, broke.

I should point out that sending us this book made not the blindest bit of difference to anything. There wasn't anything not in the public domain within a week anyway. By that point, there were starting to be rumours about him, I think. And we are not people who could do much with information about a dead paedophile.

Just very, very odd.

I definitely flew when I was a child - definitely!

Thanks Helly, I'll check that book out.

Vivalabeaver- there is an interesting book about that , it is called (predictably!) "Dogs that know when their owners are coming home" I think it is by Rupert Sheldrake. A friend has my copy at the moment or I would lend it to you.

First year at uni, fell asleep in my Halls room some time in the early evening reading a book. Woke up some time later to find it was 3am and I'd left the light on, but I was too lazy to get up and turn it off so I read a bit more of the book and then went back to sleep.

Next time I woke up, a couple of my friends were knocking on the door to ask if I wanted to come to the pub. But it was only 9pm, and the bedroom light was off. My book was open face-down at the point I remember reading to at 3am, though. I definitely hadn't slept through a whole day, so I can only guess that earlier on I wasn't quite awake, and managed to misread my watch and turn off the light without remembering doing it, but somehow manage to read and remember the book? It was weird, at any rate.

I did have a great one for ages, but it got solved in the end! Me and brother playing conkers in my bedroom as kids, he knocked the conker out of my hand and it just disappeared. Didn't hit the floor, didn't hit anything else, didn't land anywhere we could see, just gone. We searched everywhere and no sign of it. Then about ten years later, I noticed a piece of string around the curtain rail, and there was my conker tucked in behind the curtain rail with the string wrapped tightly round it. It hadn't stopped the curtains opening and closing so I'd just never noticed it. Shame I never found it at the time, it was an eighter...