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

[RevoltingPeasant]

....inspired by the intriguing threads thread!

Does anyone have a mini-mystery, or a story they want to know the end to? We can all supply improbable answers

Here's mine....

DH and I go for a walk around the block most nights before bed . Almost every night, at a particular point in the neighbouring street, there is an 'offering' of baked goods in the road.

Sometimes it is bread rolls. Sometimes, baguette. Once, about 8-9 Mr Kipling's Bakewell tarts. Just lying there in the road.

At first we thought it was for hedgehogs, but then the cakes? And in the road??

What's your unsolved mystery?

Also, men are sometimes kept for forced labour.

These are fascinating and some of them have given me goosebumps! I have two for you:

When I was very little (7 or younger), I took my wristwatch off before bed one night and put it on my bedside table. As I then reached to turn out the light, I knocked my watch on to the floor. I would have had to get out of bed to retrieve it, so I decided to leave it until morning. However, in the morning, it was nowhere to be found. In fact, I never saw it again! There was carpet on the floor, so no cracks for it to have fallen down, and nowhere else it could feasibly have gone. I was half convinced that the Borrowers had taken it - I was into those books at around that time!

The second one occurred when I was in my mid twenties. I was walking through a crowded Edinburgh Waverley station, on my way to catch a train. I was listening to music through headphones at the time. Suddenly, I heard the voice of a young woman, sounding absolutely terrified, screaming 'Help me! Somebody please help me!'. I ripped my headphones out of my ears, trying to identify which direction the voice was coming from, then realised I couldn't hear it anymore, and nobody around me was reacting at all. This was before the days of MP3 players, so I would have been listening to a cd (one I'd listened to many times before, although I can no longer remember what it was), and my CD player did not have a radio on it. The voice was incredibly clear, and I was completely convinced that what I had heard had nothing to do with the music, and was somewhat freaked out.

LadyEmma, you have to follow this up. (and come back and tell us)

I have remembered a really sad one - we were on holiday in Ireland when I was about 8 or 9 and on a hike along cliff tops somewhere in Cork or Kerry.

We saw a woman coming towards us with long brown hair and dressed in ordinary smart clothes & jacket rather than hiking gear. She was sobbing and crying, obviously very distressed. My dad asked if we could do anything to help, she said no.

We carried on in the opposite direction, but it was pretty clear we were all thinking the same thing - that she was about to go and throw herself off the cliff. Perhaps my parents alerted somebody when we got to the village at the bottom of the hill, I don't know. I just remember how sad it felt, and have often wondered if she was ok and what had happened to her.

What does the washing machine do with all the fucking socks.

Waves at The Victorian and JulietBravoJuliet, I live in LE and there used to be a bunker in my garden.

It's taken me aaages to read this thread but I've enjoyed every minute of it! I love a good spooky mystery and went to bed with the shivers last night after reading some of these but equally I love hearing possible explanations for them - such as associating being carried down the stairs as a baby with flying and the low buzz a landline might emit before it rings. Although I am mostly non-woo and believe in rational explanations, I do believe we have a six sense - maybe intuition? A few of you have mentioned seeibg somebody's lookalike and then seeing the real person shortly afterwards - this ALWAYS used to happen to me. I was so shocked to read about other posters experiencing it. Sometimes it was horrible because I'd see the doppelganger of someone I didn't like and would spend the rest of the day dreading their appearance. In fact it was always a horrible experience for me because I felt like a freak. I know this is going to sound weird but I think I was actually able to turn it off. I haven't had it for years and am so glad.

A few weeks ago I was cleaning, with my ipod in to motivate me to keep going. I had moved into the bathroom and was just getting the cleaning products out when the sound cut out in my earphones and I heard a woman's voice, quite faintly, say something like 'I hate that song.'

The only explanation I could come up with was electrical interference maybe?

When I was a teenager and I was left alone in the house at night, I could see lights, almost like soft spotlights on two faces on a poster on my wall. I turned the light off in my room but the faces stayed illuminated. I blocked the poster every which way but the light was still there. This was shortly before I started to suffer hypnogogic symptoms though, so I think the lights were coming from my mind, they weren't really there. And why the spirit world would light up the faces of Lee Sharpe and Ryan Giggs on my wall I have no idea!

oops posted too soon. So yes, I think maybe we're able to tune out of these intuitive quirks if we want to?

Also, I know this was mentioned waaay upthread but ChaCha, we used to hear a noise like mice scratching - it sounded like it was coming from my wardrobe and having searched it and found nothing we were a bit perplexed. Eventually realised that birds had built a nest in the gutter above the bedroom window and it was them making all the noise!

I've got one.
When I was around 9 I got a birthday card. It was sent to my home, with my first name and no surname. It was around the time of my birthday. But it clearly wasn't meant for me. It was a purple ronnie card with a poem that was a bit saucy, and the message made no sense to me.
It was tha late 80s so addresses weren't as easy to come by as they are now. Nobody but my family had lived there for over 10 years. It was a small village and the house had a name not a number so quite distinctive.
Who sent the card? Who was it meant for? We thought a practical joke but it was not funny or cruel or followed up by any kind of 'aha' reveal. How did the sender get confused between me and some other person with my first name? With a birthday in the same week as mine?

Just started reading this thread as had it in my watch list but hadn't got round to it and i love anything woo and mysterious.i have a few myself but will come back later.
As i got to page 7 and i read about the grandparents going missing i thought about a book i borrowed today from my mum.then someone else recommended the very book.
Not a mystery but more a coincidence

I'd love to know more about what the hell my Dad got up to in his early years. He would never talk about that part of his life at all, although we did find out in bits and pieces that he'd worked in the middle east and in Africa and spoke fluent Arabic. I saw a photo once (never saw it again) of what looked like him involved in an ethnic ceremonial thing where they were all dressed 'strangely' (to me, I was young and can't even remember if it was African of middle eastern). Not long before he died, we got talking randomly to an English woman who had lived in Nigeria. When she found out my Dad had lived there at the same time, she got a really odd look on her face and said 'Oh my God! You're the man from the radio!'. Apparently there had been an ethnic uprising and my Dad had been doing something 'official' on the radio (coordinating evacuation, maybe?). He admitted it was him but was very cagey about it and never mentioned it again.

I'd also love to know how I broke my collarbone...when I was in my 20s, I had to have an x-ray on my shoulder after an accident. Nothing was broken, but the Dr (who I had known since I was born) said, 'What happened here, though, where you smashed your clavicle, I don't remember that?' Even I could see on the x-ray that the clavicle was a bit mangled with a callus where it had healed. I have no memory at all of breaking it or even hurting it, but I can still feel the callus under my skin, so I know it was my x-ray.

We had a large, brown, leather Hippo - a sort of doorstop that we had in the living room. One day we noticed it had disappeared. No idea where it went. It was too large to be accidentally thrown away. It still puzzles us today - it was really lovely! Just weird that it literally vanished into thin air!

ravenrose I reckon your Dad probably went bankrupt, there might still be a record of this depending on how long ago it was. If you google Insolvency Enquiry Line and ring them they should be able to trace if you give them his full name and an approximate year (more difficult if before 1992 ish as no computer records, but not unheard of). Doesn't explain why you moved so far away though.

Thanks for suggestions re our noise, definitely not the CO2 detector, boiler a possibility. Hasn't happened for ages so hoping it won't again!

Numberseven.

I nac kaeps dna etirw sdrawckab.

Been able to do it ever since I could read. I can do both as fast as I can speak and write forwards.

Can't read foreign languages though :)

Chacha There's research showing that as long as the first and last letters of words are in the right place, most people can read whole paragraphs where the words are jumbled letters, which is similar to your skill, although not quite as specific.

I tried this, along with DS and DD, and it was amazing how fast we could read a paragraph in this way, as fast as normal.

Until her year one teacher got to her (and this is tongue in cheek) my DD found it indistinguishable to do mirror writing (not only backwards) as normal writing. She really couldn't see the difference. Apparently it is a 'thing' that is quite common in young children. My only PFB moment ever, I swear, was when her teacher marked her first spelling test wrong because it was in mirror writing. I was damn impressed!

I saw someone had a mystery injury to their foot, and it reminded me of my own foot-related mystery. I was walking along the corridor at work when I felt a tickle on my foot. I was wearing flip flop type sandals, so I reached down and itched my foot quickly, just very gently. When I got into the office, I looked down at my foot and it had gone very red and mottled. Over the next hour it developed into a huge multicoloured bruise. It spread from the arch all over the top of my foot, probably covering about 60% of the top of my foot. It didn't hurt at all, but it lasted for at least two weeks. I even went to the doctor to check I didn't have some bizarre clotting disorder, but they didn't find anything wrong! So bizarre.

About 6 months ago I received a really really nasty poison pen letter (I was going to start a thread, hence the name). I have no enemies, as far as I know & cannot for the life of me work out who sent it or why. It was someone who didn't know my correct address & used a version of my business one which was almost what is on the web under my business registration. This made it quite distinctive - meant it was no one local and not someone who had been to the house.

I have two stories. First one- about flying off the stairs. We recently bought a house, but haven't moved into it yet as it needs some work. Last week my DP came from the house, where he went with our 3year old DD, and told me how our DD was standing at the top of the stairs, suddenly shouted 'i fly!', and jumped down! Luckily, my DP was there to catch her. I must say that my DD was born and still lives in a ground floor flat and practically never uses/sees stairs. She has been to the new house only few times, and was definitely never carried up/down stairs as a baby. Not sure how to explain.
Second story is more than 20 years old. Before my bellowed Grandfather died he used to say he wanted to be buried with his walking stick. This was his occasional stick, it was given to him by my mum and my Grandfather carved names of his grandchildren onto it. When my GFather died suddenly, nobody remembered his wish and he was buried without his stick. Few days after the funeral the walking stick disappeared never to be found again.

I too jumped down a whole flight of stairs when I was about the same age as Angry's DD, and was caught by my aunt, though I don't remember thinking I was flying! I do remember going into the bedroom up there and being terrified by a small bird that had got in and was bombing round and round, and getting out of the room as quickly as possible. My aunt said it was my screaming that brought her to the stairs - perhaps luckily for me.....

I have a Links bracelet which is stretchy but close-fitting with no catch to open, & has to be eased over my hand. We were away on holiday, walking into the hotel lobby & DH said "There's your bracelet!" - it was in the middle of the floor ahead of us, definitely mine - no idea how it had come off my wrist

Once I was chopping mushrooms in the kitchen when one of them, still whole, rolled off the chopping-board onto the floor. I saw it roll & fall, heard it hit & it then completely disappeared. There was nowhere it could have gone - units down to the floor, no room at the side of the fridge etc etc. Very odd.

iwasyoungonce but at that point in my life I wasn't in contact with anyone from when I was 15, and I was working 20 miles away! This was pre Facebook and social networking of course as I'm old I guess it's a possibility though, but they were on a counter in the kitchen area so not accessible to the public... I've driven myself mad over the years thinking about this!!

Waves back at catmint :)

I've nominated the thread for classics. It can't disappear after 90 days!