I love it when you read through accounts of hauntings and poltergeists in which the afflicted party mentions 'things just disappearing' as evidence of nasty creatures from the scary beyond messing with their head. In the process of cleaning out everything in my room and generally stripping it down to the state it was in when I moved in I've already found a couple of things that I thought I'd lost long ago. Some of them are perfectly standard cases of misplaced objects - I found a young persons railcard at the bottom of a desk drawer that I could have sworn I left on a train to manchester in 2004, but there is nothing particularly interesting about that - I do things like that all the time.
The interesting one, well, interesting to me and seeing I'm the only one who reads this that's all that seems to matter, is the popshield for an old microphone of mine that I found among the books on my shelf. I dropped it when sitting on the end of my bed about 6 months ago and the grille and popshield flew off on landing. I remember that it was relatively soon after an inspection by our landlord and so my room was quite tidy. I bent over and picked up the popshield - which is a small, black, piece of foam - and, thinking of how easily misplaced it would be, put it on the shelf next to me, or so I thought, whilst I rummaged around and found the grille. When I turned back to the shelf, however, it was gone.
I looked everywhere in the one or two metre radius around the bookshelf that it could have possibly been put on or been blown to but found nothing - my mind boggled (which is painless, luckily); my eyes had been off it for about 10 seconds in which it had vanished.
If I was more into that sort of thing, or perhaps if I was in a place that could possibly support the idea of a haunting (you really can't have a haunted 1960's ex-council house built on former farmland) I would have put this down to some sort of invisible beastie snatching away my precious popshield and gone to church more, being the heathen that I am, however, I just assumed I was going more crazy and made a new popshield out of cut up old socks. Which probably didn't suceed in doing anything other than making me look more crazy.
Whilst packing all my books I found it, exactly where I thought I'd put it, sort of - It was lying, sure enough, on top of a book that was lying flat on the front of one of my shelves. The reason why I didn't find it was that the book in question was underneath a pile of other books. I figure what must have happened was that I put it on top of the book, then, when rummaging around for the grille, half unconsciously picked up a book that was on the floor and put it on the shelf on top of the popshield. Not remembering having done this, however, it appeared to me that the popshield vanished - I turned round to see a book lying there with no popshield on it - I didn't pay any attention what either book was so I didn't notice that it was different.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this exactly, probably just giving an example that the weirdness of human behaviour, whether malicious or stupid, probably accounts for the vast majority of ghost experiences and other such woo.
-Ben
oh yes, and if you were wondering how an object lost since 2004 could be in a drawer in a house that I've only lived in since 2005, which I know you aren't, but I'll answer anyway because I'm bored - it's because I basically tipped the contents of my desk drawers in my first year flat into boxes then, in an absence of the motivation to sort through the heaps, emptied them straight into the desk drawers of my new flat at the beginning of the second year - as a result I've been sorting through heaps of first year essays, handouts and lecture notes - some of which, like a sheaf of notes on Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, aren't even mine.
