Disappearance of The Mysterious Mop & Other Oddities

 Most of us have experienced what I call the mystery of the  lost sock in the dryer. It’s not always a sock, of course, and it’s not always in the dryer.  Over the years, a number of objects have vanished in our house: a $100 bill, shoes, keys, flash drives. Sometimes the objects have reappeared in a place where we’ve already looked for it.

 But the experience Anne of Tennessee had  is a new twist!

 I had a leak in my bathroom sink 10 days ago and had to call the plumbers.  Twice, in fact.  This left water running across my bathroom floor.  I had my mop in the bathroom, mopping up water as needed.  After the plumbers left the second time, I left the mop in my bathroom in case there was still another leak. 

 My daughter called me at work, yesterday, looking for the mop, and I told her it was in my bathroom.  She couldn’t find it.  When I got home from work, we both looked for the mop.  In closets. Under beds.  In the garage.  It’s gone.  Disappeared. I am on my way to Walmart to buy another one. Strange.

 Two days later, I received an update from Anne on the missing mop:

 I am almost totally unnerved.  That mop that totally disappeared a few days ago?  It showed up sometime yesterday.  When I got home from work around 7:30, I found it leaning against my bathroom door.  My daughter didn’t believe me until I showed it to her.  And my granddaughter is now spooked as she says something is really off here.

 Yep, my old mop is back and for how long, I don’t know.  And I am really rattled about this.  Just makes me wish some of the other things I have lost/misplaced would return.

 Don’t know what to think of this.

 I asked Anne if she thought there might be a poltergeist or some other phenomenon at work in her house or some other trickster:

 I have wondered if i have something around that would do a stunt like that mop thing.  Laura and I searched the house completely twice for that mop, each time starting in my bathroom.  It was not in the house.  

Since it has reappeared, that leaves a lot of options open…like tricksters.  Just what we might have, I don’t know. I don’t even have an idea about how to figure out what is doing what.

 A mop is larger than a sock, keys, a bill. Is it possible that a person could disappear like the mop did?

Perhaps. In November 1878, 16-year-old Charles Ashmore of Quincy, Illinois went out into the night with a water bucket. When he didn’t return after several minutes, his father and sister went out to look for him. They found his footprints clear in fresh snow, leading hallway to the well, where the footprints suddenly stopped.

 In July 1854, Orion Williamson, a farmer near Selma, Alabama, supposedly got up from his porch chair and stated out across a field to bring in his horses from the pasture. His wife and child watched from the porch and on the far side of the field a couple of neighbors on horseback waved at him. Right then, Williamson vanished.

 Witnesses searched the field but found no trace of Williamson. Journalists flocked to the property to investigate. One of them, Ambrose Bierce, wrote about the incident in a story called, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.

 Author Paul Begg, in his anthology of strange disappearance Into Thin Air, concluded that all these stories about disappearance are probably duplicates of the same story.  But when you experience one of these mysterious disappearance, it’s not as easy to dismiss.

 I’ve often wondered if these missing objects somehow slip into another dimension or something. Do our homes have vortices that act as portals between dimensions? If so, what activates them?  

And, totally off topic,  Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone!