Your own personal mysteries.

[A.P. Wulfric]

I've always wondered why I was one in my family with learning disabilities.  I mean, boys are slightly more likely than girls to end up with them, so why me and not my brother?  Not that I would wish them on any one, but it is just...odd.  

I've also always wondered where my brother's and my ability to read quickly came from.  It isn't from my parents.  We can both finish an entire (300 page or so) book in about two hours, sometimes less.   (I've read Stephanie Plum mysteries in less than an hour.)  I also have a memory like no other- I can remember entire passages from books I read when I was eight and I'm 24.  However, that memory does not extend to math or spelling.  I can't spell basic words (thank goodness for spell check).  Why can I remember the entire first paragraph of Dealing with Dragons and not how to spell 'sensibility'?  Especially when the ability to spell is more useful than remembering lines from The Tempest.  

Are you me? I do not have  an LD, though my husband swears I have undiagnosed ADD.  I know my math facts and can whip them out, but can't do much more. Can't spell for beans.  My memory though is fabulous.

[Scuba_Dog]

I have two...

When DH and I were engaged we were at a store and a man about 10 yrs older than us walked up to us and asked "how have you been" "haven't seen either of you lately" "how's the family"  and then went into more personal deatil asking about our jobs, clearly knowing where we both worked, asking us about the upcoming wedding saying he excited about attending.  After walking away, we both turned to each other "who was that". 

Do you watch LOST?  The above sounds a bit like a "visit" from Jacob!  Did he touch you? 

[Carnation]

*I have also mysteriously lost several items while moving at different times in my life. I'd love to esp. know what happened to a lot of the programs from the theatrical productions I've acted in. Quite a few have been lost, and it's saddening as I like to scrapbook that stuff. The same goes for some of my scripts.

Our beloved high school principal lost all his copies of the yearbook when retired and moved to FL.  He had been at our school for so long and was so popular they named the new athletic field after him.

[Pinky830]

On my first day working at KFC in high school, a customer ordered coffee. I served it to him. He sat and drank it with his meal.

It wasn't until the next day that I found out that we made tea in the coffeemaker and diluted it for the iced tea dispenser. There had been a batch brewing when I poured that "coffee." I had served the gentleman super-strong hot tea.

I have always wondered why he didn't say anything. It wasn't a to go order, it's not like he didn't discover it until he was miles away. I don't know if he decided not to bother, or he thought our coffee was that bad.

I thought of him when I read that Abraham Lincoln once said to a waitress, "If this is coffee, please bring me some tea, but if it is tea, please bring me some coffee."

[hot_shaker]

On my first day working at KFC in high school, a customer ordered coffee. I served it to him. He sat and drank it with his meal.

They serve coffee at KFC?  Now there's a mystery.

Mmm, coffee and fried chicken!

[SisJackson]

Some good friends of mine bought a home about a decade ago, and a bunch of people were conscripted to help them move in.  We decided to remove a dropped acoustic ceiling that had been installed in the basement, since it was ugly, so we started lifting the tiles out of the frames.  On about tile #8, a jar of pasta sauce fell to the concrete floor and smashed, spraying tomato sauce everywhere.  Further searching of the ceiling tiles revealed a hideously ugly oil painting, a ring of keys (none of which fit the house's doors) and a hand-knitted winter hat.  Nothing on the painting or the hat indicated the vintage of either, and the sauce jar was completely destroyed so the label was unreadable.

When the friends sold the home a few years later, they put the painting (which they jokingly kept hung the spare bedroom) in the attic with a note outlining the details of its discovery and the hope that it would stay with the house.

Why would anyone store/hide things in a dropped ceiling, especially such mundane things?

[Shoo]

Why would anyone store/hide things in a dropped ceiling, especially such mundane things?

Because they knew that one day someone would discover it and it would drive them bonkers trying to figure out why anyone would hide that stuff in a ceiling!

[Suze]

because they were "holiday" presents that you just can't "Possiably" get rid of.....

but the pasta sauce?  Somebody REALLY didn't like that brand?

[LeeLee88]

I have two...

When DH and I were engaged we were at a store and a man about 10 yrs older than us walked up to us and asked "how have you been" "haven't seen either of you lately" "how's the family"  and then went into more personal deatil asking about our jobs, clearly knowing where we both worked, asking us about the upcoming wedding saying he excited about attending.  After walking away, we both turned to each other "who was that". 

Do you watch LOST?  The above sounds a bit like a "visit" from Jacob!  Did he touch you? 

Oh noes!!!  Hahahaha, oh that is good  

[Penguinity]

My old boss' house was just loaded with mysteries. It dated back to the industrial revolution, and different owners had added to it since.

One of my jobs was to "clean the basement". OK, so I'm moving things around and there's a low door hidden behind the paint cans. (There were a LOT of paint cans). It looks like it has a dirt floor, but in the back it's just stone that slopes up and hits the wall.  I'm kind of curious, so I start scratching at the dirt. I get a few inches down and I hit cement. Who put a cement floor there? When? How did that much dirt get there, in that smooth a layer?

That room also had a deep tank of some dark reddish fluid. It doesn't look like it's attached to anything, and Boss Lady can't identify it, so I glove up and take it out in buckets.  Finally I can see what's in the tank...an old rusted out car engine. Hunh. How did that get there? What was with all the water?

Another job I had to do was kill the poison ivy in the yard. I'm working on it, and all of a sudden I notice berries. They look a lot like raspberries. I carefully move the poison ivy, and sure enough, there are raspberries canes there. I ask Boss Lady, and she never planted raspberries. So either the raspberries are a lot older than they have any right to be, some stranger planted them, or they've been growing wild. I didn't spray that area.

Another time Boss Lady asked me to clean out the jam cellar. What's a jam cellar, I ask. She points out a door under the patio. I go in, start moving around the lawn furniture, and (you guessed it) another random door. Which lead to a tunnel with a bed-shaped platform and another door. Which lead into the rental property next door.  Judging from the age of the houses, I'm guessing it was part of the Underground Railroad, but what has me baffled is the topography of the place. I tried counting steps, and there is no way to get all the way between the houses with the length of the tunnel.

Really. Half the time I worked there I could hear the Zelda theme playing in the background.

[kingsrings]

*I have also mysteriously lost several items while moving at different times in my life. I'd love to esp. know what happened to a lot of the programs from the theatrical productions I've acted in. Quite a few have been lost, and it's saddening as I like to scrapbook that stuff. The same goes for some of my scripts.

Our beloved high school principal lost all his copies of the yearbook when retired and moved to FL.  He had been at our school for so long and was so popular they named the new athletic field after him.

Yikes! I would say that he could just get more copies of the yearbook from the school, but I suppose that his copies were full of autographs and written notes, etc., from the students, so that is irreplaceable. How heartbreaking!

I guess I probably accidentally threw my theatrical scrapbook stuff away in the midst of moving, as much as I hate to say it. That solves the mystery, although I can't imagine why I was so careless to do that.

[Suze]

Penguinity said ----


That room also had a deep tank of some dark reddish fluid. It doesn't look like it's attached to anything, and Boss Lady can't identify it, so I glove up and take it out in buckets.  Finally I can see what's in the tank...an old rusted out car engine. Hunh. How did that get there? What was with all the water?

*************

it was probably part of a cistern well. A few of the older houses in out town had them -- huge tanks in the basement to hold rainwater

[Kimblee]

I wanna know who my yellow eyed man was.

When I was little (maybe 7 or 8?) I was sitting on the curb in front of our house, basically just people watching. I was just plain bored. There was a man in a long brown coat walking up and down the street, looking confused, and he eventually came over to me and crouched down (to my eye level). He had yellow eyes... Not the white part, the iris was kinda a dark yellow color. I've never seen anyone else with that shade of eyes. I remember wondering if I should go inside to my parents, but there were lots of people around, so I didn't. First he asked me where my coat was, and why I wasn't wearing one. I told him I wasn't cold and he nodded. then he asked me where Miss Tammie lived (name changed of course) and I pointed the house out. He smiled and patted me on the head and gave me a sucker, then stood up and walked into Miss Tammie's house, without knocking or unlocking the door. he just opened it. We did NOT live in an area that people kept their doors unlocked either. I went back to watching the street, and didn't bother to eat the sucker.

I don't know how it happened, but somehow the ambulance came to the house, and they brought Miss Tammie out all covered up. (which I later realized must have meant she was dead, but it didn't occur to me at the time.) And that darned man walked out of the house, past the paramedics without anyone acknowledging him, waved at me and walked off down the street. I didn't think much of it, but later asked a bunch of neighbors if they knew who he was. Despite all of them having been gathered to watch Miss Tammie come out of the house (because that was a nosy neighborhood) NO ONE saw the man. And they claimed no one had come over to talk to me, because if they had, they 9the neighbors) would have run him off for talking to a little girl alone.

I still wonder who the heck that was... I ought o add this experience to a book, it was really weird.

[ica171]

I wanna know who my yellow eyed man was.

When I was little (maybe 7 or 8?) I was sitting on the curb in front of our house, basically just people watching. I was just plain bored. There was a man in a long brown coat walking up and down the street, looking confused, and he eventually came over to me and crouched down (to my eye level). He had yellow eyes... Not the white part, the iris was kinda a dark yellow color. I've never seen anyone else with that shade of eyes. I remember wondering if I should go inside to my parents, but there were lots of people around, so I didn't. First he asked me where my coat was, and why I wasn't wearing one. I told him I wasn't cold and he nodded. then he asked me where Miss Tammie lived (name changed of course) and I pointed the house out. He smiled and patted me on the head and gave me a sucker, then stood up and walked into Miss Tammie's house, without knocking or unlocking the door. he just opened it. We did NOT live in an area that people kept their doors unlocked either. I went back to watching the street, and didn't bother to eat the sucker.

I don't know how it happened, but somehow the ambulance came to the house, and they brought Miss Tammie out all covered up. (which I later realized must have meant she was dead, but it didn't occur to me at the time.) And that darned man walked out of the house, past the paramedics without anyone acknowledging him, waved at me and walked off down the street. I didn't think much of it, but later asked a bunch of neighbors if they knew who he was. Despite all of them having been gathered to watch Miss Tammie come out of the house (because that was a nosy neighborhood) NO ONE saw the man. And they claimed no one had come over to talk to me, because if they had, they 9the neighbors) would have run him off for talking to a little girl alone.

I still wonder who the heck that was... I ought o add this experience to a book, it was really weird.

Creepy.  That sounds like a Stephen King story about the Grim Reaper.

[Cracea]

I wanna know who my yellow eyed man was.

When I was little (maybe 7 or 8?) I was sitting on the curb in front of our house, basically just people watching. I was just plain bored. There was a man in a long brown coat walking up and down the street, looking confused, and he eventually came over to me and crouched down (to my eye level). He had yellow eyes... Not the white part, the iris was kinda a dark yellow color. I've never seen anyone else with that shade of eyes. I remember wondering if I should go inside to my parents, but there were lots of people around, so I didn't. First he asked me where my coat was, and why I wasn't wearing one. I told him I wasn't cold and he nodded. then he asked me where Miss Tammie lived (name changed of course) and I pointed the house out. He smiled and patted me on the head and gave me a sucker, then stood up and walked into Miss Tammie's house, without knocking or unlocking the door. he just opened it. We did NOT live in an area that people kept their doors unlocked either. I went back to watching the street, and didn't bother to eat the sucker.

I don't know how it happened, but somehow the ambulance came to the house, and they brought Miss Tammie out all covered up. (which I later realized must have meant she was dead, but it didn't occur to me at the time.) And that darned man walked out of the house, past the paramedics without anyone acknowledging him, waved at me and walked off down the street. I didn't think much of it, but later asked a bunch of neighbors if they knew who he was. Despite all of them having been gathered to watch Miss Tammie come out of the house (because that was a nosy neighborhood) NO ONE saw the man. And they claimed no one had come over to talk to me, because if they had, they 9the neighbors) would have run him off for talking to a little girl alone.

I still wonder who the heck that was... I ought o add this experience to a book, it was really weird.

At least Death is nice to little girls....