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Ok, What Was It?

Which is more likely, Jodie:

1) Unseen forces in the universe randomly move objects in your unique presence.
2) Like billions of other humans, you have occasionally seen and misremembered something that did not occur as you now relate?
 
Well,
1) Air currents under gravity, and tricks of temperature are legit unseen forces.
2) Misremembering is not mutually exclusive from 1.
 
We have threads like this all the time. When there are no videos or other corroborating evidence of the OPs "inquiries" we're left with a handful of options and I'm just waiting to see which way the thread falls.

The most common path is that people offer up reasonable and semi-reasonable explanations and the OP returns to "explain" that none of those are possible. Somewhat less often the OP returns and says, "Yeah, I'm probably mis-remembering and what you say makes sense."

The bottom line is in my opening paragraph. Without corroborating evidence we're dealing with human memory which has been proved to be far too faulty to be trusted.
 
I was sat in my living room in my one bed-roomed flat back in 1983 when the electric kettle switched itself on and boiled. I was the only one in the house and the kitchen was a separate room some feet away.

I don't really know what it was, but I certainly know what it wasn't.
 
We have threads like this all the time. When there are no videos or other corroborating evidence of the OPs "inquiries" we're left with a handful of options and I'm just waiting to see which way the thread falls.

The most common path is that people offer up reasonable and semi-reasonable explanations and the OP returns to "explain" that none of those are possible. Somewhat less often the OP returns and says, "Yeah, I'm probably mis-remembering and what you say makes sense."

The bottom line is in my opening paragraph. Without corroborating evidence we're dealing with human memory which has been proved to be far too faulty to be trusted.

This, especially the "it couldn't have been that" moving goalposts.
 
I was sat in my living room in my one bed-roomed flat back in 1983 when the electric kettle switched itself on and boiled. I was the only one in the house and the kitchen was a separate room some feet away.

I don't really know what it was, but I certainly know what it wasn't.

Wow, that is eery. That just happened to me last Wednesday. I was in my class room (I teach bridge at home) preparing the evening class, and suddenly in the pantry the electric kettle switched itself on and boiled.

I have the same explanation as you have.
 
The trunk lid: Many possibilities, but if the trunk uses gas filled struts, these are notoriously unpredictable especially when they age and become weaker. They may hang up and lift later, sag and then recover, be in a delicate state of balance so slight that a falling acorn can change the level, or rise and fall as the sun's heat varies.

This. My lift had similar issues described by the OP and eventually gave out completely. But for a while there, it would do weird things on its own. I've replaced the struts and they've behaved ever since.


Why is this tagged with bigfoot?

Why is half the General Skepticism page filled with bigfoot posts anyway? Can't we just move them to their own dedicated sub-forum and clear this area up?
 
The magic trunk lid issue is quite common on the '68 Mustang California Special, aka GT/CS.

The extra weight of the spoiler eventually weakens the torsion bars in the trunk. Unlocking the trunk lid causes it to rise slowly, then it falls back down, then back up, then back down........

Once it stops the slightest breeze will restart the whole process.
 
Was it possible you were exhausted and seeing things? Not kidding... I've had periods in the military where I got downright hallucinogenic. And it looked extremely real to me at the time.


No I wasn't tired, I was on my way out to run an errand, my neighbor was with me and we both saw the trunk lid incident and just shrugged it off at the time. I'm no mechanic and the car is at least 7 years old, but there is a type of mechanism that allows the trunk lid to stay up, could it fail? I would think the lid would just drop and not flip back up if that were the case.
 
A trunk lid has a large surface area. The tiny air movements that can affect it are not perceivable by you.

They are also not light weight either, it would take a stiff wind to do that. We were standing by the side of the car, I would think we would feel the breeze simply due to deflection once it hit the lid if that were the case.
 
What interests me about ghost stories is the great amount of detail setting up the mysterious occurrence, (aunt Tillie was visiting, her cat had died, she had her blue dress on...) but little or no detail of the subsequent investigation undertaken to determine the cause.

Trunk lid:
Asked by ToyotaFan77 Sep 26, 2010 at 01:43 PM about the 2010 Toyota Corolla LE
Question type: Maintenance & Repair
The trunk lid keeps falling closed when the car is on the slightest incline. Can the tension rods which hold it up be adjusted?
Did you walk over and try to operate the trunk lid to see if perhaps it was at a very delicate balance point and a very slight almost imperceptible breeze was present?

Door: Did you check the door after you exited to see if the hinge screws were loose in the jamb? What kind of lock? Hook and eye? Slamming a door could conceivably swing the hook into the eye.

Kleenex: How hard did you smack the box? Did a hole appear in the smashed box which would permit a fast mouse to escape? Were there mouse droppings or chewed kleenex in the box?

Any chance of someone playing practical jokes on the ghost lady?
 
I don't know how productive this exercise is going to be. Reconstructing how something happened long after the event based on someone's possibly flawed recollection of it is never going to be easy. I think we can say with some confidence that whatever it was in each case it wasn't magic, fairies, elves, psychic powers or Bigfoot, but beyond that there will be little anyone can say.



The description is so vague there's nothing much to say. Maybe a bird landed on it and then flew away.

No bird, we were right by the car.



As described the incident is impossible or close to it, so the most likely explanation is that you misremembered something. Most likely you shut the door and latched it yourself in between standing up and washing your hands while thinking about something else, and by the time you finished washing your hands you had forgotten about it.

That or Elvis did it.

No, I didn't remember it incorrectly. It was difficult to shut the door due to the crooked jam. It took some shoving and pushing to completely close the door and anyone would hear that. That's why I posted it here because it is impossible.

Gravity.

The only time I've ever had it malfunction is if the next kleenex doesn't unfold properly to be pulled through the hole at the top of the box. Once the kleenex is in the proper position, the cellophane guard around the lip of the hole prevents it from falling back into the box. This wasn't falling, it was slowly tugged back into the box.

See bolded
 
Those hooks on doors often fall down and latch themselves.

That I can understand, but not how the door got pushed into the crooked jam and certainly not without my hearing the scraping noise that should cause.
 
The most likely explanation for the door latch is that you did it and your were not recording it to memory at the time.

Everyone has that feeling when they suddenly realize they're driving their car but have no memory of the last few minutes. But the cars don't crash. The reason is that you were awake, aware and reacting the entire time. You've just hypnotized yourself and don't remember it. It can happen with mundane activities such as, oh, closing a bathroom door.

I didn't hypnotize myself or tune out while I was using the rest room. The toilet was directly facing the door, so for the couple of minutes I was sitting, I was looking straight at it. I didn't spend an inordinate amount of time trying to force the door shut because there were only females at this party and co-workers I had known for several years. I just pushed it to and called it a day.
 
The kleenex box, could be various things, but perhaps just gravity. A tissue is partly pulled out, usually held by the box that way, but relaxes and falls back in.

The bathroom door, a common occurrence in an added room if construction is not sturdy. If the room has settled so the door does not shut, there's probably at least one point at which pressure somewhere on the floor or elsewhere will change the shape enough. I have a bathroom like this, in which not only do slight variations cause flexing, but the door behaves differently according to the season. If the bathroom is attached to a porch, it's even possible someone elsewhere on the porch, or above it or below it, might be enough. A bit of wind at just the right moment might blow it shut. Many doors will shut better if pushed in a particular way, or at a particular angle. Way too many possible variants to ascribe this to anything but glitchy construction.

The trunk lid: Many possibilities, but if the trunk uses gas filled struts, these are notoriously unpredictable especially when they age and become weaker. They may hang up and lift later, sag and then recover, be in a delicate state of balance so slight that a falling acorn can change the level, or rise and fall as the sun's heat varies.

Maybe on the tissue box, but with the cellophane lip snug around the hole on an almost full box, I can't see how it could fall back in.

Yeap, I can see how the trunk lid could move under the conditions you stated since I had no understanding of how struts work in detail. That is a possible explanation.

I don't think the door closed on it's own due to drafts or pressure. The owners had closed in part of the back porch to add the bathroom and cut the door through a bedroom wall. It was so settled and crooked you would have to literally lift the door, or shove and push, to get it to close all of the way. No windows were opened and no one was upstairs since we were all in the dining room finishing up lunch. And if it did close that way, I would think I would have heard the door scarping as it was pushed shut.
 

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