Ok, What Was It?

[JoeMorgue]

Another Woo Slinger trademark is the constant appeals to "But I know what I saw!"

As has already been pointed out this is a bad position. Evidence, logic, and reason sometimes have to override personal experience.

Now let us be very, very, very clear here. Pointing out that one's memory and perception can sometimes be faulty is not saying the person is lying, stupid, or crazy.

Allow me to relate a story. Many years ago I worked an ungodly swing shift onboard an aircraft carrier stationed out of Virginia. One dark, dreary early winter morning I drove to work in the wee hours of the dark, parked my car, and headed toward the ship. After taking a few steps something ran from under a nearby parked car and into some nearby brush.

Now here's what I literally saw within my own perceptions. I saw a small bipedal figure run in a very humanoid like gate from under the car.

I'm a rational adult. I'm mentally sound. I don't do drugs or had recently used alcohol or prescription medication. I have fine eyesight when wearing corrective lenses, which I was at the time. I've actually literally had training on how to recognize a human figure moving against a background. The distance was no more then a few dozen meters and I saw what I saw for several seconds.

Option 1: I literally saw a tiny humanoid creature.

Option 2: A sailor walking to his ship spooked one of the of multitude of birds, feral cats or big rats that live on the base and when he looked at it some trick of light and shadow made him see something that wasn't there.

So which is more likely? That a species of gnome somehow lives but has escaped detection on one of the largest and busiest military facilities in the world or that a weary sailor had a brain fart?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The radio looked something like this:

 

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

The way things implode is the pieces go in toward the center then hit things in the center and fly out. Ever read how a supernova implodes?

Of all the things you described, this one is the easiest to explain. The fact you don't accept the explanation on this one speaks volumes.

Er, she did accept the explanation, a few posts higher than yours.

 

[asydhouse]

I wondered about the electrician, he may have meant that it was a defective bulb and I just didn't understand what he was saying.

I think someone further up said that the mechanism for the struts can wear out, that with the added weight could have caused the flopping trunk lid.

I was writing an e-mail, it was quiet, I heard the scraping noise and looked up to the see the tissue being completely drawn back into the box first one side, then the other. I remember it very clearly.

No, it was cold, the window was closed. I can't see a door frame adjusting itself that much without me hearing something like a creak, popping noise, the door scraping the jam as it closed, or that soft thump sound you sometimes hear when a door closes.

All of those noises could be covered or mixed with the sound of running water in the sink, and evade your notice. Everything being finely balanced, you had to stand at the right spot by the sink first to gently (and slowly) cause the very slight sinking of the floor needed to release the corner of the door enough for it to then gently swing the short distance to contact the door frame. The slight jar as it did so caused the hook to drop into place, just as you turned off the tap.

As unlikely as all that may seem, it's all easily believable, and much weirder things have happened which still fall under normal physics. And it's all virtually infinitely more likely than that there is some new unknown force at work. See the link I provided earlier to the thread with Sean Carroll's video.

Once you absorb the message of that video, quibbling and pondering over these incidents will seem as worthwhile and meaningful as discussing a soap opera.

Or playing Trivial Pursuit (I hate that game… I couldn't care less who starred in which musical in 1955!)

 

[Ethan Thane Athen]

So it might have only needed a little more effort to successfully close. Standing by the sink, the tilt and warp of the floor caused by your new position in the room released the door from the slight mound where you had left it wedged, and it fell closed and the slight bump caused the hook to fall down to latch the door.

Snip.

An excellent and very plausible hypothesis. I've seen something very similar with our back gate which sticks slightly on a bump in the ground just before closure. Swung it shut one day and it didn't quite make it then saw it was shut a few minutes later. Slightly spooked until I realised what had happened - kids had just run past so plenty of vibration. Have also heard plenty of internal doors click properly closed when you walk on the floorboards near them.

Always amazes me how people think 'can't immediately explain = supernatural'.

Here's one I had very recently - see if forumites can spot what turned out to be the very mundane explanation:

Mother-in-Law left the house (empty) locked the door and posted the keys through the letterbox. Postman called sometime later and posted a small parcel through the letterbox. Family returned, opened the door and the keys were on top of the parcel.

I'm pleased to say that no-one blamed poltergeists but they were intrigued and challenged me to explain it when I got home. Which I did in minutes - to everyone's satisfaction - especially when I gave a practical demo.

 

[asydhouse]

Here is the next odd incident. I was helping my 76 year old aunt take care of my 90+ year old grandmother with dementia. My grandmother's partial went missing, we assumed she had misplaced it somewhere and that we would eventually find it.

A few days later I was getting my grandmother ready for bed and turned the light on in the room. The light had a flush mount fixture. I happened to glance up and see a U-shaped shadow outlined on the glass shade.

I went and got a chair, stood up on it, unscrewed the glass cover, and found my grandmother's partial inside the glass shade. Any suggestions on how it got up there? Neither relative was agile enough to climb up on a chair, so it couldn't have been either one of them. I got nothing......

The most obvious answer is someone playing a practical joke. Got any nephews that may be aware of your catalogue of "unexplained mysterious incidents"?

Or perhaps someone with dementia may forget they are too old to climb on a chair and stash their gold teeth in a special glass box on the ceiling, and then forget all about it?

See, all this back and forth with trickles of information is at best a sort of game. It's impossible to really solve anything. But there always is a mundane "explanation".

 

[bluesjnr]

You sound like you are being sarcastic, but I have a true story.

My boyfriend and I were in the living room of our house when the portable radio came on in the kitchen. No one was in the kitchen and we were both there, it wasn't me forgetting the radio was on.

I have no idea how it came on, it did not have any remote control capacity or I would ascribe it to a random signal.

I'd seriously love to know what part of my post came across as sarcastic. Do you set out to be deliberately antagonistic?

 

[Grabula]

I'm not sure I understand what the point of an exercise like this is. First, is the OP looking for actual answers or just challenging us to an impossible task? Second we know our brains play all sorts of tricks on us, don't perceive things as well as we think they do, and our memory is notoriously horrible and rewritable. Speculation on the minutiae of a moment that might possibly explain what happened without as one poster pointed out, silly.


There's always a rational explanation. I had two experiences that would be hard to explain, one took me a few minutes to figure out, another took me over a decade.

In the first, a roommate and I were standing in doorways across the hall from each other in our apartment. Underneath our carpeting was a plastic sheet so you could always hear someone walking around. While we stood there we heard 'steps' pass between us and down the hall. It only took me a few minutes to figure out the carpet was essentially settling back into place or relaxing after one of us walked down the hall.

The second involved me waking up one night and feeling a powerful feeling of oppression in the room. I looked in the corner and saw something I could only describe as the grim reaper. I couldn't explain it, but I 'knew' what I experienced. Later I discovered Hypnogogia and sleep paralysis which describe what I experienced perfectly.

I think if the OP really wants answers she'll find them. I suspect like many people I know, it's more 'fun' to live in a fantasy world.

 

[Tolls]

It's a possibility if I hadn't been watching the door, however it was in my sight as I walked to the left to use the sink. It closed after I turned away to use the sink. Wouldn't it have shifted when I stood up?

So you weren't watching the door.
And no, it all depends on where the supports are and how the thing was constructed and how the thing has settled over time.

As has been pointed out, it doesn't take much to move a door from "sticking" to "unstuck".

The point is that leaping to something supernatural is not really rational in these cases.

 

[JoeMorgue]

The point is that leaping to something supernatural is not really rational in these cases.

And playing the sad "But what could it be..." JAQing off game isn't any better.

 

[IXP]

For Skeptic Ginger's radio I would favor the following. The radio was actually on, but some intermittent component had failed and silenced it. Then that component starting working again and the sound came on.

IXP

 

[Tiktaalik]

There's a radio in one of our work trucks that you cannot turn OFF. You turn it off with a rotating knob and a few seconds later it turns itself back on. All you can do is choose a station you more or less want to listen to. I've always assumed that the old, dusty truck has a gummed-up knob and some spring or gunk inside causes it to rotate back to a particular position even when it's been cranked to the 'off' position. You can watch the little knob turn itself back to the right after you turn it to the left.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

For Skeptic Ginger's radio I would favor the following. The radio was actually on, but some intermittent component had failed and silenced it. Then that component starting working again and the sound came on.

IXP

I admit that is one explanation I'd not heard or thought of.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I'd seriously love to know what part of my post came across as sarcastic. Do you set out to be deliberately antagonistic?

Leaving the kettle on just sounded like something one would accidentally do then blame the poltergeists. Nothing personal.

 

[bruto]

I admit that is one explanation I'd not heard or thought of.

We have a radio very much like that in the kitchen, and it has a couple of switches that occasionally blip off and back on. If you have something like this and tend to leave it at one setting all the time, there are a lot of possibilities for something getting dirty or corroded. It is also possible, if this was an FM radio, many of which have some form of muting, that the tuning drifted off, or the signal dropped off, just enough to activate the muting, and then drifted back or strengthened just enough to unmute it again. This is actually pretty common, especially with a radio that is not retuned often, but also on any radio whose antenna is subject to variation in signal. FM tuners with AFC, a common feature, will tend to keep their signal moderately cleanly as it drifts, and then lose it all at once.

Our kitchen radio does this from time to time when it has drifted a bit. It is not fully muted, but the interstation hiss is audible only if you're listening for it. Another one I have at a lake house, with a poor antenna, mutes intermittently depending on where people are in the room.

 

[bluesjnr]

Leaving the kettle on just sounded like something one would accidentally do then blame the poltergeists. Nothing personal.

The kettle was off. The clue is in this quote from my original post.

the electric kettle switched itself on and boiled

If it suits you, your story is better than mine.......

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

The kettle was off. The clue is in this quote from my original post.

And the clue in my post was

Leaving the kettle on just sounded like something one would accidentally do

If it suits you, your story is better than mine.......

Are you offended I didn't know if you were being sarcastic? Because I don't get why you would be.

But getting back to your story, leaving it on accidentally is one possibility. Some of the explanations for my radio switching on might also apply to an electric kettle.

 

[Loss Leader]

The farther into this thread we get, the more upset i am at myself for offering any sort of rational explanation for any of this. The real answer is: Weird things happen, memories are corrupted, and we don't have the information to explain them. It's a long, long way from saying "not enough info" to "this disproves everything we've ever thought about the universe."

 

[Garrette]

--snip--
Here's one I had very recently - see if forumites can spot what turned out to be the very mundane explanation:

Mother-in-Law left the house (empty) locked the door and posted the keys through the letterbox. Postman called sometime later and posted a small parcel through the letterbox. Family returned, opened the door and the keys were on top of the parcel.

I'm pleased to say that no-one blamed poltergeists but they were intrigued and challenged me to explain it when I got home. Which I did in minutes - to everyone's satisfaction - especially when I gave a practical demo.

1. Keys got hung up on the inside of the letterbox and were unstuck by the parcel passing over them. Parcel landed first with keys on top.

2. Keys bounced as parcel hit the floor, landing on top of parcel.

I favor #1.

 

[GraculusTheGreenBird]

The farther into this thread we get, the more upset i am at myself for offering any sort of rational explanation for any of this. The real answer is: Weird things happen, memories are corrupted, and we don't have the information to explain them. It's a long, long way from saying "not enough info" to "this disproves everything we've ever thought about the universe."

I completely disagree, considering several potential explanations for the OPs and other events have been accepted as likely after discussion.

This is not actually a thread where every suggested explanation is countered then discarded.