Have you ever lost a small object, perhaps of great personal value, then have it turn up later in almost the same spot you last saw it? My guess is you probably assumed you were responsible for losing it even though you couldn’t imagine how.
Three days ago, my passport disappeared from the pocket I could have sworn I left it in only hours before I was scheduled to board a plane. I searched everywhere, repeatedly emptied my backpack, repeatedly reached into every pocket I might have left it in. No passport. Did I leave it on the seat of the bus I had just got off? But that seemed impossible. I guarded that passport with my life!
A feeling of horror crept over me. You must show a passport to fly from a foreign country back to the States. No exceptions. I was stuck in a hotel in Asuncion, Paraguay. I didn’t speak Spanish, and no one I turned to understood English. It would be days before I got home even if there was an American Embassy in Asuncion. I was thoroughly confused and frightened.
Just before I fell into bed near despair, I placed my wallet into the side pocket of my cargo pants where the passport should have been. And there it was—in the very pocket I had reached into half a dozen times before. I was astonished. It was as if I had awakened from a horrifying nightmare.
I began to wonder. Was I victimized by a poltergeist? I knew they did strange things. And one of their habits is removing small objects from their place, then later returning them to that place. Parapsychologists have a phrase for this: Disappearing Object Phenomenon, or DOP. Obviously, I didn’t leave the passport on the seat of the bus!
Had a poltergeist been toying with me, having a little fun at my expense, possibly because I pretty much had their number? But maybe there was another cause. countless people down through the ages have believed that good-hearted sprits can get our attention by influencing nature (“working a miracle”) to steer us away from a bad decision or correct us for having made one. I recalled the argument I had with my wife the day before. Had I behaved badly? Was I being corrected by a good spirit? One thing I do know: a bad spirit, or “demon,” wouldn’t have returned the passport.
Have you experienced a mysterious disappearing object, one that you were sure you had done nothing to cause? If so, did you write it off as a moment of forgetfulness? Perhaps you should go back and reconsider.
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