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.
Poltergeist activity is one of the nine basic types of evidence for an afterlife. The subject gets a whole chapter in my book When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? That book is loaded with evidence of all types. You might take a look.
Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His novels include The Imprisoned Splendor, The Afterlife Therapist and Guardians of the Afterworld. His latest book, The Hell Dwellers: A Novel about the Dark Side of the Afterlife is published by White Crow Books. Stafford can be found at staffordbetty.com.
Stafford, thanks for sharing that interesting experience. I have had many such experiences over the years and have often wondered if there was some purpose in them. However, I have failed to keep a record of them and while I can remember with some detail experiences from 80 years ago, I struggle to remember the details of my recent experienced. I had just a week ago, but I’ve already forgotten the details.
I’m glad I am not alone among the people I know to be sane. It embarrasses me to admit I might have been the prey of a poltergeist when I dare share the experience with my local friends, most of whom don’t believe there is any such thing. I though I’d share this account with readers of the local newspaper but changed my mind. It’s a shame when one has to hide the truth to protect one’s reputation. Such is life in the strange lane.
Dear Stafford,
This is an interesting report, and it falls into what is by now a fairly well-recognized class of parapsychological cases. Mary Rose Barrington’s work on JOTT – ‘Just One of Those Things’ – is probably the best starting point. She treats these incidents as apparent ‘spatial discontinuities’, in which objects disappear, return, relocate, turn up unexpectedly, vanish, or are in rare cases even ‘traded in’ for similar objects. In her taxonomy, your passport episode would seem closest to what she calls a ‘comeback’: an object known to have been in a particular place disappears from that place and is later found back there, or very near there.
Barrington’s book JOTT: When Things Disappear . . . and Come Back or Relocate – And Why It Really Happens is the major treatment, but two of her shorter articles, “Samples of JOTT (Phenomena of Spatial Discontinuities)” and “From JOTT to Cosmic Control,” are also useful introductions. Stephen Braude reviewed the book favorably in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, praising Barrington for doing the kind of parapsychological ‘natural history’ that spontaneous psi phenomena especially require. Tony Jinks’s later book Disappearing Object Phenomenon also follows this line of inquiry, using the DOP/JOTT literature to classify disappearances, appearances, reappearances, and replacements, and to ask what explanatory models might fit the better cases.
Where I would be more cautious is in moving immediately from this experience to ‘poltergeist’ as an associative explanation. A poltergeist or RSPK (Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis) interpretation would normally require more than a single disappearing-and-returning object: some recurrent pattern of disturbances, a focal person or place, associated sounds or movements, thrown or displaced objects, or other contextual features suggesting a broader episode of physical disturbance. Without that larger pattern, ‘poltergeist’ seems premature. The first classification, assuming ordinary oversight is insufficient, would be JOTT/DOP. Poltergeist activity, unconscious PK, spirit agency, meaningful coincidence, or some still-unknown mechanism would then be possible explanatory hypotheses to consider only after the case facts warrant them.
So, I would not dismiss your passport incident. On the contrary, it is precisely the kind of small but disconcerting event Barrington thought deserved more careful attention. But I would place it first in the JOTT literature rather than treat it at once as evidence of a poltergeist “on the attack.”
Best,
Paul
For a prosaic explanation, perhaps the passport was stuck to or inside the folded wallet.
Not a chance. Passport is bigger than the wallet. See Buzz’s recent post. Then your mind might open. I understand why it hasn’t so far. For the same reason I assumed I must have lost the passport on the bus. “Surely such things don’t happen to me!” But it turns out they do.
I owned the book Superminds, a scientific study of anomalous metal bending. It includes a wonderful photo of a woman bending a metal pipe with her fingers while a man is smoking the pipe. I wanted to scan and email this photo to someone. It is a tall book and always occupied a specific spot on my bookshelf. But I could not find it on the shelf, in my closet or anywhere else. Had I loaned it to someone? I rarely loan books. I became increasingly distressed, not only had I apparently lost the book but have no recollection of taking it anywhere.
Hoping to forget my anxiety, I made dinner in the kitchen. When I emerged, my desk chair was turned around 180 degrees from its usual position – it was now facing the kitchen – and sitting pretty on the seat was Superminds. I tried to reconcile this incident with what I know of reality and failed.
As Paul rightly pointed out earlier, poltergeists hang around a location for a while and perform many acts that confound us. In that sense, Buzz, you and I have not been victimized by a poltergeist. They are not one-timers. However, the spirit or spirits behind poltergeist activity might well be the same. Their disruptions seem to be of the same order. In any case, what happened to you is a clear case of some kind of spirit agency. I bet your reaction was like mind: bafflement followed by intense relief. Thanks for sharing your story: an ideal case of DOP.