[T]he Brownies stole the philibeg off me, along with sark, jacket, and vest, and left me naked except for hose and brogan. (Marjorie T. Johnson, 2014, Seeing Fairies, Anomalist Books, p 268).That was the experience of Adam Campbell Hunter at Glen Oykel in 1938. He had gone for a long walk, taken off most of his clothes to sunbathe, and placed a stone on them to keep them from being blown away. After a while, he walked 50 yards to the top of the hill, came down, and found his clothes had disappeared! The boulders used as landmarks were still very obvious, the rest of the landscape was empty. Then follows the amusing story of his coming home nearly naked, and of the search party's valiant attempts to discover the clothes until they suddenly turned up right where he had left them, visible from a distance of 200 yards, despite the whole area having been gone over with a fine tooth comb immediately before.
Mr Hunter had just suffered an extreme example of something I'm sure we've all experienced. An object, usually small, disappears, only to turn up in the last place you would expect it or, more baffling, in plain sight in a place which had already been searched several times. No doubt there is a conventional explanation in the vast majority of these cases. Nevertheless, some of them appear to defy any rational explanation. I sometimes joke that the world is hard to understand for people who don't believe in gremlins, but ... what if it's not a joke?
