He just disappeared.
My father, when I was young, was the teacher in charge of school upkeep during the summer holidays. Once a week, we’d stop through to make sure nobody had smeared shit on the walls, then we’d check the meters and go home. For my sister and I, these trips were particularly fun. We could run through the corridors of a school! We could shout in a school! We could do cartwheels in a classroom! Best yet, we could see what the boys’ toilets looked like!

On one nondescript summer day, my dad, my sister and myself made the usual walk to the school. We got up to the usual bumbling about, while my dad got up to his usual duties. Time came to leave.

“C’mon kids! Time to leave!”
“All right, dad!”

We saw him walking towards the front door, then, I swear to Darwin and Tesla, he fucking disappeared. One second, there was a dad. The next, nothing. Right before our bloody eyes. There was no mist, no image dissolving like in the movies. CLICK – he was gone, and the only place he could have gone was through the front door.

My sister and I thought he was playing a joke, a bit of a scary hide-and-seek. We ran through the building, searching every locker and cranny. Nothing. Then we started crying out, scared. Nothing. Surely a father – and my dad was the greatest, at this point would sheepishly emerge to calm us down. Nothing. Three hours passed and we had no sign of our father, we couldn’t go home because we were locked in and we couldn’t get to a phone to call our mother. So we sat in a corridor and waited.

“Are you coming, kids? What are you doing sitting down, I told you to come here!”

And there was dad again, standing in the same spot.

“DAD! WHERE DID YOU GO!! WE WERE SO SCARED!”

“I, well, I didn’t go anywhere, I’ve been standing here the whole time, sillies.”

“NO, DAAAAAAAAAD, you disappeared! We were sad! We cried! We looked everywhere for you!”

“Don’t be stupid, kids. Obviously, I…”

And then he checked his watch. Indeed, three hours has passed. He turned a whiter shade of green, and we walked home in silence.

I had spent the years following assuming that my dad had played a dirty trick on us, that he took it as an opportunity to skip out on his kids so he could go to the bar or something. I brought it up again a few years later.

“I swear on your mother’s life, I didn’t go anywhere. I remember calling out to you kids, then suddenly the two of you were sitting down. Three hours were gone, but not a single second had passed for me.”

“Yeah, sure, dad.”

“I swear on your life, I didn’t hide from you. And in those years since it happened, I lie awake at night wondering what happened to me during those three hours. I – [voice cracking] - don’t know what happened…”

I’m inclined to believe my dad and to believe my own eyes (HE FUCKING DISAPPEARED!!!) But was it a dad playing a particularly devious joke on his kids? Eh, I’m not so certain of that. I certainly can’t explain what happened, and dad’s admitted to all of his other practical jokes by now.

There was only one way he could have run away to hide, and that was through the door. That door was locked. All I know is that he disappeared right before my eyes.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 10:46, 12 replies)

Woah
Shivers down the spine stuff..
( TY&GN, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 10:52, closed)

This....
Better be true.

Or I'll make you disapear alright!
( whenanimalsattackhumans clad in global hypercolour, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 10:52, closed)

Sounds
like a job for Stephen Hawking and his magic uber-science
(Dazzorifik is bored of b3ta, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 10:54, closed)

I swear
It is true!

Later, in my comedy years, I suggested that Aliens abducted him and put things up his bottom. He was none too pleased with that.

Still, it gives me shivers re-living it.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 10:55, closed)

Ive read accounts of things like this happening before, Your Dad is by no means alone in experiencing this but he is very lucky
because the other people who this happened to didnt come back.

One story is about a man who was working a field at his farm and was seen by his wife, kids and two other witnesses to vanish, in the blink of a eye, without trace and never returned. Creepy thing is the small patch of grass on which he was standing remains long because the cows wont graze it.

The second account is of a man who fancied himself a bit of athlete and was challenged to race a horse and carridge (it was a long time ago). A few miles in and he was seen to trip up and then vanished in a instant, never to be seen again. The road he was running on had no pot holes and was boardered by grass banks with no ditches. A search was launched but no trace was ever found.

Your dad is very lucky he came back from.....wherever he went.
(Absynth&Cheese Have you tasted my Jesus, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 13:07, closed)

Similar
This reminds me of something I vividly recall from my childhood, although I'm not really sure it actually happened due to the impossibility of it.

Unfortunately (fortunately?) it didn't happen to a living, sentient thing, but rather to a slightly crappy dark blue McDonald's frisbee type-thing with Ronald McDonald standing in a sort of Vitruvian Man-esque pose in the centre.
I don't remember much, just that I was playing with it indoors (it was probably raining or cold outside); I chucked it down the stairs of my house, and at the moment it hit the floor at the bottom, it vanished from sight entirely.

I never saw it again, but that's possibly the weirdest and strongest memory of my entire yoof.
(LLamaBoy skived off work on, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 14:42, closed)

Llamaboy
What you're describing there is called 'asportation', the disappearance of an object, either completely or to an unknown location.

This used to happen quite a lot in my old house, and not just in an "I've lost my car keys" way, but in a "thing I set down before going into the next room is now gone, but if I ignore it eventually it'll turn up on another shelf" way.

Very weird.
( Shegetz Chris Kamara's comedy moustache, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 15:05, closed)

Somehow...
It is more odd when it happens to a piece of plastic instead of something with a thought process and the ability to make decisions.

Why? Because OBVIOUSLY it had no control in the disappearance matter. It just happened for no reason.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 15:25, closed)

So...
...the only place he could have gone was through a locked door...a door to which he held the key?

Even if your father's assurance of no malicious intent is true, surely it's far more sensible to assume the possibility of a "funny turn" and amnesia, something along the lines of sleepwalking, say...a mental episode, than something supernatural? He unlocked the door and went out spent the three hours doing who knows what, then came back, and couldn't remember doing so?

Or perhaps he left, went home, sat in front of the TV...then three hours later thought "Hmm...have I forgotten something? Oh god, I forgot the kids!" and raced back to collect you, lying to cover it or, if you wan't to think better of your father, blocking out the traumatic memory of abandoning you.
(Musuko, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 18:27, closed)

@ Mosuko (or whatever you spell it, I've had beeeer!)
A likely story, one which I would really like to believe.

But the door was not only locked in the conventional lock-key-deadbolt way, but also with a series of chains. I remember this, as it was my sister's superior job to lock the padlock.

And sure, I've run the scenario through my head - dad wandered off, unlocked the padlock, untied the chains, unlocked the deadbolt and then unlocked the door. But, BUT - he didn't. I was looking at him, he vanished.

I like science. In fact, I love science. I like to figure out the possible from the improbable. But this, in my mind's eye (as well as my sister's and my father's) remains the improbable, likely never to budge.

I'd love to give the explanation of, "And dad, after watching football for three hours, realised he did, in fact, own children," but, unfortunately, that doesn't settle well.

On my previous love of science, I once heard a hypothesis about the nature of time and how it doesn't tick forward in the marching line how we might expect it to. It overlaps itself. We can't trust physics, we can't trust mass, so why can we trust time?

I am sure that there are those with greater understanding of this frankly misunderstood concept of time who might be able to shed better light on the subject.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 19:46, closed)

Keep thinking on it.
If alchohol is powerful enough to make you miss entire evenings of memory, then I'm sure it's possible for you yourself to have had a lapse of conciousness long enough for his disappearance to have occured.

Perhaps it was such a traumatic event, being abandoned, that you at the time were perfectly aware of watching him leave the building, but since then you have blacked out that memory and it's left you with it seeming he disappeared. Considering how traumatising the event was, as you've described, this seems possible.

The human brain is an odd thing. I'd be more inclined to believe that your father had a funny turn and blocked out the memory of it, and you were traumatised by watching your father leaving without you and blocked out that memory, leaving you both with lost time, than I am to believe that magic is at work or that time is messing up.
(Musuko, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 21:40, closed)

Sheesh
Moanyskdo do you just like trying to pick holes in everything?

Steven Hawkin has said there are 11 dimensions, we have no proof either way of this theory but it's accepted as a possibility, maybe these "ghosts" and other unexplained occurances are cross overs from dimensions beyond our own that due to certain circumstances we are able to briefly experience.

Either way it was a well told story so clickity click
( TGB checking Off Topic is still shit at, Tue 8 Jul 2008, 11:27, closed)