Maybe We Should Go Back

2nd Glitch in the Matrix story: "Treasure"

Another true story from my childhood that I simply can't explain. This is called:

Treasure

This event happened to me when I was about eight or nine years old. I'm going to start by explaining about a little shop in our town because this is connected to what happened. In our medium-sized town, we had this small book shop that we went to frequently. We were homeschooled, and they had a bunch of curriculum books that my mom would buy for our lessons. They also had other books, school supplies and CD's and movies to buy. One day I saw these necklaces beside the register. They were cheap but cute little necklaces with charms on them and such. I wanted one and asked my mom if I could get it. She said no. It wasn't a big deal, and I quickly forgot about it.

Now that you have the context, I'll get into the story.

This was the mid 1990's. Back then we lived far out in the country, and our house was at the top of a deep creek. We didn't have very many close neighbors, and the only kids who lived nearby were a boy and girl who lived on the other side of the creek. We hung out with them a lot since they were around our same ages. The creek was an excellent place for exploring. To us, it seemed much bigger than it actually was, and we could spend hours down there playing on a wooden swing we had built, ice skating when the water froze over or just pretending to be explorers.

One of our favorite games was pretending we were hunting for treasure. Me and the little girl who lived on the other side of the creek would play this game together, and we would find little rocks and things that we pretended were treasure. We were talking one day about how cool it would be if we found REAL treasure in the creek, like jewelry or something. About a minute later, no joke, we stumbled across something silver half buried in the leaves. It was the EXACT same necklace I had seen in the book store, still attached to the price tag! It was a wet, rainy day, but the price tag was still pristine, as if it hadn't been in the leaves for very long. On top of that, we had already searched this area earlier in our game and hadn't seen it there. It would have been impossible for us to miss it, so it was like it appeared out of nowhere.

Like typical kids, this didn't freak us out the way it would freak me out today. Instead we were absolutely thrilled with the discovery of "actual" treasure and ran home to show my mom. She got very angry with me, thinking I had stolen the necklace. She recognized it as well and knew it was the same necklace I had asked for weeks prior. I told her I hadn't taken it and that honestly I thought she had bought it as a surprise for me and accidentally threw it away, where it ended up in the creek. When she told me she hadn't bought it either, I got really weirded out. How did it get here, miles away from town, buried in the leaves of our creek at our isolated country home?

None of us kids had bought or stolen it and neither had our friends' parents or our parents. And now we knew that there was no explanation for that necklace just appearing. To me the weirdest part was that the price tag was still attached. That meant that no wandering stranger had been wearing it and happened to drop it in the creek. It was obviously brand new. It also wasn't expensive enough to bother stealing from anyone's house if there had been robbers using our creek as a getaway. It was maybe five dollars, something like that.

As a kid, I just saw this as good luck and asked my mom if I could keep it, but she insisted we return it to the store. We did. Sure enough, we confirmed it was the exact same necklace I had been wanting. I explained the story to the cashier, but I'm pretty sure the cashier just figured I had stolen it. I'm also pretty sure my mom thought this too, though she couldn't prove it and I wasn't a dishonest child. I don't blame her for thinking that, since there was no other way to explain it.

To this day, it remains a strange and unsolved mystery. I like to think that maybe I had a friendly ghost companion or guardian angel who just wanted to give me a little gift.