Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Spirited Away...

Disappearance cases are quite common. However, there's a distinctly Asian concept that I love, and it's called being "Spirited Away". It was popularized by a Miyazaki film of the same name. Which kind of relates to the concept.
Basically, a person disappears and then quite sometime later, ends up appearing (usually in the same spot they disappeared), sometimes months and years later, with no memory of what transpired.
One famous story, is of a Japanese boy, who in the late 1940's who, while playing in a nearby forest, disappeared and his family could not discover what happened to him. It was around the same time as a bombing that occurred. Naturally they determined that the boy must have been killed in the bombing, but then in the mid 50's a child resembling that same boy emerged and was completely unharmed.
These kinds of cases sometimes get cross-referenced as abductions, but I believe just trying to simplify everything as someone being crazy, or that little green men got them, is a little irresponsible. The phenomenon itself is recorded all throughout the world. In India, a house wife of 5 was cooking and cleaning in the kitchen. The kids and husband went to the local market street, not more that 3 blocks away, and were not gone more than 5 minutes. They came home to woman missing, the door had been blocked from the inside and there we no physical way into the house. They had to get in through a hole in the roof, and the woman was entirely missing. There was a timer that indicated it had only been set not 1 minute before they had gotten back to the house.
The family moved on and moved out of the house, not more than 3 years later, a young man came into the house and noticed a frightened and disorientated woman inside his house, not knowing how or why she was there. Turned out that the neighbors recognized her as the same woman that had gone missing years earlier. No one in the neighborhood saw the woman enter the house, and do not know how she got there.
In some cases, the subjects have memories, that they can't believe are theirs. One women, in Ohio, who had some of the same things happen to her said she remembered being in the house and her spouse looking for her, but no matter what she did she could not get his attention. She described the experience as "being invisible".
What would you do if you suddenly could not interact with those you cared about? What would you wish you would have said or done? Then, imagine the miracle of coming back and having a 2nd chance. To me, it just seems like something very interesting...

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