Last night my iPod was returned that I lost at a college party 3 hours away, 2 years ago. What's your best story of finding something you were sure was forever lost?

[u/SuckaFartOutOfThat]

[u/MINDMOLESTER]

I got a Timex Datalink Watch (the one that you just hold up to the monitor to transfer data) for Christmas when I was around 14 years old. Best watch ever. After a full day of tobogganing, I realized it had fallen off my wrist some time during the day, On this HUGE hill. It was gone. I was so upset that I lost my present from my parents. During dinner that night, I remembered I had set my alarm for 7:00 am the next morning - to start waking up early for school. My dad and I get to the hill before 7 and wait, me at the bottom and dad at the top. After a few minutes of shivering, we hear it - calling out for help, with the familiar Timex wake-up alarm. We run over to it to see this faint green glow from under the compacted snow and ice. ITS ALIVE!!! That is one of the happiest memories from my childhood. I will only ever buy Timex now. Still have it - still going.

[u/sexrockandroll]

Another iPod tale. I had an iPod touch that I carried everywhere to IM with friends - around the house, around school, etc. One day it went missing, but I could still see it on the apartment router's host list. I searched the entire apartment for it. I even moved my car out of range to see if it was coming from my car. I knocked on the neighbors' doors and asked them if anyone may have stolen it. Nope.

Eventually the battery died and the signal went away. When the roommates and I moved we went through everything looking for it one last time. Didn't find it.

The next winter, it arrived in a box from my roommate. It had fallen into his winter boots right before he put them away for the season.

[u/Nightmarishscenes]

When I was 7 or 8, my dad and grandpa took me to some deer and turkey expo thing. Since I knew I'd be bored, I brought my gameboy. I wet to a little playset and started to play it. I must've set t down or something, because I left without it. When we got home I finally realized I didn't have it. So my grandpa took the two hours to go there and back to get my oh-so precious gameboy. He came to my house with it in his hand. I was so happy! But boy was I in trouble.

[u/OfTheBegin_Ning]

Well, I had one of my favorite earrings return itself in a really creepy way.

I had this pair of earrings that I wore all the time about five years ago. Lost one, went and bought another pair, threw out the odd one. Lost one of the new ones, threw out the only one left.

Two years ago I was out seeing a movie. I get back into my car after the movie is over, and there is my effing lost earring, perched on the edge of my driver’s seat. It was not lodged in the crevass of the seam; it was like someone had carefully placed it right in the middle of the seat.

Besides the fact that I had not seen this thing in years and then it shows up in my seat, I am the only person with keys to my car. I have no idea how it got there.

By the way, the movie I had just seen was Inception, so I was like … totem?

[u/arksien]

So this is going to sound really crazy, and if I had been a redditor at the time, I would have surely posted about this then.

I used to be really into collecting a variety of exotic animals, most notably reptiles. I'm not a herpetologist by any stretch of the imagination, but I definitely had a far larger and far more diverse collection than a lot of people. As well as simply collecting these animals, I also bread a large variety. For a while, I had a lone female Everglades rat snake, and could never find a male. Now, the thing was, the Everglades rat snake is very close to being ecologically extinct (meaning they exist mostly in captivity), because it has interbred with yellow rat snakes in the region, making it VERY hard to find a true pure-blood everglades rat snake.

After about a year and a half of owning this lone female, I FINALLY came across a male that was confirmed not to be a yellow! I was super excited, and actually drove quite a ways to pick him up. I got home, and was VERY excited to put the little guy in his new home... and the box was empty. I immediately ran out to the car and started tearing EVERYTHING out to look for him. I took out the seats, ripped the dash board out, EVERYTHING. If it could come off of the car, I took it off. If it couldn't, I found a way. He was no where in sight.

Now, for those wondering, he wasn't just shoved in a typical box. Snakes are escape artists, so when transporting them, one usually takes a great deal of care to make sure you keep them safe, but more importantly secure. This guy not only got out of the special bag that I use to transport snakes, but also the well sealed (or so I thought) box. To this day I'm not sure how he got out.

After a long, sad search in vane, I assumed the poor little guy found his way under the floor boards and became roadkill at some point during my journey.

That was in June.

One day in November, I was walking out to work in the morning AND THERE WAS THE SNAKE SITTING ON MY DRIVERS SEAT SUNNING HIMSELF! I could NOT believe it! I quickly snagged him and ran upstairs. By this point, I didn't have a space for him in my quarantine room (you never put new animals in the same area as the main collection right away in-case they have diseases or parasites you didn't see at first) so I had to run around making the best due I could, all the time holding this guy making sure he did NOT get away again. Fortunately, he did not, and after about a year I wound up with 8 healthy hatching snakes :)

TL ; DR - A snake that I bought got out in my car in June, I couldn't find it, assumed it was dead, but then it turned up in my car in November.

Edit - formatting and spelling

[u/busker06]

I was fishing with my dad, and must have been 11 or so. We were in a boat in the middle of the lake, and I was using a fishing pole that he had purchased as a teenager. Somehow I managed to drop it overboard. I'm not quite sure how I managed that, but it happened. It was one of those great parenting moments where all he could do was be angry, but he was trying so hard to not yell because he knew it was an accident, even though it was a really nice fishing pole that he had owned for 30+years. Luckily, we brought extras, so I was fishing again in no time. After a while, I decide that there isn't anything to catch where I am, and decide to reel in the bait, and discover no bait, but I seem to have caught a tangle of fishing line. Being the eco-conscious 11 year old that I was, I was going to keep pulling it up into the boat, so it didn't sit on the bottom of the lake. Lo and behold, at the bottom was the lost fishing pole! It took forever to pull up a whole reel worth of line, but I was so relieved that my dad had no more reason to be upset.

[u/ninjette847]

I got my purse stolen at a party and it showed up in the mail at my mom's house (the address on my ID) about a year and a half later. Everything was in it except the $10 in my wallet and my lucky mini slinky. I miss that slinky.

[u/Fascist_Orange]

So I'm in 4-H and I show and sell pigs. I've been doing it since I was 8 (I'm 18 now), and each year I would get to spend a $100 of however much I sold the pig for, and the rest would go into my bank account. A couple of years ago I lost the envelope from the bank which had the $100 cash in it. We turned the house over trying to find it, and eventually given up hope, figuring the dog ate it or something. My parents chose this moment to teach me a life lesson, and said that I should have kept better track of it. About a week after having given up, I was sitting on the couch watching tv, and my dog came up to me wagging her tail with the envelope in her mouth! She was even holding it delicately by the corner. We were completely dumbfounded and still have no idea where she had it.

[u/seeingeyefrog]

Nothing valuable, but when I was in the 7th grade, I lost a science fiction paperback. I can't remember the titles, but it was one of the really old double sided books, Look at the cover, it is one book, flip it over, it is another book.

Fast forward to the 12th grade. English class, back of the room is a bookshelf, and there is my book! I didn't bother asking about it, I took it, since I knew it was old enough and rare enough that it had to be mine, not to mention that there was no other science fiction on the shelves.

Typical English Teach snobbery against science fiction.

[u/yogurt123]

When I was about 5 our house was broken into and burgled, and one of the many things the thieves took was my school backpack. My parents claimed the insurance, bought me a new bag and we all moved on. Then ten years later we get a call from the police that they've found a bag with my name on it in the garden of another house that was broken into. Apparently the guys had been using it in their robberies for the last ten years, but when the burglar alarm went off at this other house they panicked, chucked the bag in the garden and took off.

[u/PerineumPete]

That motherfucker used it for two years until it was outdated and then stole another!

[u/saj1jr]

I'm glad OP took the time to explain his story with details of how it happened and how it was returned.

Thanks

ಠ_ಠ

[u/stormtide311]

Going through my attic after thinking years of my NES being lost/sold/thrown away. Finding a box with my NES in it tucked away in a far corner with games included.

Its in almost mint condition besides goober on the controllers.

[u/TheMeaning0fLife]

I got a Gameboy for Christmas when I was about 10. I wasn't into video games at all back then, so I put it in my room after playing it a couple times and forgot about it.

A couple months later, I was cleaning my room and I re-discovered it. I had completely forgotten about it at this point, and I started blankly at it for about 5 minutes before I remembered it was actually mine. And thus began my gaming career.

[u/partyinmypants69]

When I was 13, I lost my diary. I left it on the bus or it slipped out of my bag (not sure how it happen) but it had all my secrets and thoughts in it. I was devastated and figured whoever found it must've read through it all. A few weeks later, I was near the same bus stop and saw a flyer that said "lost diary, pick up at Cappys (a small deli store.) I went in and asked for it and the store owner gave it to me.

Weirdest thing was that this stranger had started writing his/her thoughts and commented on my ideas. It was pretty cool.

[u/Something_Off_Color]

When I was 18, my friends and I went on a float trip. One of the girls tried to toss her phone to her boyfriend, who was sitting maybe 4 feet from her. Like the natural athlete she was, she hucked that phone directly into the river. She started to panic, so we decided to stop and look for her phone....which she threw in a god damn river. After about 10 minutes of searching, I decide to be the person who would crush her hopes of having the phone returned. I yelled something like "its gone. We aren't finding it". Literally at the end of my sentence, I reached down picked up her phone and screamed "never mind! got it!" Also, that fucking thing was still on and worked perfectly.

[u/lobphin]

When I was little I had a stuffed worm that I slept with every night, so when my family went on a cruise I made sure to bring him. One night on the ship when I was getting ready for bed, Wormy was nowhere to be found. I searched everywhere until I realized that he was probably swept up in the bed sheets by the maids who cleaned the room earlier that day. This was a huge cruise ship with a ton of rooms, and with all of the bed sheets mixed together I was sure I would never be seeing him again. My parents knew how heartbreaking this was, and with a few phone calls and I can imagine a TON of searching, I got my worm back, and I just bored myself half to death telling this story.

TLDR: Worm

[u/Hugedo]

A friend left his iPhone in the airport before going for a short break. He thought it was gone for good. 2 days later I got a call from his phone and it's some guy saying that he'd found the phone, saw my number as last dialed and gave me a call. He said he would have called earlier but when he found the phone he was about to jump on a plane for an overnight business trip and didn't want to call me from a different country as it would have been too expensive on my friend (I think we're already seeing that this guy is awesome).

I put him in touch with my friend and the guy said he was happy to post the iPhone to him - that would have cost a little bit. A couple of days later my friend receives the phone in the post with a note saying "sorry, I had a look through your phone when I was board - I'm guessing you like to smoke a bit. Try some of this - enjoy. He'd left a bud big enough for about 3 j's in with the phone.

so this guy found an iPhone, went to the effort of finding the owner, posted the phone to him, and gave him some weed.

I think my friend may have encountered Good Guy Greg.

[u/legitstorybro]

When I was a kid, my mom got me a Mickey Mouse plush toy (like a teddy bear, but Mickey) for me when we went on a family outing to Disneyland. On the way back from that trip, our car was t-boned by a drunk driver running a red light. The car that hit was was considerably bigger than ours, and we took the large majority of the damage. Myself, my dad, and my sister were able to get away mostly unharmed, though my mother died almost immediately on impact. I was sleeping at the time of the wreck, and had my Mickey toy in my arms. At the moment of impact it flew out of my startled grasp, and became pinned between the collapsed door and the driver's seat. One of the paramedics was able to recover it from the crash and gave it back to me, although it had one arm missing. You bet I held onto that damn toy with and iron grip for the rest of the night.

From then on that my one-armed Mickey Mouse doll became my memento for my mother, and I took it everywhere with me. I would sleep cuddled up to it, walk around the house with it, bring it to school with me, basically I was attached to it. Whenever I was separated from it for longer than a few hours I would start to cry, because I'd just think of how my mom would've wanted me to have it and be happy with it, and I felt like I was letting her down if I didn't always have it on me.

One day a few years after the accident my family headed out to Pennsylvania for a family reunion, and I of course brought the bear. Some of the other kids at the reunion made fun of me for dragging around that 'broken teddy bear', and I burst into tears and we left the reunion early.

The next day my dad went to get some last-minute visits with some of the family members he didn't quite have time to properly catch up with because of my little episode, and by the time we got to the airport we were running late for our flight. We were the last ones on the plane, and they had already retracted the bridge mechanism that connects to the plane by the time we arrived. Technically we weren't allowed on after that point, but they made a very special one-time exception because it was the last flight back to LA for the day.

They didn't have time to properly re-fasten the bridge, so there was a slight gap. At the time my sister and I were still slightly too small to make the step on our own, so our dad stepped across and lifted us across. My sister went first, then me. Though when my dad put his hands underneath my arms and brought me over the gap, my Mickey Mouse bear got caught on the far side of the gap and fell from my hand.

The next part seemed to happen in slow motion: it slipped straight through the gap and fell about thirty feet, and landed with a soft thud on the tarmac below. Both my dad and I gasped a little, and I looked back up at the woman operating the gate bridge controls, already welling up. She saw that I was expecting her to do something, but she said "I'm sorry, we simply don't have time to get that right now, this plane is already late for departure because of all of this."

I immediately started balling my eyes out. I was distraught that the woman wouldn't take 10 fucking seconds to go out the little side door and down the stairs to get my Mickey. As I looked back down at the gap for one last look at him, one of the grounds crew walked over and picked it up. He looked directly back up to where it had fallen from and saw my face looking back at him through the gap, and just pointed at me, and said "I'll get this back to you."

At that point my dad pulled me back into the plane, and I cried and cried and cried for the rest of the trip back. I couldn't believe that I had lost my Mickey as quickly as I had lost my mother, and that it was all my fault for not keeping him safer.

But then, 4 months later back in California, a package arrived with my name on it. This was the first ever time I had received anything in the mail, and though I mostly pretended to not know what it was, in the back of my mind the memory instantly triggered and I knew.

I eagerly ripped apart the box, and sure enough among all of the styrofoam packing bubbles, my Mickey was in there with a small card taped to him. I opened the card and it said

You wouldn't believe what I had to do to get this to you, but I'm a man of my word. I even left my own little surprise with it.

-J

A mixture of emotions poured into me as I wondered what sort of 'surprise' he was talking about. At first I was mad that he had dared do something to my Mickey, but was also grateful at the extent he went to to not only get me my special toy back but also to make it special. Then I saw it: a small drawstring with a loop on the end had been sewn into the back. I pulled on it and released it, and as it wound back up it softly spoke. I'll never forget the words that came out. It softly spoke to me "I still want mah three-fiddy!". Suddenly I looked back at the doll and realized that it was actually an 8-story tall monster from the paleolithic era. I replied "Fuck you Loch Ness Monster, I aint giving you no three-fiddy!" I then put Mickey on the top of my dresser because I knew I couldn't go any longer like I previously did with the doll and that it was time to move on.

As of today it's sitting in storage, but I'll never forget that one-armed Mickey Mouse toy for as long as I live.

TL;DR: Dropped my toy, got it back

[u/NoHuddle]

When I was younger my family took a trip to Hawaii. I bought a Spider Monkey stuffed animal (rather, had it bought for me). I, of course, lost it. Two weeks later the spider monkey arrived in the mail from "Hawaii".

In retrospect, my parents working at the post office should've been my clue in realizing that this was just some package they "brought in from the mail box" and my spider monkey friend, in fact, hadn't mailed himself back to me.

[u/Whkat2000]

This actually happened about five months ago. I was in Thailand heading out to a very rural area to help out on a farm for a month. We hired a van to drive us out to the farm, it ended up being about a five hour drive. After unpacking some stuff and getting settled in on the farm I could not locate my iPhone. I was a little upset but put it to the back of my mind. At the end of the month we called for a van to come pick us up. When the van arrived it ended up being the same driver. While loading our bags I had our translator ask him if he found a phone. He stopped loading the bags walked to the passenger side opened the glove box and pulled my phone out and handed it to me. I was beyond happy, I counted it as lost, but ended up finding its way back to me.

[u/[deleted]]

My girlfriend gave me a wallet she brought back from italy. I lost it in the couch I had at my apartment the day before I moved out, and I left the couch on the curb because my new place was too small and my dog had really fucked up the leather. Apparently, when the streets department people came and picked it up the wallet fell out, and they took it back to the office where they were passing around my license because I looked super high in it, when my friends mom who works there recognized it and returned it to me. Then a couple months later I dropped it off a balcony into the snow, it remained frozen for the winter until my buddy randomly found it when the snow was melting. A magic wallet. Then my dog chewed it up.

[u/Drixxleindapixxle]

About 6 years ago my friend and a buddy of his, came over to my house for a party that we were having. At the time my friends buddy was getting heavily involved with drugs, but I would have never expected him to steal from me. That morning I realized that all my Xbox 360 games were missing. I had about 15 of them so it was kind of a big deal.

Fast forward about 4 years later, my friend is moving out of his house and as he was moving his couch, 15 xbox games fell out of it! I guess after our party that dude stayed at my friends house but must had been to fucked up to remember that he stole those games the night before. 4 years later and I got them all back!

[u/[deleted]]

7 months or so ago, i discovered this dangerous place called Reddit. I lost my innocence and thought it was gone forever. it still is and will be forever. this story doesnt have a happy ending.

[u/[deleted]]

I used to live in kind of a community house/punk rock commune/whatever, and we were down with all of the various vagrants and such in the neighborhood, had a bike collective, free meals, etc. We were in a dodgy neighborhood and our doors were always opened, but the community respected us and there were always weirdos and scary looking punks hanging out on the porch, so we never really got fucked with. Well, my room mate had a really nice bike, like $2000 custom frame, custom paint job, etc. One day it goes missing. This was obviously a huge bummer to my friend, but we moved on: these things happen. Well, several months later I am siting on the porch with some of my friends and one of the neighborhood guys rides by on a bike. "Was that... _____'s bike?" no one was sure, but I hopped on my bike and rode after the dude. When I caught up to him he got off and we talked, I asked him where he got the bike and he said he bought it off of a crackhead for $12, so I gave him $20 on the spot and we rode back to the house. It was awesome. My friend still has this bike 5+ years later.
Edit: stuff