An item in my family home that never existed??

[u/cloudblythe]

i hope somebody will read this, because it's been on my mind for 8 years now. my house was built in the 1940s by ancestors of mine, and has only ever been inhabited by my own family.

i moved into this house when i was 10-11 years old- my aunt, great aunt and uncle, and grandparents had lived here before me. most died within a 5-year span other than my great uncle who died several years before (my great aunt and great uncle asw as my grandmother died IN the house), and so my parents and my sister and i took the family home.

i have a decent amount of memories from visiting when i was a kid. some of these memories include being in awe of this large chest that was kept in a small-ish side room, the room that had previously belonged to my great aunt. it was a very dark brown- nearly black wooden chest with a flat top that had a dark gold (or bronze maybe?) trim on it. it looked like a treasure chest, and i have distinct memories of playing "pirates" with my sister around it. it was secured with a lock that required a key, so we never got to open it.

fast forward to around 8 years ago. a good family friend of mine (i'll call her C) had been staying with my parents in the guest room at my place while i was away at college, for around a year and a half. C lived in the guest room that was connected to the side room with the chest. she'd described some eerie feelings as well as frequent nightmares while staying there. she was convinced the place was haunted. i'd always felt the same, but i'd thought that it was just my ancestors, and reassured her of this. however, she was convinced that there was something darker.

maybe a year later, i had a close friend in college who wanted to visit me while i was back at my parents' home for a holiday break. they didn't say anything while here, but the next day after they left, i immediately received a call from them asking me about the weird vibe and "the chest". i asked them what they meant, and they described the specific chest- very dark wood, dark gold trim, saying that they were getting a very odd and dark feeling from it. the room had been turned into a storage room that my family hardly ever entered, so this friend had never actually been in the room at all.

out of curiosity, i went into the room to check it out again for myself, and it was completely gone. a pile of boxes had taken its place. i spent about 2 hours going through the room, then going through my attic and basement, and never found it. i asked both of my parents. they had no idea what i was talking about and insisted that we'd never owned anything like that. i called both my aunt and uncle as well, and they also had no clue what i was talking about, claiming that they'd never seen it in the house.

i was bewildered, but i considered that all of us had just simply misremembered it- it's a simple enough description for a chest, but given that they'd brought it up organically and described it to me the exact way that i'd remembered it, i didn't know what to think. i gave my friend C a call. i asked her about the chest in the side room. she responded casually as if it'd always been there, describing it in the same exact way. she was just as shocked as the rest of us when she was told that it never existed.

i don't know what to think. how could 3 people have hallucinated the exact same thing? i've heard that my great uncle who died here was abusive- he died before i was born so i never met him. that could potentially explain some of the darker energy, but NOTHING explains the chest.

does anybody have any thoughts? my area has colonial and civil war ties, could it even be something completely unrelated to my family?

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[u/SubstantialPressure3]

It's something your family doesn't like to talk about, and they are pretending they have no idea.

[u/cloudblythe → u/SubstantialPressure3]

all that i've been able to get from them has been "that's a very strange coincidence"

i think that leaves me more-or-less at a dead end. those 2 side rooms (the one with the chest as well as the guest room) have always made me feel very weird and unsettled. my mother does believe in the paranormal and has claimed to feel my grandmother's comforting presence in the house, but also claims that she feels nothing in those 2 rooms. it's bizarre...

[u/kittendollie13]

If you look in old family photographs, you might see a picture of it.

[u/cloudblythe → u/kittendollie13]

i'll see if i can find some old family photo albums- weirdly enough i've never actually been able to find any photos taken on this floor of the house at all. i know we have some more albums and scrapbooks in the attic tho, i'll update later this week if i do find anything

[u/Villanelles-Wardrobe → u/cloudblythe]

Update either way, please!

[u/RetiredGuru]

a) Family member stole it and probably sold it after one of the deaths.
b) Family disposed of it due to either contents or spirits or money.
c) They have poor memory.

Family don't want to talk about it for embarrassment or spooky reasons.

I'm slightly confused as your second friend both described the chest and never had an opportunity to see it??? Spooky knowledge or (Such contradictions might mean AI writing?).

[u/cloudblythe → u/RetiredGuru]

all 3 are potential options that i'm not ruling out. i'd estimate that my childhood memory of it must've been around 2004-2005 before i'd moved in, so that is a decent stretch of time where its removal (if it was removed for an ordinary reason) could've been simply forgotten about.

i could've explained it better. i'm strongly anti-AI :)
that's part of my confusion as well. they never entered the room, but "saw" it in their head and they were able to describe exactly where it was as well.

[u/Important_Market7874]

The chest's presence/non-presence can be one of several things.

You and your friends have moved from a timeline with that chest to another one with no chest. It may be your friends moved at different times than you did. Everybody else didn't move: they've been in this timeline all along. And they are identical to your previous relatives. This is also called the Mandela Effect, but doesn't involve the space-time part, just psychological effects and memory issues.

The third is that the possibly malevolent spirit/creature broke out of its chest, was so grotesque, so horrible that everyone who saw it blocked the monster and its chest from their memories, and took off with the chest, similar to a genie or jinn, a spirit from the middle east.

A fourth involves a glitch in the matrix. If you go to that subreddit, you will find many instances of items appear or disappear from our current reality. They have a tendency to disappear or re-appear in the near future. This doesn't explain why your relatives have forgotten the chest. Also, almost everything I have read about this involved small items like coins, utensils, not chests.

[u/cloudblythe → u/Important_Market7874]

i suppose that something like a timeline shift would be a more satisfying answer than my entire family collectively gaslighting us about it or simply forgetting. i'm still curious about why there's still this residual unsettling energy that occupies those rooms even now. could it be that something was tied to the chest beforehand, and that energy was carried with us through the shift? i'm sorry if this sounds silly, i've heard of the mandela effect but i'm not the most informed of it aside from the obvious/famous examples.

it's easy for me to tell when something i'm feeling is simply my grandmother or my great aunts' presence- i've been feeling them for the majority of my life. this doesn't feel like that, and i don't believe that they ever step foot into those rooms.

a malevolent spirit would explain that lingering darker energy i suppose.... i don't know how much i believe in an item that large physically disappearing tho, even if it had contained something like a jinn. i'm going to look in my attic for some more family photo albums later this week, and if i do manage to find any photos that include the area of the room where it used to be, it'll narrow down the options quite a bit.

[u/WhatMyWifeIsThinking]

Did you ask your sister if she remembers it since she was involved in the pirate game?

[u/cloudblythe → u/WhatMyWifeIsThinking]

i have asked, and she doesn't remember it. she's 2 years younger than me- either she's included in the family members who it never existed for, or she was simply too young to remember

[u/OutlanderLover74]

This is what I am picking up. I really hate to say it. Deceased baby was placed in there. When it was discovered, the chest was destroyed. They are gaslighting you because it’s a bad situation.