Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register

Okay, this one's a little freaky-deaky. The woman shown above is a California resident named Marion Shurtleff. She's holding a 65-year-old essay that she found in a Bible that she recently purchased at a used bookstore.

Here's the freaky part: The essay was written by her.

According to this story, Shurtleff didn't even look closely at the sheets of paper tucked into the Bible for about two months. Then she took a closer look, recognized her own childhood handwriting, and saw her name on the first sheet. She had written the essay to get a Girl Scout merit badge back in 1948, when she was a 10-year-old girl in Kentucky -- 2,000 miles from where she now lives.

The used Bible in which Shurtleff found the sheets of paper was not as old as the papers themselves. So someone had saved her essay and then put it in the Bible at some point, and then Shurtleff just happened to purchase that Bible by bizarre coincidence.

I have to admit, I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. You can read more here, and here's a video report:

(Special thanks to James Poisso for alerting me to this one.)

The painting you see above is at the center of a very interesting story involving my friend Shane Arbogast. A stranger recently got in touch with him to say that he'd been combing through items at a Goodwill shop in Florida and had spotted a painting with Shane's signature on it. (You can just barely make out Shane's name at lower-right.) The guy didn't purchase the painting but was curious about its back-story, so he googled Shane's name and e-mailed him.

Shane immediately recognized the painting as something he'd done for a class assignment while attending art school in Sarasota, Florida, back in the early 1980s. He's not sure what happened to it after that (he thinks he may have sold it in a student show, but he's not certain), but in any event he hadn't seen or thought about the painting in 30 years. He didn't want it to vanish into the ether again, so he arranged for the guy who'd gotten in touch with him to purchase it for him:

The best part is that Shane and his girlfriend are longtime thrift store shoppers and have purchased their share of thrift store paintings over the years. Now Shane himself is a thrift store artist. It's a great example of something coming full-circle.

There's more here -- possibly a lot more -- but I don't want to get ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that I plan on interviewing all the principals in this story and hope to bring you a more fleshed-out version soon.