Stephen E. Braude, in his review of JOTT: When Things Disappear… and Come Back or Relocate – and Why It Really Happens in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, has the highest praise for the work of Mary Rose Barrington: “This book accomplishes the nearly miraculous achievement of being both substantive and highly entertaining… I’ve argued that we need fewer lab parapsychologists and more parapsychological naturalists, good observers (like the biological naturalist), who can record and systematize the subtleties of broad ranges of relevant phenomena and behavior…Barrington, in her book, plays this crucial role of the parapsychological naturalist, by looking at some unheralded peculiar events and then trying to incorporate them into the big picture. She focuses on a class of ostensibly paranormal phenomena that have received much less attention than, say, cases of apparitions and poltergeists. And she’s clear about why that is. The phenomena typically and all too easily get dismissed as merely a nuisance and are readily put out of mind…the best of these cases present real puzzles with serious ontological implications…” Robert A. Charman of Society for Psychical Research also strongly recommends the book: “The author… has applied her legal mind to investigating claims of objects that have disappeared and returned, or not returned, or have appeared for the first time, for which there appears to be no normal explanation such as memory lapse, absent mindedness, inadequate searching, third party trickery, deliberate deception, and so on…Barrington has over 180 cases of jott on file, grouped by similarity of occurrence into six categories…A lot of serious thought and much fascinating information has gone into the 190 pages of this book…”

You are certain you left the envelope on the kitchen counter. Now it’s gone. No one else lives in the house. You look all over for it. The next day, you walk into the kitchen and there it is: the envelope is on the kitchen counter, right where you left it. Mary Rose Barrington calls this phenomenon JOTT, for Just One of Those Things. She has been collecting and categorizing various types of jott for more than a decade. Here for the first time, the phenomenon is given a book-length treatment, JOTT: When Things Disappear… and Come Back or Relocate – and Why It Really Happens, just published by Anomalist Books. These might seem like trivial incidents but when they resist conventional explanations–it’s your faulty memory, your faulty perception, your inability to report facts correctly–they have far-reaching implications. Bravo, Mary Rose, for bringing attention to these subtle rifts in the fabric of causality!