Who would write this?
"Stephen King murdered Stacey McGill in the Seattle Center. If you find this contact Gwen at 929-4961 urgent."
My mother found the above inscription written inside a cardboard box on her deck circa 1987. Nobody knows where it came from or what it really means. The phone prefix didn't match anything in the 206 area code at the time. We checked with the police: no unsolved murders at the Seattle Center (although there was that whole Green River thing going on), nobody reported missing named Stacey McGill, etc. She kept if for years then I took it to my place several years ago.
A prank? Almost certainly but here's the nagging thing about this box: what the devil kind of prank is that? Definitely written in a female hand (can't tell you how frequently I spell that "femail" then have to correct it -- but that's a different story). Why write that? Why leave it in an obscure place with a non-existent phone number? Where's the payoff for this prank? It made no sense then and time has not improved things where this mystery box is concerned.
Perhaps the prankster has lived a life of frustration wondering what became of her little joke. Maybe one day she will stumble upon this post and learn the truth: I've used the box as the basis of a short story that helped get me through a college writing class and most recently I built a screenplay around this little curiosity. While I may be curious about the box and it's origins, I'm not frustrated by it.
It would be interesting to learn the truth one day.