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Nury Vittachi ventures to the mysterious world down down the back of the sofa

Hong Kong electronics manufacturer Karuna Menon once told me he was in a friend’s living room when he got the urge to stick his hands into the depths of the sofa on which he sat. (I’m never inviting him to my house). He felt something odd down there. He reached in and yanked it out. It turned out to be a piece of jewellery—a serious one, made of gold with real diamonds.

His host came back with the tea tray from the kitchen and was astonished at the discovery.

Sofa cracks are amazing places. I once found a fossilised French fry which appeared to be from the early Cretaceous period down the back of mine. The weird thing is that the sofa itself was less old, from the more recent Jurassic period. Explain that, Neil Degrasse Tyson.

And do you remember that news item about a nine-year-old cat pulled out of a sofa in Spokane, Washington, by an astonished woman who had been wondering why her couch had been making rather strange squeaking sounds? Then there was the boa constrictor found in a couch in Brooklyn, New York. The snake was taken to an animal shelter where she was named Sofie to commemorate the fact she had emerged from that most mysterious source of marvels: the sofa crack.

Your humble narrator was talking about this with some readers and Angela, based in Singapore, said she reckoned sofas were portals to “a parallel universe”. This is the most believable explanation of the spate of sofa-crack discovery new reports circulating just now.

Children are more aware of the magic than adults, frequently taking lucky dips. Some sofas seem to be angled to empty coins and other objects from people’s pockets. “My sister and I had a lucrative way of raising funds beyond our allowance,” reader Thomas Seifert said. “We called it The Sofa Harvest.”

Serious treasures are regularly found, too. An unpublished 1836 manuscript from Hans Christian Anderson was found in a sofa. Photographs from famous snapper John Bellocq were found in a couch. Had it not been for nosy people like Karuna who stick their hands into people’s settees, these masterpieces could have been lost forever.

A few years ago, UK teenager Rebecca Wells found a chocolate bar down the back of her sofa. She was tempted to put it straight into her mouth, but then changed her mind. Good thing too. It turned out to be a Cadbury’s Wispa, a discontinued line of chocolate bar that had been wildly popular in the 1980s. She ended up selling it on e-Bay for 1,000 pounds, equivalent to $10,000.

Then there was the case in Nigeria where a killer dropped his knife down the back of a sofa, expecting it to disappear for good. Detectives reached into the dark vortex, extracted it and used it as evidence against him.

What is the biggest thing that has disappeared down the back of the sofa? I’m not sure, but I had a weird great-uncle who vanished mysteriously from a sitting room without anyone seeing him leave. He was last seen 20 years ago on a black leatherette three-seater in a small flat in Yau Ma Tei. He is now probably in a parallel universe. If you reach down the back of your sofa and pull him out, get straight on to the phone.

Call anyone but me.

Nury Vittachi is an award-winning author and journalist based in Hong Kong. He is best known for his comedy-crime novel series, The Feng Shui Detective. Contact him via nury@vittachi.com or through his public Facebook page.