And Found

Here’s an idea I received from supporter, Leigh H. It’s pretty fully-formed, so I’ll post it as is and just add a couple quick at the end.

I stumbled into the opportunity for a pretty strong piece of magic recently, which I thought had a useful underlying idea in it:

I had my girlfriend choose a card, and we lost it in the deck. I tried to find it a couple of times, and failed, so we gave up.

Later, I remembered something my grandma used to do when she had misplaced things: a little superstition which was supposed to help you remember where you'd left something you lost. I suggested we use it to try and find the card.

We conducted a little ritual, focused around the card box, to try and help us locate her lost card.

Unexpectedly, it seemed to work: something appeared inside the box.

I dumped out the contents of the box…

The reaction was really strong. Not because the card was correct, but because some of the things in the box were legitimately lost and had suddenly reappeared, supposedly summoned/found by the ritual.

This came about because over a year ago, my girlfriend let a friend of mine borrow a padlock she had (he was staying with us, and going to the gym in our building). He ended up heading back home to England with the lock, and neither me nor my friend thought anything of it.

Months later, in passing, my girlfriend mentioned that the lock had some sentimental significance, and she was pretty sad it was gone (but knew it was 'just a silly padlock', so had already given up on it).

I reached out to him, he had it and mailed it right back. I was planning to wrap it up as a gift and give it to her at Christmas (not as part of a magic trick).

But then... we have these little plastic figurines we hide around the apartment as a game: put the guy somewhere funny, and wait for the other person to stumble across it.

They often get hidden and forgotten about, and turn up a couple days/weeks later so we only know where 1 or 2 are at any point in time.

Goose had not been seen for months. Neither of us remembered the last place we hid him, so eventually we concluded he must have been hidden in a cereal box or something and thrown in the trash.

But, months after we assumed he was gone, I found him when she wasn't around (he was in a box of Christmas tea bags, which had stopped getting used after the holidays). I immediately had the idea to put him with the padlock and gift them both back at the same time.

But then I realized I was in a unique position where I had possession of multiple items which were assumed lost, and could use that as the basis of a magic trick.

The opportunities to use this effect are likely pretty rare, but it feels like a useful tool to have in the back of mind in case it does come up.

I suppose you could also just start stealing small objects from your friends in order to eventually give them back, but that changes up the sentiment a little, I suppose! —LH

I like this idea a lot.

Note that the idea is not to use a magic ritual to find a spectator’s lost object. You don’t say, “Let’s use a ritual to find your lost ring,” or whatever. Instead, the lost object is found as a repercussion of a “ritual” used in the context of a card trick. So it’s the fictional magic world and their real world intermingling in an unexpected way.

You’ll see a similarity with this idea and the trick In Search of the Castaways in book #2. And the subject of Reps (repercussions) is covered extensively in the next book (#4).

The only tweak I would make is to do some sort of card case switch. So the person you’re performing for hands you the empty card box and while you’re arranging things for the ceremony, you switch in the pre-loaded box. I recommend this not because this is a trick about items magically appearing in the card box. But because this has the potential to be a “big” trick in their memory. And the empty card case might be a detail that gets lost in the moment (under the surprise of seeing their lost object). But it can be a little magical time-bomb that they remember when they think back to the effect. “Wait… there wasn’t even anything in the box when I handed it to him.” It’s good to “seed” big effects with smaller magical details that might get remembered later. And that’s simply because big effects are the ones people think back on the most, so it makes sense to pack them with as many little moments as possible.

And I agree with Leigh that I wouldn’t just steal something in order to perform this effect at a later date. I would wait until I serendipitously found something that someone had lost. Ideally you want something that has been missing for weeks or months, not hours or days. However, after I found such a missing item, I probably would steal something else to round out the effect a little more. I think the ideal “cache” to appear in the box would be something like what Leigh had:

1. Something that’s been missing for a while that you genuinely stumbled over.

2. Something else that is both inessential, but also will be noticed missing. Most likely this would be something you take yourself. And I emphasize “inessential.” Don’t steal their credit card or car key or something for your trick.

3. The missing playing card.

4. And then fill it out with some random “missing” items. The sort of things people lose all the time, but aren’t necessarily remembered like change and the button in Leigh’s example. Also little screws (from when you’re putting together furniture), guitar picks, rubber bands, hair ties. Maybe an M&M that rolled under the fridge back in May.

Of course, there’s a decent chance whatever lost item you find won’t fit in a card case, but you can use the same basic idea with any type of larger container as well.

This isn’t something you’ll have the chance to do often (although I did recently find my friend’s earring at my place, so I’m set up to do this soon), but when the situation to perform it does arise, I think it has the potential to be a really strong moment for the spectator.

Thanks to Leigh for sharing this with us.