History Main / EerilyOutOfPlaceObject

* ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaDawnOfSorrow'' has the random vehicles in [[NoobCave The Lost Village]] by the virtue of being one of the few reminders, along with the occasional handgun, that the game takes place in the future - 2036 in fact. This doesn't make them any less out of place in a jarringly way.
* ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'': Played for laughs with one anomaly you can find being... a [[Creator/BertrandRussell teapot]]. Floating in deep space. No explanation is ever given, and your scientists eventually just give up even trying to figure out how and why it's there. Another anomaly features an asteroid made entirely of coprolite (fossilized animal feces). Not a scary or dangerous kind of stone, but floating in space, the size of an asteroid, it raises... implications.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Returnal}}'', you've crash-landed on a hostile world surrounded by the ruins of ancient alien civilizations ... and then, in one cave, you find a normal suburban house. [[spoiler:''Your'' house.]]

* The ''VideoGame/{{Xenosaga}} series features the Zohar, an object (inspired by the Monolith from 'Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'') that seems to be constructed from highly advanced technology first discovered at the bottom of an African lake. Later games imply that it might have originated at the same time as the universe, and appears to be U-DO's method of trying to communicate with humanity, but the specifics of how and why it turns up in particular places and times remains mysterious.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Returnal}}'', you've crash-landed on a hostile world surrounded by the ruins of ancient alien civilizations ... and then, in one cave, you find a normal suburban house.

** The second sequel, ''Film/EscapeFromThePlanetOfTheApes'', opens with a derelict spaceship falling into the ocean near San Francisco some time in the early '70s. When the authorities investigate, they find no humans aboard - but three [[ApesInSpace chimpanzees]].

* ''Series/FlashForward'': The kangaroo. (Of course, it could have simply escaped from a zoo during the blackout. Still, in context it's exactly played as this trope.)

* Immediately after traveling "sideways" in time in ''Film/LandOfTheLost'', the characters come across a crashed Cessna on a wrecked viking ship, overlapping with SaharanShipwreck. The eeriness is not just in finding either object in the desert, but in finding the two objects from vastly differnt time periods together.

[[folder: Folklore]]

* ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'': Played for laughs with one anomaly you can find being... a [[Creator/BertrandRussell teapot]]. Floating in deep space. No explanation is ever given, and your scientists eventually just give up even trying to figure out how and why it's there.

Related to OntologicalMystery, which is when the thing you find somewhere you can't explain with no idea how it got there is ''yourself''. Supertrope to SaharanShipwreck, where a ship is found far away from water (e.g. in the middle of a desert), and OminousCube. Compare AnachronisticClue.

* ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'', episode "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E3TheSurvivors The Survivors]]": Acting on a distress call, the ''Enterprise'' encounters a desolate world where the inhabitants who sent the SOS signal have been annihilated by an alien race, the Husnock. There's just one thing out of place: a quaint little spotless cottage belonging to an elderly human couple, the only survivors on the entire planet. How they remain there alive with everyone else dead remains a mystery until Picard figures things out at the end: [[spoiler:Only one of them survived the attack. The woman is an illusion and the man isn't even human. He's an incredibly powerful entity called a Douwd, possibly nearly as powerful a Q. He was also a pacifist, who refused to fight with the colonists. When his wife was killed along with the other colonists, he lashed out in anger and annihilated not only their assailants, but also the entire 50 billion members of the Husnock species. He voluntarily isolated himself to atone for his crime.]]

* ''Franchise/SilentHill'': This pops up a lot throughout the series. often the objects have some associated significance to a character in the story, even though they may or may not have put it there, but sometimes there will be a single colorful toy or baby carriage inside a bloody, rusted-out Otherworld room, just for the sake of unexplained, incongruous creepiness.

* These are quite common in the world of ''Wiki/SCPFoundation''. One example is an indestructible floating cheeseburger in the middle of nowhere that makes people go crazy trying come up with an explanation for why it is there.

* ''Literature/IremongerSeries'': Everyday objects frequently appear in strange places, and people mysteriously [[BalefulPolymorph go missing...]]

* ''[[Radio/QuietPlease1947 Quiet, Please]]'': Episode "The Thing on the Fourble Board". The oil drillers find a gold ring in the rock their oil drill has pulled out of the ground. The problem? That rock was a mile deep and had been a mile deep for a million years.

* ''Radio/QuietPlease'': Episode "The Thing on the Fourble Board". The oil drillers find a gold ring in the rock their oil drill has pulled out of the ground. The problem? That rock was a mile deep and had been a mile deep for a million years.

* ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'': Played for laughs with one anomaly you can find being... a teacup. Floating in deep space. No explanation is ever given, and your scientists eventually just give up even trying to figure out how and why it's there.

* In ''Literature/AllTomorrows'', when the star people find a [[EverythingsBetterWithDinosaurs dinosaur skeleton]] on an alien planet otherwise inhabited by creatures with [[StarfishAliens three limbs, a copper based skeletal system and hydrostatically operated muscles]], they know there is something wrong. Soon after that, the [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Qu]], who initially brought the dinosaur there, attack and defeat the star people.

* A benevolent example in ''Literature/TheWindInTheWillows'', when Mole and Rat are lost in the [[LostWoods Wild Wood]] during a heavy snowfall. Mole trips over a door scraper, buried in the snow, and not far from it they find a doormat as well. Mole assumes that some careless person has been dumping their garbage in the forest, but the intuitive Rat reasons a door must not be far off. Sure enough, a bit of digging in the snow reveals the home of Mr. Badger, who happily gives them shelter.

** In "Dagon", a shipwrecked sailor washes up on a newly-formed island thrown up to the surface by volcanic activity, covered in the rotting mess of deep-sea life that didn't survive the ascent - but the island already contains a mysterious stone monolith that is unmistakably the product of deliberate craftsmanship.
** The best-known example from Lovecraft is ''Literature/AtTheMountainsOfMadness'', in which a ruined city is found deep in MysteriousAntarctica.

* Everyday objects frequently appear in strange places in the ''Literature/IremongerSeries'', and people mysteriously [[BalefulPolymorph go missing...]]

--> "That's a '''bad''' thing to see. Something ''happened'' here. You hope it was a ''miracle''... but probably not."

* The house where the end of the ''Film/TheBlairWitchProject'' takes place is smack in the middle of the woods. If anything, this makes it even creepier that the forest itself.