I used to belive in the dryer gremlin, the one who steals one of your socks from each pair, until I discovered it was my g/f throwing them out because: a)She thought they looked like shit, or: b)they had holes in them and should be replaced. For a time I thought that the mystery was solved until my perfectly good socks would disappear(the ones Jess bought me). After a little investigation I found that what was happening was that the socks were somehow working their way into the leg of my jeans and other trousers and shorts as the dryer was in action, then when I would take everything out I would think the sock was stolen when it was in the jeans leg. The sock usually fell out while I was hanging them up, which of course I did not notice and later I would find the solitary sock and think it wasn't the missing half of the pair from which one sock had been 'disappeared', that it in fact was the remaining sock from a completely new pair from which one had been 'disappeared', not the two halves of one pair.