Electronics manufacturer Karuna Menon 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 whatever it was out. It turned out to be fistfuls of treasure: real jewelry, including gold and 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 fossilized French fry from the early Jurassic period down the back of mine. The weird thing is that the sofa itself was from the Cretaceous period. Explain that, Stephen Hawking.

And did you read that recent news report 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 mewing, while the armchairs had been standoffish and taciturn? 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 Sophie 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 for money and valuables. "My sister and I had lucrative way of raising funds beyond our allowance," reader Thomas Seifert said. "We called it The Sofa Harvest."

Serious treasures have emerged. An unpublished 1836 manuscript from author Hans Christian Anderson was recently found in a sofa. The photographs which made the reputation of John Bellocq, an American photographer active in the 1920s, were found in a couch. Had it not been for the existence of nosy people like Karuna who stick their hands down the cracks of people’s settees, these masterpieces could have been lost forever.

Last year, 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 1000 pounds.

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. 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.

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