chasing ghosts

[cachalote]

i am certain some of you (like me) have this problem.

after a few years collecting you start to chase ghosts.

ghosts meaning sets that you've never seen / just heard someone talk about them once / only seen once but lost the auction never to be seen again / appear in an old catalogue but seem never to have been produced.

recently i found a mexican ghost set - http://www.playmofriends.com/forum/index.php?topic=14645.0 - and it gave me a very weird feeling when i was scrolling and suddenly just saw something i had never seen before.
but others ghosts in the pirate world are yet to be "caught".
  i will leave with 2 images of a brown 3740 schooner that aléon from playclicks has (just the images, not the set) and another 2 that come from the "collector" bible and were never seen by me or by anyone i know (american sets 5866 and 5867)

if we could had a little music to our posts you would be hearing the overture theme from the "twilight zone" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone).

could it be that other "worlds" besides the pirates also have their ghosts?

[GrahamB]

Spooky! The Twilight Zone music (in my head) adds to the atmosphere!
I am surprised no-one has added any more comments about these pictures, cachalote, especially the two US exclusives.

Collector 3rd edition has some tantalising entries, where there is a set number but no image...3123 and 3214 (p. 313), 3269 (p.317), 3131 and 3132 (p.320), 3281 (p.324).
Then there is the color set 3670 which appeared in the PM catalogue for 1980-81 but was never issued (p.76)

Three well-known examples of ghost sets are the 1989 roller-coaster (only released in Japan), the Mississippi Steam Boat (never issued) and the red framework house shown in 1980 promotional literature, but not actually produced until it was issued as a DS item in 2005.

I often wonder where Collector takes its authority from- its not a Geobra publication, so how certain can we be that sets included were actually issued - especially if no-one has ever seen them!

[Birdie]

Aha, thanks for clearing that up about the Steamboat. I actually saw one in a diorama once, but that must have been a custom then.

[Tiermann]

I remember a ghost set of a UPS type driver Special quite a while back.

There was a ghost dog once, the earliest images of the 4227 Rescue Team showed a different dog than the tan beagle that was released with the set.

[Robbie]

I would love to see stock images of the African American Children & Adult add-ons, #3721 and #3722.

[GrahamB]

I would love to see stock images of the African American Children & Adult add-ons, #3721 and #3722.

Good one, Robbie. Those sets aren't listed in Collector and PlaymoDB has only what looks like a collage of pictures of figures from 3722 here, with no mention of 3721. Great ghost candidates!