The Bell Knot has been around as long as coiled cords have been around, but was something Alexander Gram Bell hadn't thought about. What is a Bell Knot? Quite simply, a Bell Knot is when your coiled handset cord develops an irregularity in the symmetric coiling of the cord. It is sort of an anti-coil where the coil direction of the cord reverses. Bell Knots can appear anywhere along a coiled cord as mysteriously as crop circles in a virgin wheat field. While many paranormal events have been captured on film, nobody has been able to capture a Bell Knot's creation. One minute everything is fine, and then you hang up and are horror struck to find your cord has developed a Bell Knot. So, how do you untangle this reverse-coil without having to wind it up all the way out the cable. Surely Bell Knots aren't created by inserting them from the end of the cable?

I have 3 of them on my phone cord and have been trying all morning to get them out!

For more info check this link out: http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/105/The-Mysterious-Bell-Knot-Challenge

Any ideas, have any of you discovered that the Bell Knot is haunting your phone system? Or, have any of you found a way to cure your cable from it?

Very interesting...I have had a related but probably somewhat tenuous mystery surrounding tea leaves in the bottom of a tea cup.
Essentially of an English preserve, it has been noticed over years of observations that an apparent constellation of leaves in the bottom of a cup bears an strange resemblance to patterns which were doodled on a desk jotter.
Computer analysis followed and many mathematical hypothesis were presented and postulated to solve this phenomena.
Our secretary within the office happened upon the papers produced and without resorting to examining the code or over-analysis, solved the problem:-

"Don't stir your tea with the same pencil used to doodle on the jotter"

I finally managed to get all 3 of them out of my phone cord but I still can't figure out how they are created, any ideas?