9-Year-Old Finds Mystery Phone Stuck Under Carpet in Family Home; Question of How It Got There Is Still Unanswered (Exclusive)

Dee Crawford was invested in finding the phone's owner and the story of how it ended up wedged in her home's staircase

• Dee Crawford was making content when her son happened to make a discovery in their home.

• The entrepreneur mom caught the moment her son shared his find: an old cell phone stuck in the carpet on their stairs.

• Considering they've lived in the home for nine years and it didn't belong to her or her husband, Crawford tells PEOPLE about taking the mystery to TikTok.
  

Dee Crawford was making content for her small business when a mystery was discovered in her own home.

Crawford tells PEOPLE it was her 9-year-old son, Grayson, who discovered a phone that led to them going viral on TikTok.

"He's always looking into and touching things and snooping. He's always aware of everything. I'm not sure where the rest of my family was, but he just said, 'Oh my God, I just found an iPhone,' because he thinks everything is an iPhone," she shares.

In reality, Grayson discovered an older cell phone, later identified as an LG Shine, stuck in the carpet on the staircase of the family home.

"I went to look in the hallway and he was as ecstatic as he was in the video. He was like, 'Dude, look at this. I just found this phone, right here.' He showed me where it was."

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No one in her family recognized the phone. "My husband is like, 'Dee, you probably bought that phone from Goodwill years ago and Grayson probably hid it in the steps.' I was like, 'Absolutely not,' " she says with a laugh.

"I wouldn't buy a phone that was so beat up and Grayson has the memory of an elephant. He'd definitely remember if he'd seen the phone before, so he's my testament that I'm not forgetting anything," she adds.

The family couldn't immediately turn the phone on, because they didn't have the charger it required. They even checked with the home's previous owners, who knew nothing about the phone.

Perplexed by the discovery in a home her family has already lived in for nearly a decade, Crawford decided to share the story with her TikTok community and see what they thought.

"Someone messaged me and said they had the battery and charger for it, but it ended up not being the right ones," she explains.

She continued to share the story on TikTok. After checking a few local stores, she was connected with "an IT guy" in the neighborhood.

"He was able to somehow find and order a charger and a battery for me, and he got it all. He set it up and then brought it to me and then we started looking through it," she says.

As Crawford continued to share discoveries from the phone on TikTok, a bigger crowd of people became invested in her discovery.

"There have definitely been comments like, 'I had a phone just like that,' or, 'I think that's mine,' but never any real follow-up to claim it. I think people are just being funny," she says of the Internet's help.

Crawford made a breakthrough when she realized one of the contacts in the phone contained the number that was assigned to the phone at the time it was in use. Excited, she called the number, but didn't get the resolution she hoped for.

While someone answered, and even "confirmed [the phone] was theirs and that they lived close to me at one point, they have no idea how the phone got in my house nor do they care to get it back," she shares. "Unfortunately, the mystery remains unsolved!"

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