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Most of our days go down pretty much like we expect them to. We wake up, get coffee, we work and talk to some people, and we go to bed and get ready to do it all over again.
Sometimes, though, a coincidence so bizarre happens that it makes us sit up and wonder what else we might have been missing all of this time.
These folks faced down moments so wild it made them question reality itself.
1. It really is a small world.
Last week I am at work doing a job, my coworker strikes up a conversation with the homeowner at the job site and mentions that his parents live across the street from him, he also asks how long he had lived there. Homeowner responds that it has only been a few months, he just moved to the city from small town several hours away.
Co-worker laughs and says he was born and raised in that town. Then asks “Do you know the mini-plex at the corner of X street and Y street? I lived right across from that.”
Homeowner looks confused, “do you mean at 103 X street? That was my house”
They talked more, and discovered that my coworkers parents had sold their house to this Homeowner when they moved to the city. He lived there for 15 years, and then sold it to move to the same city, across the street from the previous owners. Small world.
2. Definitely a long shot.
My wife and I were looking to hire a caterer for our wedding and when we met, my wife and her started talking about their lives a bit.
Turns out they had both literally grown up on the same street, in a city of 10 million people, on the other side of the world. Both had left the city around a decade before immigrating to our current country.
They knew the same people, had hung out at the same coffee place, attended the same church. They even used to grab mangoes off the same large tree that hung over the wall of one of the large houses in the neighbourhood.
But they had never met one another until meeting on almost the exact opposite side of the planet, in a small town of about 50,000 people.
3. Halfway around the world.
I immigrated to Seoul about a decade ago. A few years after moving here I went out with a friend for his birthday. Over the course of the night, I got talking to one of his friends who was from Chicago. Eventually the birthday friend mentioned I was born “in Chicago” but I clarified that it was not really as it was a suburban town thirty minutes outside of Chicago and someone like him who was actually from Chicago wouldn’t consider it Chicago proper.
He laughed and clarified he wasn’t actually from Chicago proper either, but from a small suburban city outside of Chicago too.
It turned out we were from the same town. In fact we were the same age and lived on the same street. I moved away when I was very young though, prior to starting school. I mentioned that I had moved to Columbus when I was young and he excitedly exclaimed that his parents had just moved to Columbus… And as if it couldn’t get any weirder, his parents moved down the street from my parents….
And of course, this all went down with us meeting on the literal other side of the planet.
4. Just a bit.
Not exactly the same but reminded me. My husband had a high school sweetheart that they dated for quite a while but broke up a few years into college. It was a bit messy so my husband moved across the country. He lived there for a couple of years then moved to a completely different country.
Fast forward and we’re newlyweds driving back and forth between my parents house to my husband’s house to move my stuff in. At a gas station stop we run into my husband’s ex’s brother.
In a completely different country than where they grew up. Apparently they’d lived in neighboring towns for like 5 years and had never ran into each other. Twas a bit weird.
5. This is almost impossible to believe.
The guy telling the story was from the UK and on holiday in Greece. He went for a walk and passed a public phone, which started ringing. On a whim, he answers the phone… and it’s his bank, calling him about some unusual activity on his account.
The bank starts asking him questions, but he’s still taken aback by how his bank knew his location (this was in the early 90s), and asks them how they got this number. The bank tells him that it’s the number they have on file. He tells them that can’t be right, because he’s in Greece, and this is a public phone box.
OK, so the bank tries to work out what happened. And then they realise. INSTEAD OF DIALLING HIS PHONE NUMBER, THEY ACCIDENTALLY DIALLED HIS ACCOUNT NUMBER… WHICH JUST HAPPENED TO BE THE EXACT NUMBER OF THIS PHONE BOX IN ANOTHER COUNTRY THAT HE ALSO JUST HAPPENED TO BE WALKING PAST AT THE EXACT SAME TIME THAT THEY CALLED.
What are the odds of that happening? Like 3 to 1 at least.
6. A stroke of luck.
I was at the doctor a few years ago for a rudimentary blood test. I never normally care about that sir if thing but for whatever reason I felt a little queasy. I decided to get a snack from a nearby store but remembered then that I had forgotten my wallet rushing out the door earlier.
I looked down and a gust of wind blew a 100kr (like 10 dollars?) Note out from under a car.
7. Meant to be.
I met this girl who worked at the farmer’s market, we would see each other on Saturdays and chit chat on occasion.
Eventually we exchanged Instagram accounts, found out we were both into home brewing and fermentation, she posted that she had 40 lbs of apples and had run out of fermentation vessels. I reached out, found out were close neighbors and went to pick up the apples. We decided to hang out in a few weeks and compare our home brews.
When we hung out, we really hit it off, she had just moved to Boston a year ago after touring with a band through Europe, she had only been to Boston once before in 2013, but only for a weekend to play a festival.
Anyway, we started seeing each other pretty often, one day we were laying in bed, talking about a future where we had a farm and a were talking about our pet pig Francois. I mentioned that at one point I had the chance to walk a piglet on a leash. As I’m scrolling through my phone to find this photo, I have what I can only describe as a strong “calling/energy” to check a different photo not too far from that one.
So I open this picture that’s calling me, I remember that day. It was October 2013, i was outside of my undergrad dorm, enjoying a nice day, when suddenly this brass ensemble walks by, playing. They get to a little platform that was outside, play music for like 10 minutes for the random people who were outside enjoying the day, and then they keep going. I thought they were pretty cool so I snapped a photo and then enjoyed the music.
So back to present day, this picture seemed important, I open it, I turn to her and say, do you know this band? She looks at me and says, “you see that person in the middle of your shot who is staring at you? Yeah that’s me”
I lost my mind, the chance of seeing this band when they strolled by, her being a part of it and being there for that weekend, taking that picture, centering her while she made eye contact with me, encountering her 8 years later, being neighbors, dating, and finding that picture while we were side by side.
I’ve had a lot of coincidences in life, but that one still gets me.
8. It all worked out in the end.
About a month ago, I decided to put on a movie. But not just any movie. I wanted to put on a random movie. So I used a random number generator to pick a number between 1 and 1000, and I would then find the corresponding movie on Metacritic’s Top 1000 Movies of All Time.
The first movie I landed on was “Particle Fever,” a documentary about the search for the Higgs boson. Toward the end of the film, they reference “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” the Werner Herzog joint, one of my all-time favorite movies. I thought about putting that on next, but I reminded myself: naw, dawg; we’re using the random number generator now. There are rules.
You can probably see where this is going. I used the random number generator a second time. I wound up with #463. #463: Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
Rough time sleeping that night, mateys.
9. Gives you goosebumps.
I met my doppelganger in Iraq. I wish I had the pictures. I’m white, grew up in Canada, moved to the U.S. and went to Iraq with The Marines. He lived in Al-Rutbah. His complexion, build, face structure, everything was IDENTICAL. It was so uncanny it disturbed his mother greatly.
Sure, out of 7 billion we all have look alikes but this one was so close we even had the same moles…
10. Dogs are perfect.
Several years ago, I had a husky that was getting on in years. I was very in tune with him; enough that I knew which whines or queues meant which need or want. He had a particularly unique one that signaled when he needed a bathroom break. As he got older, he started needing to go outside in the middle of the night too. Old man problems, amiright? Lol
When he got to be a bit past 11 years old, my fiance and I started noticing that I could hear him from across the house. Then, we noticed that he never failed to wake me up at night, even though he wouldn’t come in the bedroom to get me, just meet me at the back door.
One day she was sitting on the couch with the dog and watching TV, while I was taking a nap in the other room. I had sound dampening headphones in, with light music going to help drown out distractions. I woke up to the sound of this dog making a loud enough racket to wake me up through all of those precautions, pulled on pants and shoes and stepped into the next room, where my partner asked what was wrong. I said the dog was whining. She disagreed. So we looking to the dog, who made the tiniest “I need outside” whine, before getting up and going to the back door. It was surreal.
And then it happened more. I’d be outside in my workshop and hear the dog whine. Within two minutes, my partner would be bringing the pup out to do his business. To the day he died, I could tell what that dog needed, when he needed it, regardless of distance.
Currently, I have a two year old husky that I’ve started hearing at different volumes than my partner.
I’m not psychic. But I think that just maybe, some dogs are.
11. Spooky, indeed.
My mum and I were heading out for a morning shopping trip so I was in the shower pretty early, around 7.15am or so. My grandpa had been ill with a cold – which could be concerning as he only had one lung – but was recuperating at home and had seemed perfectly fine when we spoke to him on the phone the previous day. Chipper, even. Yet out of nowhere, my brain suddenly went: “We’re not going shopping, he’s died”. I have intrusive thoughts every so often so I just told myself to shut up and get on with the shampoo.
Five minutes later mum bangs on the door to tell me my grandpa had passed away in his sleep and we need to head over to his house.
I don’t believe in psychics or precognition or anything like that, and I’ve never even thought of myself as a particularly perceptive person either. Like, I’m as dense as a brick most times. Which is why this still has me spooked fourteen years later.
12. Happy the dog is ok.
Last week, I was driving my dog home from the vet. While turning onto my street, I noticed a woman sitting at the intersection while her collie sat in one place defiantly.
Twenty minutes after I got home, my mother asked if my dog should be having any kind of reaction to anything. I didn’t know, but after seeing my dog, I knew something was terribly wrong. I rushed her back to the vet where they stabilized her — she had gone into anaphylaxis as a result of a shot she received maybe half an hour earlier.
I called mom to tell her and she gasps, “We were out front earlier and a woman had to stop walking with her collie. She told us all about how her dog recently went into anaphylaxis.”
13. It was too much.
I watched a (4 number) lottery on TV when I was a child. After the first number coincided with my home’s address, I quickly said the other three out loud before they were pulled, those other 3 numbers came up one after the other.
My home address WAS the lottery numbers. I turned off the TV and went to bed after that.
14. I would not have been ok.
Okay, not my personal story, but my friend’s mother used to tell this story at Halloween when we were kids— it’s got no super-natural connotations and she claims it’s totally true.
She was visiting Vermont as a kid (late 60’s/early 70’s) and the power went out shortly after it got dark. Her and her sisters (three girls ages ten to fourteen) decided to go play with the Oujia board for some spooky times.
My friend’s mother, being the oldest, just decided to pull a prank on her younger sisters. She asks the Oujia board if someone is “there” like a ghost or something, board says yes, she asks if they’re angry, board says yes… she goes on fir a bit just scaring the living s**t out of her sisters and ends the bit by pointing to the glass door across the room and screaming “AND THERE HE IS RIGHT THERE!” Only to shine the flashlight across the room to expose an angry and psychotic looking bearded man banging and slobbering on the glass! They were immediately scared s**tless and ran upstairs to tell their folks.
Turns out the guy banging on the glass was a drunk driver who has hit a telephone pole and that was why the power had gone out. He was banging on the door to ask to use their phone.
15. Definitely eerie.
I was reading about a fairly well known cold case not in my area. The woman killed looked a lot like me, and I found out while digging that she went to the same small college as my dad. They were in an extracurricular together and our family photo album has a group photo where they are next to each other.
16. A continuing connection.
I had been at my youngest sister’s soccer (football) game. I made conversation with one of the soccer moms for the opposing team (I think she thought I was an adult), they won, we told her we’d beat her next time, yada yada yada. It finished kinda late, but we were hungry and decided to stop at souplantation. As I’m getting in line with my tray, I look up and see this exact same woman reaching for the same corn at the same time. I chuckled and thought nothing of it.
A year later, I decided to treat myself with a smoothie. As I’m stepping up to order, in an entirely different state, I s%*t you not this lady and her kid come into the shop. We chatted, then I was on my way.
17. Are you sure it was him?
Had a friend who wasn’t crazy weird, just did absolutely everything backwards and was hard to get along with quirky weird. He stayed at my school for a year then just up and disappeared. My family traveled a lot and had sometimes been up rooted in short notice I didn’t think anything of it.
Years later, in A DIFFERENT STATE, he flies by on a bike, a half sub sandwich in one hand, soda in the other, not touching the handle bars, says “Hi Vroomped, long time no see”…. and then I never saw him again.
18. A lucky guess?
Several years ago I was at a coffee shop with some friends and one of them had an ipad, another friend went to unlock it and asked him what his 4 digit unlock code was, so I just blurted out 4 random digits pretending like I knew it, and it actually worked.
I had never unlocked it before or knew of the same numbers being used for anything else, or his phone number, etc.
19. I guess they needed to keep being vigilant.
I was crossing the street after leaving a store and had the strangest feeling I was going to break my ankle, so carefully avoided a vehicle coming my way.
That evening I went to pick up Thai food, fell leaving the restaurant on less than a 4 inch step, and shattered my ankle to the point of needing surgery and after a year haven’t fully healed.
20. A bizarre turn of events.
I dialed my mum on my mobile when I was on public transport and accidentally swapped two numbers around.
The person I called was on the same carriage.
I was listening to my phone and at the exact moment it started the ringing sound I heard a phone start ringing and I thought it was a coincidence but then the phone answered and it wasn’t mum.
All I said was “Oh, are you on the Upfield train?” and they said “Yes, who’s this?” but I got shy and I hung up.
Poor guy must have been so confused.
21. Now that’s random.
My dad lives in a national park here in Australia. It’s farmland that’s grandfathered in. It’s the remnants of a volcano that blew itself up very violently, so it’s very hilly terrain.
One day we were sitting out on the deck, when we see a hang-glider come down halfway down the valley, and it didn’t look like a nice landing. “We better see if he’s alright, they don’t land anywhere near here”
So we get in the car, drive for about 10 minutes to reach the spot. We head over to the guy who is standing by a very damaged glider. The pilot is staring at us incredulously, he stammers “Jack, is that you?”.
My dad, who hasn’t seen his childhood friend for 35 years shouts “Tim, is that you?”.
They both grew up in Greymouth, NZ. Found each other randomly after a glider crash in NSW, Australia.
22. Your jaw just drops.
One time, me and my dad were discussing his friend while out driving at night without many other cars on the road.
As we were talking, we pulled up to a red light, and the car waiting in front was my dad’s friend. He didn’t even live close to there.
23. That’s pretty random.
About 15 years ago or so I was playing Counter-Strike 1.6 and tried joining a password protected server with a few people in it. I typed in “yellow” for the password and it worked. First try. I’ll never forget that.
24. Wishing made it so.
I remember being 6, and my family was driving in rush traffic to my grandmothers house to spend some of our summer. I was really sad because I had just finished kindergarten and my best friend were going to attend another school than me.
I was crying and looking out the window when a car tried to overtake us, but the traffic were moving slowly so the car ended up driving next to us for a little while. And there sat my best friend, looking out the window at me.
Weird coincidence, and my parents did not believe me at first, but they recognized the driver, otherwise I would dismiss this memory as a dream or false memory.
25. It’s like a sitcom episode.
My friend and I were on a road trip a few years ago and needed a place to stay. We both told each other we had a friend in the city we were going through, so we figured we’d be able to crash with one of them.
Turns out our two friends were roommates and had both been telling each other that they had a friend coming to town soon.
26. A family affair.
When I was younger my family and I went to a Zoo (it was like 6 hours trip from our home town) and we sit on the dolphin aquarium ready to watch their show.
When the show was ready to start, a couple sat down on our left, they were my aunt and her boyfriend.
27. It was meant to be.
My wife is a nurse. In her first nursing job she had a preceptor who showed her the ropes of the job. They have remained best friends to today. That preceptor was my first kindergarten girlfriend. Didn’t know until my wife wanted us to all go out to eat together. I went to school in a different city than where she works.
Also, my wife is originally from 8 hours away outside Detroit. I did some community theatre stage acting in my teens. Turns out she came to visit her family in this area one summer and they took her to see the show I was in. This was probably 15 years before we met.
28. Maybe it’s not a joke.
Mate my mum does that all the time. She talks/thinks about people and they somehow appear in one way or another (in person, phone call, etc.) in the next 24 hours.
It’s a running joke between us that she’s actually a witch.
29. A familiar view.
We are new to the city we moved to. One of our best friends here was video calling with a girl friend of hers (yes this is in COVID times) and paused focusing on that girl friend’s view out the window thinking “that looks familiar”.
Turns out that girlfriend is our next door neighbor – and now a friend of ours as well.
30. Mom is always welcome.
I passed out after receiving a flu shot when I was 28. The nurse who helped me up kept asking if I wanted my mom. It seemed like a really weird thing to offer an adult woman – the option to have her mother phoned and brought in – so I was really confused and getting progressively more annoyed at her repeatedly asking…
…until my mom walked up to me. She had the appointment after mine to get vaccinated. The nurses assumed we had come together, but neither of us knew about the other’s appointment, and we lived an hour away from each other in different cities.
31. I bet they were freaked out.
This isn’t as crazy as other ones I read, but it’s mine
We probably scared the crap out of some poor old couple while on a road trip.
We were going to my grandmother’s, and we followed the SAME freaking car for over 4 hours, and eventually stopped at the same restaurant, and the same gas station, and only ever stopped when we pulled into my grandma’s residential neighborhood.
32. Twins for life.
The Jim Twins. Look it up. Two twins who were given up for adoption at birth, given the same first name by their adoptive parents, took family vacations to the same beach, married women with the same name, divorced, their second wives’ names were off by one letter, both served as volunteer sheriffs, both were into carpentry, both smoked the same brand cigarettes and drank the same brand beer.
33. Chance meetings? Or?
This guy I went to- school with, an acquaintance at best. I’ve seen him in 5 different locations in different countries throughout the last 15 years.
Disney World when I was a kid.
Some beach bar in Thailand.
The Bean in Chicago.
A pub in Budapest.
A library in San Jose, Costa Rica.
We’ve become friends due our love of traveling, but neither of us post on social media and neither of us communicated with each other our plans to travel. We never talked outside of the random meetings. Now if I see him, its like the world wants us to have a beer together.
Man, I love stories like these. So many great thoughts.
What story would you add to this list? Tell it to us in the comments!
