Coincidences happen, of course – those things that shouldn’t have happened so perfectly but somehow did – and the small ones happen often enough that we’ve trained ourselves to shrug and move on.
What about the big ones, though? The ones that you wouldn’t believe if they hadn’t happened to you, or the ones that honestly made you think you were crazy?
If you’ve got one of those stories, you’re not alone – these 15 people are right there with you.
15. 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.
13. 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.
12. 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.
11. 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.
10. 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.
9. 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.
8. 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.
7. 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.
6. It was 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.
5. 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.
4. 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…
3. 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.
2. 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.
1. 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.”
I’m just blown away by how bizarre some of these are, y’all.
If you’ve got a great story in this vein, tell it to us in the comments!
