Truth is stranger than fiction

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was watching the movie In America over the weekend (fantastic movie), and there’s a part near the end that’s based on something that actually happened to the director’s family.

the family has a $30,000 hospital bill, and they have nowhere near enough money to pay it. In the movie, the family’s friend, who just died, arranged to pay their bill with what was left from his estate. According to the directors commentary, in real life, the hospital staff liked the family so much that they went into the computer system and marked the bill “paid.” The director said he didn’t use that in the story because he thought no one would believe it.

What are some true stories you’ve heard that you would have considered completely implausible if it happened in a fictional story?

2

My grandmother was cremated in Florida, and her ashes were shipped to New York for a memorial service.

There was supposed to be an urn, but they only sent the ashes in a sort of Ziploc bag, and the ashes arrived just hours before the service. My parents spent nearly two hours frantically racing around the neighborhood seeking a funeral home or store that had a suitable holder for the ashes.

That SOUNDS like something that would happen in a bad sitcom.

3

Feb 14, 1967. My parents are getting married. Suddenly, a blood-curdling screech echoes through the church.

My mother had forgotten her petticoat or whatever that thing is that goes under her skirt. One of the groomsmen races back to the house to get it, and on the way back to the church, gets pulled over for speeding.

The groomsman explains the situation and the cop lets him go with a warning.

4

One time(in my late teens), a friend of mine decided to play a stupid game. We decided to choose a car filled with annoying looking people and then “follow” them. Not casually, mind you. We decided to really obviously follow them, including driving right behind them and switching lanes with them. At stop lights, we decided to pull along side them and pretend nothing was going on. Then, we’d pull back behind them and follow them.

Anyway, we find a car filled with punk looking teenagers. Yes, we were teenagers ourselves, but these were the kind of teenagers even we could identify as pseudo-punkers. They were playing loud music with the windows down and they just looked lame to us.

Anyway, we followed them(I was driving). They noticed and would yell at us when we pulled along side of them at lights. We’d give them the cold shoulder, and then proceed to follow them closely when the light turned green.

Anyway, they eventually made a sudden left turn with not signal. I crossed three lanes(illegally) to keep up. Then, they pulled over.

:eek:

So, I pulled over and just sat there. They got out of the car and came yelling at us. They were banging on my hood, roof, and pounding our windows. Mind you, this is all in a white, middle-class downtown, so it’s pretty wimpy. Despite, this we were a bit intimidated.

Of course, they had gotten out of the car and I hadn’t stopped mine. So I pulled away, watching them freak out as they realize I’m driving off. We watched the rear view mirror as they scrambled into their car, but we were already turning and we lost them.

Now, here’s the kicker. A series of coincidences occurs here that I still can’t believe.

The next day, I was about 10 miles away and decided to get some fast food. I stopped at Wendy’s and ordered my standard #4(the Big Bacon classic). I was in the drive-through, and made my order.

I pulled up, got my food and paid. I then had a thought I usually don’t have. I should pull forward and check my order. So I pulled up, looked in my bag to make sure everything was there.

Now, if you’ve eaten at Wendy’s, you know they have glass walls in a majority of the dining area. I was on the outside, but pulled up to where those glass walls are. I look left.

:eek:

The whole group of “punk teens” we chased are eating, sitting at the table right by the window. I’m literally 5 feet from them, with a glass wall and sidewalk between us.

This was the only triple take I’ve ever done in my life. Not only did I do a triple take, but they did one too. I know, because our triple takes were staggered.

They stand up, start yelling(I can’t hear obviously). They are banging on the glass wall and yelling and acting all tough.

Me? I just smiled, waved, and drove away, leaving them screaming and scrambling for the door. I’ve never seen them again(this was 12 years ago).

I still can’t believe this happened in real life.

One, I can’t believe I chose to eat at the right restaurant. Two, I can’t believe I stopped to check my order. Three, I can’t believe they were eating right at the window by where I pulled up. Four, I can’t believe they saw me and reacted as I would have hoped.

I know we were asses for playing our little prank, but these kids were just so “punkish”, I laugh to this day thinking of it.

:slight_smile:

5

It’s 1964, before cell phones. I’m 17, miles from the nearest town, not even any farmhouses nearby, It’s the middle of the night and my car dies. A nice man stops to help. He pops the hood and without a second’s hesitation jiggles around with the distributor. The car starts.

Me: “How did you know to do that?”
Nice Man: “This car used to be mine. The dealer should have replaced the distributor before he sold it to you. Better get that fixed, little missy!”

Another car story (I think I’ve told this story before):

In the mid-80’s we bought a used car, a 1969 Pontiac with only 39K miles on it. The owner was a 96-year-old man, and his family made him sell the car after he put a dent in it, pulling into his driveway. They were afraid it was getting too dangerous for him to drive.

Just a short time later we read in the paper that the man was out walking and was hit by a car and killed. :frowning:

6

My friend’s sister was pregnant and their father died. She went to get a checkup to make sure she was OK to travel and they found the baby had some sort of thing where it had lost 2/3 or 3/4 of its blood. She hadn’t known anything was wrong and wasn’t scheduled to go in for a check. So only because their dad died were they able to save the baby.

7

I know I’m probably dumb, but what happened? They took her Dad’s blood for the baby? Or her Dad died, and she literally decided to go to the doctor because of that?

8

Two for me.

I lived in Milwaukee the first 25 years of my life, and while I’m not bothered by heights I would always get kind of nervous going over a certain stretch of I-94. It’s just downtown, and it’s a ways up - probably 80-100 feet if I had to judge. You pass right by these two large smokestacks that continue to tower over the interstate. One day in my teens I mentioned it to my mother, and she told me that when she was very pregnant with me she had a bad wreck up at that spot. Kinda weird, eh?

The second one involved a homeless skinny little black woman in Milwaukee. One time when I was a kid (under 10, for sure) my mother and I were walking downtown when out of nowhere this crazy old bat throws a cigarette at my mom. I was probably going to attack her, but mom drags me off.

Several times a year for the rest of my life in that city, I ran into that woman. All over the city. One time I was working in a Pizza Hut in the far north end of the city (Brown Deer Road) and there I am standing behind the counter running orders when I see her go walking past the front windows. A minute later she goes by again. And again and again. That wasn’t a terribly small building - I can only imagine that as soon as she got out of sight she started sprinting.

-Joe

9

… presumably to Dad’s funeral.

10

…psst…

She went to the doctor to make sure it was okay to travel. Presumably to the funeral.

-Joe

11

As noted, she wasn’t scheduled for a check-up and went in only because she was going to have to travel for the funeral and wanted to make sure all was well with the baby before she went.

12

About 20 years ago, I was looking for a nice old Buick. I wanted a '59 or '60, but they were out of my range. I bought a 1956 Buick 4-door. It had been the prize in a radio station sweepstakes, and I bought it from the winner. Within a year, the previous five owners looked me up to tell me they had owned the car. They all told me what they had done to it. One of them told me an illogical cure for its vapor-lock problem. “Clip half a dozen wooden clothespins to the fuel line between the fuel pump and the carb.” For no good reason, it worked. One of them was the man who had bought it from a preacher in Tennessee and brought it here. I eventually sold it to a guy in Carmel, Indiana.

13

A woman I know had her wallet stolen out of her purse as it sat in the child seat of a supermarket cart. The thief took the ID and credit cards across the street to a car lot where she tried to rent a car from the salesman. The salesman asked her to wait while the car was prepped and while she was waiting the police showed up to arrest her. The salesman was the father of the woman who had her wallet stolen.

14

Oooh, Bill Door, I have one similar to that. One of the lawyers I worked for in Seattle had a shopping bag stolen – I think it was from her car, don’t remember for sure.

Anyway, the thief tried to return the items to the store (Nordstrom) the same day for a cash refund. The sales clerk recognized the shoes and called security. The lawyer wore a size 5 and the thief had much bigger feet, or the clerk might not have caught on. (It also might have helped if the thief had waited awhile.) Dumb crooks!

15

My grandfather once wrote a book called American History Made Simple, or something along those lines. It was one of his first books and he didn’t know very much about the publishing industry. The publishing company was a rather sleazy company, and they tricked Grandpa into signing a contract where he forfeited any right to the royalties after one year. His agent knew that this was a raw deal, but he helped them trick Grandpa into signing the contract because he feared that he’d lose his job otherwise.

Grandpa signed the contract and got screwed out of the money. That was way back in the 40’s. He and his wife soon forgot about it.

Almost forty years later they chose to rent a summer home on Long Island. When they arrived, they were met by the caretaker of the property, who was the former literary agent. He was standing on the porch and the first thing he said was, “I want to explain about American History Made Simple.”

16

I mentioned the West Memphis Three murder case in a thread earlier today. This case is filled with “if you put this in a novel nobody would believe it” aspects. A few:

On May 5, 1993, the bodies of three 8 year old boys were found naked and murdered- one of them sexually mutilated- in a creek in the woods of West Memphis, Arkansas. Obviously this was not a common even in a small town and was the top pri crime.
That night, while the murders were being investigated, a man walked into a local Bojangles fried chicken covered in blood, crying, agitated, and talking to himself, and he entered the women’s restroom. The staff, understandably, freaked and called the cops.
Consider again: three boys, bloody murder- unknown bloodcovered stranger in the bathroom of the opposite gender (and one of the kids had been emasculated- coincidence?)
The cops drove through the parking lot of Bojangles but never went inside.

Two days later they did send a forensics team to collect the blood samples left in the ladies room by the bloody male stranger.

And lost them.

Then they charged three teens who had absolutely no known link to the boys, a couple of whom had been in trouble with the law but never for anything like this and who had no motives, with the murders. The key evidence against them was
1- the confession of one of the boys- a retarded kid (IQ of 70) questioned for hours without an attorney and with a baseball bat present in the room and who got key data wrong in the details (including when the murders took place [the retarded boy said daytime, the coroner said night] and whether the boys were raped [the retarded kid said they were and the coroner said they weren’t])
2- the testimony of an expert on the occult who was billed as the author of 40 books on the subject (which may be true, but none published) who had a Ph.D. from an unaccredited mail order diploma mill, who incorrectly identified the date the boys was killed as a satanic holy day due to being spring solstice (off by more than a month) and a full moon (it wasn’t)
The boys were convicted because the jury could not find reasonable doubt even though there was no hard evidence connecting them to the crime, there was abundant inconsistency in the testimony against them, they had not known the boys and had no motive, and there was no motive. Since the trial DNA evidence has implicated the stepfather of one of the boys and a friend of his in the murder, a leading witness for the prosecution has recanted her testimony completely (she said she was told if she perjured herself charges against her on another matter would be dropped), members of the law enforcement of West Memphis have been fired and prosecuted for corruption and one of the defense attorneys has been disbarred- and the State of Arkansas has seen no reason to grant a new trial even though one of the boys (now men) is on death row and the other two are facing life without parole.

17

Two very famous “stranger than fiction” coincidences I’ll mention just in case anyone doesn’t know them:

Frank Morgan played the title character in the Wizard of Oz and wore a rumpled old frock coat supplied by wardrobe. The old frock coat came from a thrift store and it turned out it had been donated by the widow of its owner, Frank Baum (owner of the Oz novels).

Sam Clemens/Mark Twain took great pride in having been born while Halley’s Comet was in the skies and said repeatedly he wanted to die under it as well. “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It’s coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said no doubt, ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” He got his wish, dying at the age of 74 years, 4 months, 21 days, while Halley’s Comet was again visible.

18

In the early 50’s my mother was a young, single schoolteacher who was carpooling with two other women to the school where they all taught. There was an accident and she was thrown through the windshield, through a wire farm fence and into a field. She was the last to be found and only because someone heard her moaning. She got to the hospital with two badly broken legs and a foot just hanging by the tendons. They asked her in the ER if she wanted to wear heels or flats for the rest of her life, because they would be bolting the foot on and needed to know what angle. Many, many surgeries later and she goes back to teaching, while still in two casts and on crutches. She loses her balance and falls and rebreaks both legs. More surgery. Finally she’s finished her treatment. Her surgeon is checking her over before he released her and asked her to walk across the room. She does, and he says “That’s all the payment I need. I never thought you’d walk again.”

Doctors just don’t do stuff like that anymore.

StG

19

This isn’t quite like these other stories (great stuff!), but I’ll tell it anyway.

One day, my grandfather Paul was walking down the street in downtown Seattle. Another man came up to him and said, “Hi, Paul! How are you?”

Paul: “Just fine, thank you. And you?”

Man: “Great! It’s so nice to see you! And how is Fran [my grandmother]?”

Paul: “Oh, she’s doing great.”

Man: “And [my mom by name] and [my aunt by name]?”

Paul: [Further pleasantries about his family]

Man (with a somewhat hurt look): “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

Paul: “Gosh, I am so very sorry, I’ve been trying to place how I know you this whole time, and I just can’t come up with it. I’m so sorry.”

Man: “Well, if you don’t know, I’m certainly not going to tell you.”

And he stalked off, and Paul never did figure out who it was.

20

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson within hours of each other, on the 50th anniversay of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. (July 4, 1826).