Nope … I assume it involves the grotesque, though. 
I can’t say this one is true. I heard it on NPR’s Car Talk.
Lady Caller: Something really strange happened the other night, my (Somewhat new used car) stalled out for no good reason on a dark country road. A man, dressed in black like a minister stopped to help. He took off the gas cap, blew into it and the car started right up.
Tom/Ray: Yeah, your car needs a new old gas cap. You car needs a hole in the gas cap that lets air in so the fuel can flow out. You have a modern replacement cap that is sealed for pollution control.
Still a creepy story.
This may be a bit too mundane/silly in comparison with the others but, heck, I thought it was cool.
A few years back I planned to join a friend in Chicago for a special weekend event he was organizing. Just after I booked my flight, I found out that my favorite rock band that I was totally obsessed with and had to see live every chance I got (substitute yours here) had announced their tour dates without my realizing it. As it happened, their New York date fell right at the time I would be in Chicago, and they were playing in Chicago the same night I was to arrive there. Not only that, but the Chicago show had sold out almost instantly.
Undaunted, I spent several minutes and $200 with Expedia Customer Service and changed my flight to arrive in Chicago a day earlier. I had hope there would be a scalper or some last-minute releases if I went early enough. Surely someone would have a ticket they couldn’t use. I mean, it had been a good five years since the band’s last substantial top-forty hit…
So I arrived in Chicago the night before the show, and the next day my friend dropped me off at the venue in the blazing 95+ Chicago midafternoon soul-sucking heat. Seeing the venue, and its lack of shade, I realized I was truly SOL - it was unbelievably tiny, holding only a scant couple hundred people, there were many miserable-looking people asking everyone in line for tickets, not a scalper to be found, and signage plastering every outside flat surface stating, in no uncertain terms, that if you didn’t have a ticket you were. Not. Getting. In. Shut. Up. Go. Home.
Discouraged, I called my friend and told him that if nothing changed by 6:00, he could pick me up. Shortly after I hung up, I recognized the band’s tour manager (I mentioned I was obsessed, no?) walking around the crowd. Nobody was paying much attention to him. He happened to look up as I was looking at him so I flashed a big smile. He asked me “are you a member of the fan club?” I responded in the affirmative, and he said “Ok, follow me” (please note: I was thirtyish, slightly dumpy, extremely sweaty, wearing an unflattering t-shirt-and-jeans combo and a full decade older than anyone else in the crowd. I was about as far from a hot groupie - in the sexy sense anyway - as you could get).
Moments later, I, along with about half a dozen young ladies, was whisked into the venue and up the stairs to the band’s meet-and-greet. I met-and-greeted, exchanged pleasantries, shook hands, got my photo snapped, and then went directly down to the venue where I could leisurely grab a beer (and a free cupcake!), hit the restroom, and chat with a couple of the band members’ girlfriends before they started letting everyone else in. I ended up with a plum position in the front row at the coolest, tiniest venue I think this band had ever played.
All without a ticket, or a snowball’s chance of getting one.
Best $200 I ever spent. 
OK, fine. It was Hanson. I know, stop laughing.
Sorry, can’t. :D:D:D
Great stories!
I hope it’s alright that I repost this rather than just link to it. It’s something I posted in a thread 3 eyars ago about a lady (now deceased) I used to know in Montgomery.
OK, I’ll play.
I’ve posted before that I used to work at a newspaper, where one of my jobs was editing obituaries. Checking spelling, punctuation, grammar, stuff that’s going to get us sued.
I had a sister with whom I hadn’t spoken in about 15 years, since just after our father died. We had never gotten along, and things had gotten much worse in ways I won’t go into here. We got a “sibling divorce” and she lived in another state.
One day I was working, reading some notices. When you finish one, you click “next.” “Next” came up one with my sister’s name. I sat there stunned. My mouth was probably open. I read down through it, but it wasn’t finished – no funeral information, so I was sure it was a prank. Just like her, I thought, to screw with me. She knew what I did for a living.
I got up and went down the hall to the writer’s office to bitch her out for colluding – though how could she have known my sister’s married name? and age? — and though there were strangers in there, I demanded “Where did that come from?” Puzzled, she handed me a fax. I grabbed it and stomped back to my desk. It came from a funeral home in Florida, near where my sister lived. Or had lived.
Because I checked it out. With my job, I knew how to do that. One thing I know how to do, is verify a death. With a funeral home and a board of health and the other newspapers and the medical examiner.
And it was true. Her husband hadn’t been planning to call me. There was no funeral. I might not have known for months – or years.
And I learned about it by it coming up on my screen at work. “Next.”
I had one of these just yesterday…BY A REMARKABLE COINCIDENCE!
One of my roommates quit his job because one of his co-workers kept threatening to beat him up, get his “boys” to beat him up, etc. etc. He’s filing a hostile workplace grievance with the EEOC about this. He got a letter from them yesterday from a lady in corporate headquarters who got several key details of the grievance completely wrong and Roommate was angry because it was clear that the written statement he had made had not been sent to the higher ups. I suggested that he go back to his old store and get a copy of the statement and send it in himself. I volunteer to drive him because he’s too upset to drive and I needed gas anyway.
We get to the store just as two police cars pull up. I do my thing while Roommate goes inside to talk to his old boss. Everyone who works at the store is there, including the district manager. They all tell Roommate, “You want to be at the meeting they’re about to have.” So he goes in.
The co-worker who had been harassing him was being arrested for stealing from the till. They started keeping a closer eye on him after Roommate left and caught him on tape.
Back in college, I worked as a short order cook in a restaurant. I found a co-worker quite attractive and flirted with and hit on her ruthlessly. Finally she agreed to go out with me, but we never seemed to have the same nights off. So one Sunday evening I convinced her that we should both call in sick and just go out that night. We did.
The next morning we learned that a tornado had come through around midnight and wiped out the entire shopping center where our workplace had been. If we had gone to work we probably would have died. The manager and a dishwasher had survived by diving into the walk-in cooler at the last second.
A year or so ago I was asked to help a cousin locate his nephew, because the nephew’s father was on his deathbed. Nephew had been estranged from his father since his parents’ divorce.
Long story short, it took a few days but I found the nephew – at his mother’s home in Arkansas. He was there for her funeral. His parents died on the same day, one in Iowa and one in Arkansas.
IIRC their last words both expressed hope that the other man was still in fine health (this despite an often strained relationship between the two for most of their lives).
I have two. One is less impressive than the other.
First, the lesser of the two:
Flying to Chicago last year out of Albany, I heard a name being called over the intercom. The name was someone I knew through work, but the lived fifty miles away from Albany.
The more impressive:
When I was ten, I flew to India alone. My aunts had told me, “When you get out of the plane, look up - we’ll be on the second level, waiting for you.” Well, we missed our connecting flight out of London, and so we were delayed a day. This is before cell phones and before Internet and instant communications, especially in India, so they didn’t know. Between them having to sleep overnight in the airport, me being ten years old, and right then them changing the rules of letting people too far beyond the gates, I missed them completely.
That’s not the weird part though. The weird part is I ran into the mother of two little twin girls in my neighborhood that I used to help take care of. It had been at least two years since I last saw her. She was also flying to India and just happened to be at the airport then. She took care of me until we could get me to my aunts.
I can’t quite get over this. In Corner Case’s umm…case, I can grok that, knowing how cars which are spinning can go any which direction, and in that case he happened to spin out of harm’s way. Here any sane driver wouldn’t have nonchalantly pulled into the nearest parking lot after doing a full 360 (and what caused it to flip around like that?). For one thing the suspension would likely have been completely shot after the impact, and in addition the driver’s state of mind must have been completely boggled by what happened. Weirdest of the weird stories in this thread, hence it begs for more details.
This happened some 20 years ago but I’ll try. We were on the US-59 service road in an area with lots of parking lots, possibly where 59 crosses Hillcroft. A hatchback ahead of us, either in the center or the right lane, suddenly vaulted into the air and we were expecting the worst. I believe Sis slowed down a bit in case she needed to stop and render first aid. The hatchback started rolling left but didn’t land on its side or roof, instead it continued rolling in mid-air, maybe a foot or two above the pavement. When it did come down, it had done a complete 360° and its wheels were able to regain contact with the pavement. We were absolutely dumbfounded!
I’m not sure exactly what order these next events go in but we did a cursory–as best we could without stopping and getting out of the truck in the middle of a busy three-lane street–investigation of the area where the hatchback became airborne. Didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. We also observed the hatchback ease off the street and into a parking lot. The service road has no shoulder so the driver couldn’t stop there without being a hazard. A group of people in the lot went over to the hatchback to make sure the driver was okay; we also hung around a bit to see if first aid would be needed. The driver opened his door; other than being shaken up he seemed fine so we continued on with our business. IIRC, Sis later mentioned something about the possibility of the whole thing being staged.
Crazy man crazy. 
Background: I’m a magician and I wrote a book on cold reading that some magicians are interested in.
Unbelievabkle story: I was once at a dinner party where I met a guy called Tom for the very first time. He was a magician too, and he told me he had a small shop selling magic tricks and so on in the Hampstead area of London. This is not a part of London I had ever been to at the time I met him, and it’s miles away from where I lived at the time.
About two weeks later, on a Monday morning, I had stayed with friends in a house not far from Hampstead. I walked down to the tube / metro station, and as I did so I glanced into a shop window. It was obviously a shop selling magic tricks, jokes and novelties. I looked in the window briefly, but I was in a hurry so I didn’t go in and continued on my way. A few moments later, I felt a tap on my shoulder and it was Tom, the guy I’d met at the dinner party, and the owner of this shop. Guess what he told me? This is the unbelievable bit.
About 30 seconds before I had stopped to look into the shop window, someone else had walked into Tom’s shop and asked if he had my book, the one I’d written about cold reading. Tom said no (he didn’t have it) but had then seen me lokoing into his shop window, and had said to the customer, ‘…but there’s the author, looking into my window’. And he had come outside to catch me, and take me back inside the shop to meet this customer.
Think how this looked to the customer… goes into a shop, asks for one book (out of thousands of magic books), owner says ‘No, but there’s the author’, walks out, comes back in with the author of the book he’d just asked for.
And I repeat, this was and remains the only time in my life I had happened to be in that part of London.
It’s MAAAGIC!
No, seriously, cool story.
But the big question is, did he refuse to explain how the trick was done?
Heh. I don’t know if this is on point exactly but when I saw the title I thought of Gravity’s Rainbow wherein Pynchon wrote this bit about the zoot suit riots. And I thought my, the stuff this guy will make up…and then found out there really were zoot suit riots.
So now I’m left wondering if the rest of Gravity’s Rainbow isn’t true as well :eek:
So you thought the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies were liars?!?
Some travelling stuff:
I took a cycling trip once from Sligo to Galway, and ended up at a hostel on a tiny island west of Galway. There was a French guy in my dorm room and we shared a beer that night.
Three months later, I’m in a shopping centre in Rennes, Brittany, having gone over to visit a friend. There’s the guy from the hostel.
Was in a bar in King’s Cross, Sydney, sitting by the window having a beer. There walks past a friend I didn’t even know was in Oz.
Leaving LA last year, in the baggage check queue, spot a guy with a MEL tag on his suitcase. As Melbourne is my favourite city in the world, I start talking to him. Not only does he go to the bar I drank in for 8 months (yep, pretty much constantly :), he also knows the owner.