Okay, people who ran into someone they knew at Disneyworld, I got you beat.
I ran into a girl I went to school with in Jerusalem, Israel on a streetcorner in Rome, Italy. Which is, I can assure you, a great deal larger than Disneyworld, and in an entirely different country. And then, I ran into her again the next day. (Well, that was at the Vatican, so it wasn’t so surprising that two tourists would be there, but the first time it was in a totally random place, not near anything famous.)
Well okay! Here we go!
Freaky Story #1 - When I was eighteen I lived with a couple of friends for the summer. We often used to go and pick up another friend, Wes, from a house in New Westminster. I never went in the house, but there was a guy who usually sat on the front porch, playing a guitar. Two years later, I met Mr. zoogirl. One evening he sugessted we go over to his old place and meet his friends. Guess who the guitar player was! Oh yeah, and he dated Wes’s sister before me. Pretty good, right? Wait, it gets better. Now the couple I lived with, Gary and Eve, broke up not long after. I stayed in touch with both for some time and Mr zoogirl got to know Eve fairly well. For whatever reason, he never met Gary. I lost touch with him in '87 and didn’t see him until last month when I ran into him at a gas station on my way to work. Yesterday, Kid, the Elder, showed up at the zoo needing a ride home. I went outside to wait with him and who should pull into the business next door but Gary. Finally, after twenty-two years, the guys met!
Freaky story #2 - I’m sitting in the old Windjammer Hotel with Mr zoogirl. In walks an old friend of mine, Dennis. I said hi to him at the same moment as Mr zoogirl. Turned out Mr zoogirl know him from Air Cadets, twenty years before!
Freaky Stories #3a & 3b - a) After living all our lives in the Lower Mainland area of BC, Mr zoogirl and I moved to Edmonton Alberta, where we lived for five months. We just moved into our new apartment when Mr zoogirl ran into a girl he knew from his hometown of Abbotsford. A couple of days later, he ran into a guy from Abbotsford, in a different apartment. Next thing we knew, his step-niece’s aunt (Whew!) also from Abbotsford, turns up. In all, there were four apartments in that one building populated by people from a small town in the next province! b) In that apartment, we moved out the fridge and found a letter opener from my grandmother’s tiny hometown of Kalispell Montana!
Freaky Story #4 - My ex-boyfriend and still very close buddy passed away on Aug 8 1991. His sister, also a good friend of mine, passed away, from an entirely different cause, on Aug 8 1998 - seven years to the day!
First trip to China, I was in a hostel in Guangzhou and ran into a fellow punk rock from the Bay Area that I hadn’t seen for a few years.
In Lhasa, I ran into a woman that had worked at the same college radio station and I hadn’t seen for 5 years. In high school, the same woman was best friends with another woman who had become my step-sister in those 5 years.
I’ve got another one about meeting people who know people you know. When I was in college I started talking to a girl in one of my classes. She was cute, responded to the flirting, but she had a boyfriend who she didn’t get to see very often because he was in the military and she didn’t like his friends very much. She preferred to hang out with him alone, which didn’t happen very often.
One weekend I’m hanging out with my brother and a couple of his Marine friends when the girl from class walks into the apartment - she was dating my brother’s best friend!
Even weirder, I never knew that her mom was my boss until I went over to thier house for dinner.
I think this is more creepy than unlikely, but here goes:
When i was living in England in the early '90s, my sister came to England also. I arranged a job for her at the hotel across the lake from the one where i was working.
During that summer, i was going out with a woman who worked in my hotel and my sister was seeing a guy who worked in her hotel. Both relationships were short and not very serious.
When i returned to the area about a year later, the woman that i had been seeing, and the guy my sister had been seeing were now together.
It’s a bit creepy having only a couple of degrees of sexual separation from your sister.
The winner of FOX’s Murder in a Small Town X was a NYC firefighter who died in the WTC attacks.
The (near) co-incidence? Had FOX not messed with it’s schedule, bumping their season start up one week, the last episode of MISTX was to be aired… on September 11th, 2001.
Don’t know where this thread has gone but wanted to get mine in.
Ran into a friend in a reststop in VA, who is from Alaska, who I met in Europe. 
I use to have a similar thread like this saved. But my memory was erased.
I could have sworn it was entitled, “coincidence”
It had some totally outstanding ones in there.
Great thread.
Mine doesn’t even come close to any of yours (the taco story is just crazy), but years ago, my family and I were on a vacation in Myrtle Beach, but had to leave because of Hurricane Dennis, so we went to Gatlinburg, TN, where we ran into my aunt and uncle (and, of course, we had no idea they were there).
When on holidays with Mrs. Bernse last year, we were just passing time during the drive and talking about an old boss of mine that retired.
When we got to our destination, we checked into the Ramada and ordered some chinese take out. Our room had a patio with a table and we ate outside on it and enjoyed some wine.
As we were finishing the bottle, The boss of mine we were talking about earlier walked by. I haven’t seen him in 8 years and we were hundreds of miles away from where either of us lived.
It was just bizzare.
*Vastly entertaining and a great way to simply avoid work.
I give it two thumbs up! *
A couple of things here.
This story made the AP wire and we received clippings from around the country and one from Germany.
We’ve seen each other a few times since, though just as friends.
my mother, by chance, ran into her highschool best friend. And the weird thing is we moved to Montreal a long time ago, and she had lost contact with her friend.
And her friend moved here a few years after us…without knowing
:d
So, does a Sherrif feel out of place at a Sheriff’s convention?
Hi again! Missed a couple…
We have a number of teenage volunteers at the zoo. One of them, Melissa, mentioned that her mom wanted to come in and have a look. I said sure, and a little while later, mom turned up. She took about one step into the building, stopped dead and called me by name. She’d gone all the way through Elementry school one grade behind me.
Our old neighbours best friend turned up at the zoo, too and another friend of a friend lived in the little apartment next door for a while. In both cases I hadn’t seen the person for several years.
When my mom passed away, before I got my inheiretance money, I was looking in the exotic pet section of the Buy and Sell. I’ve always wanted a bat, so when I saw Egyption Fruit Bats advertised, I clipped the ad, thinking to call when the cash came through. When it finally did, I headed straight for the phone, but I was too late. They’d all been sold. Several years later, I went for my interview at the zoo. During my first walkthrough, I saw a cage of bats. I asked the boss where and when he got them. . .
Oh well, I get to look after 'em!
It’s not very astonishing, but still cool.
I used to do the whole Where’s George thing–stamp a bill with the Where’s George web address, enter it into the site, then circulate it normally. People who find your bill go to the website and enter it, and voila, you know who got your bill.
So anyways, one Tuesday I entered a bill and on the same day spent it for lunch at school. The following Friday I took a Science Club field trip to Arizona State University. When I got home, I found that someone had received the bill in change at ASU that day, for buying a snack, after their biology class.
Not sure, but it may have been the biology class we snuck into for a bit and watched. The time was right. Hm.
Also, I found out that my Art teacher in 8th grade was my uncle’s best friend in high school.
A good friend of mine is the son of my mom’s best friend in high school. It’s no backflip no-spill beer thing, but…
If we should ever go fishing together, I’M bringing the coffee.
When I was at college in Buffalo (a State University with several thousand undergrads) I became friends with a guy who had the same major as me. Bill was in several of my classes, and it turned out we had a lot of similar tastes in music, politics, etc. It turned out he came from the same small city as me in upstate NY, although he went to a different High School.
When telling this story to my father in passing, he wanted to know Bill’s last name. “Ask Bill if his mom’s maiden name is Smith” he said. Well it turned out it was, and to make a long story short, Bill’s maternal grandmother and my maternal grandmother had been best friends in Manhattan, decades earlier. My mother and father had been friendly with Bill’s mother and father for a while as well.
For 2 years me and and guy named Tony battled for the same position on the football team. He beat me out when we were juniors, I started when we were seniors. We were social acquaintances, not what you would call friends. The last time I saw him in high school he was arrested the next day for possession of pot. This happened about a week before high school graduation. This was in 1975.
Almost exactly 4 years later I ran into him in San Diego, we were both in the Navy at the time, I was due to be discharged in a week, he still had a couple months to go before he got out. The next day I was taking care of some business at the Master at Arms office. While I was there he was brought in and was being charged with possession of pot.
June of 1983 I was at my father’s wrecking yard scrounging for some parts and guess who walks in? Yep, Tony. I tell him to leave for his own sake because he will be busted for possession again, it had happened twice before. He just laughed and told me it would be impossible this time. He pulled out his wallet and showed me his badge. He was a deputy sheriff in a neighboring county. When I asked him about the arrests he told me the police were looking for his brother, not him when he was arrested in 1975. It was a case of mistaken identity. The second time he had been set up because he helped break up a theft ring on his ship. The charges were dropped shortly after I left the Master at Arms office.
A few days later in the newspaper was a story about a big drug bust in Olympia. The officer that made the arrest that started the whole thing? Yep, Tony.
This isn’t as cool as the rest, but it was pretty funny at the time. My friend was over, and we were about to watch a movie. Just as he pushed the “On” button on the VCR, the power went out.