My boyfriend’s brother was involved in an accident when they were kids. They were on a family vacation at a park and he fell off a large rock formation. An ambulance arrived pretty quickly, but they were never sure who called. It was a good thing they showed up because this kid had hemophilia and surely would have died if no he had come to help. (As it was, he ended up in a coma for a few weeks and suffered permanent brain damage.) Fast forward many years - the boyfriend’s dad, B, was talking to a brand new co-worker, CW. CW casually mentioned that his family often vacationed at above-mentioned park. B mentioned that his son had been involved in an accident there years back. CW says he witnessed a kid falling and called an ambulance. Turned out that CW had saved B’s son’s life!
Saturday night I’m driving to a club with my brother and he’s talking about a guy at work that wears loud shirts which my brother calls “Larry Dallas” shirts. I thought Larry Dallas might be a clothes designer and totally missed the reference to Three’s Company.
I haven’t though of this show in at least 15 years.
The very next day, I’m walking along the Santa Monica Pier and a huge banner proclaims that the musician presently playing is called, you guessed it, Larry Dallas!
I like coincidences, they freak me out sometimes but I consider them good omens, like I have the gods’ attention.
Wow, these are great. I had two consecutive flying-home-for-Christmas coincidences.
In 1998, I was going to school in Iowa and flying through Denver to get to Seattle. I had to transfer to another plane, and was checking the Departures board to see which gate I needed to go to. I turned around and literally bumped into one of my best friends from high school. We both yelled, he picked me up and whirled me in a big circle, and we walked together to the gate, since we were both catching the same plane home. My friend was going to school in Chicago but had just gone on a ski trip in Colorado that week, which is why he was there.
In 1999, again at Christmas, I was flying through Minneapolis to get to Seattle. I was in my seat on the plane, waiting as the rest of the passengers boarded before takeoff. I idly glanced up from my book and looked straight into the eyes of another fantastic friend from high school. She had been teaching for Teach America in North Carolina, and happened to route through Minneapolis. Better yet, she was already assigned the seat next to mine. We talked all the way home.
Several years ago I was doing the backpacking through Europe thing. I was visiting Stonehenge and ran in to the clerkthat served me coffee every morning (I lived in Burlington, VT at the time).
I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and went to school in Olympia, Washington. I lived in room 214 in my dorm.
One day my roommate came to get me. “There’s some girls here to see you,” he said.
I went to the door, and these two girls said, “Hey, is Daniel here?”
“I’m Daniel,” I said, a little confused.
They furrorwed their brows. “No you’re not,” one of them said.
“Uh…yes, actually, I am.”
Eventually, we sorted it out: apparently, the guy who lived in 314, the room directly above mine, was also named Daniel.
So I went up to introduce myself to him. That’s when I found out that Daniel in 314, like Daniel in 214, was from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and had many of the same friends back home that I did.
A couple of years ago, my school began offering a three week summer study tour of China. Several of my friends went on the tour, which took them all around the country. One of them, A, has very distinctive long, curly, reddish hair.
That same year I had also made friends with two one-year students (B and C) from Japan. Over the summer I received a letter and package of Chinese candy from B. In her letter she explained that shortly after she and C returned to Japan they decided to make a week-long trip to China together. They had been standing on a corner of the busiest street in Shanghai when C said, “Look at that girl, she has hair like A!” They both looked, and sure enough it was A and the rest of the study tour group, doing a little shopping during their last day in China. The tour group asked B and C to join them for dinner that night, where their appearance came as a big surprise to the professors chaperoning the tour.
These stories just rock! I remember hearing something about how there was a Prince Charles/Lady Diana Spencer romance in the 16th century or thereabouts, LONG before the one we know.
I also remember hearing about a ship that had crashed three times in different centuries, with only one survivor each time. The man’s name in each case was Hugh Williams.
I used to read a bunch of books on coincidences and such, but for some reason, they never seem to happen to me. Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know.
lurkernomore’s story reminded me of a similar occurrence that happened on one of my first (and most ill-fated) backpacking trips. My friends and I had headed cross-country down into a river canyon (not a great idea) and didn’t think we could make it straight up the way we came in, so we headed downstream. We often had to ford back and forth across the river to make progress, and were in fact pretty lucky the area’d been in a drought for several years, or we wouldn’t have made it at all.
At one point the river reached over 6 feet deep and there was no easy way to get the packs across. There was a large boulder near the side we were on, so we were able to hook up a rope to try and get the packs across. Except the ground on the other side was a lot lower, so some assistance was needed to keep the packs out of the water. My particular job was to push the pack as hard as I could from one side while jumping into the water, and then lifting and pushing it the rest of the way over. Of course this had to be done as quickly as possible.
The first pack got over fine; only a little water got splashed onto it. When it came to the second one (which was my pack) I pushed, jumped into the water – and as soon as I went underwater I heard an incredible whooshing sound. I thought my pack, or maybe my head, had for no good reason exploded. What had actually happened, though, was at that very moment a fighter pilot was having a lot of fun running the canyon, and was just passing over our heads. Scared the heck out of all of us, needless to say, and my pack ended up getting soaked.
Another minor coincidence happened on the same trip. This trip just kept getting worse, as we all got stuck down there after I lost the map. Eventually the river broadened out too much to continue, and I designated myself (as the map-loser) responsible for heading downstream to look for a way out. After swimming for a while, I found I needed to answer the call of nature, so I climbed up and went a ways from the river behind some convenient rocks. It was right in the middle of this activity that I heard the fishing boat that was to be our salvation (and the fishermen themselves were a little lost, as no one would normally be that far up the river). I did manage to rush back down to within sight of them to signal for help.
Okay, now for some reason, all of my posts lately have revolved around my enjoyment of Yahoo Pool (I don’t play that much), but here is another one.
I was playing some random guy in Yahoo Pool one day during my lunch hour. I looked at his profile and saw that he lived in Tulsa, OK. I said, huh, my mom is from Sand Springs. He tells me that he lives and works there at the high school. I mention that my mom owns an alterations shop in town and ask if he knows where it is. Turns out that that very morning, his wife had picked up some clothing from my mom’s tiny alterations shop in Sand Springs, hundreds of miles from where I live.
**Sue Dunhym ** and I are both from Michigan. One time we emailed back and forth the particulars. Finds out we are both from the same town. There are three high schools - two public, one private. She went to a public one, I was a Catholic School girl, oy! Since we are around the same age, we ask each other the ever popular " Do you/did you know so and so…"
She knew some boys that were my best neighborhood friends growing up.
That just blows my mind. Billions of people on the internet and being able to zero in down so far to that…
I had a client named K. I also have a brother in law with the same name. These two men sound *exactly * alike on the phone (very friendly, energetic, witty.) Because all my work was on the phone, I have been told I have Voice Recognition in my brain and can recognize a clients voice by one word. So the caliber of screw up on this is rather amazing to me. I talked to client K at least five or six times thinking he was my BIL K (but I didn’t know my BIL’s last name-they were in the ‘just friends stage’) and it wasn’t until Client K came in to pick up a ticket that I realized he was not who I thought he was, but he was exactly like the person he should have been.
Odd, may not qualify.
My old boss was a teenager living in Bremen, Germany during WW2. Her father was very wealthy (banking, I think) and had managed to get a cushy desk job for his only son in the German Army in Paris. His son, bored with a desk job after so long, decides to do a transfer to the Russian Front ( didn’t he watch Hogan’s Heroes?) and within a week of the transfer, is killed in action. His death announcement appeared the town paper on a saturday. " Klaus Smit" ( I can’t remember his name) killed at…"
His father was so heartbroken from this that he died a few days later and since he was also “Klaus Smit” everyone assumed that the paper did a miss print, running the death notice two weeks in a row.
How horrible for my friends mother…
My great uncle Basil died five years to the day after his wife.
It was said at his funeral, “Just like him too, to keep his wife waiting.”
I had loaned {permenently} my tattered garage sale copy of *The Godfather * to a friend. I love this book. But since I paid twenty five cents for it, I was not going to go over that price to replace it.
So I forgot about it for awhile (year or so.) until I got the urge to re-read it and got all mad about the permament loan of my book to a friend and how I wanted to read it, but I would never go over my price limit, therefore, i would never read it again. (the library did not even enter my rationale.)
That very day, coming home from a doctor’s appointment, driving the scenic route on dirt roads north of Assboink There is a title of a book! , I see a garage sale sign. On a Tuesday. Very Odd. It didn’t look like much, but that inner voice told me to stop and do a quick look-sy. It ws the last day of a moving sale and they were going to pitch everything when the garbage man came later on that day.
They had a copy of *The Godfather * for…ten cents!
My college roommate is from Cincinnati, Ohio. I am from Warren, Ohio - almost (but not quite) as far away as you can get from Cincinnati and still be in Ohio. When my roommate went to med school, she was assigned a roommate at Ohio State (which has a very LARGE med school, with students from all over the world). Turns out that her new roommate had been quite a good friend of mine in High School, whose brother I had briefly dated.
While in college, I went to a friend’s wedding. The friend, who was from Toledo (also far away from Warren) was marrying a guy who was from California. Imagine my surprise when the Best Man turned out to be a guy on whom I’d had an enormous “little girl” crush on in grade school, who had moved away after fourth grade!
Not as interesting as some of these but still… weird.
Actually, Daniel’s story reminded me of something else I read in a book somewhere: apparently, there’s this guy named Steve Smith who keeps on getting phone calls and mail for the previous tenant, also named Steve Smith. Bizarre! Of course, there’s no way he can stop the phone calls and mail, since they happen to have the same name.
Then there was a story I read about two people with the name Michelle Samways living next to each other in the same townhouse complex. They were both named after the Beatles song, both had blonde hair, and both were around the same age. (26 and 27) Oddly enough, they didn’t find out about it until the townhouse complex mailed them about some meeting of the complex. That would truly be weird!
I have a couple, and one I saw on Oprah on last week that’s a doozy.
One time when I was a kid I was in the grocery store with my mom and she was looking through the coupon pile. (This certain store had a bin near the entrance where you could put your extra or unused coupons so others could use them, you could help yourself to the unwanted coupons of others.) I was staring longingly at the gumball machine or something when I heard her say “Whoops, someone threw a voided check in here on accident.” She pulls it out and looks at the name and says “no way!” She took it home and called the number; turns out it was a man and woman my mom and dad were great friends with in college and hadn’t seen in 15 years. The kicker is they lived one block over from us, hundreds of miles from both the college and the assorted towns where everyone was from originally.
Also when I was a kid, our family went on vacation with my aunt, uncle and cousin. (Never, ever do this…what a nightmare!) Anyway, at one point we were at an amusement park (I believe Opryland) and had gotten separated from my uncle somehow. We decided to wait for a while near a ride while my aunt went to go look for him in likely places. One of my parents figured they might as well take pictures while we were holding still so crossed the path and took our picture in front of the ride when there was a break in foot traffic. We got the pictures back and there crossing between us and looking right at the camera was my uncle, mid-stride, completely oblivious.
The one on Oprah a couple weeks ago totally blew me away. This woman logged onto some internet dating service and read through about a million men until she found one that interested her called “talltexan” or something. She saw he was online one night and started talking to him and said “where abouts in Texas are you?” he said “Oh, I’m from Texas originally but I’m in the service and they have me stationed in Virginia now.” The lady said “Oh that’s funny, I’m in Virginia too.” He said “That is funny, I’m up north in (whatever the city was)” she sorta blinked and said “Well, that’s where I am!” He said “Really? I live in (whatever) estates, in the (whatever) building.” The lady is totally freaking out now and says “ME TOO, are you kidding me?” He says “REALLY!!! I’m in apartment 204!” The woman says “I’M IN APARTMENT 206!!!” They’re currently engaged or married I believe. Can you imagine pulling a person randomly out of the entire United States and having it be the person who lives next door?
My hometown in Alabama is very small, about 5,000 people, give or take a hundred. I spent 11 days in Houston, TX, one summer, rooming with a girl named Amanda from San Angelo, TX.
One night about six months after that, I received a random ICQ message from a guy about my age who wanted to chat. I asked him where he was from and he said, “San Angelo, TX.” I became very excited and asked him if knew Amanda. He did! It turned out he was good friends with her younger sibling. Then he asked me where I was from. I told him and he FREAKED out and started asking me if I knew a girl named Laurel–who I did know, quite well in fact.
Strange that he and I had friends in common, and it all came from a random ICQ message…
A smaller coincidence:
My college roommate–M
M’s brother–W
W’s fiancée–E
E’s ex-boyfriend–T
My ex-boyfriend–also T
When I was 17 I was obsessed with the Doors. My best friend and I were in my bedroom one night and decided to have a seance (sp?) We had no idea how do really do one and the whole thing was meant to be a joke anyway! SO I put on a Doors album (Soft Parade I think) we lit a candle, sat on the floor and just started chanting all of this jibberish and nonsense and laughing and after about 1 minute of this the Jim Morrison poster that I had on the wall slide right off the wall and onto the floor! We ran like hell!! Still freaks me out to this day when I think about it!
I once picked up the phone to call and tell a friend that I had found a new job. I got no dial tone, so I said hello. My friend was on the other end, wanting to tell me that she had found a new a new appartment. Odd enough that I picked up the phone before it rang when she called, but it turns out her new appartment is in the building next door to my new job.
Truly weird.
Daniel
who suspects that the woman’s daughter has a red right eye and a white left eye, whereas the man’s daughter has a red left eye and a white right eye
Our family’s favorite coincidence is the day my father was visiting Chicago on business. He was walking downtown, turned a corner and literally ran in into his brother, who was also visiting Chicago on business.
