Yep. I was in the lobby of the Sari Pacific hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia back in 1980. In walk the parents of one of my high school friends. They were retired and doing an around-the-world trip.
I was on holiday in Cambodia, had spent a gruelling day looking around S-21 in Phnom Penh (Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum) and had ridden a motorbike taxi back to my randomly chosen hostel on Boeung Kak Lake. I dropped off my backpack and went out onto the veranda for a beer and sunset, as all the tables were taken I asked a couple if I could sit at their table. The woman was a colleague from my work team in the UK, who had just cycled from Siem Reap for charity.
I definitely have.
One of the strangest cases isn’t exactly what the OP means, but stands out in my mind. We were in Las Vegas. My wife and I were standing near a fountain and overheard a couple next to us talking about a restaurant near us in Seattle. We started talking and discovered that we have been living within 1 mile of each other for 15 years… but we only met in Las Vegas!
Back in the fall of 2001, my wife and I were traveling to Maui. So we’re at the Honolulu airport, in line to get on the puddle-jumper to Maui, and we get to talking with the couple next to us in line. “Oh, you work at XYZ, my brother works there.”
Five thousand people, give or take, work for my employer, and I hadn’t been working there very long, so what were the odds? But his brother was someone who worked closely with my then-officemate, so I saw him practically every day when I was at work.
Some other for-instances: a year or so before that, my wife and I were at the wedding of the daughter of some friends of ours, a couple of states away from where we were. And when we got there, we ran into a woman who worked in the next office from me, who I saw almost daily, along with her husband. Turns out she was a longtime friend of our friends’ daughter.
And when I was in college in Connecticut, my parents moved into a new house in northern Virginia. I was showing some friends a pic of the house that they’d sent me. One of my classmates’ aunt and uncle had been living in that house, and had sold it to my parents.
I grew up in a town of about 900 people…a one stop light type of town.
Once we were on vacation in Gatlinburg, TN, about a six-hour drive from home.
While walking down the street, we ran into another family from our tiny town on the same sidewalk.
The odds of two families from the same town being in the same town 400 miles away are probably pretty small, but the odds of us being in the same place at the same moment and seeing each other seemed pretty crazy.
Ran into some friends of ours from back home in New Orleans on a ski lift in Breckenridge CO.
Back in college my roommate and I took a spring break road trip to NYC. I dropped him off in Connecticut to stay with his long-distance girlfriend, then I drove out to Long Island to spend the week with college friends who were going to grad school in Stony Brook.
We had spent one day doing touristy stuff in the city and were heading back to Penn Station to take the train back to L.I. We’re standing on a corner in Times Square waiting for the light to change when my friend Deb says “Oh my god, look at that guy across the street. He looks like he just got in from Kansas!” Which, in fact, he had, because it was my roommate! I know it’s not a huge coincidence since we were in the same area, but still – what are the odds of running into someone in the middle of Times Square like that?
At the top of Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park (Utah), I ran into a guy I’d last seen a decade earlier when we were college classmates in New York.
I bumped into an old grade school / high school friend and his family that I knew when we both were growing up in St. Louis. I hadn’t seen him in ten years - he was living in Denver and I was living in San Francisco.
My wife and I walked right by him and his family in…Seville, Spain. Aside from the ridiculous odds of that happening, the odds of it happening in Seville, with streets like a giant maze, were off the charts.
What was weird was that I kept running into the same person in remote places. He and I knew each other from college in Texas when he was the lab instructor for a petrology lab I was taking. 5 or 6 years later I’m working in Alaska, drive over on a weekend to very remote Hope to do some gold panning, am driving past a stream and I see some old sourdough and another guy talking… and the other guy is Steve. I get out of my truck and he looks at me like wtf?
Then a couple of years later a well is drilling in South Texas, I’m the wellsite geologist, drive out to a very remote location around Freer and who’s running the logging truck? Steve.
Then about 5 years later I’m with a different company in Calgary, take some rock samples to a firm for Scanning Electron Analysis and who’s running the SEM? Yep… Steve. Don’t know where I’ll see him next, probably on my next vacation.
Something similar happened to me in Alaska with another guy. I met him at his Homer halibut charter, then a couple of years later when I was hitchhiking several hundred miles away one rainy night in Tok the same guy stopped and gave me a ride and I was like hey… don’t you have a boat in Homer? Then a couple of years after that I ran into him in a Talkeetna bar. Yep, I bought him, Tony DeMichelle, a nice cold beer and we had a long chat. I’d gone to Alaska 3 times and ran into the same guy in different parts of the state each time.
Many years ago I took a summer appointment at the University of British Columbia. We had plenty of time to get there, so my wife my son and I drove from Chicago. We took at least two weeks, stopping at Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, etc. At Yellowstone Park we stopped and walked down into a valley to see the falls. At the very bottom, we ran into a colleague and his family also from the University of Chicago.
Waling down a backstreet in Christchurch, New Zealand, and bumped into not one, but two of my former classmates.
One was living there, the other visiting her, and they’d apparently been walking down the street discussing who each had kept in touch with from school when they saw me wandering towards them.
Traveling for work I have run into people at airports. I am based in Seattle and I ran into another Seattle friend in Amsterdam (I was headed to Singapore and she was off to Germany I believe).
Another time I ran into someone in Dubai. I was returning from Hyderabad and he was at a wedding in Pakistan at the time.
Another friend of mine was in Tokyo, and the people at the office took him to this teeny tiny noodle shop hidden down an alley way, where he bumped into someone he worked with 5 years before who was now living in Singapore.
In Vietnam I ran into a guy I went to high school with.
I was in a crowd in Alexandria, VA during some sort of parade/festival and ran into a former Ensign that I had worked for in the Navy up in Massachusetts some eight years earlier. Weird.
Ran into a woman in the Seattle airport that had lived on the same street I grew up on in Anchorage. However, if you’re from Alaska, you’re sooner or later bound to run into somebody you know in Terminal C.
I was walking along a fairly remote beach on the west coast of Mexico and saw a couple tying up their dingy at the mouth of a small river. A couple of sailboats were anchored just off the beach.
I started talking to them and it turned out they were from a community a couple of hours north of where I lived.
We made introductions and it turned out he and I had been doing business together for a couple of years, but had never met in person.
Seattle and Portland seem to be popular destinations for folks from my tiny town of 1500 souls in N. Idaho. I don’t think I’ve ever visited either city without running into either someone from here currently, or used to live here.
Laughs are a dead give away. Many years ago in downtown Seattle, I was touring the shady bars near Pike Street. Dark, crowded bar, I hear a distinctive laugh. Ellis! Got to looking for him and sure enough. Visiting family.
Another laugh in a Safeway in Portland while I was there visiting family for Thanksgiving led me to turn around to find our small town produce man admiring and squeezing produce in the big city.
Most often residents or former residents will recognize our distinctive license plate and make contact.
All seems very eerie to me.
mes
–I ran into a former co-worker on the Riverwalk in San Antonio. we were both just visiting.
–Met a college acquaintance in the terminal at Dallas-Fort Worth airport. We were both on connecting flights, going from and to different locations
–Ran in to an associate from Utah while canoeing on the Concord River
and my favorite
– ran into an acquaintance from Rochester in the middle of Times Square. She was living in Washington, and I was living in Utah at the time. We were both just passing through.
I mean, even if we had both planned to meet in Times Square, it’s highly unlikely we would have run into each other unless we’d set a landmark to meet at.
In all these cases both of us just happened to be in that place briefly, so it’s highly likely that we would have missed each other – if we’d passed through a little earlier, or a little later, we’d never have encountered each other. It’s not as if we were hanging around the same place for a long time. And neither of us were residing there at the time, but living far away from the spot where we met.
These chance encounters made me realize that there are probably a LOT of “almost-meets” with people I know, where one of us WAS a little early or late, or we didn’t get close enough to see each other.
I’d been up for about 36 hours and ended up unexpectedly in a maintenance landing in Chicago (Maintenance landing meaning: something was wrong with the plane but the pilot’s voice didn’t go up in pitch in the announcement).
So I’m walking down the concourse when I hear someone call my name.
I turned around and looked at the person and instead of seeing a whole face I saw bits of pieces of face as my brain flipped through memories of various peoples eyes, nose, jaw, and mouth. The parts of faces weren’t from the same person. One person’s eyes and a nother person’s jaw, and another person’s nose. Then suddenly the whole face sprang together and I recognized my friend. It was as if my brain was sorting piecemeal through faces, passing them through a matched filter until the face I was seeing met the parameters of something in stored memory.
It was the damnedest experience. I’ve never had it since.
Wandering through the streets of Arles in the south of France I ran into a student from the preceding term.
A little different from the OP, but nearly incredible, was the time I was walking through the Japanese garden in Seattle while visiting my older son who lives there. I was with my wife and my younger son who happened to be wearing a McGill blazer although he wasn’t a McGill student. He came to me and told me there was a man who wanted to talk to me. The man had asked if was a McGill student and when he said he wasn’t, but his father asked to talk to me. So I went over to him and said that his son was a McGill student. I said something non-commital and asked what he was studying. “He is a grad student in math”, he told me. “Oh, I am in the math department. What is his name?” I don’t know very many of the students, even grad students, by name, but I recognized his name. He was my PhD student. The amazing thing was neither of us lived in Seattle, although his daughter (and my older son) does. And without my other son’s blazer, we couldn’t possibly have connected.
When I was living in Northern Virginia, I was vacationing in Florida and ran into a family I knew from Virginia.
When I was living in Southern California, I went into my bank and discovered that one of my high school classmates from Northern California was working in that bank.
When I was in the Air Force, I had been stationed at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California, and I visited a friend of mine who was stationed at the Pentagon, and ran into a guy working in his same office there whom I had been stationed with at Travis.