Okay, here’s your homework: find out where this guy is now.
I’m betting you were sensing some sort of innate personality trait. Or flaw. And that he’s in jail, or left his family for a “floozie”, or his scams caught up with him and he’s living in squalor. Or on the run from drug lords somewhere in South America.
Or, since this was in church… maybe you were reacting to his innate evil, and he was stabbed while trying to strangle the minister.
I don’t know. I’ve had that sort of reaction to a friend of my parents, when I was in my teens, and all the available evidence is that she was a perfectly nice person – and she’s hardly going to turn evil now, she died years ago.
I think I managed to hide my reaction from her. She made me a really gorgeous multicolored wool cape; I’ve still got it somewhere.
– a number of people have disliked me, but I generally figured they had reasons. Sometimes I disagreed with the reasons, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have them.
I’ve been mostly lucky during my life, most people like me (or at least do a good job of pretending they do). However, there are certainly some notable exceptions. \
My grade 6 teacher was an incredibly mean old battle axe that was loved by the principal. There had been a dispute between the family of a student and this teacher and somehow I was implicated and I ended up having a miserable grade 6 year.
After that, all seemed quite uneventful until grade 12. A very highly revered physics teacher took an instant dislike to me, finding reasons to openly humiliate me for no apparent reason. He even made a notation on my report card that I was the “consummate underachiever”. Anyway, that’s 50+ years ago and my life turned out fine, IMHO.
I just recently learned that nearly 90 year old prack is still living too. Not that I’m planning a visit anytime soon.
Speaking of battleaxes: there was a fifth grade homeroom teacher who disliked all three of us siblings - my older brother the most, then my sister, then me.
Must have been something in our genes. 
Possibly something short-circuited in @thorny_locust 's example, but I completely agree with the phenomenon referenced. Long story short, I had to deal with a visitor in my professional life and I was instantly convinced he was the scum of the earth, although he did nothing untoward (that we knew about, anyway) during his visit. I tried to hide my disdain but didn’t entirely succeed, as I got some negative feedback from my boss about how I reacted to him.
Fast forward about 5 years … by complete coincidence, I ran into an old friend who ended up taking a job working for him. It turns out he sexually harassed the women, embezzled company funds, and one day just vanished, never to be heard of again. So my spidey-sense turned out to be spot on.
I very rarely have such an instant dislike of anyone, but so far it has always proved correct.
I’ll agree that a couple of people I’ve had the reaction to really were sleazeballs, and that caution is warranted. I just don’t think it’s a guarantee.
Many times, throughout my life.
I would hope that it is because I interact with lots of people, and so, even if a small percentage hate me for no reason, that’s still a reasonable number of people. Not simply that I’m unlikable… 
Also, it’s worth pointing out that, of course, there probably is a reason, you just don’t know it.
Like, sure, sometimes people just don’t like the way you look.
But I’d say more often it’s the case that something you said or did ground their gears (and often in a sitcom way, where there’s additional context they are unaware of, so it’s actually a misunderstanding) or something happened that you don’t know (e.g. that guy’s girlfriend said she found you charming).
I had a physics teacher who did- by all accounts she had one student per class who could do no right, and I got the lucky spot in mine. I was probably in the top 1/4 of the class grade-wise, and until then it had been one of my favourite subjects, but she took any opportunity to yell at me, make me sit by myself and blamed me for everything. It was at the point that other students actively avoided working with me in her class, because they’d get the spillover, and would even, apologetically, tell me that.
One one notable occasion, I was off sick for a class, then the next class had a quiz on the stuff they’d covered that session. I’d tried to catch up from the textbook, but hadn’t been able to borrow notes yet, so I didn’t do very well. She handed my paper back and started full-on spittle-flying screaming in my face about how I was, and such scores were utterly unacceptable in that class, and absence was not an excuse for such a pathetic show… then she handed the papers out to the rest of the table with a little laugh and a comment of ‘Never mind, we all have bad days dear’ to the girl sat next to me, at which point I realised I’d got the highest score of the 4 of us.
The worst bit was that she completely switched at parents’ evening, and even stated that I was one of the best students in the class- so of course my mother decided I was making it up and proceeded to ignore every complaint I made about her. I’m pretty sure that was deliberate.
More than a few. I’ve heard that I’m too serious (HA!), I have a severe RBF (“if you just smiled!”), I’m a know-it-all (if you ask a question, I’m going to answer if I can - isn’t that how it works?), and that I just have an overall off putting personality. I’ve heard more than a few times that I’m a good person once they got to know me.
In school, it hurt. One student absolutely hated me. Stole from me, harassed me, lied about me to anyone she could. Forty years later, discovered we have a mutual friend. Through said friend, found out it was because I wouldn’t let her copy off of me and because the teachers liked me.
It took years to realize it was a “them” problem, not a “me” problem, although I’ll be honest and say it sometimes sucks to not be invited to play in their reindeer games.
Conversely, I have encountered a few people who cause my hackles to rise. Not to the point of hate, but distrust. Most tend to fall into the smarmy personality category. Schmoozers.
Hated me “for no reason” is impossible to answer.
I have a lot of shared experiences with some of the above responses. An academic who didn’t seem to like me on sight and gave me a low evaluation was the one that hurt the most. She was a feminist and I was the only male in the class. It wasn’t a class on feminism or anything though, it was on voluntary legal services for the public. She gave me my first C. She said every student had to make treat for each class and then addressed me specifically saying that I couldn’t buy things I had to make them myself. When it was my time to make them she didn’t try one of them though. Probably she didn’t know I had three older siblings who taught me to make wicked chocolate slices.
To be fair:
I looked like a frat boy.
I had resting bitch face (and still do). But come up to me and say hello and I will have time for you.
But those are both fair reasons for someone to not be favorable towards you at the outset.
So “for no reason” is difficult for me to know. Maybe she had her reasons and I don’t know about them.
I have also had many people in Japan who have never met me, dislike me on sight, or just come up to try and start a fight. Is that for no reason? No, they probably have a reason. It’s not about me though, it’s about them.
No, they’re not.
They’re reasons, yes. But they’re not fair reasons.
Good for you.
In my strongest example of this, I was the teacher. Student walked in and BAM! My adrenaline kicked in. Fight or flight.
Turned out, he had that effect on the other students, who took to getting up and moving if he sat near them. He’d yell at them, at me, at the Dean, and lie to all of us.
He’d show up late (due to his “allergy medications”), get pissed off halfway through class and stomp out, ripping up his homework instead of turning it in.
(He was the archetypal Angry Meth-head. He’d get up and pace around the classroom, glaring at the other students, and bounce in his seat. One student even asked him if he was tweakin’, and he yelled “It’s just my allergy meds!”)
But the school had a "We don’t kick students out (we desperately need their tuition money)" policy, and the Dean said nothing she could do until he took a swing at me. Even seeing his name as the subject line of (many) emails triggered that adrenaline overload reaction.
He finally disappeared before finals week, and I came home one day to see his obituary. He’d died of “complications due to his many allergy medications”.
This dour co-worker I had once. We each worked at different companies before they merged into the one we both worked at. It didn’t take long before I noticed he despised me. Adding all the pieces together, I found out it was:
When the companies merged, they merged the respective employees of our classification in what’s known as the “zipper seniority” method. Went by hire date. The fairest way in a merger of equals. He wanted them to just basically staple our seniority list beneath the seniority list of his previous company. So…
I had more seniority than him because my hire date was before his.
I was 20 years younger than him
I was from the northeast, he was from the rural south.
Miserable git he was. I never heard him speak to me in any other tone than growling, tense, indignation.
I’m frankly astonished at the workplaces where people can treat each other terribly with no pushback.
I’ve worked at small companies where the boss would hear about it before the end of the day, and at 5:00 the growler would be called into the boss’s office and reamed out. And I mean given an ultimatum: “If you can’t treat everyone with respect, and everyone equally, you have no business working here.”
Now, when my dog said someone was a creep, she was always spot on.
This is actually pretty sad.
No! Everybody loves me!
In many workplaces, it’s the bosses who don’t treat the employees with respect. And if a coworker who is buds with the boss is treating you like crap, don’t expect anything to change. If you’ve always had bosses that always had your back, consider yourself lucky.
Yeah, the boss that I saw do that a lot, it was more like he didn’t have ANY favorites.
He wanted everything to run smoothly (and make him lots of money). If anyone said or did anything that threw a wrench into that process, they got put in their place pronto.
About a month after I started the job where I worked with the woman mentioned in the earlier post, we had a Christmas party, which simply consisted of going to a cook-your-own-steak restaurant, and I thought we all had a nice time.
Anyway, that woman was the only person in the department who didn’t attend, and I just knew it was because I was going to be there. Her loss, I guess.