Real life coincidence so rare you doubt anyone would believe your tale

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I had one today. I think it is the most unbelievable coincidence I’ve ever experienced.

I have an uncommon surname. A quick Googling says its occurrence is approximately 1 in 5k people. I know of no famous people with my name, past or present, and I’ve only met one other unrelated person in my nearly 7 decades.

For this story let’s assume my last name is Whimsing.

I had a doctor appointment this morning. Mine was the first of the day and I was first to arrive I signed in and took a seat in the otherwise-empty waiting room.

In walks a couple. They sign in and, while walking to a seat, the woman pauses and says to me, “you’re a Whimsing, too?” It turns out that we share the same surname.

Unusual occurrence, probably worth telling family members about, but not extraordinarily weird.

Then, a third man enters, signs himself in, and you know where this is going.

At this moment there are three patients in the waiting room, all three are named Whimsing, none of them related or know each other, looking at each other in disbelief.

I know it’s likely a had-to-be-there moment, and there is not much to offer in the way of a comment other than “wow”. But I still had to share.

There have been other similar threads, but none less than 10 years old that I can see. Feel free to add you own coinkydinks.

mmm

2

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychotherapy, collected (and published in a book) examples of extraordinary coincidences, which he called synchronicities. One of his often-cited examples involves a mother who, in 1914, takes a photo of her son and drops off the roll of film to be developed in Strasbourg. While it is there, WWI breaks out, and she never gets to collect the developed photos and forgets about them. Years later, she has a daughter and buys film to take pictures of her. When the pictures come back developed, she sees images of both son and daughter on them. The roll of film had, for some reason, not been processed but resold as new, and she bought that very roll, which ended up exposed twice.

The Wikipedia article on synchronicity has real-life examples, narrated by Jung and other writers, including an amusing one involving quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli.

3

I don’t think this rises to the example in the OP, but recently I was brought up short here on the boards.

We had a thread about what movie we would like to see made “warts and all”, about a public figure. I replied early on, but later intended to come back when I thought of something: I’d really like to see a movie about Red Sox great Ted Williams. He was the best hitter who ever played the game, Marine Corps fighter pilot, expert fisherman, basically the real-life John Wayne.

So I go back to the thread to add this and the very first thing I see is somebody had already posted the exact same idea. I felt like I had entered the Matrix because the poster said almost precisely what I was thinking, nearly word for word. I had a strange moment where I wondered if I had already written it and forgotten. Which is to say, great minds think alike. :slight_smile:

4

I guess I was more featuring in someone else’s bizarre coincidence really, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m from the UK, grew up in a pretty small Northern English city. While walking down a back street in Christchurch, New Zealand, I bumped into two of my former classmates who were walking the other way down the street, discussing who they’d kept in touch with from school and how they were all doing.

5

Along these lines, when Sophia (my daughter) was 12, we went on a Mediterranean cruise which included Rome, Athens, Istanbul, etc. We spent a few days in Rome, and, when walking into the Pantheon, ran into some of Sophia’s classmates (and their parents) who were walking out. Sophia went to a small Catholic school and there were, at most, 60 kids in her grade.

As for me, there was one time I reached into my pocket, grabbed three quarters, and the dates were 1967, 1968, 1969. Probably not all THAT coincidental (this happened in the late 80s), but the memory has stuck with me ever since.

6

Maybe this isn’t so rare, but it was astonishing to me. I was on a pilgrimage with a few hundred other people. Which pilgrimage isn’t important, but the people on it were all descended from immigrants to the US. While on that pilgrimage, I got to talking with a guy about my age (60ish), and asked where his family was originally from. He said they were from a small coastal village where he was probably related to most of the people there. Coincidentally, my own ancestors came from a similar village, so I said, “Me too. Nobody has ever heard of our village.” Then he named it. Same village. We are cousins - exact relationship yet to be determined - who grew up living about 150 miles apart an ocean away from where our families started, and never knew of each other. He described my great-grandmother’s house, including that it was directly across the road from the walking path to the local cemetery!

7

My best friend in high school was Jim. From there, we went to college together. Then the military got me and I never heard from him again. The internet came along and I searched, but couldn’t find him. His last name is not that uncommon, but when paired with Anchorage, AK, the pool gets pretty shallow pretty quickly. I searched high school reunion sites and genealogy databases and obituaries. Nothing. For over 40 years, not a whisper. Then, one night in the early 2000s, I dreamed about him. I woke up with a strong feeling about him and went to the computer. Typed in his name and “Alaska” and got an immediate hit. A man with his name had opened a winery in Washington with his wife and son, and the bio blurb left no doubt. I contacted him by the email address and he told me he had just put that info up on the web the same day I had the dream. Cue Twilight Zone music.

8

Not super rare, but…

We have two daughters and one son. Around twenty years we were driving through Delaware, Ohio on our way to our vacation destination. We crossed a street called Elizabeth St, and I shouted out to our daughter Elizabeth, “Hey, there’s a street named after you!” She smiled, laughed, and though it was funny. Ten seconds later we crossed another street, called Catherine St, and I shouted out to our daughter Catherine, “Hey, there’s a street named after you, too!”

We live near Dayton, OH. About ten years ago my daughter and I drove up to Cleveland for the weekend. At around 10 PM we left The House of Blues to go back to the hotel. As soon as we left the place and walked out onto E 4th St, I saw a woman walk in front of me. I stared at her and thought, “Don’t I know her?” She looked back and stared at me. I couldn’t believe it… it was my coworker. She was with her husband and two children on a short vacation in Cleveland, and I had absolutely no idea she would be there.

9

I can think of two that have happened to me.

  1. I was visiting England with my parents and was in a touristy place in Upper Slaughter called Lord of the Manor. My stepmom and I had gone to the loo and were chattering about the delights of the day as we washed up. I said something about looking forward to sharing pics of the place with friends at home in Podunk, California. Suddenly from one of the closed stalls came a voice: “You live in Podunk, California?” Why, yes! Yes, I do. Turned out the person occupying the stall lived there too, and was in fact related to another person I knew well online from Australia, who I had met when she visited her aunt in Podunk.

  2. My brother was traveling with his family from Montana back to Washington State where he lived, when his car suffered a breakdown. A kind family stopped and picked up brother and family so they could contact help. As my brother chatted with the driver, he mentioned he had a sister who lived in Podunk, California. The good Samaritan said, “That’s quite a coincidence! My mother lives in Podunk, California, too!” My brother then said, “My sister works for the courts in that county.” The good Samaritan said, “You’re kidding. My mother does, too!” Turned out the good Samaritan’s mother and I were not only co-workers, but we were the only two clerks assigned to the Juvenile court at that time. We literally shared a desk in the home office. Crazy!

10

When I was eight, I heard a song (identified well into adulthood as the Blues Brothers’ “Rubber Biscuit.”) In it, I heard the following joke:

Hee, hee, hee, hee the other day you know I had a wish sandwich
Well a wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich
Where you have two slices of bread and you
Wish you had some meat
Bow bow bow

[I mondegreened it as “…and you wish you had some meatball-ball-ball.”]

I didn’t hear the joke again, so clearly it was not a common one.

Five years later, I was in my homeroom and got the idea to tell the joke to Mr. Shaw. I’m literally about to open my mouth, when Mr. Shaw looks at me and, out of the blue, asks: “What is a wish sandwich?”

For years, I took this as strong evidence of telepathy.

11

I have a very common first name (the single most-common one for boys born in the 1960s), but an extremely uncommon surname.

After growing up in, and going to college in, Wisconsin, I moved to the western suburbs of Chicago in 1989. About a year later, I was sitting in my apartment one evening, when the phone rang; there was a woman on the other end of the line.

Woman: “I’m trying to reach [my exact first and last name].”
Me: “Speaking.”
Woman: “I’m not sure that I have the right person. I’m looking for [firstname last name], who used to live in Madison.”
Me: “I used to live in Madison.”
Woman: “And who now lives in suburban Chicago.”
Me: “Yes, that’s where I live. If you are looking for [firstname lastname], who used to live in Madison, and now lives outside of Chicago, you’ve found him.”
Woman: (a bit of a laugh) “Well, you sound way too nice to be my ex-husband.”

Turns out that, yes, the guy lived about five miles away from me. He’s still in the area (as am I), and I saw his/my name on a political sign a few years back, as he was running for (and won) a seat on the town council.

12

I went to school at OWU. Delaware is SO much cooler now than it was back then…

13

This is tiny, but it tickles me to this day.

Shortly after we moved in here, I built a box to go next to the back door to hold outdoor shoes and boots (my husband is Japanese so we don’t wear shoes indoors). It’s pretty simple, a larger box with compartments built in, one big compartment for boots, other shoe-size compartments (large and small ones for my and my husband’s very different size shoes). The size of the box was just what seemed a good size to hold enough compartments. It sits on four short legs that I got at the hardware store.

A dozen or so years later, we remodeled this floor, the downstairs, back to the studs. The back wall was extensively rebuilt, with both the door and the picture window moving. One of the decisions in this remodel was the casings for the door and window, and as this was kind of a budget project, I picked plain square-corner casings. During the project, the shoe holder was put in storage, along with almost everything else from the downstairs.

When the project was finally finished, we of course moved the furniture and stuff back into the space. And this is the tiny coincidence: the shoe holder that I built 12 years before now fits exactly, to the half-millimeter, between the casing for the picture window and the casing for the door. And the feet are far enough in from the back, that the back of the box fits snugly against the wall and doesn’t hit the floor molding. All I had to do was re-paint it in the new casing color and it looked like it had been made to go there.

14

That’s absolutely the dippiest kind of serendipity! (That’s a good thing.)

15

My wife and I had a coincidence that is similar to the OP’s, at least in that it’s also last name related. People think my last name is uncommon. It’s not very uncommon, but it’s no ‘Smith’, ‘Jones’ or ‘Williams’. My wife’s maiden name is extremely uncommon. She comes from a largish family, but as far as she knows only her family has that surname in the states.

This was earlier in our marriage, when we still subscribed to a print edition newspaper. We were sitting around one Sunday morning, drinking coffee and taking turns with sections of the paper. She, for some reason, always read the Sunday obituaries. Suddenly she said “look at the obits and tell me what you see”. So I did-- I saw right away that someone with her surname was in there, since it’s early in the alphabet, and they print the last names large for easy ID on the page. I asked “a family member?” She said no, and told me to keep looking. Then I saw someone with my (well, our) last name on there as well. Not a member of my family, either. I don’t know what the odds could have been to have both our surnames in the same obit list, but it had to be pretty high. And pretty creepy :scream:

16

I always flash back to this little oddity.

After her grandmother died, my wife asked if she could have a very old drop-down desk of hers, basically the one thing she wanted. We drove down to Connecticut, stopped in at a random U-haul rental, and picked out a random trailer to be hitched to our car. Those are normally completely emptied out but I noticed an easily-overlooked tiny key on the bed of the trailer.

When we got to her parents’ house I saw that the drop-down door, to be used as a writing surface, had a keyhole. The original key had been lost. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the key I had just found. Fitted perfectly.

Was this the lost key? Undoubtedly not. But still the only random key in a random place I’ve ever found, with the right use for it appearing within minutes of its apparition.

17

Did you send that user a PM? Sounds like you two should meet for a few beers someday, or at least chit chat by email/et al.

18

And you’re positive your doctor didn’t purposely make this happen in any way shape or form? I’m guessing there’s no way in hell he did, and he wouldn’t have much reason to, either.

19

To whom in the thread are you replying? The OP? As you did not quote or cite another poster, it’s not at all clear.

20

Back when I hadn’t yet broken into double digits age-wise, my dad would sometimes take my brother and I down to the beach on weekends (mom was getting her hair done). On this particular occasion, we were playing in the shallowest water when my dad reached down and pulled out a dead baby shark. We were stunned. How cool is that? Can we keep it? No, we couldn’t, dad said, without providing any reason. He threw it back in the ocean.

Sometime later – I’m not sure how much time had passed; maybe an hour or so? – we were playing in the shallowest water in a completely different location when my dad reached down and pulled out a live baby shark thrashin’ to free itself from his hold on its tail. Dad let out a (comic) shriek and flung it back into the ocean.

Randomly finding one baby shark by the shore is unlikely, but coming across two of them on the same day? That seems more metaphysical.