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

This may only be mildly amusing if you were not present, and I think most of you were not.

Many years ago when the kids were small they owned a “Talking Bubba” stuffed bear. It randomly spouted phrases, many of which were sarcastic. They had a special “Bubba on Board” traveling version.

We were all heading to the in-laws on Easter morning and one of the kids brought along Bubba, who oddly stayed mostly silent for the most part. Then, in the middle of a busy road, the car just died. No power at all. I steered it and coasted to the shoulder of the road, and there we were, sitting there dead in the water in our Easter finest.

Just then, Bubba starts in: “Hey, what’s going on? Why ya stopping? What is happening?!?!?”

Bubba was very lucky he didn’t get tossed into traffic at that moment.

Oh man, something very similar to that happened to me too! I’ve told this story before in some other thread, I think.

My wife has many nieces and nephews. Years ago, when they were young, she’d buy toys for all of them. Late one mid-December Friday night, my wife and our kids were in bad, and I was sitting on the couch in our darkened living room, among several not-yet-wrapped presents, playing songs on my guitar. A plush talking Barney the Dinosaur toy was at the other end of the couch, in an open box designed so you can squeeze its hand or whatever to make it talk while it’s on the store shelf.

After awhile I set my guitar down to take a break from playing. And a minute or two later, the Barney toy suddenly says “Play another song” in that dumb Barney voice. Now, I’m sure the doll was set to ‘demo’ mode, so it would radnomly say stuff, but that was the first time I heard it do that, and it was just freakin’ creepy.


I just thought of another creepy coincidence story (not sure why all my coincidence stories are spooky): Some nights, like many of us as we age, I often wake up in the wee hours of the morning and cannot get back to sleep for hours. This happened one weekend night a few years ago, so since it was the weekend, I decided to just get up and watch a movie until I got sleepy again.

I chose a movie called ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’ a supposedly true story about a college student who gets possessed by a demon. In one scene, Emily is sleeping in her dorm room, when she starts to become possessed and has terrible seizures that contort her entire body. The camera pans from her writhing horribly to a clock radio on her bed stand, showing the time to be exactly 3:00 am, which the movie had made clear was the ‘demon hour’.

The clock radio in the movie happened to be the very same brand, with big red digital numbers, as one we had on a shelf just below the TV I was watching. So I reflexively looked down at our clock…and saw the time was exactly 3:00 am :ogre:

Back in the 70s I lived in a big house with a bunch of roommates. In the living room we had one of those flip clocks that made audible clicks when the number panels changed. One night we were watching a movie where a clock was shown changing time to midnight. At that moment, our clock noisily flipped to 12:00. Cue a chorus of “whoa did you see that?!”

If it was broadcast maybe the TV channel had timed the start of the movie on purpose as a clever little joke.