The spooky, the funny, the ones that came to you right when you needed them most… tell me about all of them!
P.S. this is just for fun, so… exaggerate if you want. I don’t care. And, if you don’t mind, please try to resist picking people’s stories apart. We all know confirmation bias is a thing and it wasn’t really ghosts, premonitions, or psychic connections. Just… go with it? Please?
Two from a previous thread
and
And another that I didn’t add then:
When I was recently-separated from my now-ex-wife, I dated a few women, one of whom I had known since high school and after giving it a shot, decided to be just friends (with occasional benefits). While I was sowing some oats, she was also dating and we would sometimes compare notes. She told me the story of one fellow in particular, whom I’ll call Sven who seemed to her to be very unusual in a few ways and with whom things never really developed.
A few months later, I met someone and we began what turned out to be a fairly long-term thing. In getting to know each other, we told each other about some of our past relationships and she mentioned a fellow she had gone out with a few times but he … seemed to her to be very unusual in a few ways and with whom things never really developed.
As you probably have guessed, it was the same guy.
Just last night, I was regaling my wife with the tale of one of the craziest coincidences I’ve ever experienced in my life.
Today, I open the SDMB and this is the first thread I see.
Coincidence?
I’ve been with my gf for around 15 years now. We first met at a bar; we were both there to see a fairly obscure blues performer, Corey Harris. I thought she was cute, I sent her a drink, and she smiled and invited me over. In conversation it came up we were both big fans of Harris and had driven a distance to see him perform.
She asked where I was from and I mentioned the general area. She told me she lived in that area as well, then mentioned the town name she lived near. I freaked, living near the exact same town. She asked me if I lived right in town and I said no, I lived out Route XX from the town. She freaked, that’s where she lived. She mentioned a business she lived near and I started to get uneasy, as I lived very close to the same business.
It turned out that we lived about 150 yards away from each other, but had never met. I ignored my neighbors, as I was looking at homes and thought I’d be moving soon. Her husband actually was put off when he waved to me as he drove by and I ignored his wave. He called me “the crazy Jeep guy”.
After the show it was late. I walked her to her car and asked if she’d like to go to dinner some time. She said no! (her husband had just moved out, that night was her first night out since he left)
At the Corey Harris show she had mentioned that she walked her dogs on a local trail. I had shared custody of my kids, so I began taking them to that trail all the time “for exercise”. After two weeks of trail walking we just happened to run into her. I introduced her to my kids, and my always insightful daughter told her she was so happy to meet her, as now I’d stop dragging them to the trail all the time. She agreed to go out with me and the rest is history.
My horrible ex and I have an 8 year age difference, but we were born in the same small town hospital north of Sacramento, attended the same Montessori school in Marin county and met at the same college in Rocklin. Weird. Should have ignored all that and avoided him like home grown plague, though.
This is a minor one. I once posted in a thread about Jack Chick and his cartoon Chick Tracts.
The next day when i was walking across the parking lot of my local supermarket and saw a scrap of paper on the ground. I picked it up to throw it out and realized it was…a Chick Tract!!! It was the first time I have ever actually seen in person; I had only read about them online. Just weird little coincidence!!
More me being someone else’s freaky co-incidence.
I’m from the UK, but spent a year in New Zealand in my early 20s. I was walking down a backstreet in Christchurch and bumped into not one, but two of my former classmates (one living there, one over visiting her) who were walking down the road talking about our old school, and wondering how everyone from there was getting on. They were kinda freaked out 
A minor one, as impact goes, but it really piqued me at the time.
One night at work, back in the mid 80s, a guy I was working with said he had a special tool he made, one that would work great for a task I was performing. He gave the locker combination of his locker lock, and gave me directions where it was. ( the locker room/changing room was large with many rows of lockers ).
Great. I found the locker by his directions ( something like 12th one down on the 5th row or somesuch location ), opened the locker, but could not locate the tool. I came back outside and told him so. I said he was positive it was there, so I asked him to come in and see if he can find it. We went to the locker and he says: “The reason it’s not in there is because this is NOT my locker”. Turns out I misconstrued the directions he gave me, and we went to his, opened it and gave me the tool.
It really blew our minds that his exact locker combination worked on another random lock, one that by sheer “luck” I just happened to erroneously try.
I was talking about a specific episode of an old TV show one day, and the person I was talking to hadn’t seen it. I know reruns were being show on Saturday nights but didn’t know the time. So I turned on the TV. Not only was the show on right then, it was the same episode!
Years ago, I accidentally addressed a co-worker by the wrong name. I wished the ground would open up.
That’s when an earthquake hit.
About fifteen years ago, when I was single, an old and good friend decided that she was going to fix this situation. I didn’t think it needed fixing, but I went along with it.
So we go out with some friends one night, and she brings along the woman she’s planning to fix me up with. We’re all having a fine time, I’m getting along with the new woman quite well, and thinking, hey, maybe this has possibilities.
And then the old friend asks about my stepbrother, who has a distinctive name. There can’t be more than three or four in the whole country. Seriously.
So the new woman says “your stepbrother is named [name]?” And I say yes. And she describes him, and says “is that him?” And I say yes.
She says “I lived with him for two years.” And she didn’t mean as a roommate.
OK, that was the end of that.
I have two tales neither in any way exaggerated.
In 1991, I was visiting my older son in Seattle accompanied by my wife and my other son. The three of us visited the botanical gardens that have a Japanese garden inside. While we were inside the Japanese garden my son, who was wearing a McGill sweatshirt said there was a man who wanted to talk to me. He had spotted the Sweatshirt and asked if my son was a student there. “No, but my father is a professor there.” So he asked to talk to me. He told me his son was a student there. “Oh, one of 40,000” I said to myself. He continued that he was a grad student. That cuts it down a lot. So I asked him what department. “Math department.” “Hey, that’s my department”, I said. “What’s his name?”, although it was still unlikely I knew him. So he named him. I just about dropped my teeth. He was my Ph.D. student! Turned out the father was visiting his daughter who lived in Seattle.
There was a friend, call him Roy, from HS that I hadn’t seen since about 1955 until 1990, when I was on sabbatical at Penn and he walked into the office of one of the people I talked to regularly and who knew I knew Roy and reintroduced him. Roy self published a small magazine called Ferment, in which he basically wrote essays about his life and travels. For the hell of it, I subscribed. Ten years later I was visiting my younger son who was now living in Boston and one fine evening we took a ferry out to an old fort located on an island in Boston Harbor where there was to be a free concert on grounds of the fort. We brought along a blanket to sit on. As we entered the fort, there were a few programs and I grabbed one. We spread the blanket on the grass and waited for the concert to start. Then a man I didn’t recognize came by and asked if he could look at the program. I showed it to him; he read it and returned it and asked if we minded if he sat on a corner of blanket and sat down. As he sat down, I noticed that his T-shirt said “www.ferment.com” and I immediately asked him if he was Roy. He turned and said, “And who else would be wearing this shirt?” Like the other story he didn’t even live in Boston, although I never did find out why he happened to be there.
My grandfather died while I was dating my wife. I attended and during the conversation, my grandmother mentioned my wife’s last name. It’s a very unusual one and I wondered why she was talking about her. Turned out my grandmother’s grandmother had the same last name as my wife.
So here’s mine:
One morning, I woke up knowing that my friend/co-worker had hit a deer overnight. She was fine, but inconvenienced and the car got a few dings. I’m not sure how I knew it- I didn’t really think to question it at the time and when I did think about it, it was like I had woken up in the middle of the night and checked Facebook while half-asleep and that particular piece of information had been not alarming enough to make me want to take action right away, but noteworthy enough to remember. The next morning, we both went to work. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her, but I did see her car in the lot and thought, “Oh good, she’s still got her car. So it wasn’t too bad, then.” Her car is a little banged up anyway, so I didn’t really question the fact that it didn’t look damaged- just figured it had been more of a scare than a real accident and was relieved for her. Then I went about my day and thought no more of it.
…Until that night, when I did wake up in the middle of the night and reach for my phone to scroll through Facebook. There was a post from my friend. She had hit a deer. She was okay, but the car got a few dings. That’s when I got confused and the first time I questioned myself. Because no- that already happened, didn’t it? She hit a deer LAST night, right? I checked her page and… no mention of any deer from the night before. The next morning, sure enough, the car was dinged up and she was telling the story of how the deer came out of nowhere.
I don’t read anything into it- like no part of me thinks this was a premonition or sign or anything. But it was definitely weird.
My father was a physician. A department head at the state medical school, in fact. Like the children of many physicians in the 60s, I never had my tonsils removed as a child. I had few sore throats and those that I did have were quickly treated with antibiotics. I had siblings whose tonsils were much more troublesome and had been snipped, but not mine.
Fast forward a decade or so and I am in college hundreds of miles away. My throat starts hurting, worse than it had in recent memory, so I go to the school clinic when I can’t stand it any more. I get assigned a random doc and he looks at my throat and tells me that I obviously still have my tonsils and they are infected. He prescribes me amoxicillin and tells me to come back in a week. I fill the prescription. I call my father to let him know of my new medical situation and he gets a little miffed. I still remember his words, “With all the doctors I know in this state, and you go to the school’s walk-in clinic? Well, what did he say?” I told him about the prescription and tried to pronounce the prescribing doctor, as shown on the bottle. It was not an English name, perhaps Greek (?) or eastern European (?), so I mangled it. He had me spell it and quickly pronounced it. He said his room-mate in medical school had that name, and was at his wedding, but he didn’t know where he was now, as that was over 30 years prior.
When I went back to see the doc, I asked him if he had heard of [father’s name]. He looks at me, looks at my chart, then looks at me, again, and says “You know, I was going to ask…” Yep, same man.
As for my tonsillitis, the Amoxicillin put a dent in it, but a double course didn’t quite kill it off. By that time, I returned home and my father looked at my throat and threatened me with a tonsillectomy. My response was that I didn’t think it was that bad. He gave me a course of Keflex that knocked it out. Tonsils are still there!
I was at an off-campus meeting and I mentioned that when I was a very little girl, in the late 70s, my family had lived for a couple years in a house near where we were. Another woman mentioned she’d lived in the neighborhood herself, in the mid-80s. It turned out we’d lived in the same house. I think the fact that we figured it out was every bit as crazy as the fact that it was true in the first place!
I was on Usenet
The group I was in said 'a small plane had just hit a building in NYC."
Then they said the pilot was a Member of the NYC Yankees
The group was…the Yankees newsgroup.
Back when my fiancee & I were planning our wedding, there was only one friend from high school I wanted to invite, a woman named Carolyn. I had no contact information for her or any way to find her (pre-Facebook by a long shot). I just accepted that she wouldn’t be there and we sent out the invitations.
A couple days later I got a phone call: “Hello, this is Carolyn. I just got invited to your wedding.” Turns out she married one of the few people at my wife’s job she liked enough to invite to her wedding…
My last name is very rare. Like, there are far less than 3,000 people with it worldwide, and only around four to five dozen others also live in this state. There are exactly two other women in the entire world who share my first and last name. I found out a bit about each of them while trying to see what came up about me on google during my last job hunt.
One of them is a Mormon missionary out west. She posts a lot of pictures.
The other married a man with the last name whom I’m not immediately related to…and they moved to the New Hampshire town I grew up in a few years after I left it. What the hell are the odds of that?!
They recognized the family dog: