I’ve mentioned this on here before.
My grandfather died before I was born. Sometime in the early 60s. He is buried in a small cemetery on Staten Island. My grandmother died a few years ago when she was 104.
As we were standing there in the bitter cold I noticed the tombstone facing my grandparents plot had the same last name as my ex-wife. Same first name as her brother too. It turned out that my grandparents and my ex-wife’s grandparents were toe to toe in the cemetery.
I have two. When my wife and I were still dating, we were hanging out with some crunchy/hippy friends of hers who brought out a Tarot deck, had her pick… I think 4 cards, and read from a book to tell her how those cards related to aspects of her life.
Then I took my turn. I shuffled and cut the deck, and turned over the same card she’d turned over first. Then I cut again and turned over the second card, same as her. Then I cut again and turned over the third card, again, the same card. Then I cut the deck, and just before flipping the top card, I put it on the bottom, and turned over a different fourth card. After my fortune was read, I flipped the deck over, and the bottom card was her fourth card.
No one touched the deck except me the whole time. They must all think that I’m a master of sleight of hand, but I’m not! We just happened to draw the same 4 cards from… whatever a Tarot deck has. 50? 60?
Second one: On our honeymoon, we went to Peru. Walking through the train station at Machu Picchu, I thought I saw someone I recognized from home, but it was very crowded and before I could get a good luck I lost him in the crowd. A week and 200+ miles away later, we go out to dinner. As we walk into the restaurant, there he is, and calls my name out. So, we happened to run into each other, twice in another country.
When I was a teenager my family was on vacation. It was a road trip through natural sites, like the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad, and so on. My maternal grandfather and grandmother were with us. At a small, narrow canyon called Box Canyon we were enjoying the view. Somehow my grandfather’s surname came into the conversation and another tourist overheard it. He asked if Grandpa was related to Mike Surname, from Kansas. Heck, it was my grandfather’s nephew! My mom’s first cousin. Seems my grandfather could go anywhere and find a connection.
My wife’s best friend has the same name as my sister.
Said best friend is married to a guy who has the same name as my sister’s husband.
Said best friend has a brother who has the same name as my sister’s son.
Said best friend named her daughter after my wife.
Okay, the last one isn’t a coincidence, but it makes things bloody confusing.
I have three great coincidence stories.
I don’t think any of these are anything but classic coincidences and there are other minor factors- I lived on a street that was a common route into Manhattan, my friend and her husband chose that restaurant because it was her college town and they knew the area. Still the timing on these incidents was so tight that they were pretty amazing. Not supernatural, just amazing.
When I was twelve, my family went to Niagara Falls (this was the 1970s), several hundred miles from where we lived. We got to the hotel too early to check in and so were waiting in the lobby with a crowd of other people. My father (a mailman) told my mother that the woman across the lobby looked like someone he used to deliver mail to back when he walked a route. Mom told him to go over and say hi. He walked over to her but he could say a word, she turned to the person she was with and said words to the effect of “I told you that was my old mailman!”
I was visiting NYC with our younger son in 2004. While we were on the subway, heading to the East Village, I thought “wouldn’t it be funny if I saw John (a former coworker I hadn’t been in contact with since leaving New York 6 years earlier).” We got off the train, and hadn’t walked in a block when I ran into him.
Ms. P grew up in the Baltimore-DC area, but went to college in Florida. Many of the times she drove down to FSU she went right past my parents’ farm.
A lot of meetings with people far away from where either of us lived.
– I met someone I used to work with in Cambridge MA on the Riverway in San Antonio.
– I met someone I knew from Utah while out canoeing on the concord River in Massachusetts
– But the most unlikely coincidence was running into an acquaintance from upstate New York in the middle of Times Square. If I had been living in New Jersey, that wouldn’t seem so unusual – but I was living in Utah at the time, and she was living in Washington D.C. But it’s even more amazing when you consider how big Times Square is and how many people are in it at any one time. We could easily have missed each other. Or one of us could have arrived or left just a minute or so earlier, and we never would have met up. That would’ve been a shame – it was the last time I ever saw her.
Experiences like this make me think about how there must have been a great many times in my life when I almost met someone in a distant spot, but we were looking the wrong way, or arrived just a little too early or too late. Such “almost-meets” must surely outnumber the “meets”, so there must have been a great many missed opportunities.
I was driving home one day and noticed I was low on gas. There was a gas station not far from my house and I thought, meh, not REALLY low but I’m right here, so may as well stop and fill up, which I did. When I got home literally just minutes later, strangely, the power was out. I assumed it wouldn’t last long. I was wrong. It was the beginning of the Great Northeast Power Blackout of 2003 and lasted for days. Many people were soon too low on gas to be able to go anywhere and were immobilized. When power came back on days later, there were incredible lineups at all gas stations. I had missed it by literally just a couple of minutes! Being mobile had many advantages, including the ability to get perishable groceries from one store that had backup generators – many or most grocery stores did not, and suffered significant spoilage losses.
Here’s another one, but it’s not about me. My brother and his wife live in Manhattan and are big fans of Broadway theater. One morning he left for work and her mission was to go to a last-minute ticket place that sold discounted tickets to that evening’s shows that had not sold out. She had planned to be there early, like around 9:00 AM or so. The ticket outlet was located either just outside or just inside the World Trade Center. Something came up and she had to postpone until later in the day. The date was 9/11/2001.
I have a similar story. When I was 15 my family went on a big family summer road trip. We drove from Minnesota to California and stopped everywhere in between. The highlight of the trip was, of course, Disneyland. I was standing in a line for one of the rides, I turned around and there stood a kid, right behind me, that I went to school with! We looked at each other but neither of us said a word! We must have both been in shock.
About 20 years ago my then husband got an email from somebody we didn’t know. It was a woman also named “Butterfly” (well, no, but the same first name as me 
) and she was VERY angry with my husband! Accusing him of sending her an ecard that was OBVIOUSLY intended for the other “Butterfly” in his life and what he was thinking and he’d better apologise!
My husband did indeed write her back, telling her, that he wasn’t aware of sending her anything, that he was well aware of wich “Butterfly” he was married to and that he was sorry for her anger but blamed it on a server error.
Her answer was “Who are YOU??? This email was intended for a friend! I don’t know you!” and in turn apologised for sending my husband an angry mail.
As we were all curios what had happened, the two continued writing and it turned out, that the lady had a friend whose girlfriend was also called “Butterfly” and despite the girlfriend he was always flirting with her and she didn’t like it.
One day he was at an airport, used a public internet terminal and sent her a flirty ecard. He didn’t want to use his real email address, so he made one up out of his nickname and a german service provider.
By coincidence my husband had the same nickname and was the owner of the email address. So when she got the ecard, she simply hit reply and thus unknowingly wrote to my husband.
The last part is unlikely enough, as the nickname in question was a misspelling of a name not that often used as a nickname. But that all three women were called “Butterfly” was the real coincidence - my husband probably wouldn’t have replied if the name had been different.
Getting to the bottom of the story was so much fun for all of us, that we invited “Butterfly” to visit us. We hit it of really well and she stayed a friend. My husband and I divorced years ago but remain friends, and he and “Butterfly” are still going strong as friends as well.
As a student my friend and I were walking to the store. My friend said he really hated Mr X who worked at the campus radio station with us. About 5 seconds later a guy yells out “come have a beer!” and it was Mr X. (can’t recall his name) . So we went and had a beer with him. We had no idea that he lived on that street.
I’ve been working as a para at a high school about four hours drive from where I grew up for not quite 5 years. There’s one teacher there I get along with really well. She was diagnosed with cancer around Thanksgiving of my first year there. The second year, I got diagnosed at the beginning of December.
Toward the beginning of the third year, I had found a postcard with a picture of the public library from my hometown, and showed it to her because it has a very unusual front entrance. When she looked at my postcard she said “That’s my library!” Turned out she grew up in the same town, she’s just enough younger that she didn’t start school until after I graduated. Then she asked me what my dad did (he’s a retired mail carrier). She then said “I think I used to follow him around his mail route when I was a little girl.” She told me her maiden name, and sure enough Dad not only remembers her and her family, he remembered her address.
I was enjoying a few weeks on the beach in Goa, India when I met this Australian girl. She stood out in my mind because she has a very unusual voice (much more than just an Oz accent) and for the fact that she had almost no pigment in her nipples.
Years later my wife and I are on a ship from Shanghai to Hong Kong and I hear this unusual voice around the corner near where were eating. It was her!
One of my lab co-workers and I went to a local Chinese restaurant for lunch. We were talking about how two of the instruments, in different rooms, had the same unusual malfunction on the same day. We were trying to figure out what the common denominator could be but were stumped because these instruments were in different rooms and ran different assays; there were no common samples or reagents at all. “Why would both of them have the same problem on the same day?” I asked, as I opened my fortune cookie. The fortune inside read simply “There are coincidences.”
This happened just minutes ago and I immediately thought of this thread. I have been converting my digital video library to a different format that takes up around half the space at around the same quality. When a video is converted, I do some spot checks looking for visible compression artifacts. Just now I was rapidly clicking on the slider for a movie, and got back to back:
Character saying “yeah”
Character saying “yeah”
Character saying “yeah”
(Three different characters, three different points in the movie.)
My mom used to accompany my dad on occasional business trips to Europe, plus they used to take cruises. It seemed like every trip they took, no matter where, they’d run into people from their old neighborhood in east Baltimore, and it usually turned out that they had acquaintances in common. Same thing when they went RVing - I guess a lot of east Baltimoreans liked Arizona.
As for me, a few weeks ago, I had a dream about a girl I knew in grade school, and who I hadn’t seen since 8th grade graduation in 1968. About the same time, a guy who was also in our class left me a message on FB, tho I didn’t see it till a couple of days ago. We went to different high schools, so I never saw him after 8th grade. He and I shared a brief chat, and I refrained from telling him I’d had a huge crush on him way back then. 
Okay, so, I have a couple of really freaky weird ones that I felt might be out of place here in this thread, based on the actual responses to the OP. I was hemming and hawing about posting a particular one after all, because it’s really fun, but also a bit embarrassing. Then I saw:
So, yeah.
This one requires a bit of backstory. My whole life, since I was a kid, I wanted to be an SF writer. Ursula Le Guin, Philip Dick, and Douglas Adams have long been important influences on me as a person and as a would-be writer.
So, several years ago I was re-reading Man in the High Castle, and around that time had a conversation with a somewhat famous writer I had gotten to know. She was talking about how she got into astrology (the real stuff, as she put it, as opposed to the horoscope in the paper) as part of her research for a character who runs a magic shop. This author gave an appropriate disclaimer about not actually believing in the woo stuff, but impressed upon me that it was nevertheless quite uncanny and useful; perhaps the process of it allowed her to access certain insights which otherwise would have remained dormant in her unconscious.
So, that was enough to tip the scales for me and I grabbed a copy of the I Ching off of Amazon and tried it out (PKD and my years of Tai Chi making that choice of oracle easy for me). I carefully read the instructions, intending to be as earnest as I could despite my scoffing rational mind, about how to conjure up one of the sixty-four hexagrams that would somehow be an answer to my question.
I spent some time formulating my first question. This is important, I thought. One doesn’t just jump into this will-nilly; some sort of baseline must be established. My first question: “Who, or What, am I asking this question of, when I consult the I Ching?” I meditated upon the question, repeating it in a whisper as I tossed the coins and built the hexagram. Along with the phrase, I held in mind that I was seeking an answer that would be personally meaningful to me, and not something that required a deep understanding of the I Ching.
“Who, or What, am I asking this question of, when I consult the I Ching?”
I built the hexagram and checked the chart to see which number was the answer to my question. I must admit I had my mind blown just a bit:
42
a’ight … i’ll take the bait … it’s true and unembellished … call it a “roll-of-the-die”, if you wish.
a few weeks ago … i drove in to one of those large petro-kiosks (racetrac) to replenish my fuel … pulled up to a pump. s’two ways of paying … either at the pump or inside the building. proceeded to the cashier … gave her $20 as deposit. she giggled a bit … looking at her, she exclaimed "20 on 20?" ($20/pump#20) … i added, with a grin, "and to think we’re in the year 2020". a moment later we both realized … it was the 20ᵗʰ of february!
As a kid I called a friend of mine to see if he wanted to hang out. I dialed, there was silence, then I heard his voice saying numbers as he dialed. 5 beep 7 beep 9 beep and so on. It was my phone number, and he was calling me.
I called him, and after the call connected but before the phone had a chance to ring, he picked it up to call me. Wild.