Several years ago my Aunt went through a ridiculous spate of bad luck with her car. First she backed it into a pole while exiting someone’s driveway. A few days later she parked it at my grandparents’ house, decided to move it under a tree to accommodate an additional guest, and not long after she exited the car, a massive branch fell on it, shattering the windshield. The denouement was a short time later, when she was at home sleeping, and awoke with a massive BANG! Turns out some drunk asshole creamed her car while it was sitting in her driveway. That was the end of the car. My Aunt, who is an atheist, bought a St. Christopher medal to keep in her next vehicle.
My kid ran out of school, straight into a rusty knife-edge handle on a dumpster. Right at third grader’s head level.
Got a huge gash in his forehead, and I ran him to the ER to get stitched up. The doc said “Now, if you don’t want a big scar running from your eye to your hairline, I can call a plastic surgeon in…” “NO! I want the scar!” Every 9 yr old’s dream, I guess…
We said “You might regret it later in life, but okay, it’s your face.”
epilog: It’s now later in life. He still thinks it’s cool.
I was driving home from work today and as I turned onto my street I saw a woman on the sidewalk pushing a stroller, paying absolutely no attention to the six foot inflatable dinosaur walking behind her.
Never saw that before.
Was putting the kid to bed and heard a crash and tires squealing. Then a few minutes later heard voices. Went to look and saw somebody had driven through our yard, completely knocking down the street light, and the neighbor’s mailbox. Unlike @Spice_Weasel’s aunt, they somehow managed to miss the car parked in my driveway, and the car parked in the street opposite my driveway.
The pole on the ground is the street light. The big light on the ground is the actual street light still attached at the top of the pole. The pole used to be in the ground where the firemen are standing. The bottom of the pole is in my driveway. The red thing under the pole is part of the bumper of a Nissan Titan or Armada. The pile of wood was a four foot diameter piece of a tree stump. The wood took out the trucks oil pan, but the truck killed a little snake that lived under the wood.
The tire tracks look weird, because I’m pretty sure the truck went through the pole, stopped when it hit the stump piece, backed up, and then took off, leaving the skid marks on the driveway, and hitting my mailbox (on the very edge of the picture).
Whoa!
Poor little snake. Glad you and your vehicle emerged unscathed. Freakin’ drunk drivers.
I had a series like that, none of which were my fault. This was back in the 80s. The first wreck was when a 90 year old lady turned left in front of me on a major street. I hit the brakes so there wasn’t much damage and no one was hurt. The second was a few months later when a man who spoke no English ran a stop sign. Again, I hit the brakes so there was little damage and no injuries. The third time, a couple months later, I had gone to a party at a friend’s house which was on the curve of a major street. I parked at the bottom of the curve but when I got out, I thought that could be dangerous in the dark. So I moved my car under a streetlight. A little while later we heard a crash. I said “fuck, that’s going to be my car”. Of course it was. A drunk driver had hit the car and knocked it into the streetlight. I was just never meant to have that car. 
In the service we had a saying:
The older I get, the better I was.
True dat.
On a solo boating trip, in a lake, Christmas eve, I encountered “the splash”. I still have no idea what it was, but here’s the story.
It was very foggy and I was apparently the only boat out that day. I was in the middle of the lake, miles from any shoreline and shut off the engine to enjoy the quiet. It was absolutely still and almost totally silent, with near-zero visibility. As I enjoyed the solitude there came a loud “KERSPLOOOSH!” a few yards from the boat. It sounded as though someone had cannonballed from a high diving board. The resulting wave rocked the boat enough I had to grab something to stay standing. It should be noted this is a 30 foot cabin cruiser, not a small rowboat.
After the wave passed, the water became still again and the silence returned. It was as if nothing had happened. Based on the size of the splash I would have believed a body had dropped from an airplane, but there was no noise above me.
Someone falling out of a nearby boat that I didn’t know was there? A giant alligator surfacing? A meteorite? Your guess is as good as mine. But it was definitely weird.
A friend of mine wanted a facial scar. He consulted with a tattoo artist/body modification guy and made an appointment. He says it was horribly painful, but he came away with a big bandage on his cheek.
It’s now three years later. The scar looked kinda cool for a couple years, but is faded to the point it is barely noticeable.
I accidentally punted a squirrel last year before the pandemic. I was getting into my car and got a text, so I paused with the door open and a particularly aggressive squirrel that wanted a ride tried to hop into my car. Without thinking I kicked out with my left foot, connected and the little turd when flying across my lawn with a squeal, then turned around and ran away. I was about to leave when I then found that my daughter had smuggled a rather large handful of pill bugs (roly polys) into my car with the intent to show her friends (they’d been in her pockets), so it took a while to find them and remove them. Some were on the back of my seat and getting dangerously close to my hair. So I start driving to work and there’s a freaking car chase on the highway. I can only assume they were looking for me and my bugs.
When I got to work, I found out that my boss was in town, which I hadn’t been expecting. So I had to explain to her that I was late to work because I’d kicked a squirrel and had to hunt down contraband insects for a while and nearly got arrested and I hoped I wasn’t too terribly late. She has an amazing sense of humor.
Crustaceans.
Great story! I sympathize with the girl collecting roly-polys.
We’ve got a poltergeist.
A very, very focused one, which only cares about my phone.
I’ll set it on the dining table - not especially near the edge - and after a bit it will simply fall off and onto the floor. It’s done this from my nightstand, as well.
Less-interesting theory: I have it in an Otterbox Defender, with the hard plastic clip case in place. There’s little friction between that and table surfaces - somehow, minor vibrations from people walking, eating, etc must cause it to shift position by tiny bits until it finds itself near the edge of the table. If the table isn’t quite as level as it appears, that would explain why it never slides the other direction and against my plate.
I took a lot of photos of pill bugs last year. Turns out that, like snowflakes, no two look exactly alike. (Unlike snowflakes, they aren’t fun to catch on your tongue.)
When I first bought our current house, I moved in first. I was there alone, no pets or other people yet, minimal furniture and possessions. At about 11PM I was in the bedroom and from somewhere in the house a heard the “sproing-rrrrrrrr” sound one of those spring door stoppers make when you accidentally kick it.
I turned on every light, searched the entire house and found no unlocked doors or windows, and no living creatures that could have sproinged that thing. I still have no explanation.
Reminds me of this research study I once participated in on regional variations in linguistic patterns. One of the questions was “What do you call this creature?” Various options including pill bug and roly poly… But when you clicked on the picture the name of the image was “roly poly.” Like okay, research noobs, try not to unduly influence your participants!
I had been living in my new place for just a few weeks. Everything seemed fine. One of the neighbors had even assured me that “nothing ever happens here,” except for a small fire some years back.
Around 10pm one evening, I’m lounging on the couch when I hear a terrible crashing noise from the rear exterior of my place. Has the hot water heater exploded, I wondered? I looked out one of the rear windows and saw nothing…but I heard several frantic voices and could clearly hear one of them calling 911. The police and paramedics arrived very soon thereafter.
I was subsequently able to piece together what had happened. Two brothers on a third-floor balcony of the apartment complex behind my place had been imbibing alcohol and arguing. One of the brothers had been sitting on a ladder. The dispute was settled when the other brother pushed him off the balcony. The body sailed over the retaining wall separating the properties, falling in the exterior of my unit in the proximity of a lemon tree. The “terrible crashing noise” had been the ladder hitting the metal balcony floor. I did not hear the pushed brother landing on the concrete path behind my place. In any event, he was dead (and had a broken leg).
There followed hours of police follow-up, flashbulb photography, forensic chatter and stale coffee. The brother who pushed was taken into custody. I remember hearing his gravelly voice asking repeatedly for water and saying “I’m going to hell!”
I had already gone to bed when I received a knock on my door around 1:30am. I gave the apologetic police officer routine information (e.g., name, phone number, and that I had seen nothing) and went back to bed. The police wrapped up their investigative work around 3am and departed.
The next morning, I examined the rear exterior of my unit. There was a small amount of paramedical debris which I cleaned up, as well as an approximately 3”-4” diameter bloodstain on the ground which I did not clean up. One small under-branch of the lemon tree was hanging, broken.
It was my welcome to the ‘hood.
I wrote a short letter summarizing the evening’s events for the landlord’s benefit. I ended it with a suggestion that he might want to consider including warnings about falling Armenians in future rental agreements for the area.
A year or so later, I saw the movie Kick-Ass which opens with an Armenian falling from a skyscraper. Are Armenians falling from great heights some kind of known phenomenon?
Oof. How tragic.
I had some vaguely similar night noises. Eventually I managed to get out to the right part of the house quick enough to turn on the light and observe a 12" rat scampering away from the stuff he’d just knocked off the counter. He disappeared into a closet and then when I got to the closet he was simply … gone.
Which tiny crevice in the walls or baseboards or plumbing chases he’d used to escape was a mystery. But escape he had.
This has happened previously, and again today. I hear a small crash right in the room I’m in. Something has obviously fallen, but it isn’t clear exactly what. Kid is at school, cat is asleep in his bucket, and the adults are all in the laptop zone. Only thing left are the plants.
My wife finally figured it out this afternoon. We have spider plants in the window. They have grown so much that the roots are pushing the soil up out of the top of their planters. There are decorative glass beads on the top of the soil. Occasionally one of the beads will fall off and hit a metal vent on the floor, making a much louder noise than one would expect from the size of what’s fallen.
Too bad we’re not into supernatural stuff, because I’m sure we could have had loads of fun trying to appease the ghosts.