I once got a wrong number.
Entirely random; the caller, in a city of 6 million, had no clue who I was or any intention of calling me. The number wasn’t even similar; crossed wires or something, or total brainfart while he dialed.
The call was for someone I happened to know. A client, a business acquaintance. Totally random wrong number.
In a city of 6 million.
Around late 2007, I started doing some contract work for a government agency. To do that, I needed their service desk to set up an account for me to log into their network.
Very simple task, but it confused them terribly and they didn’t get it done until we asked them several times. I found out the reason a few days later:
Someone else with exactly the same name as me (first name and last name) started working at that agency on exactly the same day that I requested the account.
One day my sister was telling me her 20th High School reunion was coming up. She wasn’t planning on going, and mentioned there was only one old friend she would care to see.
That made me start thinking about the one old friend from High School, I would want to see. I hadn’t thought of her in years.
The next day, my husband and I took our son to a touristy town about 3 hours away. I saw my old friend there.
Also…
There’s a family that lives in our not very large town, that has our same very unusual last name. The son has the same first name as my son, and the dad has the same first name as my husband.
Dubious? It’s true. The phone was on the wall outside the market formerly located right here. All I can figure is that the coins didn’t get deposited into the coin box but were stuck in the mechanism. Anyone who pressed the coin return lever would have probably got the change. I’ve never taken apart a Southwestern Bell pay phone to see how it worked.
Once, when my brother and I were idly rolling a pair of dice, he started rolling double sixes, one after another. After about five of them, we started to get giddy. At ten, I dragged Mom and Dad into the room to watch. At twenty, I was reminded of part of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Were we dead? Finally, after a streak of twenty-seven double sixes, my brother rolled something else and we came back down to earth.
I’d call that inexplicable without invoking such things as loaded dice (and I’m pretty sure these weren’t–they were from our Monopoly set) or Infinite Improbability Drives.
About a month ago, I was awakened by the phone ringing. I don’t have a phone in my room, so I stumbled out to the living room. It stopped ringing just as I turned the light on, so I looked at the caller ID.
I had evidently slept thru another call, at 1:14 AM, listed as ‘private caller’. The call that woke me up was at 1:27, and it was my dog’s breeder in Virginia. I couldn’t figure out WHY she would be calling me at 1:27 AM, so I called her back by just redialing the number in the ID window. It rang & rang, then went to her answering machine. I hung up and went back to bed.
The next morning, I e mailed her first thing and said I hoped nothing was wrong, that I had tried to call her right back and didn’t get an answer. She replied right away and said she hadn’t called me at all… she had been THINKING about me, PLANNING to call, but hadn’t. She had heard the phone when I called her but didn’t answer it.
When I checked my caller ID that morning, the two calls from the middle of the night were gone. In their place was ANOTHER call at 1:24 (between the times of the other two) from ‘private caller’.
Never did figure that one out.
I believe that a lot of inexplicable things happen because of how we perceive reality. Our minds are very involved in constructing the world around us, and I think this can result in some seemingly inexplicable things. I don’t suppose this explains everything, but some of it anyway.
As for my own uncanny experience: I remember one time I was in the bathroom, probably brushing my teeth, I turned the water on in the sink and then turned it off. When I looked down I saw the the last drops of water had fallen on the stopper (one of the kinds that sits in the drain and is opened and closed with a little lever) in the shape of a smiley face 
the stopper made the circle of the head and drops of water formed the eyes and mouth. Not only that, but it was facing me. My mom saw it too, as I recall.
It really isn’t inexplicable, the water would just have to fall in exactly the right way, no big deal, but it surprised the hell out of me. It’s like wunderkammer’s 27 double sixes in a row, entirely possible, just surprisingly improbable.
Funny: As soon as I saw “Tenerife” and “toy plane” I immediately thought of the KLM/Pan Am collision, and thought you had had some foreknowledge of it. When did this happen, just out of curiosity? Your toy plane disappearing, I mean; I know when the real planes collided.
I wish I could count how many times my wife has had somthing inexplicable happen. For example, she is in another city, traveling for business, and begins thinking of someone from her past, who soon strolls by her booth (she does art fairs.) This scenario or similar has happend so many time in the twenty years I’ve known her, that I am no longer surprised. I just tell her to trust her gut, because it’s usually right on the money.
As for myself I have had one inexplicable event. (Maybe there should be a term for it.)
It’s hard to write about, so I’ll make it brief. On March 30th, when I was 19, I drove my best friend Mark to the bus station so he could go off to boot camp. It was that time of our life, and his decision was the service, while mine was to goof off for as long as I could.
That spring I did a lot of camping. I had just gotten home from a three or four day trip, and I had called a friend who wanted to go camping for another few days, so I was running around the house grabbing stuff and generally rushing around. I may have been trying to get out of there before my parents got home, but that’s not a memory, just a sense of urgency that I seem to recall.
Anyway, as I was running past the front door to head upstairs, I saw my parents coming up the front walk. My mom was in front, walking with a cane, with a bandage around her ankle, and my dad was behind her carrying something.
I opened the door to let them in, and instead of asking them “What happened?” what came out of my mouth instead was, “Mark’s dead isn’t he?”
I have no idea where that information came from. My parents later said they were walking up the front walk trying to figure out what the hell they were going to say to me.
The rest of the weekend is a blur, and I’ve never gotten over the sense that some giant cosmic mistake was made when a gentle soul like Mark had his life cut short at 19.
I’m sorry to hear about that, sincerely sorry. Also sincerely spooked: was there anything about your mom having her ankle bandaged that could have clued you in–like did you half remember that Mark might be in the car with them that day, and you guessed there was an auto accident–or was it completly unrelated?
mailman, that’s incredible. I’m really sorry to hear about the death of your friend. So it was just a coincidence that your mom had gotten injured?
I often feel like whenever something massively bad happens like that, the sadness is so overwhelming that a bit of it must radiate backwards in time as well as forwards.
I once called for my Mom, got a wrong number, and she was there! Now granted, it was a college campus with a common prefix, but the chances were still, what, one in ten thousand?
I was once the victim of a bank robbery.
Hardly inexplicable, as I was a teller at the time. Stick with me for a moment.
About two weeks later, I had a dream just before I woke up. In the dream, the same guy came back in and robbed me again. That day, the same guy came back in and robbed me again.
A week after that, I had a dream that he came in again, but the police were waiting for him and caught him. That day, I got a call from the police. The guy was caught robbing another bank in a neighboring town.
A couple of weeks after that, I had a dream that a bunch of people were robbing us. But they didn’t want to take the money, they just wanted to fondle it a bit. When I got into work that morning, the auditors were waiting at the door to the bank.
:eek: That is really spooky! I have things that disappear. Sometimes they never come back, but sometimes they reappear in unlikely places. One time I accidentally knocked something off of a table. I distinctly heard two things hit the floor, but I could only find one. The other thing I knocked off, a stupid ostrich toy from Kung Fu Panda, was just gone. I looked all around the table and under the table and it wasn’t there anywhere. A few hours later, I looked at the table, and there it was, sitting on top of the table.
I’m still trying not to freak out.
For my Smaller Girl’s first birthday, I got her a set of chime blocks (basically like a little xylophone, but the individual notes could be separated and mixed around). They came in a yellow box, with their own sticks, which fit inside the box.
Well, we’re not the world’s most organized family, and there were two (later three) Registered Forces of Chaos running around, so of course it wasn’t long till those sticks got lost, and stayed lost (we managed to keep all the chime blocks intact though). Maybe no more than a couple of months.
About 6 months later, I finally accepted reality and bought some more sticks. These were just like the old ones, but a few centimeters longer, so they no longer fit in the box. So they were kept alongside the box. We kept slightly better track of these, so they didn’t get lost.
Soon after her second birthday, we had to move house. We packed up all our stuff, looking for spare pieces of things as we went. We did not at any time find more than two xylophone sticks (the new ones). We unpacked at the other end. We did not at any time find more than two xylophone sticks (the new ones)
A few weeks after the move, the Smaller Girl was running round with the xylophone sticks, and did something bad which necessitated taking them off her (I forget what - probably trying to whack her baby brother in the head). She complained muchly. A few days later, I observed her running around with them again. Knowing her climbing prowess, I went off to the high shelf where I’d put the sticks to see if they were still there.
They were.
I took the sticks from her hand, and put them in the box. They fit.
I have NO idea where they went during that year, or how she got them back again. I would have sworn no toy got through the moving process without my seeing it on the way to a box.
But I wish she’s use her Lost-Thing-Finding-Powers to bring back our camera which she walked out of the room with four months ago and hasn’t been seen since.
Yeah, I think I’ve mentioned before that I have a moving black hole in my house. I will look and look and look for something–say, on my desk. Then I will accuse someone in my family of stealing it. Then it will reappear, on my desk. Just where I was looking for it. Sitting there and being quite obvious.
But that shoe…that was very very strange. We only ever opened that cellar to let the electric guy read the meter. That happened once a month, if that. (Lots of months, they just estimated.) The door was outside. I’d worn the shoes earlier that very day.
My wife has a shoe story like that. She looked high and low for one of her shoes, at her office, in her closet, under the bed—everywhere. She was a bit pissed–her attitude was like ‘how do you only loose one shoe?’ Finally she gave up.
In her closet is the trap door to our crawl space. On a wild hunch I opened the hatch—and lo and behold there was her shoe! How did it get there?
I thought maybe our daughter was fooling around in the closet and opened it, but that seemed unlikely as it is a very difficult hatch to open. And when I innocently asked her about the hatch–my daughter seemed genuinely suprised that we had a crawl space and a hatch. So it is possible that she opened it, or maybe one of her friends did…but that is the only explanation that made any sense. But we really don’t know how the shoe got there. But I think my daughter is smart enough that if she dropped one shoe down there, that she would have dropped the other there too, to hide ALL the evidence. That way my wife would think she just lost or misplaced the shoes. But one shoe?
So she can certainly relate to your one shoe story
Okay well…
This didn’t happen recently, but it is still pretty creepy, and I’ve been living with it for 14 years. My parents divorced when I was 2 years old, and when I was 5 I remember my dad bringing me over to this woman’s house (at the time i did not understand, but this was his new girlfriend) and introducing me to a little girl.
When he did this, he said “Katie-bug this is Katlyn, shes about your age”… I looked at him and said “Daddy, she has my name!” Turns out we were both “Katlyn” our first names spelled in the same exact odd way… Well that wasn’t all… we have the same middle name too!! We are both Katlyn Ann, spelled exactly the same… Okay, this is too cool I remember thinking, I didn’t really get how odd it was until later on in life…
Well the more time we spent together the more our parents mentioned, and a few years later I remember getting all our similarities.
Me - Katlyn Ann, May 26th
Her - Katlyn Ann, May 24th
Our parents only started really seriously talking when they discovered they had such an unusual coincidence, the girlfriend is now very obviously my step-mom and Katie and I are super close!
A few years ago I received a notice from an insurance company threatening to take me to court regarding a motor vehicle accident they claim I caused. I hadn’t been in any accidents. My name is not too common, although I lived a town away from my ex-mother-in-law who had the same name (first name variation, she had an ‘e’ at the end of hers), even though we were a generation apart and it was very unusual back then. My last name is not too common around here either. The insurance company said the accident was in a town in another state, months before. Out of habit, I flipped back to that month on the calendar and…I had been in that town on that day, enroute to my parent’s house for a visit.
I checked my credit card bill from that month and…we had stopped for gasoline in that little town off the interstate! I asked my kids if perhaps I had lost my mind and we had been in some type of accident that resulted in a head injury and caused amnesia. They said no, we just got gas and kept going. When I called the insurance company, they insisted that it was me involved in the accident. I wondered if maybe a security camera had somehow caught my vehicle’s license plates and attributed it to an accident that happened after we left or something, but they said they had a police report that I had signedm, and this is the town I gave as my address. I contacted my insurance company, who said not to worry about it. I didn’t hear about it again.
Months later, the local newspaper carried a story about a man who saved a toddler who had fallen in an irrigation ditch. His girlfriend was quoted talking about what a hero he was. Her name? The same as mine. I guessed she was the one the insurance company was looking for.
So we had been driving through the same small town in another state on the same day.