I met a guy by phone named Chris Reilly. He lived in Boston, I was calling from Chicago where I grew up. For some bizarre reason I mentioned that as a child I knew a kid named Chris Reilly–a stupid thing to even bring up, since there must be several thousand guys by this name. It turned out this was the same guy. It was a bit awkward because I remembered quite a bit about him even though we weren’t close friends, but he didn’t remember me at all.
How sad! Any idea whether it was someone related to you?
I’m afraid my astonishment overwhelmed my curiosity at that point and I failed to press him for added details. No, I’ve no idea who it was or how closely we might have been related.
I collect cookbooks. Old cookbooks, quirky cookbooks, and especially, old quirky cookbooks with a lot of hand-written notes, marginalia, newspaper clippings stuck inside, etc. Three or four years ago, I was browsing at a thrift store in a small town about 30 miles from my hometown. I found a neat old cookbook, dating from the early 1940s, with lots of clippings, old envelopes, and stuff stuck inside for only a dollar or two. Bought it, of course!
When I got home, I started leafing through the cookbook, peeking at the various “extras” in that book. Found a couple of letters that had been received by the previous owner - whose name was very familiar. Further reading confirmed that the cookbook had been owned by the lady who lived next door to my family when I was 8 and 9 years old. This lovely lady and her husband were childless, and became like another set of grandparents to me and my siblings when we lived next door. And now I have her awesome cookie recipes!
Those aren’t coincidences, dude. He’s stalking you! :eek: 
A guy I know was once at a dinner party in LA, and two people at the table got to talking about their childhoods. They’d never met before that night, but it turned out they grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. In the same neighborhood. On the same street. In the same house. And had slept in the same bedroom of that house, decades apart.
My wife and I are each the youngest of three children in families with two girls and a boy (different birth order, obviously), with Irish blood and lawyer dads, in small river towns with names shared by no other U.S. communities, and we ended up at the same small college.
Just last week I came across a note dated seven years before we moved to our current street, mentioning that street as the address of a friend of my in-laws. I’d never heard of it before.
In college, I visited NYC and right outside of Grand Central Station bumped into a childhood friend whom I hadn’t seen in more than a decade, many hundreds of miles away from where we grew up.
My cellphone number, randomly assigned, has the same area code and three-digit prefix as that of my childhood home number.
One of my teenage son’s best friends now is a kid with whom he went to preschool but didn’t really get to know at the time. We didn’t realize it was the same kid until we saw a class photo years later.
A few years ago, I went to a football game with my friend Stan. We’d known each other for about 4 years at the time. We were looking for his family’s tailgate, easily identified by everyone wearing their family t-shirts, which were bright lime green. A few minutes later, I see my friend Marcus, who I was really good friends with in college, but hadn’t stayed in touch very well - and he was wearing a bright lime green t-shirt…
Me: “Hey, it’s my friend Marcus!”
Stan: “Hey, it’s my brother-in-law Marcus!”
Wha…? Okay - so Marcus had married Stan’s sister. At my college (where everyone involved here went), that’s not all that unheard of, it’s a pretty small campus, and coincidences like that happen all the time. So we start catching up.
Marcus: “So Munch, what do you do these days?”
Me: “Well, I help coordinate housing agencies around the state of Indiana put together applications for a large federal grant program. What are you up to?”
Marcus: “Well, I help coordinate housing agencies around the state of Kentucky put together applications for a large federal grant program…”
You can’t say that and then not share!
Anyway, to make this post less pointless, I’ll share a story not from me but from my parents.
While my dad was in law school he made friends with a woman who he thought looked very familiar. At one point he thinks he’s figured it out. She’s Greek, so is my mom. But of course the logical next question from Friend is, where in Greece is she from? Oh, her family comes from a tiny town in the mountains (the current population is about 4500 but was probably closer to 200 when my ancestors left for America). Really? So does mine, says dad’s friend. They investigate further and find out that said friend is my mom’s second cousin.
At the time they were living in a different city from where mom grew up, also different from where mom’s family moved to when they immigrated to the US. Which brings me to another story.
Because it is also where dad’s family moved to when they immigrated to the US.
But not where either of them grew up, nor where they met.
Basically, my grandparents on opposite sides, who come from different cultures and religious backgrounds, and whose children met and fell in love hundreds of miles away, could have run into each other in the supermarket as kids. So I have a pretty coincidence-filled family.
My life is rife with coincidences.
The earliest I recall was a dream I had that involved a man climbing up a private property ravine behind our house and when confronted claimed to be epileptic - not drunk. In the dream the police come and take him away. I told my sisters about the dream because it was strange (I was about 7 at the time). That night two men in shirt sleeves in February climbed up the ravine. When confronted, one claimed to be epileptic but they were clearly drunk - I overheard that as the police took them away.
Late seventies I dated an impoverished hippy cab driver. We’d been invited to someone’s home for dinner a couple of hundred miles away. Boyfriend determined we needed the following: $60 to get to the friend’s home; something social to smoke; and a bottle of wine for the dinner. The next fare he picked up paid precisely $60 - and they’d had such a great conversation the fare ran into the house and tipped him a wee bit of smoke and a bottle of wine.
A few years later when I went west from Toronto to Edmonton driving an old pick up truck, I arrived in town needing gas and had only $0.32 to my name (I found that between the seats). I pulled into a gas station and two guys were filling their tank. They were friends from Toronto - neither of us knew the other was heading to Edmonton - and one happened to owe me $20. The first people I see 3,500 miles from home were people who owed me money!
I was watching a movie in the old VHS format and the credits rolled - then the next thing I knew was there was me!! It was before the days when they’d effectively thwarted pirating movies, and someone in my town had duplicated the movie on to their own tape, taping over where someone had recorded a game show I was on - then returned it to the video store - and I rented it. Weird.
When I met my now-husband we had so many coincidences that we were almost afraid we were related too. His cottage phone number was my childhood phone number, but for the area code. His bank card pin number (which we chose for ourselves): the first number is double mine; the second two are half of mine and the last number is the same. His roommate from university was a guy I met many years later and did business with - in a small town far from Toronto. He and I both lived across Canada in towns near cities - 3 years apart. His cousin used to talk about a friend of the family “Grandma X” - my real grandmother was Grandma X. His family 100 years ago lived in the same neighbourhood as my family back then - they certainly knew each other.
Some of these are freaktastic. Nothing interesting like this ever happens to me.
Just to make myself useful, 6 Insane Coincidences You Won’t Believe Actually Happened.
I forgot one - my randomly assigned parking card has 0 plus my exact birth date.
Hey, that’s kinda what my girlfriend does, too.
Not to call you out- but wasn’t Bin Laden not even brought up as being possibly involved until the next day at the earliest?
I remember seeing a story on the news not too long ago about faulty witness memory and one of the pundits brought up this bit of information. He used 9/11 as an example and specifically said people would often talk about their anger and a hatred at Bin Laden as they watched the news that day but Bin Laden’s name wasn’t mentioned at any point on that day.
A couple:
After graduation from high school, I went with my parents on a trip across Europe. I ran into a graduating classmate on the second day of the trip in London on a subway. Three weeks later, I ran into her again on the last day of the trip in Munich at the airport, about to board the same airplane home.
In late high school while working at a YMCA summer camp, I met a guy named Marty. After a few months of friendship, we were telling stories about our past.
He told one about being at a boy scout camp five years earlier and getting appendicitis on a camp-out. Another scout carried him out of the woods back to the base camp to get medical attention. That was me.
I told a story about a kid I met from a different YMCA summer camp who (accidentally, it turns out) took home all my Garbage Pail Kids cards home with him. That was him.
We’d met for the first time on three separate occasions over 15 years, all at various summer camps.
Identical twins separated at birth?
I got a couple.
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Friend of mine asks me to join a fantasy football league as a last minute replacement. I say sure, why not, and we go to the draft party in a town about a 45 minute drive away. Afterwards, as we’re leaving, a friend of both of ours (the only other person I knew in the league) asks if we want to meet up for drinks back in our hometown. Guy #4 overhears this and says, “Hey I live right by there, mind if I join you?” A few questions later, it turns out he is quite literally my next door neighbor, who in 3 years of living at that address I had never met.
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I’m sitting on the couch flipping channels on the TV one day when I start idly wondering what ever happened to an ex-girlfriend of mine who I hadn’t seen in about 4 years. In the exact moment that thought crosses my mind, I change the channel and * she is laughing at me on the television*. One near-heart-attack later, I realize I have just stumbled upon an old episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos where she and I were in the studio audience. As it so happens, I had never actually seen that episode before, and therefore did not know that there was an audience cut-away shot of her laughing, immediately followed by a wider-angle shot with me sitting right there next to her.
A year or two ago, I had to go and pay a friend some money I owed him, then I had to go and get new plates for my car. License plates here are three letters and four numbers. On the plates I was given, the three letters were my friend’s initials, and the four numbers were the amount I had just paid him, minus the decimal.
A couple months ago, as I was getting ready to leave for work, I noticed that the ceiling light in my bedroom wasn’t working. So, I made a mental note to call the property manager once I got to work and put a maintenance request in. Anyway, while I getting a couple things together to take before I left, there was a knock on my door. It was a maintenance man asking if I called about a light in the bedroom that wasn’t working. I told him I didn’t call, but was going to, but maybe someone else in the building had. He told me he had my apartment number and was ready to work on it.
Facebook regularly freaks me out by showing me intersections of totally different circles of acquaintance, sometimes not at all in a good way. :-/
- In 1999 or so, I was a regular poster on a particular message board online. Someone started a thread suggesting we do a group chat room just for members, and people started doing that. I popped in for the first time just to see who was there (I normally hate those things with a passion), and there were some witty, interesting people participating, so I hung out for a bit.
As is typical, we asked where the others lived and basic details about them. Upon hearing I lived in Seattle and was a single woman, one of the other women (who lived in Phoenix) said, “Well, a word to the wise! If you ever meet a dude named Mike Smith (totally not his name) who works at Software Company X, don’t date him! He’s a total trainwreck!”
I laughed and said, “Ha, I recently met somebody who works there, he probably knows this guy.”
The woman in Phoenix proceeded to tell me horror stories about this guy, who was an Air Force buddy of her husband’s, and who had mooched off their hospitality for months after being discharged from the AF, and who had done horrible things to his ex-wife, including abandoning her and their very ill twin babies and moving to Seattle on a whim. Then she said that Mike was a volunteer with the “Q Patrol”, a group that walked the streets helping ensure the safety of the gay community in Seattle’s Capitol Hill area, and this his nickname was “Jumbo” (not his actual nickname).
“Holy shit! That’s the guy I met who works at Software Company X!”
“No way!”
“Way! And he IS a douchebag! He’s the ex-sorta-boyfriend of my friend B. She got pregnant accidentally by him and he refused to help pay for an abortion.” I’d only met the guy two or three times, and didn’t know his surname, so I didn’t immediately twig to this being the same trainwrecky guy when Phoenix woman mentioned his name.
- My family was on a day excursion to the San Juan Islands with a family friend who owned a really nice boat. We were just motoring around, enjoying scenery, fishing a little. We stopped at this teeeeeny little island. Like, it’s not much bigger than a city block, but it has a public restroom for boaters. I think our friend said it doesn’t even have a name. Marine toilets being as fickle as they are, any time you can avail yourself of the facilities on land, you do it.
We poked around on the beach a little, picking up shells and stuff. I picked up an oddly-shaped rock; it was pinkish and flat, shaped kind of like a fat boomerang. I turned it over and, painted on it in capital letters was … my name, JEANINE. Not a common name at all, and there are a number of variant spellings. Weird!
- I was a travel agent in my early 20s, and worked with my Mom in the agency she owned. The manicurist at my hairdresser’s was going to travel school, and she asked if she could do a short internship with us, and Mom agreed. After several months, Yvonne and I decided to go to Las Vegas for a weekend.
Her boyfriend said he would drive us to the airport. They came by the office to pick me up, and we zoomed up to my house to get my suitcase before heading to the airport. As we turned down my street, he said, “I’ve been down this street before.” Pulling up to my house, he started laughing. “Dude, I’ve been in your house! I have partied in your house! I once passed out after barfing all over the bathroom floor in your house!” Turned out he’d been good friends with the children of the former owner, and they threw EPIC parties.
- Another online world meets real life story: For about nine years, I’ve been a very active member of a totally different online community than the one in my first example. There’s a married couple who are members; they actually met through the board. He’s USAian, but has lived in Prague for many years; she is English, and she moved to Prague to be with him. I’ve never met either of them in the flesh, but I would very much like to.
I ran into a high school friend, Kyle, whom I hadn’t seen in years, and while we were catching up, he said his best friend, Darby, had moved to Prague. I remarked that I knew a couple who lived there, and wouldn’t it be funny if he met them?
A few days later, my Prague friends spontaneously rang me up on Skype, and we chatted for a while. I remembered what Kyle had said, and so I jokingly said to them, “Hey, I found out a HS friend of mine has moved to Prague, so if you meet a 30-something guy from Seattle named Darby, tell him I said hi! I’m sure you’ll run into him.”
“We actually do know a guy from Seattle named Darby! He’s a friend of a friend, and we just met him last week. We’re trying to get him to join our role-playing game group!” Yep, it was the same Darby.
I dialed a cell number for a business call and I recognized the voice of a friend of mine as the person answering the phone. Thinking I had dialed my friend by mistake, I identified myself and told her I had mistakenly dialed her number instead of the number I was meaning to call.
She seemed completely puzzled, then managed to explain that she had found the cell phone she was answering earlier in the day and hadn’t been able to identify the owner. She had been waiting for them to realize their phone was missing and call their own number so she could arrange to give it back.
This is in NYC. Talk about synchronicity.
I grew up in a smallish town in Ohio - lived there from about six to fourteen. Then I moved to Atlanta.
Fast forward about 15 years - I’m in a company training seminar, mostly attended by employees from the metro Atlanta area. There are a few long-distance folks, including a woman from Kentucky. During the obligatory (and much-hated) “tell us who you are and where you’re from”, she mentions that she grew up in a small town in Ohio.
Now you can probably guess that she grew up in the same small town in Ohio as I did, but that’s not the weird thing. The weird thing is that she and I had lived on the same street.