What is the strangest coincidence you've ever experienced?

In My Humble Opinion
101
  1. One time I randomly decided to look something up on Wikipedia. It was something physics related; I think it was quarks. We’ll pretend it was quarks. I went over to the main page of Wikipedia, which always has a featured article, which that day was on: quarks.

Over three million articles, and the featured article was the one I was looking up.

  1. Ocean Born Mary is a famous legend in my home town in New Hampshire. The house she supposedly lived in and haunts still stands and is still in quite good condition. It’s a couple of miles from my mother’s house, and directly on the back route from there to one of my old aparments. (The fact that she never lived there (it was her son’s house and she apparently didn’t like him and probably never even visited) has never really bothered anyone.) My elementary school librarian lived there until she died in the late nineties, when it went up for sale.

My family joked a little bit about buying it. It’s quite a large house, so we could all fit there, and if we pooled our money… . No, even then we couldn’t come close to affording it. It sold, and we forgot about it completely.

Fast forward a couple of years. I’m doing a three week workshop in Minneapolis with some fellow graduate students. One of these grad students has a friend in Minneapolis that she’s staying with during the workshop. The rest of us spend one night there before moving on to our own housing.

During dinner conversation, the woman kept mentioning her rich sister’s “haunted house”. Every once in a while she would mention something about New Hampshire, but I didn’t notice any connection. Until she mentioned my home town (population ~5,000). When I mentioned that I grew up there, she said “Really? My sister lives there.” “Huh,” I said. “Where?”

“In the Ocean Born Mary house!”

102

I was looking over this thread, trying to come up with one.

Can you have a coincidence that lasts you entire life?

My mom and my dad got married on a 19th.

I was born on October 19th.

My dad died February 19th 1991 (Aged 40, Colon Cancer)

My dad’s mom died in the Summer (June or July) on the 19th. I believed she died in the early 00s.

My Mom remarried on a 19th.

I think there are a few other 19s that I always forget, whenever I tell this, but I think you see the trend here.

I don’t subscribe to numerology, but I think anyone would agree that 19 has some meaning in my life.

103

Met a guy at Epcot the other day, at the Japan pavilion. We both study Japanese and have been to Japan. He goes to Boston University, and I graduated from Boston College. We both have ancestry from Sicily. Not the most amazing, but pretty neat at the time.

104

Back in 1997 my dad drove to this crappy little computer part store here in Richmond and while he went in I waited in the car listening to the radio. I remember this it because it was the first time I heard about Princess Diana dying in a car crash.

In 2007 I drove to that same store to buy some memory. I walk back to my car, crank it up, and the radio starts talking about how Princess Diana died ten years ago that day.

The really cosmic part? I’ve only been to that store twice in my life. On those two occasions. Exactly ten years apart to the day, as it happened. And I swear I didn’t plan it out that way!

105

I was born and mostly raised in a very large city (4th largest in the US, I think it is…something like that) in Texas. My grandmother’s married name was a bit unusual, a rather long French name that I learned to spell by age 4 because no-one else outside the family knew how to. :stuck_out_tongue:

She was the only listing under that name in the entire phone book for that city of millions.

When I was a teenager the family relocated to an area very near a very small town (as in 300 pop. or so small) in Oregon. My grandmother was asked several times while shopping in that town, “Oh, are you related to so and so?”

Turns out, there were a few dozen people with her last name in this tiny burg. Never found out what, if any relationship was involved, but what ARE the odds? :confused:

Another one; when my late husband and I were relocating 3 yrs ago from Texas back to Oregon (driving) we stopped about our 2nd day out (still in Texas) and pulled into a motel to spend the night. He was driving the moving truck and I was driving our SUV.

After we checked in, I went to start the car to bring it around to where our room was, but it was dead. Nothing. Great. Crap.

The next morning, we called a local shop to come tow it in and replace the battery (which we’d already figured out was the culprit…a pretty new battery, too, but it wouldn’t even hold a jump. Weird)

They replaced it and then called and said, “You were driving this thing on the HIGHWAY?” Yeah, so? “Well, the 2 front tires are REALLY bad…I can’t believe they didn’t explode!”

This place did NOT sell tires, btw, and when we got there to pick it up, we saw they were right…both tires had all the signs of being on the verge of blowing out. They were not new tires but they were not that old and had seemed fine before the trip (we checked the vehicle over pretty well beforehand). The guy who drove me back to the motel in the car wouldn’t go over 20 and was still worried about a blow out.

We went elsewhere in town and got the tires replaced (and those guys were shocked at their state as well! :eek:)

One coincidence I am VERY grateful for, since there had been no sign (odd noises or vibrations) of tire problems and yes, we’d been booking it at 80 or so for 8-10 hrs a day and would have been back on the highway the next morning if that almost new battery had not died when it did.

I shudder to think of what might have happened to me and my daughter (who was riding with me) in a front tire blow-out at highway speeds. :eek:

106

My first week in law school:

I met a nice young lady and we did the introduction thing. Turns out both our fathers were judges, and we wondered if they knew each other. She was going home that weekend and said she’d ask her dad if he knew my dad. She comes back Monday morning and I inquired if she’d asked her dad about mine. She said, "I asked him if he knew your father, and his response was - ‘Know him? I was in his wedding!’

Turned out that those two had been officers in the conference Methodist Youth Fellowship together and in the same law school class at the same university. And that 27 years later their two children wound up attending the same law school that their fathers had attended.

107

When I was in junior high there was a girl who was very hateful to me. If there is anyone I can truly say I’ve ever hated it would be this girl “jane”. She moved away before we went to high school and I never heard of her again, or known of anyone with her last name.
My stepdaughter became extremely close friends with a girl she went to high school with. Same last name as ‘jane’, but we live 170 miles from where I grew up. I asked her one day about ‘jane’ and yes, she’s a close relative.
__

A certain number has showed up repeatedly, call it 121. When I lived in a trailer park in town, the house number was 121. When I got married and moved the new house number was 121. The last four digits of our phone number were 0121. After I divorced I rented a P.O. Box. The randomly assigned box number is 121.

My sister has two children from two different marriages. Both of the fathers were born on the same day of the same year.

I was at a Christmas party years ago talking to one of hubby’s co-workers and the co-worker’s new girlfriend. I was telling the story of how my son had totalled my car, and that there was a girl riding in the car with him who had been reaching over and jerking the wheel. The co-worker’s girlfriend blurted out “That was my daughter!”.

108

Perhaps you should have bought that memory sooner. Then you could have planned the second trip out. :wink:
No, but seriously, I can see something like that happening.

109

I just experienced something very eerie.

The clock on my car is literally fast, by about 3 minutes a year. I don’t bother ever resetting it (it would take a while); I just get used to it. It’s around 38 minutes now (yes, I’ve had it since it was new in '98). So a couple nights ago I’m driving past a bank, and think the time on their clock seems off. I go and look at my car’s clock, and it’s within 2 minutes of the bank’s. I double and triple checked to be sure, and yup, the clock was wrong, and nearly agreed with mine.

How does a bank’s clock get over a half hour different from reality, I drive by and notice it, and it’s about the same as my own car’s inaccurate clock? I swear it felt like a systems glitch in the Matrix.

110

In the ‘small world’ category:

I got on a bus in downtown Chicago, and at the next stop my sister gets on. Neither of us live in Chicago, or knew the other was vistiting, or even use the buses when we ARE there. I can’t even remember why I was on the bus, but it must have been a really unusual situation to be on it all, let alone have my sister show up.

Similarly, a good friend of mine vacationed in Swtzerland, was hiking on a mountain trail, turned a corner and met up with a woman who worked in his lab a couple desks away.

111

So I’m at work one day while off from college for the Summer and I help this pretty cute girl with a computer problem. We chat and she leaves.

The next day my sister tells me she’s going to Blockbuster, did I want to come with her? My sister and I aren’t really close. Birthdays, holidays, weddings, even then, that’s all the time we really spent together even though we lived in the same house. This was probably the first time we did something together since we were kids.

So who do I see running the register at Blockbuster? The cute girl from the day before. We end up dating for almost a year.

112

I was reading the newspaper, a few years back. Quite by accident , I happened to think about a man (a professor at the university I attended as an undergrad).I had only known the man briefly (he was an astronomer), but he was well known in his field.Why I happened to think of him, I have no idea. Then I turned the page-and saw the obituary notice of professor Strong. Weird! :eek:

113

I thought of 2 more.

  1. My brother and sister-in-law met in their freshman speech class in college. The first day of class, the teacher had everyone stand up and give a brief introduction - name, where they were from, etc. My brother stood up and mentioned he was from MA, which perked up my SIL’s ears. She stood up soon after and admitted she too was from MA.

Turns out, not only were they both from MA - they had both attended the same church, just at different times. They knew and had hung out with a lot of the same kids, but had never met each other before. They had travelled over 1000 miles to meet each other - when they lived less than 20 miles apart growing up.

And here’s an additional twist. My brother was born in November, and so therefore my mom had a decision which year to send him to kindergarten. Since letting him go to school early meant he would be in the same year as his older brother, she decided to have him go the next year so they would have separate identities. My SIL was born in December, but her parents chose to let her go to school early. Only, when she graduated from high school she decided to take one year and go to a language school. If my mom hadn’t kept my brother back, or if my SIL hadn’t gone to that 1-year school, they might have never ended up in the same freshman speech class.

  1. When I first started dating my bf, I was telling him about this former pastor I had dated briefly a few months before. Suddenly my bf’s face got quizzical and he started filling in details I hadn’t told him yet. Turns out, my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend started dating my ex-boyfriend right after I had broken up with him. So needless to say, when I met my bf’s ex (they are still friends) we had a lot of fun exchanging stories about the ex-pastor!

(Confused? not surprised).

114

I was watching Hollywood Squares one day and Flo-Jo was on. I’d never heard of her, so I asked my mom who she was. During the very next commercial break, there was a news blip saying she had died.

115

I love delicious little coincidences.

A few years ago I set out to open a new checking account. I noticed the bank employee helping me had the same last name I had years ago. I’d been divorced for a long time and hadn’t had any contact with the ex but I still went by my married name. The lady helping me laughed and said she had a sister-in-law with the same name. It hit me that I’d had a sister-in-law who shared my name, so I asked her if she knew my ex-husband.

She was his new wife.

Of all the banks in town I chose the one my ex-husband’s new wife was in charge of! I think she was uncomfortable but I thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

116

My junior year at Ohio University in Athens, I formed a band with some guys in my dorm. They became my best friends, and remain so to this day. There has never been a year since we graduated (now over 35 years ago!) that we haven’t got together to make music together again – either for informal jamming, or for the past 15 years or so, recording.

One of our members, Pete, sort of came in and out of our orbit over the years; he went off to graduate school in Texas, lived in Florida for a while, etc. So there were years he wasn’t a part of our gatherings and we fell out of touch.

Circa 1985, it had been awhile since we had last heard from him, but I got wind that Pete had returned to Athens. I had planned a trip to Cincinnati to visit two of our other band members, so I decided to go there by way of Athens to see if I could locate Pete. I had no contact information for him, but made as many inquiries as possible when I arrived to see if I could turn him up. But all of my efforts were doomed to failure.

So I reluctantly gave up and decided to leave Athens and head for Cincinnati. Because of the way routes are arranged, one has to go east to go west, passing through the downtown on a one-way street before catching the main route west out of town.

I set out to do this, but at the last possible instant I realized that I could avoid going through the downtown by taking a street two blocks shy of the main one. I hung a very quick left and headed up this street, which runs up a very steep hill before going back down to connect to the road leading out of town.

I had just crested the hill and was heading back down, when to my complete astonishment there was Pete, walking down the sidewalk of one of the cross streets! We had a joyous reunion, and he ended up accompanying me to Cincinnati, where we surprised the hell out of our other fellow band members.

If I had done a single thing differently in the hours leading up to that moment, and if I hadn’t got the last-minute inspiration to take that alternate route, we never would have found each other.

I don’t really believe in predestination or any of that weird stuff, but I have to admit that this incident tested my skepticism. It’s still one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me.

117

No, onto a belfry.

118

Back in the '80s I was riding my mountainbike (touring, with all my crap on the back) on this jeep trail in this area called Chicken Corners west of Moab, UT. Not quite the middle of nowhere, but pretty out of the way. A VW van came bouncing down the trail (lord knows why they used them) and I stopped and chatted with the driver and a young lady in the passenger seat.

A couple weeks later I was on my mountainbike making my way through this canyon SE of Boulder, UT, on the Burr trail (before it was ‘improved’) and this little white pickup came up the road. Who else was driving but the woman in the passenger seat of the VW van in Chicken Corners.

I’d like to say we were destined to meet and blah blah blah but all I remember is her saying “Wow, you’re hard core!”.

119

I bowled in a Sunday morning league. Guys we were scheduled to bowl asked if they could have a makeup match some other time because they were going to be out of the state. We said fine. On a well the hell not moment, my girlfriend , another girl and I, went to the Mardi Gras. In the first bar, I ran into the guys from the league. They put us up for 3 days. It worked well.

120

I was in Metropolis, Illinois for work (distribution).

On Sunday morning, around 8:00am I receive a call from one of my team: His van is busted, had a U-joint shear off on his right-front tire. I hop in my car, go to his hotel - yup, his U-joint is busted. On a Sunday morning. Freakin’ wonderful…

So we went to O’Reilly’s Auto Parts which was, fortunately, open. Took the busted piece of iron to the desk, asked them if they sold them (this was for a 1995 (or so) hollowed out GM van) - they referred me to the junk dealer, who wasn’t open until Tuesday.

However, a man was there at the register who stopped to listen to our story. Turns out he knew of a blacksmith in town and gave us his address. We drive there, knock on the door knowing that the guy is in church or getting ready to go.

Surprise! He was there. Even bigger surprised, he made us a new U-joint for ten dollars*. On Sunday morning. In Nowhere, Illinois. And all because we happened to meet another customer at an auto parts store who bothered to listen to our tale of woe after his sale was complete.