Mine:
In 2006, while in a Usenet newsgroup I learned that a small plane had struck a building in New York. The pilot was unknown. At that point the pilot could have been anyone in the world. About 20 minutes later we learned the identity of the pilot.
The pilot? Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle. The newsgroup? The Yankees baseball newsgroup.
I once had a bad night where I thought that I had a rat sleeping with me. At first I thought it was the cat, but eventually remembered the cat had recently passed. At which point rat became the obvious choice because I had recently heard BIG rats in the attic. Eventually I got brave enough to leap up and turn on the lights but nothing was there.
Meanwhile, many many hundreds of miles away my long term childhood friend WAS sleeping with a rat. Actually a stray ferret that entered their house and was sleeping with him. He thought it was their cat and tried to push it out of his bed. At which point it attacked him with great vigor.
Both things happened within the same hour of the same night.
Speaking of rats… I was over at a friend’s place a few years back and he was showing me around. One room on the 2nd floor had an open window with a tree branch just a few inches away. He scoffed at me when I suggested rats would use that to get inside. He’d lived there for 15+ years and had never seen a rat. He calls me the next day to say he saw a rat in his house that night.
Once my wife and I were taking a walk through a park, and we came upon a single playing card lying upside-down in the grass. I said to her, “Queen of Spades” and flipped it over with my foot. Sure enough, that’s what it was.
Unfortunately my amazing psychic abilities haven’t translated to picking lottery numbers or anything profitable.
I accidentally sat down right next to a friend of mine from high school at a Haagen Dasz ice cream shop in Nagoya, Japan, 5 years after we’d graduated from our DFW area high school.
A little bit creepier:
I got to school late once in high school. No one was in the lobby, which was normal given the time I arrived, and I knew this. Yet, without having seen anyone yet or heard anyone say anything, I thought to myself “Something terrible has happened. I think somebody died.”
It turned out this thought was true. It was the girl I usually stood at the bus stop with every morning. She had been murdered by her boyfriend. He killed her because his (other) girlfriend told him to. He and the other girlfriend are still in prison.
I use both of these examples in my critical thinking class, btw, to help illustrate how bad we are at assigning the appropriate amount of significance to such coincidences (the appropriate amount being, of course, zero).
My sister and I ran into each other once on a CTA bus in Chicago, when neither of us lived anywhere near Chicago, or know the other was in town, or used the bus when we were in town.
I’ve posted about this before, I know.
My family lived, and I grew up, in Ohio. My sister got her first boyfriend when she was in middle school and I was in high school.
A few years later I was in college in Texas and the (now ex-) boyfriend was a freshman at a college in Iowa. Early on in my sophomore year, I befriended a freshman at my own school, a student from Colorado. A couple months into the year, he was heartbroken after suffering the (inevitable, of course) end of his big high school romance- his girlfriend had found someone else, a new classmate she’d met after leaving Colorado to attend a college in… Iowa. My sister’s ex, of course.
And thus was all of our Ohio-Texas-Colorado-Iowa circle closed.
I’ve mentioned this one before.
I was driving across country. I stopped in a store in New Jersey and bought a used CD. It was the recording of a David Cross comedy show. It had been released a few years earlier and it wasn’t anything prominent.
A couple hours later, I was driving along and listening to that CD. I saw a store and felt like taking a break. So I pulled, parked my car, and walked inside. And as I entered the store, they were playing the exact same section of that same David Cross CD on the store’s PA system.
Keep in mind, this was not some popular hit album. I would have been amazing by the coincidence if I had somehow found out that somebody else on the other side of the country was playing this CD at the same time I was. So the odds that I would actually meet another person playing this CD are literally astronomical.
In 1996 I stopped outside a radio shack in NYC because there were Norwegian flags in the decorations (and other flags) and said to my American travelling companions “Hey, Norwegian flags!”. Just then a Norwegian expat and her friend visiting from Norway walked by and heard me.
In the early 90s my family ran into some old friends in an amusement park in Sweden. We also once stayed in a camp ground cabin in Northern Finland and found an entry in the guest book from a class mate of mine.
I once called my best friend, back in the days people used land line phones and confused the hell out of him when I started talking. He hadn’t heard any ring, but had picked the set up to call me.
Back in about 1970, my new wife and I were tent camping near Sundance, WY. All while we were setting up camp, I kept feeling like we were being watched (the campground was otherwise empty). I made a big production out of taking my .45 auto out, clearing it and sticking the mag back in.
We turned in for the night, but both of us had the jitters. After about an hour, we both jumped up, folded everything into the car and split for the nearest motel.
A few days down the road, I read in a newspaper that an escaped murderer had passed through Sundance that day. ::cue eerie music::
Back in the early 2000s I worked for a high tech company in Ottawa that also had an office in South Portland, Maine.
I drove down for a few days on business; we were frugal in travel expenses and it’s only about 6 hours anyway.
During the drive down, through the beautiful Green Mountains in Vermont, radio reception was quite sporadic. So, for the drive back I figured I’d pick up a couple of CDs to alleviate the boredom.
The first one I popped in after leaving Portland was “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne. I used to have the album on vinyl but had never bought the CD: great album BTW.
Anyway, by the time the eighth song on the CD came on I was finally just on highway 295 and on my way out of Portland. So, the eighth song, “Nothing But Time,” starts with these lyrics: “Rolling down two ninety five out of Portland, Maine.”
I laughed quite a bit. I was familiar with the song and lyrics, but I totally forgot this was coming up and the timing was just perfect.
I was returning from a vacation in Glacier National Park. There was some road kill in the middle of Highway 2. Just as I was able to identify it as a skunk, KOFI started playing Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road.
An old favorite of mine from about a year ago:
I needed an allergist so I called up someone who could make a recommendation. We chit chatted for a few minutes and while I was on the phone with her a co-worker told me the other line was for me. I told him to take a message and I’d call the person back later. I wrapped up my current phone call and with the allergists name and phone number I proceeded to call them to set up an appointment.
But they didn’t answer with something like “Dr Smith’s Office” or “Allergy & Sinus, how can I help you”. Instead the receptionist said ‘I’d like to place an order’ like three times I said ‘huh’ and she just kept saying ‘I need to place an order with you’ that’s when I finally realized that the person on the other line was her. She was calling to place order some stuff from my store.
Complete and utter coincidence that she was trying to get a hold of me while I just happened to be on the other line getting a recommendation to call her office.
A year later and I still go to that office to get my allergy shots and they still order stuff all the time.
Another odd one. In that huge Ongoing Online Dating Thread that died down a while back was a doper I had no idea was from my city, she was also on OKCupid so she was always popping up in my searches. I put the two and two together literally minutes before I sent her an email on OKC.
I am from a small town in Virginia. About 12 years after my high school graduation I was in the lobby of a hotel in Florence, Italy. A young man of about my own age called my name from across the large room. When I figured out it was my attention he was trying to get I went over to him. I did not recognize him at all but he said we went to high school together and had enough details about who I was and our high school that I believed him and kind of finessed not remembering him.
Running into someone from my small high school in a faraway country would be a coincidence by itself but the other coincidence was that the whole city was plastered in posters for the movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley” which is about a man who goes to Italy (Matt Damon) and pretends he went to school with someone (Jude Law) who does not remember him but takes him at his word.
*****SPOILERS for “The Talented Mr. Ripley” follow!!!
However my alleged classmate turned out to have really been my classmate (When I got back from my trip I checked the yearbook and sure enough we did go to high school together.) and did not murder me, so the coincidence was only partial.
The reminds me of one about my grandpa and his brother. During WWII they were both in the war and would send postcards to each other. My (great) Uncle, for whatever reason, would always check the date they were postmarked. He said it was usually about a week or two back. One day he noticed that the post card was dated from previous date. Of all over the world that the two of them could have been, they were right down the beach from each other. I think my Uncle said he walked down to go see him.
Oh, here’s another weird coincidence. In the late 1990s I went to a conference in Reno. I had booked what was known as the “high-tech shuttle” at the time.
So, a van picked me up and there was another guy in the van.
Me: “Where are you going?”
Him: “The airport.”
Me: “Me too.”
Me: “What terminal?”
Him: “3’”
Me: “Me too.”
Me: “What airline?”
Him: “US Air.” (Or whatever it was.)
Me: “Me too.”
Me: “Where are you going?”
Him: “Reno, Nevada.”
Me: “Me too.”
Me: "Are you attending the ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) Conference?
Him: “Yes!”
Me : “Me too!”
Me: “What’s your name?”
Him: “Doug.”
Me: “Me too!”
In 1993 I was living in Reno, Nevada and went to Bahrain on vacation (yes, I am weird). I had a customer who was Saudi and he came across the causeway to meet one evening for dinner at his cousin’s house in Bahrain.
In 2004 my wife and I were in the domestic terminal waiting for a flight in Vientiane, Laos. We met an American couple there who were ex-pats in Saudi Arabia and were on vacation in Laos. My Saudi customer from 11 years earlier was now their next-door neighbor.
Post snipped.
Back in the 1990s I was in my apartment listening to a CD by a band called 9.0. My roommate had gone to NAMM and I had it cranked. 9.0 was an awesome band but never got any airplay, they were not really known.
Anyway I was doing the dishes and turned around and went to the living room because I heard my roommate come in.
Craig Small, the guitarist for 9.0, was standing in my living room. I said “Holy shit you’re Craig Small.” He said “Holy shit, you’ve heard of my band.”.
My roommate met Craig at NAMM and he came back with my roommate, though I don’t remember why Craig came to town.
Slee
When I was in, maybe, sixth grade, my family took a trip to New Orleans. While there, I picked up a book about Marie Laveau, the famous voodoo priestest. It caught my imagination, and I decided to try to make one of the voodoo charms described in the book. I gathered bits and pieces from around my room, sewed them up a little bag, and called it done. I realized though, that I hadn’t dedicated it to anything. I decided to dedicate to one of my old friends who had an interest in the paranormal. She had moved away in third grade, and I hadn’t seen her since.
Five minutes later, she called me. She had decided on a whim to look up my number in the phone book.
Relevant background: I grew up in Green Bay, WI; both of my parents are Wisconsin natives. I’ve lived in the Chicago area since getting out of school in '89.
In 2002, my wife and I went on a long driving trip, hitting the Grand Canyon, Vegas, Yosemite, and Yellowstone. We were in Yellowstone over the weekend (early August), and, on that Sunday morning, we were driving around the park, looking at various sites.
We arrived at one place – some sort of rock formation – and parked my car. It being early on Sunday morning, ours was the only car in the lot. We walked the few minutes from the parking lot to the formation, looked at it for a bit, and headed back to the car.
When we got to the lot, we saw that another vehicle – a conversion van – had parked in the lot. An older couple was walking from the van towards us. As they passed my car, they looked at it, made some remarks to each other, and continued to walk towards us. As they approached us, we had this conversation.
Woman: “Is that your car? We were wondering who would have Illinois license plates, and Green Bay Packers license plate frames.”
My wife: (points at me)
Me: “That’s me. We live in Illinois, but I grew up in Wisconsin.”
Woman: “Where in Wisconsin?”
Me: “Green Bay.”
Woman: “Oh! Well, we’re from West Bend.”
Me: “I know where West Bend is. My mother’s from Port Washington, that’s not too far away.”
Woman: (gives me a long look) “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”
Me: “Townsend.”
Woman: “June?”
Me: “No, Joan. June is my aunt.”
Yes, she’d gone to high school with my aunt, 45 years earlier. 