There's nothing more chilling than a "glitch in the matrix" moment. From eerily accurate premonitions to unexplainable time jumps, these Redditors have stories that will have you questioning everything. Some things in life just don't have any possible explanation, and sometimes, we have to put aside rational thought and accept that maybe—just maybe—our reality isn't set in stone.
1. Deja Vu
When I was in high school, my mom, my little sister, and I would eat dinner together every evening and tell each other about our days. At the time, my sister was young and still in elementary school. On one Monday during summer break, we were all having dinner and my sister told us about how she and our next-door neighbors were playing with their new cat when it got loose outside.
They had to spend the whole day looking for it. Fast forward two days later, and my sister told me the exact same story she had told two days prior...My mom and I looked at each other funny because we both clearly remembered the cat story. When we asked her if she had mistaken the day, she just gave us this blank look and said had no memory of it. But it got even creepier.
When we called our neighbors to ask them about the cat incident, they told us all of it happened that same day, Wednesday, and they weren't even in town on Monday. So my sister told us a story two days before it happened and had no memory of it. How is that possible? Where was my sister on Monday? We still don’t know what happened.
2. Two-Faced
One day 16 years ago, when I worked at a gas station, I was watching a teenage couple get slushies at the back of the store. I was taken aback when the young man looked toward the till, because I noticed that he had a very severe facial deformity. But then, when I kept watching, I noticed something bizarre. When he looked to the girl, he looked perfectly normal in profile. Confused, I assumed I imagined it the first time.
Well, they eventually came to the front of the store. Then his face was distorted again, like a terrifying gargoyle. I kept looking at the girl to see if she could see what I was seeing but she didn’t seem to. And every time he turned to her, his face was normal. Trust me—this was like a Halloween mask. It was not an expression anyone could possibly make.
It was SO DIFFERENT and terrible. Anyway. As he looked at me and finished paying, I felt like a massive black cloud of hate inside me, like an actual thing. It was like I had drunk a glass of liquid hate. Then they left. I’ve never been able to explain it.
3. Mystery Man
My mother did all her OB-GYN appointments with a doctor in downtown Austin. He was on the fifth floor of this hospital building and had a long-time receptionist named Alison. I remember going to her with her appointments when I was little, and my mother would always make a game out of finding the office and being in the waiting room, which was colorfully decorated with a forest scene.
Alison was a super sweet woman who was basically a babysitter for us kids, too. She would read books to us, provide coloring books, and occasionally even listen to our dreadful knock-knock jokes. We all referred to her as Alison Wonderland. Anyway, years down the road, I got married and pregnant and started searching for an OB-GYN since I had moved back to Austin recently.
My mother suggested I see if that doctor, who was super young when I was born, was still in business. Well, I could not find his name in the hospital directory, so I figured I would just swing by the office and check. My mother happened to be in town (she had moved years ago) and came with me. We both joked about it being so familiar but in reversed situations now.
As we reached the stairs, we ran into an eerie problem. There was no fifth floor of this hospital office building. Odd. We both must have misremembered it. We knew it was on one of the top floors, so it must have been the fourth. Nope, not there. We thought maybe we were in the wrong building...except we parked in the same parking garage from 20 years ago and walked the same route.
That doctor does not exist. Never did, apparently. My mother and I are the only ones who remember him and Allison Wonderland. We have asked around, including among the hospital staff. We even looked up our birth certificates, which are new copies, and it just lists "attending physician." One of my childhood memories is fake.
4. A Bad Trip
Back in early July, my family was going on a road trip to Montana to visit our grandparents. Prior to the trip, I had a horrible, horrible feeling about going. I kept having flashes of car accidents in my head, and I was sure that we were going to get in one if we left. It was so strange, because I have a pretty severe anxiety disorder, but this didn’t feel like my anxiety at all.
I actually never have anxiety about road trips. I love them! Anyway, we left Saturday of that week. I had told my parents I had a bad feeling about driving up there, but they dismissed me as being anxious. I had honestly never felt so certain about something in my life. Getting into that car felt like signing my death sentence.
So, we get about six hours in, and at this point, I start to think I was being ridiculous, and a wave of calmness just washes over me. This is where stuff gets strange. My dad passes an underpass and everything just shifts. I feel like I saw everything in slow motion for a whole four or five minutes. My parents were joking beforehand, but their faces moved so slowly, and then the light in the car started to shift.
This was the scary part, because I thought I must have been going insane. For a few seconds, there was a huge illumination of light into our car, and I looked at my family, and could not tell who they were or what they meant to me. And then, it’s like everything just came back. The light shifted back, and I knew who everyone was.
Still, it felt like something imperceptible had completely changed. I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of the past few minutes. When I reached back to remember, I saw blood, our car, and another minivan in total shambles on the side of the highway right beyond the underpass, and mangled bodies—and that wasn’t all.
I remembered sensations I should not have known: what spattered brain matter looks like, the smell of something burning, the way I couldn’t breathe. None of it had ever happened, yet I remember that the car in front of us had switched lanes even though there was a truck in front of us, realized it at the last second, and hit us with a lateral impact.
I have no history of psychosis, and I have never been in any sort of car accident. This wasn’t PTSD, and I have never had anxiety over being in the car in any sort of way prior to this. And maybe I could have just brushed it off, but I still think about it when I’m driving in my own car. It’s made me a more cautious driver. I don’t know what happened, it was just a weird situation.
I remember having the distinct feeling in that moment that I had passed on in some sense. I am not a spiritually sensitive person by any means, I am a scientist at heart, but this truly was something I cannot explain.
5. The Dinosaur Room
Before making an offer on our house, my husband and I went to a house viewing with our three-year-old daughter, whom we'd left with a babysitter the first time we saw the house. As we walked in, I told her she could choose a bedroom. She said, "I want the Dinosaur Room!" and ran upstairs. OK, three-year-olds say random stuff, we thought to ourselves. A moment later, she called out, "Here it is!"
Sure enough, the closet of her bedroom was covered with dinosaur stickers. My husband, the realtor, and I were all freaked out. She acted like she knew the stickers were there, but none of us remembered seeing them before and we certainly hadn't talked about them. The house was vacant and immaculately clean since it was an estate sale. We left the stickers up.
6. A Double-Edged Sword
My friend Ian and I had been on Cape Cod for three days, staying at my grandfather's beach house. We started drinking around 11 pm. By 1 am, we had chatted, smoked, listened to music, the usual. We were feeling good, but not hammered, and decided to go outside for one last smoke before bed. On the way out, we spotted my Grandpa's collection of swords and knives on the wall of his garage.
Being buzzed, young, and stupid, we decided, "Let's have a sword fight." Smart right? We took a couple of swords off the wall and began dueling immediately. A little clanging and a few good laughs later, we found ourselves on the main road. It was empty at this hour, just a streetlight and the two of us, "dueling" away.
This is where things got weird. After a few more minutes of silly swordplay, we found ourselves in an intense battle. Soon, the battle turned from friendly idiocy to something more intense. I have no idea what started it, but we were really having it out. I lunged, he lunged, things escalated, and it was quickly out of hand. Then, out of nowhere, I got the better of him.
I'm still not sure how it happened, but my final attack ended up being much more than I had bargained for. He went pale after my final thrust, and my hands shook as I released the sword, but it didn't hit the ground. I never meant it; but my sword ran straight through his abdomen. I stood there in disbelief, wondering how this happened.
After what seemed like forever, with moaning and me in shock, I ran for help. I rushed into the house yelling. My grandfather came out of his room, and I told him to call 9-1-1. I then ran back to the street to stay with Ian until someone arrived. Law enforcement showed up first, then an ambulance. After they saw what had happened, we were rushed to the hospital and taken into the ICU, where we were split up and I was forced to wait.
After a couple of strenuous hours, a doctor and a policeman entered the waiting room. I expected the worst...and I was right. Ian had passed on from massive internal bleeding, and hemorrhaging in his liver. I went outside for a smoke, still trying to comprehend what had happened. Midway through my smoke, a man approached me from behind, asking for light.
I nodded, took out my lighter, and faced the man. The man I faced wasn't who I expected. It was Ian. He looked at me, puzzled at my hesitation and shock. I lit his smoke, speechless, and immensely confused. "You alright dummy?" he said. I looked around, and we were back on the main street swords in hand. "Let's fight coward."
He swung his sword around in the air, then smacked me on the arm, jolting me back into reality. I took a drag of my smoke, picked up my sword, and parried his second swing. I wasn't myself, and he knew it, so we went back to the house, watched TV, and passed out. I didn't tell him what I had seen until years later, and even then, he didn't believe me.
He still teases me about "murdering" my best bud, and calls me "the swordsman" whenever we drink together. And that's my glitch.
7. Shadowy Figure
I remember when I was around seven or eight, I had pretty bad sleep paralysis. One night, I went to bed and at some point, I began having what I thought was an episode...but on top of not being able to move or scream, I started hearing static. That's when I realized this time was different in the worst way. Looking at the foot of my bed, there was the shadow of an adult figure just sitting there.
I know it's common to see and hear things when you have sleep paralysis because your mind is going into self-defense mode. But what freaks me out about that night is that I later fell asleep and dreamt that I was in that exact situation again...only, I was able to move and project my voice that time around. I really couldn't explain it; it was just so bizarre.
I completely lost it and started throwing everything around the room, kicking and screaming. The shadow got up, opened the door, and left. In the morning, I woke up and my room was a mess. The covers were on the floor and my bedroom door was open. There was something about that dream that always felt so real to me. 20+ years ago now and it's as fresh in my mind now as it was then.
8. Two Roads Diverged In A Wood
This happened last night while I was on the phone with my girlfriend. I was telling her about my day and ended my sentence with, "It shouldn't be like that." Then, I heard static and my voice echoing an alternate version of that sentence: "It shouldn't be that way." The phone call went back to normal and my girlfriend couldn't remember which one she heard first.
Did I glitch out to another parallel universe where I chose to end my sentence with the other words?
9. Blink And You’ll Miss It
Eight years ago, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment by myself with two cats. I had a girlfriend, who I’ll name Elsa for this story, who lived 45 minutes away, on her college campus. Most weekends, she would drive into town and stay at my place until she had class again on Monday. We did regular things, as we didn't get to see much of each other.
So, here's the scene. It's Saturday night, 11 pm. Elsa and I are sitting on the couch, watching a movie—I can't remember which. We are dressed, sober, and alert, as we slept in that morning and had plenty of sleep. We are chatting, laughing, talking. The TV is illuminating our immediate area, and I kept the light on in the kitchen to provide some ambient light for the living room as well.
My cats are asleep in their favorite chair, all is well. Everybody is safe and comfortable. Suddenly, without any kind of warning or inkling, the “Jump” happened. You know when you're watching dialogue in a movie, and they're using two cameras to film? When they switch from camera to camera to capture the one speaking, it is seamless? With no clipping, interruption, fading, or transition effects? It was that sudden.
We were having a good time together in the living room when in an instant, I found myself sitting on the foot of my bed, clothes removed, in the dark. For about one half of a second, a million thoughts entered my mind. Had something fallen off the wall and hit my head? Did I have a seizure? Was I dreaming the whole time? Where is Elsa? Then the scary part.
I turn to my right, and Elsa is also sitting on the foot of the bed next to me, clothes removed. Her eyes are the size of golf balls and she's trembling. I realize I am as well. I try to speak and ask her if something happened, but I'm so frightened. I only stutter. After looking around the room and realizing we are alive, she managed to ask me what happened.
I didn't want to answer, in case it was just me, and I didn't want to come off as nuts. I just looked at her. After a pause, she started asking me again if I had turned off the lights, or removed our clothes, or if I knew what was going on. I didn’t. Neither of us had experienced grogginess or confusion before the event.
Furthermore, we didn't experience any sensations other than fear and confusion after it. No aches or pains, no bumps, bruises, or cuts. I reach for my phone to call my mom and see if a doctor would be appropriate. I notice that it is not 11 pm anymore. Now it's 3 am. In that sudden instant, that instantaneous change of scene, four hours had passed.
Everything in the house had been turned off, and we had been stripped. We went to the ER, as my mom's fear was a gas leak. No signs of toxins or injury were found on either of us. Elsa made an appointment for a CAT scan, which also came back as expected. I explored possibilities like a gas leak, poisoned consumer goods like our soda or fast food, neurological malfunctions, and more.
But the one thing that always bothered me was the fact that Elsa and I lost and acquired the time at the exact same instants, four hours apart. Neither of us witnessed anything that the other didn’t. And there were no lingering effects. For weeks I kept bringing it up with her, just hoping one of us would remember something. I browsed forums from all types of sites searching for answers.
Every time I brought it up, Elsa would get scared at the memory, and beg me to just let it go. I couldn’t. I'm no writer, so I'm sure I left some things out that would have been helpful in understanding the magnitude and surrealism of this event and how it affected Elsa and I. Somebody, tell me what happened to me.
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10. A Premonition
This happened well over a decade ago, but I was so freaked out by it that I still remember it vividly to this day. When I was around nine or 10 years old, I had this bunk bed with a ladder that would hook onto the metal base holding up the top bunk. To be honest, it was kind of a hazard, but I survived, so I'll call that a win. Anyway, this one day, I was at my friend's house, chilling in her room with her as we watched one of those infamous early 2000s TV shows.
I think it might have been The Amanda Show. At some point, I began to drift off to sleep. When I was in that weird twilight state between being asleep and being awake, I started to see what I can only describe as a movie in my head. I could tell I was at least partially awake because I was aware of my surroundings. I could hear the chirping of my friend's guinea pigs in the background and the soundtrack of the TV show.
The images I was seeing had this super surreal quality to them. They were transparent; like I could see through them to the darkness behind my eyelids. I saw myself in them too—I was at my house, in my bedroom. My friend was standing on the right side of me, my brother was standing on my left, and I was standing in front of the ladder to my bunk bed.
Behind me, there was a small table that stood against the wall of my bedroom. I saw myself start to climb up on my ladder and I realized I was trying to get something off of my bed since I slept on the top bunk. As I climbed the ladder, I began to fall backward, and I knew I was going to hit my head on the table. With a jolt, I snapped back to full alertness, sitting bolt upright in my friend's bed, breathing hard as my heart pounded in my chest.
I told my friend about what I'd seen, and after a few moments, I managed to calm down and put it out of my head. But then came the twist. A couple of hours later, we decided that I was going to spend the night at my friend's house. I called my mom to ask for permission before my friend and I walked down the street to my house to get my things.
I gathered up my clothes, pajamas, etc., and then went to grab something from my bed. As I was preparing to climb the ladder up to my bed, I froze. I realized that my friend was standing on my right, and my brother was on my left. Behind me was the little table. I hesitantly pulled the ladder toward me, only to realize that there was no resistance whatsoever.
It was completely unhooked from my bed, just leaning up against it. If I had begun to climb it before checking to see if it was properly hooked to my bed, my weight would have pulled it backward, and I would almost definitely have hit the back of my head on the little table behind me. I went and told my mom about the incident, still in shock.
I didn't know how my ladder had come unhooked from my bed since it was securely fastened that morning when I'd left for school. My mom looked at me with an expression between shock and horror. She revealed to me that she'd taken down my ladder earlier that day while I was at school because she was afraid my little brother would try to climb up onto my bed and fall. When I'd called her to let her know I was coming home to get some stuff to spend the night at my friend's house, she'd put the ladder back, not realizing that it wasn't hooked onto my bed.
I had no idea before that day that my mom had a habit of removing the ladder from my bed when I wasn't home.
11. The Pen Is Mightier
A few years ago, I made a pen pal from another state through a website for that sort of thing. We talked a lot, with very extensive and specific letters, for about a year and some months. She told me about her childhood, her high school experiences, and what she was going through at the time. Her family, her house, her city; everything.
One day, she tells me that she was going on a vacation and couldn't send letters, so she sent me her Instagram handle in case of an emergency, or if I wanted to talk to her. Honestly, I had tried to find her before on social media, but her name and surname were too common. We were very close, and I didn't like talking to my pen pals on social media, but one day I wanted to tell her about an accomplishment I made.
So, I go to the username she sent me, but it didn't seem very active. She had no bio, no profile pic, and only one photo. I recognized her face, because we sent pictures of each other. I open the photo and see it was from 2016. It had so many comments. Weird, as she had almost no followers. I thought maybe this isn't her main account anymore.
But then I open the comments. All the comments were from family members and friends she had talked to me about. They were all giving their condolences and saying how much they missed her. I didn't know what to think, so I tried to look up what happened to her. Apparently, she’d been murdered in early 2017…the year we started writing to each other.
I was thinking it was a bad joke, so I kept on writing letters as if nothing happened. I asked her specifically about 2017 though, if it had been a good year or not. She told me a lot of things that happened that year, and that she went out with a creepy guy for a while. After that, I got too freaked out and I stopped writing to her.
She stopped writing to me too. But it still haunts me, and I still don't understand what the heck happened there.
12. It’s Always The Last Place You Look
Every night before I go to bed, I watch TV. Then, when I turn the TV off, I put the remote on the nightstand next to my bed. One night a few months ago, I did just that. The next morning, I went to turn the TV on while I was getting ready for work, but the remote was gone. I looked everywhere for the remote and it was nowhere to be found.
It bugged me to no end that I couldn't find the remote since I knew, without a doubt, that I had placed it on my nightstand the night before. Flash forward a few months later. I got a new bed and was moving my old bed out of my room. It's also important to mention that I have a wooden bed frame that the box spring sets down into. As I was moving my old bed out of my room, I lifted up the box spring…and there was the remote.
Not like it had just fallen off the nightstand and landed under the bed on the floor, but it was laying in between the box spring and the wooden frame in the middle of the frame. The only way it could have got where it was would be that someone lifted the box spring and mattress and put it there, which I definitely did not do.
13. Bon Voyage
My family goes to a garden center near my town every winter for the pretty Christmas lights. Well this one year, the day before we were supposed to go, I had a dream that on our way, the tire of the car came off and we crashed hard. It was such a horrible, graphic dream. My mom’s legs had been crushed, my dad got stuck, etc.
Well, I told my mom in the morning and she joked that she’d check the wheels. She actually did—she said the car had felt weird and the dream unnerved her. Her discovery unnerved her more. Lo and behold, the tire is loose and needs to be taken to a mechanic. Really weird experience, especially as I’ve never had a dream feel so real before.
14. The Secret Garden
I did taekwondo for 10 years, and my dojo always had yearly summer picnics with food and games. One year, the picnic was held at a pavilion in a forest preserve. My friend and I got bored—we were 12 at the time so w were over the games, but not "cool" enough to hang with the teenagers. At one point, we decided to follow this tiny path we found leading into the woods.
The path came to a few crossroads, but we decided not to split up, just in case one of us got lost. We left stick markers at each crossroads in the shape of arrows too, just in case. We walked for what felt like hours, eventually having to cross several roads that cut through the woods. We eventually came across what looked like an old factory or mill.
After a while of following a stream while sweaty and mosquito-bitten, we came to an old, crumbling set of stone walls and an open half-dome structure decorated with colorful tiles that looked like the front altar of a church. We were fascinated. I was SUPER convinced we'd just found the ruins of some old place of worship that no one else had ever discovered. It had Latin writing on the sides, and very worn mosaics depicting the globe, a lighthouse, and a star with radiating beams of light.
AWESOME, right? After some time, my friend and I realized that our parents were probably really worried about us, as we hadn't told anyone we were leaving to explore the woods and we didn’t have cell phones. We made our way back to the pavilion as quickly as we could, following our little markers, and emerged from the forest to find my mom on the phone and her mom standing by.
They were obviously very relieved to see us, and also very upset that we'd just wandered off without telling anyone. Later that evening, when she had cooled down, I told my mom about the "ruins" we had found. I don't know if she believed me, but she thought it was interesting. Fast-forward about five years—I was in high school, and my friends and I were enjoying our summer by grabbing iced coffees and exploring our town's downtown area.
My hometown is a touristy little town on a river. One of my good friends suggested that we go to the "shrine." I had no idea what he was talking about, but he elaborated: "It's this little run-down Catholic shrine out in the woods behind the old government building!" Instantly, I thought of the "ruins" and was a little spooked, but I HAD to go see it.
My friends and I hopped a fence and hiked out into the woods behind the government building for about 10 minutes, and sure enough, there were the "ruins." They looked EXACTLY like how I had remembered them and they were right next to a stream like the one my friend and I had followed to get to it years prior. I told my friends the story, but they were shocked and confused.
They told me that there was no way we could have traveled through the woods to get to the "shrine," because it was in a tiny patch of forest that was bordered on one side by the government building, on another side by a neighborhood, and on a third side by the river. They even took me to the edge of the path that was behind the neighborhood to show me.
I didn't believe them, so when I got home, I pulled up Google Maps to do some research. Well, my friends were right. The patch of woods containing the "shrine" in my hometown was completely closed off by the river, the government building, and the neighborhood. There was no way we could have exited the pavilion into the forest preserve and ended up in the spot where the "shrine" was actually located by simply walking through the woods for an hour or two.
I still go and visit the shrine on occasion when I'm home. It's a cool place and it's still beautiful. I haven't reached out to my friend about my discovery, as we grew apart about a year after the fact. Maybe I should.
15. Road To Nowhere
When I was 19, I owned a car. I haven't driven since, because I never want to go through that ordeal ever again. I was driving at night, trying to get home from a friend's place. My friend lived out in the country, so I had to take back country roads home. I was never a proficient night driver, so when I got lost, I wasn't surprised.
I tried bringing up Google Maps, but I didn't have my 3G coverage out there. I decided that I was probably going in the wrong direction—just a gut feeling—so I got out of the car to look around. At the time, it was May, but when I got out, it was freezing cold. The weather had been mild all that week, even at night it was brisk at the worst.
The second I stepped out of the car, though, I knew everything was wrong. Not only was it unimaginably cold for that time of year, but the forest that was below the hill my car was on was gone. It had been there just moments before I stepped out, but now, there were four large houses where the patch of trees had been.
The houses didn't look like houses I was used to seeing in the area. They had domed roofs with a skylight in the middle, and what looked like elongated entryways at the front, kind of like your classic igloo. I started to panic, and called my dad, but the call went nowhere. I had forgotten that I lost coverage. Then, I heard a voice below me.
I looked down at the houses, and a small floodlight had been turned on in one of the front lawns of the houses. This guy was standing outside with a dog. He was talking to the dog in this language I had never heard before. I'm no linguist, and I couldn't hear him very well, but I swear it sounded practically alien. Lots of elongated vowels and “chirping,” for lack of a better word.
I was dumbfounded. Freaking out. At that point, I was considering throwing myself off that hill hoping to hit my head and wake up back in my car. I was fully awake though, freezing, and panicked. I rushed back into my car, and drove for another few minutes before passing by another car. That car, though, was totally not the kind of car we see today.
There was a weird symbol on the windshield, and lights accenting the chassis. It had no outboard mirrors, and didn't make a normal sound as it passed by. I can't even describe the sound it made. Not a “whoosh” like normal cars, it was almost like a slithering. I think the driver noticed that my car was super different too, because as I instinctively slowed down to get a better look, so did the strange car. That was it for me.
I stopped at the side of the road a few seconds after it had passed, and took a lot of deep breaths. I turned off my car and sat for a long time, but eventually worked up the nerve to get out of the car again. This time, it was barely cool out, and I could recognize my surroundings. I was a 20 minutes’ drive away from home.
I walked down the road a ways, around a bend and up another small hill, and could see a familiar billboard out in the distance. The problem was that I was way too afraid that if I got back in my car, things would change again, so I was determined to stay outside. I thought, just to be safe, I'll open the car door, and grab the flashlight I keep in the driver's side door compartment.
I walked back down the hill, around the bend, and the car wasn’t there. It occurred to me that after I shut the car door, I hadn't looked back at all. So maybe I had just forgotten its position. I kept walking back, but nope. No car. I checked my phone, and it had been hours now since I left, and my parents were surely in bed asleep, so I called my friend, and he picked me up on the road.
I told him some made up story about how the car had crapped out on the roads going through the woods, on a different, longer route back to my house. I was getting scared in the woods, so I decided to hoof it home, gave up by the time my folks had gone to bed, so I had to call him. He laughed at my misfortune and apparent stupidity, and said he'd help me look for the car the next day.
I led my dad and him on a wild goose chase for that car for the majority of the next day, before my dad gave up and said it must have been stolen, and reported it. To this day, the car hasn't been found, because as far as I know, it's on the side of the road in what I firmly believe to be an alternate dimension, a parallel universe, or what have you.
16. Dreamscape
This is still creepy and unexplained. For a bit of context, my girlfriend had long hair when we dated, then we drifted away for a while before we got back together in a relationship. At that point, her hair was cut short. During the relationship, I had a dream about her; however, the "dream version" of her was of her past self as she still had her long hair.
In the dream, she avoided me and acted really strange as if we weren't together, just like it had been when we drifted apart. I was weirded out, but not much since it was a dream, right? Wrong. I told her about the dream and turns out that she had dreamt the EXACT same thing as me, except for one crucial detail. Hers was two years BEFORE mine.
That was exactly during the time when she had long hair and we weren't in each other's lives. She told me she was weirded out because in the dream I acted like we were together. Our descriptions of both the place and the people in the dream matched perfectly. It was a house party with lots of people and some common friends. It also had lots of strange rooms with bizarre stuff like animals and random objects. Our descriptions of the layout of the rooms made it impossible for it to simply be a coincidence.
17. Back To The Future
I live in a very small town. We have a small grocery store, hardware store, you know the drill. I was done getting groceries and hopped in my car to head home. As I pulled up to the end of the driveway of the store, blinker on to get onto the main road, I see a big, white, lifted Chevy pickup driving toward me that I need to wait for.
I watch it as drives closer to me, remarking to myself that it looks so similar to my husband's, just older and rusted around the edges. It even has the same black emblem and large iron cross bumper. As the truck goes past me, my jaw nearly fell open. Staring at me intently was a man almost identical to my husband...but with a longer, greying beard, and grey hair around the ears.
I quickly gathered myself together and pulled out behind the truck and up to the stop sign that followed. He was staring at me still in his side mirror. Glancing away and then staring at me again. He took off like a shot the first chance he got, and I tried to follow to see which direction he took, but a car was coming and I couldn't get out behind him in time.
The truck sped off toward my road, but I don't know if he turned in that direction or not. I know that it's a little crazy, but I couldn't help feeling the total connection I feel with my husband when I saw his reflection in that side mirror staring at me. It gives me goosebumps to think about it because it was like he knew that I was me, and I was the wrong age, and that he needed to get out of there before I could follow him.
I got home and my husband was there, working in his woodshop. I told him about it and he chuckled and asked if he looked hot when he was old. I mean...he did if it was really him!
18. Time Bandits
This happened to my family. Thanks to time zones, it's got a lot of layers. So, my brother was taking a trip out west. From my dad’s perspective, he dropped my brother off at the airport before work. My brother was supposed to have over an hour of waiting time before his flight, followed by a four-hour flight. After work, about eight hours later, my dad received a phone call from my brother.
Again, from my dad’s perspective, my brother should have been at his destination for less than three hours at that point. But my brother took his flight, got to his destination, got picked up by his friends, went to dinner, spent the night, went sightseeing the next day, then called my dad that evening. He thought he had been there for over 24 hours.
The confusion ended in a weird argument, but both of them continue to stick to their version of events. They've kept things like printouts of flights to prove that they were right. This is how deep it got—they both firmly believe in what they experienced. Honestly, I have no idea how either my dad lost a day or how my brother gained one, but it creeps me out.
19. 23 Years In One Night
First, some details. I’m 22 years old. Currently, I serve in the Marine Corps. In April of 2019, I had what can only be described as a hyper-realistic dream. So much so that it feels more like a legitimate memory than a dream. It starts off with me waking up the following day and going about my daily routine. Slowly but surely, day after day passes.
Eventually, I get out and go to college. I propose to my girlfriend of eight years and get married the following year. Nine months later I have a son, Timothy. It’s one of the happiest times of my life. I'm going to school and working as a Lyft driver. With my VA benefits, things are at least moderately comfortable. My now-wife works a small part-time job as well.
About two years later, and we are expecting again. This time it’s twins. My children Johnathan (John) Matthew and Gracelyn (Grace) Marie are born. By this time, I'm finishing up my degree with only one semester left. We eventually save up enough to get out of our two-bedroom apartment and make a down payment on a nice four-bedroom house using the VA home loan.
I finish school and become a pastor. Day after day goes by. Eventually, Tim graduates high school and enlists in the Marine Corps like I did. When he graduates boot camp I admittedly tear up. John graduates with honors and gets accepted into a mechanic trade school. Grace, against what her mother and I advise, gets married immediately after graduation.
Being good parents, we accept her decision and I walk her down the aisle on her wedding day. Months later, I become a granddad. Holding my grandson for the first time is equal to holding my child for the first time. A year later, in 2042, my daughter is expecting her second child. One day, when she is seven months pregnant, I go to sleep and wake up. Like, actually wake up.
Imagine my surprise when I'm in my 20s and it's 2019 again. I never felt such loss before. Realizing the family I had didn't exist.
20. All That Glitters Is Not Goldfish
When I was 10, I had a pet goldfish disappear. I suspected it was my best friend's dog that ate the goldfish, as he was always very interested in the contents of the bowl. When I confronted my friend with this theory, he informed me, to my amazement, that I never had a goldfish. He was serious too; he wasn’t pulling my leg. So why did I have the bowl??
21. Ring Me Up
When my son was about four years old, one night he started hounding me to ring Nana. I thought it odd to begin with as he had never asked to call her before, so I just put him off for an hour or so until he came back and insisted that I call her. It turned out to be an eerie premonition. It turns out, she was sitting on her lounger experiencing a massive tachycardia event and couldn't breathe.
I called an ambulance and met her at the hospital. That same week, she had a pacemaker and defibrillator unit implanted to fix the problem. To this day, I cannot explain what drove him to get me to call, but I’m very glad he did. He doesn't even remember it.
22. Don’t Wake The Baby
This morning I wrecked my car. It was such a silly way to wreck, but it happened. I started up a hill and there was a truck and trailer turning up a hill in front of me. I was a good few cars lengths behind him, but I still slowed down because he was moving slowly. He quickly made the turn, I sped up, then he stopped suddenly leaving the trailer sitting out in the road.
I slammed on my breaks and tried to stop, but still ended up sliding into him. The next couple of seconds were a bit blurry, but I remember seeing the front of my car slam into the Mansfield bar as the back of the trailer came through my windshield. The whole crash only lasted a few seconds, but I know my car had gone under the end of the trailer, jarring the bar loose.
I saw it swing into my windshield, hitting me in the face. The next thing I remember is feeling the metal slam into my face and tasting blood. My face hurt badly and my two-year-old was screaming in the back seat. My head was hurting worse than any pain I had ever felt, but I had to make sure he was okay. I laid my seat back enough to twist around to look at him.
He was safely buckled in his car seat and had no signs of injury. He was obviously just scared as he had been asleep a few minutes prior to this. When he saw my face, he screamed louder and started crying even more. He was screaming “Mommy!” “Mommy!” Through sobs. He was crying so hard he was going silent between breaths.
The last thing I remember is hearing the guy I hit calling an ambulance. As I drifted off, I could hear my baby screaming but I didn’t have the strength to get to him. The next thing I know I’m waking up in a panic and my eyes pop open and I’m hitting the trailer again. But this time it was different. The trailer twisted up and swung in the opposite direction, throwing a riding lawnmower off into a ditch.
When the car was still, I quickly turned around and my two-year-old was still asleep in the back seat. I was so confused and scared. My first thought was that I had died, and I was stuck in a loop of crashing into this trailer. I know how silly that sounds, but that was the first conclusion my mind gathered. I sat there dumbfounded for what seemed like forever until I heard the guy I hit telling me to please say something or he was calling 9-1-1.
I turned to him and told him I was fine. There wasn’t a scratch on me and my two-year-old was sleeping peacefully in the back seat. This time several things were different. Instead of hitting him directly with the front center of my car, I only hit him on the driver's side. And I wasn’t injured at all, not a single scratch. Previously my face had been hit and I felt pains in different parts of my body.
There were vehicles stopped behind me and things continued as they normally would after a wreck. Law enforcement was called and they started cleaning up the accident. The lady in the car behind me finally got out and came to ask if my little guy and I wanted to sit in her car until all was done. I declined and she asked if I was sure I was okay.
What she said next made my blood run cold. She said she just knew I’d be hurt because she saw the trailer come through my windshield. As in, she’d seen the crash the way it happened the first time. When she looked at the front of my car and saw my windshield still intact, she too was dumbfounded. I don’t know if this was a glitch, a divine intervention, or a coincidence.
Did my mind simply fill in the blanks and she perceived the accident differently than what actually happened? I don’t know, but I’m so very thankful my baby and I are both unharmed.
23. Going Missing
One day, my mom and I decided that we were going to sleep in my room for the night. A little bit of background: The living room is in between my room and my mom’s room, and it’s impossible to get to the other without crossing the hall, obviously. So I was in my room and she was in the hall browsing on her laptop. She called out to me, asking me to tidy up my bed so she could come in and knock out.
I yelled back at her, saying, “OK cool, but I need to use your laptop, mom!" She said okay and that she had left it in the hall. Then she started walking towards my room. I met her at the door as I was heading out to grab the laptop from the sofa. As you’d expect, my mom was empty-handed. But before I reached the hall, she yelled out to me, “How the HECK is my laptop already on your bed?”
Apparently, it was in the exact place where I was lazing around.
24. Pressed The Reset Button Twice
I'd like to preface this by saying my husband is an electrical engineer and I'm a teacher. Also, we're not crazy people. So, back when my husband and I were dating, my husband was in a terrible car crash. His truck hit black ice and he slid into oncoming traffic. His truck was completely totaled. So was the other truck he hit.
The weird thing is, both he and the other guy were completely fine. Not a scratch on them. All my husband had was a bruise on his knee. The first responders were baffled, as were the towing company and insurance when they realized no one had lost their lives or been severely injured. Fast forward to a few days after the crash, my husband comes over to my apartment.
We're having a conversation about a university class we're both in and he casually asks when I got the flatscreen TV sitting on my dresser. At this point, I've very confused because I've had the little flat screen since I was 13 and I’d had it the entire year and a bit we'd been dating. I asked him what he's talking about, as I've always had that TV.
He told me to quit pulling his leg and asked me what I did with the old tube TV? I had no idea what he was talking about and told him so. He's convinced I had a tube TV. I proceed to get on Facebook and showed him a picture we had taken two weeks prior with the TV in the background. It's a flatscreen in the picture. His reaction was terrifying.
My husband goes white like he's seen a ghost and just stares into space for a minute. His eyes started to water. I asked him what's wrong and he said: "I swear to god, I'm not crazy. You've had a tube TV since we started dating. It was a tube TV when we took that picture." I brushed it off as his head being rattled from the accident and he didn't bring it up again.
However, anytime we hung out in my room, he'd always look at the TV just a little weird. Fast forward seven years, my husband and I have been married for a few years and decide that we're ready to be parents. I'm not on birth control and we decide whatever happens, happens. We're not actively trying, but not preventing it either.
So we're on vacation in Italy, wandering around Rome and I feel like garbage. I’d had my period the week before and it was the worst one I had had in my whole life. As we're walking around, I am suffering from back pain, chills, and horrific cramping. I go to the bathroom in a cafe and hurl my guts out, have diarrhea, and realize I'm menstruating, heavily.
Obviously I'm weirded out, since I had just had my period the week before. I clean myself up go back to my husband and tell him I think I need a doctor. I have a pretty high pain tolerance but this is insane. It's getting to the point where I'm having trouble walking and I'm starting to feel pain in my shoulders. I don't want to ruin our vacation, but I'm starting to really worry.
My husband is smarter than me, sees the state I'm in, and says I'm visibly paler than when I went into the bathroom, so he gets me help. 20 minutes later I'm on a stretcher and being taken to the hospital. An hour after that, I get the diagnosis, and it’s terrifying. I'm being prepped for emergency surgery as the doctor tells me I have a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.
I have heavy internal bleeding and if he doesn't perform surgery I am not going to make it. Six hours later, I wake up very sore and tired. The doctor tells me I've very lucky, and if I had waited any longer to seek medical attention I'd be a goner. My husband stays with me in the hospital the first night, then gets a hotel for the rest of my stay.
A week later we're cleared to fly home and I go through a grueling month of healing from the surgery. Two months after our return, somehow my husband and I get on the topic of fires. He goes on about the dangers of kitchen fires and I say, "No need to worry, we're all set with the extinguisher in the closet." His reaction freaks me out agan.
He looks at me like I have three heads and asks me what I'm talking about. I remind him about the extinguisher in the front closet where we keep the coats. We've had it for three years. He insisted we buy one when we bought our house. My husband shakes his head and tells me he has no idea what I'm talking about and we don't have a fire extinguisher.
I remind him about my memories of fighting about if we really needed one, where to put it, buying it from Home Depot, and also installing it to the wall in the closet. He looks at me with confusion and tells me none of that happened. I get up, go to front closet to show it to him, all the while cursing him for being an jerk for forgetting our two-week fight about it and lo and behold: no extinguisher.
Not only is there no extinguisher, there are no holes in the wall where I know we installed it. No fresh paint, this wall has never been touched...I insist he's moved it and fixed the wall and ask why in heaven’s name he would play such a stupid prank. He continues to insist we've never had one, let alone talked about getting one.
This goes on for several minutes. I'm approaching hysterics, telling him to quit playing with me when finally he says: "Now you know how I feel about that TV." We didn't speak about it for a long time. Later, he brought up his theory that perhaps in another timeline or dimension, or whatever you want to call it, we both actually passed after our related near-misses.
He thinks we reset like a video game and the TV and extinguisher are glitches. I don't know if I agree with him, all I know is that I have never been so rattled in my whole life and every time I get something out of the closet I'm overwhelmed with this feeling of wrongness. I know it should be there but somehow it's just not. I can't explain it. He says he will go to his grave swearing I had a tube TV.
25. Not Seeing Eye To Eye
A friend of mine, K, dated a girl, D, a long time ago. D was cool, and they dated for a while, but they eventually broke up. Sometime later, he began dating another girl, M. They stayed together for a couple of years, throughout high school mostly. At one point, I was hanging out with both of them at M's parents' house. M's dad caught us drinking, but he didn't care all that much.
Fast forward four years later—my friend and I were talking about the past, and he informed me that M's dad had passed from suicide. I was shocked; he was such a nice guy. We shared a laugh about old times, reminiscing on his best moments. Then, like six months later, it came up again. I asked M how she was doing, but my friend was confused, saying it was D's dad who had passed.
I told him that couldn’t be right because when he told me, we reminisced about the time he caught us drinking. My friend remembered this conversation and was completely baffled. It was just not the kind of thing he would confuse. Anyways M's dad is alive and well. It would seem we jumped into a slightly different reality at some point.
26. Lost In Translation
About a year ago I was at work, helping two customers fill out some paperwork. They were both Chinese, but one spoke zero English, and the other was translating for him. I sat the paper in front of them and looked down to grab a pen. As I was looking down, I heard one of them say, clear as day, "Where do I sign my name?"
So, I looked up with the pen and said, "You sign your name right here, sir." The translator looked shocked and said, "You speak Mandarin?" I had no idea what to say. I was just as confused and shocked as he was. I made up an excuse and said, "I assumed that's what he said," to hide how mind blown I was, but no, I completely heard and understood him.
I don't think he believed me either because he was giving me that look still. It still freaks me out to this day.
27. Double The Trouble
A couple of days ago, my friend and I happened to be driving through the same town. I was getting gas over the state line because it was 30 cents cheaper and he was coming back from the mall. We got to work later that night and he started telling people that I was speeding down the road and that he couldn't keep up with me.
I told him I saw him pass by me when I was pulling out of the gas station and that I didn't know how I could have possibly gotten ahead of him. He said he swore he saw me pulling out of the Dollar General ahead of him. Either my friend saw the same model and color of my car, a Versa, from out-of-state with a driver who looked like me, screwing around with an iPod, or there was a glitch in the matrix.
28. Satan Take The Wheel
I was driving home from work one morning and was waiting to turn right at a stop sign on a somewhat rural road. A number of cars were turning left onto the road I was on. As the last one passed, a blue minivan, I locked eyes with the driver. I nearly jumped out my skin from fear. I am 100% convinced that I either saw a demon or some physical manifestation of pure evil.
The minute I noticed him, the hair on my neck stood up and I felt physically sick. From what I remember, he had no deformities or anything explainable, but something still felt so...off and terrifying about him. It was like looking at something ALMOST human. This was probably two years ago now, and I've never forgotten that otherwise normal ride home.
29. Wet And Wild
One time, I walked back from class to my dorm room and sat on my futon while talking to my roommate. She was pretty tired, and while in the middle of talking and ruffling through her backpack, she got quiet and pulled out her agenda book. It was soaked through with water. Everything else in her backpack was perfectly dry, and we both searched it for any other traces of wetness.
She hadn't taken her agenda book out of her backpack in a week, nor had she put any water bottles in her backpack that could have gotten it wet. It also hadn't rained for a week and a half either, so we were both mystified as to where this water came from. I just assumed she was too tired to remember properly. A minute later, I stood up from the futon and was met with an odd surprise.
The area where one of my legs was was pressed up against was also completely soaked through with water. No other part of me was wet. There was no liquid near me at all. Although a portion of my pants was soaked, none of the surrounding areas were wet. The area of the futon where my pants were pressed against was perfectly dry, too.
My roommate and I were never able to come up with explanations.
30. Well, I’ll Be A Monkey’s Father
I have a 10-month-old son. He’s a great kid and is just starting to crawl and move around on his own. Tonight, before I put him to bed, he passed out on this big pillow in our living room after he had a bottle. I picked him up and put him in his crib in his room down the hall, then let the dog out and sat down to watch some TV before I brushed my teeth and went to bed.
My dog walked down the hall to my bedroom to go to bed and about an hour later I get up to turn the TV off. I notice my son asleep, facing away from me on the same pillow I picked him up from an hour before. Now, thinking that given his skill level at walking and crawling there is no way he was getting out of his crib, down the hall and back there, I chalked it up to me not paying attention.
So, I walked over, picked him up, slung him over my left shoulder, went over to the front window, shut it, and went back down the hall to go to put him in bed. I opened the door to his room, turned the corner, and with the dim light from the nightlight, I notice that he is in his crib asleep. It took about a second to put together what was happening.
How did I have him on my shoulder while he was in the bed at the same time? What felt like a millisecond later, I hear my dog kind of bark/whimper in a confused tone right behind me, then I looked to my left bringing my arm down, and I see that his stuffed animal monkey is in my arm. Now, I am as sure as anything in my life that I picked up my son and that I would have known the difference between a 25 lb. kid and a 1lb. stuffed animal.
I've checked the carbon monoxide detector, the windows were open, and I've only had a single drink tonight. The weirdest thing though is that my big ol’ black lab will not leave my son's room. I'm really, really baffled.
31. Pointing In The Right Direction
I don't know why, but I vividly remember seeing a mouse pointer in the sky as a kid. I must have been around four or five years old, and my family and I were out shopping. I was lying down in the back seat and I remember seeing it in the sky. My dad said it was a shooting star, but I don't remember any of them being overly excited about it.
I just have a vivid memory of it as a mouse pointer. My brain may be jumbling up the memory, but who knows.
32. Baby’s Day Out
So, this happened about seven or eight years ago. My husband and I were laying in the bed one night, watching television. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a child in the doorway of our bedroom. Thinking it was our only child at the time, I tapped my hubby and said “Hey, shhhh, don’t look, but I think Connor is going to try to scare us!”
He turns and looks, and this child walked into our room. I can’t explain it, because it was one of those moments that seemed...somehow different. We watched in silence, soon realizing that this child was NOT our son. He toddles in, head slightly tilted back, curls bouncing and diaper squishing as he goes to the end of our bed.
We see his head go down, like he was crouching, and when we got up to look, he was gone. I looked at my husband and said, “Did we just see a ghost?!” Then, almost as an afterthought, I said, “Well, we know if we have another baby, and he has curls, that he was here before he was born.” We both laugh, because we were not trying for another baby at the time.
Fascinated, we go to check on our son, and he was fast asleep. We forget the whole thing, and a few months later, we find out that I’m pregnant. Fast forward to when our new baby, Liam, is two. He toddles in the room, head titled slightly back and curls bouncing, and it hit me like a bucket of ice water. This is the baby that came to visit us!
I mean, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind—but the story doesn’t stop there. Now, on top of that, whenever Liam is staying the night elsewhere, like with my parents, he comes to visit me in my sleep. For example, one time he came and just smiled at me while I was taking a nap. He was in a little red shirt, and his hair was cut short, even though he left with it long.
The next day, I go to pick the kiddos up from mom, and lo and behold—his hair is freshly shorn and he is wearing a little red shirt. I asked my mom, “Did he wear this yesterday?” And she replies “Oh, yeah he did, but he insisted on wearing it today, so here he is.” So, I look at him and say, “Did you go see momma yesterday in momma’s dreams?” He just looked at me, all big blue eyes and serious, and nodded his head.
33. Into The Night
There was one night during the mid-90s when I was with my ex and there was a big, yellow-orange full moon out, so we decided to go out for a drive. We lived in a small, west Texas town, so we didn't have to go too far to be out of town and into the countryside. After a short drive, she started getting all lovey-dovey, just as we were nearing a smaller town with a rest area just on the outskirts of the town.
We parked and instantly the mood changed. She picked up on it too. There was a van that was parked further down in the area, and for some reason, my eyes kept going to it. I kept feeling like we were being watched even though I couldn't see anyone in the front area of the van. My ex went from being loving to apprehensive, and she asked me what was wrong but I couldn't explain it.
Everything just felt off: the moon, the van, the area, the music, and I just had a feeling like we weren't supposed to be there or that we were interrupting something. I had a terrible feeling that the car wasn't going to start, which would have put us in a really bad situation because there was absolutely no one around (except for whoever was in the van) and it was nighttime, so the little town was mostly closed except for gas stations.
This was also before cell phones were mainstream, so we didn't have that luxury. Fortunately, the car started and we got the heck out of there. But as we were leaving, I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that a few people had gotten out of the van and were looking in our direction. I think we both picked up on something that night that may have saved our lives, and it was definitely extremely creepy.
34. Seen It All Before
I had a dream of some kid that I had never seen before dancing at a busy party. He was wearing a blue shirt, black pants, had Beiber Hair, and there was a purple strobe light on the wall behind him. I wake up and think to myself "Huh, what an odd dream," and carry on with my life. Several years later, it all came back with a vengeance.
I was at my cousin's wedding reception, chilling and hanging out with a different cousin. The music comes on and we start jumping up and down, and then I realized that I was reliving the dream. Same clothes, same hair, same purple lighting in the background.
35. The Missing Link
The only witnesses to this that I know of were my husband and me. It's a strange thing I can't explain. I am really into trees, and we live in a neighborhood with a lot of nice, mature oaks, elms, maples, etc. There is a house around the corner that had two absolutely huge magnolias, which are uncommon in my area. I used to love to pass them on my walks because they smelled great.
My husband and I always get angry when neighbors cut down healthy trees for no reason, so one day when we noticed that both magnolias had been chopped down, we were upset. I could see both stumps surrounded by the chopped-up wood and a wealth of smaller branches. I went on a rant about it and even grabbed a small branch with a bud from the ground near the stump to take home.
Without the two trees, this house had NO privacy from the next house over anymore. You could easily see the entire yard next door from where we stood, which was not possible when that tree was there. Fast forward to the springtime, and I was out walking around again. As I rounded the corner, I saw a shocking sight—there was the magnolia tree that I loved; the one that was closer to the road, safe and sound.
Now, I know people will say I only saw one cut down, but I distinctly remember my conversation and saying, "Why did they have to cut them both down?" I could see them removing the one close to the house, but the one nearer to the road was perfectly fine as it was. My husband also remembered our conversation but he was quick to assume that we somehow were mistaken.
36. The Metamorphosis
Me and my girlfriend have been living together in an apartment for two and a half years. Everything has been normal until recently, when things took a bizarre turn. For instance, for the last three weeks or so, my girlfriend has been putting sugar in her morning coffee, while throughout our entire relationship she's always been very much against it.
It may seem like a small detail, but she's always been complaining about how I don't know what real coffee is since I put quite a lot of sugar. On the first day that I saw her drinking coffee with sugar, I asked her why would she do that, and she looked at me weirded out and said something like "What are you talking about? I've always been putting sugar in my coffee."
I felt a bit confused for a moment, but then we started talking about some other things, so I didn't think any more about it. Until, that is, the morning after, when she did the exactly same thing, and had once again the same reaction. Fast forward a few days and another odd thing happened. We were doing the deed and she suddenly suggested a position that we had already tried once, but it had gone wrong and it hurt her a lot, so we had simply decided not to try it anymore.
Naturally, I was very surprised with her suggestion, and reminded her about the time when it went wrong, and she just completely dismissed it, saying that I probably mixed her up with some ex-girlfriend or that I was just tripping. Today, the weirdest thing happened, which is the reason I'm writing this. In the afternoon, I was working at home.
I'm employed as a PhD student at the computer science department of a university. My girlfriend asked me what's up with a guy who I've never heard of before. I asked her who is she referring to and she said "Well, it's that colleague of yours who you always talk about, the one from the company where you are employed at."
I froze. I asked her to repeat herself, and she said the exact same thing all over again. Then I told her that I don't work at any company nor have I ever worked at any company, since I started a PhD straight after my Master degree. At this point, she also completely froze and we were just staring at each other completely confused and shocked for a few moments.
She then asked me what the heck is going on and I reminded her about the coffee thing and about the position and that I don't know what is going on either. At this point, she started crying too, and asked what is wrong with us. Neither she, nor me nor anyone in both families have ever had any mental problems in the past. We don't know what to do about this.
37. An Echo Of The Past
December 22, 1998. It's 9 am and my aunt makes a surprise visit to my house. My parents are divorced, and my mom is at work. She decides to treat my brother and me to a movie. She's never really done this before, but we're both excited. It's now around 10 am and we're sitting in the movie theater watching the movie. I'm getting bored, and my mind wanders.
I suddenly have a thought flash through my head: "Which parent would you rather die first?" Being a kid, I weigh the option. "Maybe mom because she's so strict...maybe dad because I don't see him very often..." Then I shake the idea out of my head and think to myself, "Don't even think about this now because it won't happen for a very long time."
The movie ends, and we drive back to my house. My mom is home, which is weird because she should be at work, and I remember making a joke to my aunt that "Maybe she got fired finally!" My mom hated her job and she constantly joked about how she wished he'd just fire her already so she could collect unemployment and find something better.
I walk in and my mom tells me my dad, who was an armored guard, has been fatally shot. He was gunned down at 10:02 am. The only reason my mom is home is that her sump pump broke and the neighbors called her to say the lawn was flooding and icing over. The only way she found out he passed was when she turned on the news and there was a "Breaking Report."
About an hour after, she gets a phone call from the hospital. More weirdness: My dad was 44 years old. He passed on 12/22/98. He was gunned down at 10:02 but pronounced dead at 11:22. Years earlier when my parents were still married, they were fighting and my dad said something to my mom like, "You're going to feel really sorry the day I go to work and get shot in the head!"
My mom remembers he said this in December too...because she was putting up Christmas decorations.
38. An About Face
A really bizarre thing happened today that left me a bit shaken. Earlier today, I went to an otolaryngologist appointment with a sore throat. At the end of my 30-minute slot, I was sitting at the table across from the doctor, with her writing out the prescriptions. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and, without waiting for a response, a man stepped in.
He was tall and slightly stooping, in his 30s or maybe 40s, with balding blond hair, wearing jeans and a checkered shirt. I guessed he was the next patient in line eager to start his appointment, and only paid him a quick glance before turning back to the table. The doctor called out something to the effect of, “Sir, could you please wait outside? I’ll call you back in a few minutes” and resumed writing.
The man, however, didn’t leave right away, but continued silently standing in the doorway for several more seconds. Then, out of my side vision, I noticed something truly disturbing. There was something strange going on with his face that wasn’t there a moment ago. I couldn’t make out the details, so I cautiously gave him another look.
What I saw is difficult to put into words. The best I can describe it is, well, a glitch effect, like a corrupt image in a video file. The man’s face was now a blob of different shades of pink, misshapen and somehow almost pixilated. I was only able to catch a flash of it, though, as the man quickly turned back to the door and stepped out.
As he was turning around, I noticed that in profile his face looked flat and featureless, like that of a Lego figure. This encounter was so unexpected and so unusual that at first, it didn’t even register with me as something noteworthy. After a moment’s consideration, I figured it must’ve been a simple brain hiccup on my part due to a lack of sleep, or maybe some weird visual illusion.
But then I met eyes with the doctor. She paused, pen in hand, and asked me hesitantly: “Did you see it? His face…” “Yeah,” I said. And that was that, we didn’t discuss it further. She finished filling out my paperwork and I went home, feeling a bit lightheaded. As I left the office, the man was sitting in the corridor outside occupied with his phone. As far as I could see, his face was once again perfectly normal.
39. A Stitch In Time
I arrived 10 minutes early to school one day, so I put on my headphones and started to listen a 10-minute track I loved. When it was over, I started walking to the entrance…but nobody was there. It was usually full of people waiting for the school to open. At first, I thought I miscalculated the time and I was late, but the truth was much creepier.
When I checked my watch, only two minutes had passed since I arrived, and I sat there for the remaining eight minutes thinking what the heck had happened.
40. I Think We’re Alone Now
One time, I went over to my friend's home to pick her up. When I walked in, she was running around half-naked downstairs getting ready, so I told her I'd go wait outside. As I was standing just outside her home, I could hear the voices of her sister and mother through a window. Her sister was crying really loudly and painfully and the mother was responding back with stern-sounding responses.
It was like a fight of some type I guess. They have very distinctive accents as the mother is Somalian and they're the only Somalian people on that road (her neighbors are white people). They were both talking in a mixture of Arabic and English so I couldn't understand them, and I think at various points the mother was even using the daughter's distinctive foreign-sounding name.
After a few minutes, my friend opened the door and walked over to my car. When we're about a block away so that we were no longer within hearing range of their home, I asked her why her sister was so upset. She got really confused with me. I explained what I'd heard. She then told me that neither her sister nor her mother had been home at the time. In fact, the house was empty except for her.
This made sense, as my friend would never greet me half-naked or run around like that downstairs in their kitchen if her family were home. She got spooked and wanted to drop it right away as the idea of these unknown voices in her home creeped her out. My friend loves venting about her sister, so I knew it wasn't about trying to cover for her—like, she'd usually call me up when fights are going on to gossip right away. She'd never resist the urge to spill. Maybe they were home and she didn't realize it?
That moment has always confused me because I know that I 100% heard these two women speaking. It was clear as day—those two women in her home were definitely talking and crying for at least two or three minutes. I think it has something to do with her sister. She's very into mysticism, to the degree that we found broken eggs in the corner of one room where she'd tried some cleansing ritual. So maybe if it was something otherworldly, it was related to that?
41. Multi-Tasking
My bedroom at the time led into the living room, which you could see into the kitchen. We also had a bathroom that was directly off our room, in the corner. You couldn't get to it unless you were in our room. I woke up one afternoon. I remember sitting up and checking my phone. I got out of bed, opened the bedroom door, and walked into the living room to turn the thermostat up.
I saw my ex in the kitchen fiddling around with the coffee pot. Then he started walking towards the back of the house, into the other bedroom. I said "Hey! You're up early." He looked at me, and kept on walking. I went back into our room and sat on the bed. I started to get a strange sinking feeling in my stomach. After a few minutes, I called his name.
He opened the bathroom door and said "Yeah?" Apparently, he was in the bathroom the whole time. I was very confused and super freaked out because I could have sworn I saw him in the kitchen. Except there's no way it was him if he was in the bathroom. It shook me up pretty bad.
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42. Back To The Future
I think the creepiest experience I’ve had so far is the one where I had a phone call from the future. In 2007, I got a phone call from an elementary school, and a teacher asked for my name. She said she was calling about a young boy named Alex (they gave his last name, too) who was feeling sick. They said they contacted me because I wasm= his emergency contact.
I told them I had never heard of the school or the boy, and I wasn't sure how they got my information. The lady then confirmed my first and last name, but I insisted that I wasn't the emergency contact for this child. I had never heard of his last name either. She said goodbye and hung up. I later told a friend about it and we looked the number up on reverse number sites.
We found no results. We even called the number and we got the "This number is not in use" message from the operator. Nine years later, the number is still not in use. I don't remember the name of the teacher or the school, but I do remember the name of the child. I still don't know anyone with that last name. I'm convinced it’s a glitch. I can see someone getting my number wrong, I've had the wrong number thing happen, but for someone to nail my first and last name is what struck me as odd.
43. Doesn’t Make Cents
Early last month, I went online to pay a bill, like I've done for years. I get to the last page before finishing and the webpage freaks out, with a multitude of display issues before finally I receive an error message. After several attempts to pay I give up, assuming the site is having issues. I go back two days later and pay my bill, and it goes through normally, with me getting my usual text and e-mail notifying me I paid.
So I'm very confused a few weeks later when I check my e-mail and find a notice from the company whose bill I paid, with a semi-threatening e-mail saying the bill is due that day and do I need to set up a payment plan? I've been dealing with the company for almost a decade and have never been late in paying in that entire time.
I check my credit card account, and there's no record of me paying, nor of the text or e-mail I received. I pay the bill and chalk it up to a senior moment on my part. Last week, I get my one credit card bill. It says I never paid my last bill, so now I've got that bill to pay, plus the interest. I find my previous bill, open but with the invoice in place, in my living room. Thing is, this is actually terrifying. Here’s why.
I'm physically disabled and can't drive, and I always pay that credit card bill in person, after they messed up my payment years ago. So a family member always takes me to my credit union to pay that bill, and like me, he remembers us going down to pay the bill they say I never paid. He and I even remember a conversation we had on the way down to the credit union, and going grocery shopping afterward.
But yet the bill is unpaid and the bill is in my possession still.
44. When The Saints Go Marching In
When I was in the seventh grade, Pokémon cards had just come out and were the newest fad. I, being a super cool 13-year-old, of course, collected them. I didn't bother playing the game, but I collected the cards nonetheless. I kept my cards in a binder with those protective plastic sleeves that people usually keep their baseball cards in.
One day, I was looking through my cards and noticed that one of them was gone (the holographic Machamp, for any other Pokémon nerds out there), which was really weird since the binder hadn't moved from where I had left it and the card was in there last time I checked. I looked EVERYWHERE for that stupid card and couldn't find it anywhere.
Not too long before this happened, my aunt told me a story about how she had lost a diamond tennis bracelet and had prayed to St. Anthony by saying, "Tony, Tony look around, I've lost something that can't be found" and later that night, the bracelet was sitting on her pillow when she went to bed. I decided to try the prayer, because...why not?
So I said, "Tony, Tony look around, I've lost something that can't be found" and then went about cleaning my room that I had destroyed in the process of looking for the card. I knelt down to pick something up and sitting behind my dresser, with just enough of the top sticking out, was the mother-loving Pokémon card. I was dumbfounded since I had searched every square inch of my room and definitely looked behind the dresser.
Also, my mom was the only one home while all this happened. I had no idea how the card got out of the binder, where it was when I couldn't find it, or how it got behind the dresser. I've used the St. Anthony prayer a few times since then and it works every time. It's not that I just end up finding the item, but it's always found in a weird place where it shouldn't be.
So, I guess if you ever can't find something, try the prayer and maybe Tony will help you out.
45. The Invisible Man
This happened in 2009, when I was 16 years old. It was the first weekend of summer, and nobody was home when I woke up at around 11 am. I grabbed a snack and went down to the basement to watch TV. I had plans to hang out with a friend at 3 pm that day. Like I said before, I started watching TV at around 11, knowing I had four hours before I was supposed to head over to my friend’s house.
I had only been watching TV for about 30 minutes when my mom came down the stairs asking me where I'd been all day. I said what are you talking about, I've been awake for less than an hour? I look at my watch and see that it's well past 5 in the afternoon. I run upstairs and check my phone to see that I have several missed calls from my friend and my mom.
My mom's side of the story is what makes me nauseous when I think about this, even to this day. She was with my little brother at his baseball game from 1-3 that day. She and my brother WERE home when I "supposedly" woke up and went down to the basement, but neither of them have any memory of even seeing me that morning.
When my mom got home at around 3, she checked the entire house for me, including the basement where I had been sitting on the couch watching TV. It's been 10 years and I still have no idea what happened on that day. It is by far the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me, and although I talk about it with my family like it's a funny little thing that happened, it genuinely chills me to my bones thinking about it.
46. The Sixth Sense
When I was in high school, my mom only worked a few blocks away, so she would drive me to and from school every day. One morning, on our way to school, I had a very nagging feeling that something was wrong with my grandma, my mom’s mom. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to freak my mom out for no reason.
I went about my day and didn't really think about it again. When my mom came to pick me up that afternoon, she was visibly upset, so I asked her what was wrong. She told me that my grandma had a heart attack and was in the hospital. She told me she had to go to New Hampshire to go see her. My grandmother never recovered and passed a week later.
47. Just Another Manic Monday
About 4 or 5 years ago I worked at a Little Caesars Pizza. Usually I would work inside on the pizzas but we had just started up this Monday Madness deal where pizzas were only $4 on Monday so we needed someone to advertise. I was a wild and weird metalhead so I took up the position on Mondays of just going out there, throwing around a sign to get attention and bring people in for pizza. Not exactly glamorous but I had fun.
One day while I was out there doing my thing, I see a van coming straight at me. It jumps the curb and slams into me. I feel it crush me against the electrical box controlling the street lights. I see a quick flash as the traffic lights flick off…then I black out. I open my eyes with a gasp and I'm still on the corner and nothing has happened. No van or anything—but the story doesn’t end there.
Well, I was a little shaken up so I decide to pack it up and walk back to the store for a break. I walk no more than 15 feet away from the corner when I hear a crash. I look back and a van just hopped the curb into the electrical box and I watch the traffic lights flick off. Needless to say, I took the day off. Still think about that from time to time.
48. Nine Lives And A Lot Of Mischiefs
When I was younger, I lived in this apartment complex with my family. A lot of weird things happened there, but really only to me, so I don't really know how real those were. But this one was different. I know this is real because it involves my brother and sister. I remember my little sister and I were going to sleep in my brother’s room.
He had this small bedside lamp on the floor next to the door. As my sister and I were getting ready for bed, we had the light on, and we both remember seeing my cat pass the lamp. As soon as she did, the light bulb exploded. My other brother was just down the hall and he heard the bulb explode. I remember him saying something along the lines of, "What did you do to the lamp??"
After we told him that it was our cat that made it explode, he then told us that it was a complete lie…because my cat was right next to him when he heard it.
49. Ahead Of His Time
I had a dream that I was back in high school, at the beginning of first year. Everything was exactly the same, except I had the memories of my life after high school. In the dream I told all of my class that I was from the future but no one would believe me. Only one friend who was very, very smart said that time travel is theoretically possible. This is where it gets weird.
The next day, when I told my friends about it, their jaws dropped. They said that back in junior year, I was acting weird one day, asking time travel questions. They told me I said I come from the future. They also said that I was somehow out of it, that I was there—but at the same time, I kinda wasn’t. I saw the shock in their eyes when I told them what I dreamed.
They even recounted some of the details in the dream that I didn’t tell them. The weirdest thing is that I barely remember that day. I remember some of the stuff that also happened in the dream, but that day is kinda foggy to me. Maybe my friends are joking with me, but I have known them for 15 years and I know a genuine reaction when I see one.
50. Dream Girl
This happened about a month ago. My girlfriend and I had gone to sleep like normal. In the morning, she got up earlier than usual and was explaining her dream to me. It was a nightmare and Tom Cruise was the base of it. In her dream, he was still married to Katie Holmes. We aren’t big fans of either, which made it kind of funny. Anyway, my girlfriend and Katie were talking in the dream and Katie let my girlfriend know she was from Toledo, Ohio.
I thought that was a specific thing to remember and asked if she had any idea where she was from. She didn't. We looked it up and behold, she was from Toledo, Ohio.
51. Snap Out Of It
In early December 2015, my now ex-boyfriend’s mother passed in her home following surgery and other health problems related to her heart. She was born with a rare condition. Unfortunately, she went into cardiac arrest and we were unable to save her, so the event in and of itself was extremely traumatic and unexpected.
A couple of nights later, we decided to go see some friends who wanted to offer their condolences to my ex. Everyone loved his mom. We were all sitting in our friends’ living room watching TV and, to be honest, they were really trying to distract us from everything. One friend, Amy, was just being her goofy self, and I was taking Snapchat videos.
I distinctly remember taking a video of Amy. I saved the video, but when I looked at my screen to watch it, it wasn’t Amy. It was a grainy video with a background that appeared to be outside, and 100% not in a living room, but on the screen was my ex’s mom. She said the words, “I’m okay baby. I’m okay” and multiple other friends saw it on my phone before it disappeared.
She looked young and vibrant and had a huge smile on her face. Someone had tossed my phone to another friend across the couch to see, and the video then disappeared. When we watched the original video back immediately after, my ex’s mom was gone. It was Amy in the video again just like I had seen while recording it in the first place.
My ex and his mom had a very close relationship, best friends really, so when we saw her on my screen letting him know she was okay...it was astounding. I saw it first and everyone noticed I was visibly upset. I cannot imagine what went through my ex’s mind and heart when he saw that, but to this day, it’s something we talk about and something he shares with new friends.
It’s something we simply cannot explain other than her coming through in a glitch to let us know she was okay.
52. Weekend Warriors
This happened when I was 19, I'm 27 now. At the time I was still dating my high school boyfriend, he lived two towns away from me but we spent every weekend together. My best friend Jill had also been friends with Alan, my boyfriend, since middle school, so we were all very close. Jill and I worked together at a medical supply factory, and we would occasionally come up with some great adventures to go on on the weekends.
This week was no exception. We had made plans to all drive out to Alan's after work on Friday, spend the night, then get up and go on our adventure Saturday morning. Friday rolls around, Jill and I get off work and swing by our apartment to pick up our guitars and backpacks for our sleepover. We drive out to Alan's, start cooking up our frozen pizzas, and bust out the guitars and Xbox.
We play and talk and eat till around midnight, then decide we should get some sleep for our trip in the AM. Alan had a futon in the living room that Jill slept on, while Alan and I went to his room on the other side of the living room. We all said goodnight to each other and went to sleep. Saturday morning, I wake up and walk through the living room to go to the bathroom.
Jill grumbles a good morning at me as I walk past. I tell her to get up, it's almost 7 and we gotta get on the road. We all get ourselves ready and into Alan's '92 baby blue Ford Taurus. Then it got weird. We backed down the driveway, Alan driving, me up front, Jill sitting behind Alan. Then the next thing any of us remember, Jill and I are backing down Alan's driveway, in her car, having just returned from our day. It was 6:30 pm.
We were both smiling…but when Jill looked at me and her face fell. She looked me dead in the eyes and asked me what had just happened. It took a second for my feeling of euphoria to clear, like I'd just had a REALLY good dream, but then I realized that I couldn't remember where we'd all went after backing down Alan's driveway that morning. So, being reasonable, level-headed people, we pulled back into Alan's and went to see what he had to say.
We knocked and when Alan opened the door we knew he'd had the same reaction as us. He was pale and wide-eyed and just mumbled out a "doyouguysrememberwhatjusthappened?" And none of us did. We sat down and went over the details of the night and early morning over and over. We kept crying and having to stop to console each other, but we could not come up with any details past backing down the driveway.
Alan remembered going into his house, but not driving up to it or parking his car. Jill and I don't remember getting into her car or seeing Alan go inside. Oh, and none of us can recall what the plan for our Saturday adventure was. We know we had a destination and activities planned, but not one of us can recall a single detail about what the plan was other than: 1. Drive to Alan's 2. Spend the night 3. Get up early Saturday.
Eventually, we were able to calm ourselves down and just reasoned it must've been an abduction but it was no big deal, we were all fine. No weird side effects or physical evidence of anything. Stuff like this must happen all the time. Through the years we've brought it up to each other now and then, just a passing thought of how freaking bizarre it is that we still can't recall any other details of that day.
Part of what bothers me about it is how it's become such a nonchalant topic to bring up now, even though it was very traumatizing at the time. We just so willingly fell into calling it our abduction, even though none of us have a clue...
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53. The Long Walk
Not too long ago, I was sitting in the middle of the back seat of a car. It was dark and my mother, her friend, and I were on our way back from dinner. As we were stopped at a light that had just turned green, I was casually looking around at the cars in front of us as they slowly moved forward. I noticed a man very close to the edge of the road who proceeded to walk into the middle of our lane a couple of cars up—and then suddenly, he disappeared.
We drove past the spot where I saw him standing and there was no sign of anyone. I distinctly remember him wearing a forest green sweater and a brown beanie. I don't even know how this was possible, but it still weirds me out to this day.
54. The Gravity Of The Situation
I was in the kitchen getting something from the fridge when my dad, out of nowhere, asked me: "Hey, what just dropped?" I was confused because I didn't hear anything fall, so I asked him what he meant. He's said he definitely heard something fall. I was still trying to figure out what he was talking about when suddenly, a date pit went flying off the kitchen counter right in front of me.
I literally saw the event unfold—it flew off the kitchen counter and landed on the ground right at my feet. I’m not sure I can think up a reasonable explanation for how my dad randomly predicted something falling off the counter, just to see it happen a few seconds later.
55. In The Eye Of The Storm
When I was 13, my father and I experienced something that still makes me question reality. It happened on a summer afternoon when we made a quick stop home between games from the softball field not far from my house. My sister and I had both made all-star teams through our local league and she was in the middle of a game so my mother stayed with her while my dad brought me home to change and eat between a double header.
The softball field is less than a mile from where we lived, so it would take us a whole three minutes to get home. During those three minutes, the sky went from sunny with almost no clouds to a very sinister, dark gray. We live in Rhode Island, so this is not totally weird as New England weather changes more than most people change their underwear, but I do remember thinking I never saw us drive into a storm cloud or recognizing how it got so dark so fast, it just suddenly was.
My dad made a comment about how my second game would probably get postponed because it looked like a serious thunderstorm. Another thing I'll mention was that when we pulled onto my street coming home, it was unusually deserted. We live on a dead-end side street and most people had multiple cars; almost all of our neighbors parked a car on the street in front of their house.
We all had unspoken "designated" spots and I remember thinking I'd never seen the street so bare when we pulled onto it. I went into the house with my dad, went to the bathroom, changed, and grabbed a sandwich. My dad went downstairs to check his work email and I walked outside by the car to wait for him. It was so dark out at that point because of the cloud cover, it felt pointless to even go back to the field.
I was mulling this over while eating my sandwich when I got this insanely ominous feeling. I looked to my left and saw a giant tornado coming down the street towards me. I watched as my neighbors gutter three houses down came flying off of their house and their shingles started to rip off. Living in an area where tornadoes just don't exist, I'm pretty sure I went into pure shock from disbelief.
I was just standing there and the next thing I remember is my father grabbing me from behind and pulling me in the house while yelling. He rushed me down into the basement locking the door behind him. In the next few minutes there was just a ton of commotion with him swearing, trying to call my mom's cell phone to warn her and everyone at the ballfield, while I sat there like an idiot unable to comprehend what had just happened.
When my dad got through to my mom, she told him there were absolutely no storm clouds anywhere she could see but pulled my sister from the game nonetheless and told everyone on the two teams playing what he called to warn her about. There was confusion at the field and they stalled the game. My dad told me to wait while he investigated as we heard NOTHING after entering the basement.
After the longest five minutes of my life, my dad came back, color completely drained from his face, telling me it was gone and I could come upstairs. When I walked up, I noticed right away the sun was out. I walked outside, there were several cars on the street in their normal spots that weren't there 10 minutes ago, and my neighbor's house was completely fine.
No local news reports, my neighbors never saw a thing even though two of them claim they had been home the entire time. This was not a small tornado that we saw, there is no way this thing materialized that quickly and disappeared just as rapidly. My dad still doesn't like talking about it, and even when I get him to he has convinced himself it must have been a freak thing that began and ended on our road.
I know he noticed the same things I did, like the cars suddenly being there and our neighbor’s house magically being repaired. He’s not a very open-minded guy and I can tell the cognitive dissonance makes him really uncomfortable so I don't push him too much, but it's obvious he is just as disturbed by the entire thing. It still freaks me out to relive it. It makes me question reality in a serious way.
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56. Then He Was Gone
When I was doing my internship, there was a guy across the way from me as we were traveling on the public transport line. I noticed him because he was wearing an intricate brown suit and checking a pocket watch for the time often. When we both got off at the same stop by the school, he had a quick pace and was rushing ahead of me.
I thought he was crazy when he walked into traffic. He made it past the work van coming at him from the right, and I was terrified for him because a car was coming fast from the left. However, when the work van stopped and blocked my sight, so I couldn’t see what became of him...Then he was gone. What? The? Heck? I still wonder where he went six years later.
57. Something In The Air
When I was 13, I was in the outfield during one of my baseball games when I suddenly got this overwhelming feeling of doom. After the game, I called a bunch of my friends and family members to see if they were okay because I knew something was wrong somewhere. Everyone was okay, but I still felt really off. It didn’t take long for the other shoe to drop.
The next day, my sister’s friend, whom I am pretty close with, came over and was crying a ton. He told us that the day before (around the time of my game), his best friend back home in Alaska drank too much at a party, wandered off into the woods, and never came back. The next day, they had found his body half-eaten by a bear. After he told me this, the feeling of dread I had for the past day immediately left and I felt incredibly relieved. It's still one of the strangest things to ever happen to me.
58. A Short Shelf Life
This occurred when I was about 13 or so. My family was moving into a new home, and we were having trouble with a bookshelf that was a little too big, tall, and wide for the doorway. We eventually had to take it apart and bring it in piece by piece. The shelf went into my sister's room, and she helped put it together. Here is where it gets creepy.
She used the shelf for her books and stuffed animal collection. I left her as she was putting things onto the higher shelves, using a kitchen chair to reach that high. As soon as I stepped through the door, there was a huge, loud crash. I'm thinking the bookshelf fell on her, or she lost her balance and fell, so I check.
She is standing with her back against the wall, and she looks terrified. I peek further in...and there is no shelf. It was completely gone. Her things were heaped on the floor in that spot. The chair somehow teleported back into the kitchen. My sister and I are the only ones that heard the crash. And worst of all? Not one person in our family remembers ever having that bookshelf.
59. Guardian Angel
I was hungover, so I had my headphones on and my hood up. I crossed the road without looking, then felt a push on my backpack. I fell over from it. I took my headphones off and got helped up by a lady who said that if I didn't trip, I would have gotten hit by the bus that just went past…But I did not trip. I definitely felt a push that kept me out of harm’s way.
60. Disappearing Act
There was this creepy little room at the back of my high school’s stage. It had no light and it was small; only lockable from the outside. It gave us all the heebie-jeebies. One day, we were joking around backstage and locked one of our friends in. He flipped his lid and started hammering on the door. We were all laughing like the bunch of jerks we were back then.
Then, his screams started mingling with the hammering and shaking of the door. We stopped laughing and just stared at the door when suddenly it became dead silent. It stayed that way for a while until we started calling his name. No reply. Some of the braver members of our group opened the door and went in.
He was not in there. We didn't believe them at first…but when we peered in, they were right. We continued screaming his name and began searching nearby. We eventually spotted him through one of the windows coming towards the building. We couldn't believe it. We all ran to him, and his reply was jaw-dropping. He said we let him out.
We were crowding the door to the room. There was simply NO WAY he passed by us. We still have no idea what happened that day.
61. McMore Than You Bargained For
If I told you what I saw last night you would not believe me. Like, I can't even wrap my head around it. It was the scariest thing I've ever experienced. I can't even talk about it without sounding crazy. So here it goes. I went to do laundry around 2 am with my oldest son. After we put the laundry in, we went to a McDonald's drive-thru to get something to drink.
The drive-thru was packed with about five or six cars ahead of us. I noticed none of the cars were moving forward, and it had been like five minutes already. So, I decided to go around the car in front of me to the next drive-thru lane—this McDonald's has two lanes. As I'm pulling around the car in front of me, I look into their car, only to be greeted by a truly horrifying sight.
I kid you not, both the driver and the passenger looked like corpses. Their heads were tilted all the way back, eyes shut, and they were not moving. I freaked out and tried to pull out of the drive-thru entirely, going around the other cars just to get out of there—but things didn’t end there. In the next car I passed, all the passengers looked the same! Heads tilted back, eyes shut.
I panicked, thinking maybe they were all shot, so I hit the gas and got the heck out of there. I couldn't fathom what happened and I could barely speak. I was hyperventilating, so my son called 9-1-1 and told them what happened. They sent an officer to check. A few minutes later, the officer called us back said everything was fine at McDonald's.
Mind you, my son saw it too. We both saw the car in front of us where the people looked dead. This was terrifying. It literally looked like one of those rapture movies, or end of the world type stuff. Needless to say, I can't wrap my head around what we saw or why. I'm still scared. I know I'm not crazy, because my son saw it too—but it feels crazy to even say it.
62. Made For Each Other
I dated this girl a few years back and our first date was…weird. She was a friend of my brother and we had known each other a while before going out. Anyway, we’re on the date and she tells me that she had a weird dream about me. But the creepy part was yet to come. See, I had also had a weird dream about her that evening.
She goes first: "I was driving my teacher's car on my way to see you. We were on the phone trying to find each other. You kept saying I just drove past your apartment, but I was in the middle of nowhere and got really confused." Without really thinking about it, I reply: "I was on the phone with you as you constantly drove past my apartment. But it wasn't your normal car and you were really confused."
She's just staring at me like I was pulling her leg. Then it dawned on me, “Oh my God, we had the same dream!" We shared four-five more dreams throughout the relationship at totally random times.
63. Life Is Short
My grandpa was one of those jaded "I don't have emotions" kind of guys, even more so after his wife, my grandma, passed. Then, one day, everything changed. On Thanksgiving night, he just stood up and started talking to everyone very closely and intimately, hugging them and saying how proud he was of them. He just basically started acting 180 degrees opposite from his normal self.
That night, a burglar broke into his house and fatally shot him as he tried to stop the guy from taking a jewelry box from the living room. We opened that box up when we were clearing out his house and it had his and my grandma's wedding bands in it...which creeped all of us out BIG TIME because he lost his wedding ring about a decade earlier.
64. Altered State
I was staying in the hospital after a concussion when I was 15 years old from landing on concrete. I had been out for a few days, only waking for short periods, and I wasn’t able to keep food or drink down. They gave me multiple CAT scans as I wasn't “coming to” as expected and they were worried that I was badly brain-damaged. A lot of this people had to tell me later.
My hospital bed had the side rails up, and I was somehow strapped-in as my equilibrium was messed up and I couldn't get out of it without nurse assistance. Except that’s not what happened at all. This is hard to write, it's just so hard to explain the feeling of this moment, but I did get up. I got up, stepped over my mom who was sleeping on a mat on the floor, and walked to the window.
I saw the amazing view of the hills cast in early dawn light. I looked at the cars way down in the parking lot, the trees behind the wall, the houses and roads and nature leading to the hillside. I felt, I guess, reset. No pain, no memory, no idea why I was there or where there was. I knew it was me, the way you do, but all the "stuff" that would've normally been running through my head was absent.
I felt completely lucid, still, fresh, new, and very much at peace. I’ve never felt that way before or since. Except I didn't get up, I couldn't have, it wasn't possible. Yet I know to my core, in the way you feel yet can't describe in words, that I saw what I did, and I know that I was there, awake, looking out that window at one of the clearest visions my eyes have ever witnessed, with this incredible feeling of redemption.
I don't know, but it felt incredible and so true to me soul. I don't know, I remember it like a one-man alien abduction. The next few weeks I needed help walking, eating, etc. and it was months before I was “okay” again. I still have minor equilibrium issues 20 years later. I was at the hospital with a friend recently and saw the view from the same floor, but the wrong side. Chills, man.
I feel like maybe that was the first time I became aware of my “soul,” but everyone experiences that, and most don't need concussions to get there.
65. In The Dog House
This was freaking crazy. I was at home with the dogs and they were inside the house with me. They were whining at me because they wanted to go to the backyard, but I was playing some computer games and I was too lazy to let them out. They eventually left my bedroom, then two minutes later, I heard a loud noise. It sounded like they were horsing around and knocked something over.
I went towards the source of the sound but everything looked normal…except the dogs were nowhere to be found. I looked around everywhere and finally, I saw them. They were in the backyard. I don't have a doggy door, and the door leading to the backyard is always locked. Now, you're probably thinking there's a chance it wasn't locked and they were able to get outside, but even if that was true, how did the door get magically shut and locked again?
There was no way to lock that door from the outside unless you had the key. And the deadbolt was locked, not the knob.
66. It Cuts Like A Knife
When I was maybe 12 years old, I was outside and saw sunlight glint off a strand of spider web floating through the air. I didn't think much of it. When it reached me, however, it sliced open my cheek; maybe 3" across but not terribly deep. No trace of it was left behind. I still have no clue as to what that really could have been.
67. Aladdin’s Lamp
My last semester at college, I was nearly killed by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive. While unconscious on the ground, I lived a different life. I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red. I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over.
After two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter. I had a great job and my wife didn't have to work outside of the house. When my daughter was two my wife gave birth to our second child, a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter.
One day while sitting on the couch, I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but...just..wrong. I was transfixed, I couldn't look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp. I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn't eating or drinking.
I stared at the lamp for three days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me. By this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother's house just before I had my epiphany. The lamp is not real. The house is not real, my wife, my kids...none of that is real. The last 10 years of my life are not real!
The lamp started to grow wider and deeper. It was still inverted. It took up my entire perspective, and all I could see was red. I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises and I became aware of pain. A metric ton of pain. The first words I said were, "I'm missing teeth," and then I opened my eyes.
I was laying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by people who I didn't know, lots were freaking out, I was completely confused. At some point, an officer scooped me up, dragged/walked me across the sidewalk and grass, and threw me face down in the back of his car. I was still confused. I was taken to the hospital by the officer—it seems he didn't want to wait for the ambulance to arrive—and given CT scans and whatnot.
I went through about three years of horrid depression. I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed, I was scared that I was going insane, as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams. I never have, but sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision. He is perpetually 5 years old, and I can never hear what he says.
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68. Mirror, Mirror
When I was around 10 years old, I was inside the house alone and standing in the living room. I looked down the hall and I saw myself standing there, staring back at me. This other me then started walking towards my bedroom until it was out of my sight. I followed him and when I got to the spot where I'd first saw him, I saw him already inside my bedroom.
He was in my bedroom closet which creeped me out, but something told me to join him there. I went inside and ended up standing in my closet alone. I was retracing its steps. I also realized that it had been looking around with a confused look on its face just as I had. I didn't tell anyone because I knew people would think I was crazy.
69. Sleep Paralysis Meets Lucid Dreaming
When I was around 7 or 8, I had pretty bad sleep paralysis. One night I went to bed and in the middle of the night, I began having what I thought was an episode—however, it was absolutely evident that the shadow of an adult figure was sitting on the edge of my bed. I know this is a common misconception among the sleep paralysis crowd, because your mind is going into self-defense due to the nature of your current situation.
You begin to see and hear things. But what freaks me out about that night is what happened next. I then fell asleep and dreamt that I was in that exact situation again and I was able to move this time, I was able to project my voice. I completely lost it and started throwing everything about the room, kicking and screaming.
The shadow got up, opened the door, and left. When I woke up in the morning, my blood ran cold. My room was a mess, the covers were on the floor, and my bedroom door was open. Normally, I couldn't sleep with the door open because it freaked me out. There was something about that dream that always felt so real. 20+ years ago now and it's as fresh in my mind now as it was then.
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70. Book It Out Of Here
This one is super strange and I haven't told anybody about it. It just happened last week and it's still blowing my mind. I'm afraid that people will think I'm crazy. The first thing to note: I'm a bookbinder. I tear apart paperback books and turn them into leather-bound hardbacks. I'd received an order that had to be delivered on April 13th.
It's kind of a boring job, so I'd been putting it off in favor of other projects. Anyway, I got the book portion finished earlier and I wasn't looking forward to making the cover portion, so I slacked off on the night that I'd set aside to do it. I played a video game for a few hours, talked to a friend on Facebook, and then went to bed.
When I got up to go to work the next morning, the books were on my workbench completely finished. Like...the case was made, and the metal pieces were attached and glued together. They were completely done. I started internally panicking, wondering what the heck was wrong with my memory. Then, it hit me—I had an explanation...or at least I thought I did.
I checked my game's save log: yep. I played for several hours. I checked the Facebook chat: yep, I talked to Brandon right before sleeping. I checked my Fitbit readout: I'd only registered 200 steps so far, and by the time I went to bed, it was already beyond midnight. Six hours of work would have had me walking around quite a lot. I cut my board with a laser cutter that's set up in my spare bedroom, and there are always junk pieces left over from a cut, just like if you cut a circle out of paper.
You'd still have a rectangle piece with a circle cut out of it, but nope...those pieces were nowhere to be found. Not in the trash, not in the cutting bed. Also, laser cutting something leaves a distinct burnt smell, and I couldn't smell anything. My glue was exactly as full as I remember it being. None of my brushes were dirty .either
Even if I was sleep-bookbinding, my FitBit steps and scrap materials would have been left behind as evidence. I have no idea what happened.
71. Missing Something?
I was playing with my friend when I was young by the pond. We spotted some boys, and being the bad girl that I am, I pulled a blueberry flavored lip gloss that I got free in a magazine out of my pocket for us both to use to make the boys like us. I thought that's how life worked. We started hopping along the stepping-stones on the pond, and the lip gloss falls out of my pocket into the pond.
Both my friend and myself saw this happen. I was angry because it was the only make-up my mom allowed me to have. Cut to about five hours later, I get home and go up to my room. The blueberry lip gloss was on my pillow.
72. In Two Places At Once
I was in a lecture once, just kind of bored and looking about. At one point, I saw this guy sitting a couple of rows ahead of me. I remember him having quite a specific look—he was quite a large guy with a ponytail and a long chin beard. I looked at where he was sitting, then over toward the door…and that's when I freaked out. It was him, the same guy, coming in through the door.
Either I passed out for a few minutes without realizing, or he moved at inhuman speeds to somehow leave and re-enter the lecture theatre. Interestingly enough, the lecture I was in was on vision and optical illusions, so if I'd been paying attention, I might have better understood what happened.
73. Naming And Shaming
My dad works for animal control, and is often called to jobs suddenly. He was called to his female friend’s house one night unknowingly. He showed up to the house and a ton of law enforcement officers were there. That’s when he made a devastating realization. When someone is suspected to be deceased, animal control is often sent in first to get the animals out, just in case they attack, etc.
Anyway, he went in and made a disturbing discovery. Someone had come in and taken his friend's life—but the story didn’t end there. Later, in the middle of the night, my parents got a call on the house phone and my dad answered it. What he heard made his blood run cold. It was his friend’s voice, and she was screaming, yelling, and begging for her life.
He thought she said her boyfriend’s name at one point. My dad was very upset by the phone call. The officers he’d met that night later contacted him to say that her boyfriend had been the one to do it. He still can’t explain it.
74. Trembling With Fear
On March 11, 2011, my mom was driving me to school. We had moved houses within Tokyo just a year prior, and I suddenly realized that I didn't know where our family would meet up in case of an earthquake. So I asked, and my mom and I spent the whole drive deciding on where we would go. Eventually, we chose the park near our house. Then at 2:46 PM, the Tohoku Earthquake happened.
It was during the final period of the day, and our whole grade was hosting a speaker that worked with disaster refugees. When the first tremblings hit, we were discussing what we would pack in emergencies. The whole day freaked me out, from beginning to end. When we had left the house that morning, my sister had left a big crystal vase full of birthday flowers for my mom, on the very edge of a table in the foyer.
On our way home, we were sure it had been smashed...but to my amazement, it was still there. It looked like it had barely budged a centimeter. It was literally right on the edge and it hadn't fallen over.
75. Don’t Chase Your Own Tail
About six years ago, when I was 14 years old, I was walking through the small trails throughout my parents’ property that we lived on at the time. This was a regular thing I used to do because I had just moved into the area and there was all sorts of old-fashioned farm equipment and old shacks in the woods on the property. My parents were pretty wealthy and they had purchased well over 100 acres of land.
There were even a few streams that ran through there as well. It was sometime in the afternoon that I was walking on this narrow path and I noticed a golden retriever run out into the path in front of me from out of the brush. I was curious, considering I didn’t have a dog and there were not any neighbors within around five miles of the property.
It began to bark, and stopped in its tracks, looking at me with a very agitated look. A few moments later, a man around 19-20 years old comes running out of the brush and stops in his tracks and looks really confused to see me and yells, "Hey, what are you doing here?" and starts to chase me. I instantly sprint as fast as I can back to my house.
I didn't have any intent of looking back at him but I heard him yelling "HEY WAIT" and the voice sounded eerily familiar. Eventually, halfway through the thickly wooded thicket, I couldn't hear his voice anymore and he didn't seem to be following me. However, that didn't stop me from getting back to my house as fast as possible.
I told my parents this and my stepfather actually went and retrieved the rifle from his safe and proceeded to go look for this guy for an hour or so before basically finding no evidence of this happening. I actually got grounded for this, because they thought I was lying, and my parents being very strict basically assumed it was just another tall tale from their rebellious child.
Now that you've made it through this part of the story, this is where it starts to get absolutely weird. Around five weeks ago I visited my parents’ house with my girlfriend and her golden retriever Bentley. The first few hours of the visit went just fine. I talked with family, had some drinks, enjoyed being at home for a change instead of working my daily 9-5 shifts. It was nice.
I stepped out to let the dog out and to smoke, and for no reason, Bentley decides to dash into the woods full speed. As fast as I could, I ran out after him into the thick woods and eventually actually lost track of him. It wasn't until about five minutes of walking into the woods that I heard him barking at something.
I quickly ran to the sound and found him no more than 15 feet away from a kid playing in the woods. I looked at him confused, and said, "Hey, what are you doing here!" I start to walk towards him, and the kid booked it as fast as he could and ran through a thicket of brush and literally completely vanished. I've never experienced something like this.
During the moment, I actually had no idea, but the kid was wearing the exact same clothes I used to wear as a 14-year-old. I've told my girlfriend about this and even she thinks I’m insane, but it actually happened and I can’t explain it. Anyway, that's the story about the day I chased my past self.
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76. What We Do In The Shadows
When I was a kid, I lived in a trailer. The bathroom was next to the master bedroom, and one day, I was walking out and saw a shadow on the wall. At first, I thought it was my shadow, but then I noticed a horrific detail. Its arms were up as if it intended to grab something, and my arms were definitely not up. So I poked my head into the room to see if anybody else was in there, but nobody was.
While I was standing in the doorway, the shadow continued to move along the wall. I ran as fast as I could.
77. Well-Read
One time when I was maybe seven or eight, my mom was reading The Hobbit to me, and we got to a spot I had heard somewhere before. I told her I think she read this part already. She insisted we had never read it and went back to reading it to me, so I started saying the lines with her, word perfect. She stopped and looked at me while I continued quoting it flawlessly.
78. Under Lock And Key
One time, I came home from school with two friends and we went to hang out in my room. I put my keys down on my headboard since I had one of those ones with a bookshelf built-in. After I put them down, I immediately turned around, grabbed those same keys off my computer desk, and put them back on the headboard. My friends noticed right away, I did not.
79. Phantom Pain
My mom and I were on the highway driving home, and there was a semi truck in the lane next to us. Suddenly, the semi swerved into our lane. Luckily, my mom was able to get out of the way before it hit us—but soon after, I began feeling strange. The entire right side of my face felt hot and sticky, I tasted blood, and smelled the very pungent scent of gasoline.
Then my head and right arm started to ache really badly, and I couldn’t feel my legs. Just as soon as the pain started to worsen, it went away. It was replaced with a cold, eerie chill. I told my mom about this, and she couldn’t come up with an explanation. I think I was feeling the pain from another timeline where my mom wasn’t able to avoid that semi.
80. For Whom The Bell Tolls
Strange things used to happen to me a lot when I was in high school. One time, I was asleep in a second-period class because it was early and the teacher didn't care. The bell went off and I immediately got out of the room and was on my way to meet my girlfriend at the time. I saw her, said hello, then hurried to my third period before the bell rang again.
I got to the classroom and it wasn't my class—the teacher said I was early. I looked at the clock and sure enough, it was only the start of the second period. It didn't hit me until later just how strange it was.
81. Problem Solved
I shuffled a deck of cards back into order. The thing is—I now know how it happened. See, way back when I was semi-obsessed with riffle shuffles, those fancy ones where you separate the deck into two and run your thumb up each side so they interweave and then arch it and they all go together nicely. I wanted to get really, really precise with them, so I practiced them a lot.
One day, I bought a new deck, split it, and riffle shuffled it a whole bunch of times, at least eight I'd say. Then, I idly ran a thumb up the deck just before I put it down…and every card was back in order. It was something I already knew was impossible, or at least the odds are literally astronomical, like being a number on the order of stars in the sky.
It haunted me for years. More recently, I found out why. If you riffle shuffle too precisely, the deck is split exactly into two and it is no longer a true shuffle as it is possible to sort the cards back into order in as few as eight moves. Think of it as a formal dance where you change partners. If a non-random system is kept to, then eventually every person will be back with their original partner.
82. Missing Time
After a bath, I went to put on clothes, blacked out, and woke up on the floor, sitting upright against the sink and dressed. I have no idea what happened, didn't feel sore anywhere (like if I had fallen over), and it was as if I sat on the floor and dressed myself while I was unconscious. It felt like 20 minutes had passed, even though the bathroom still had steam in it.
83. Lost And Found
My mom used to babysit these kids when she was younger. Stuff used to go missing in the house and they would look everywhere for it, only to always find it in the middle of the basement. It would always be covered in dust as if it had been gone for years, but they usually found it after only 30 minutes of searching.
84. The More Things Change
I'm a painter I have this board that I've had since college. I started a painting on it that I never quite found the motivation to finish, but it's a decent enough board so I’ve lugged it around with me for a few years. Recently, I painted over it with a new painting. All this is a common thing for me. Materials are expensive, so I reuse a lot of my boards.
This board always stood out to me, though, as being particularly awkward and annoying to handle. I don't even remember where I got it, but that's not significant 'cause I have lots of scrap board. It's very thick, about an inch or thicker, and very heavy. It’s a pain to move up on my easel, and one edge was cut at an angle. Like, instead of a 90-degree, normal cut for a board that thick, there was one edge that was cut at 45 degrees.
Not the sides—if you saw it from the front you'd see an even rectangle, but the thickness of the back, on one side, was cut at an angle. I know this well because I picked the darn thing up so many times. I already knew it would be annoying to frame (I frame my own pieces) because to frame something, you stick pins in the back to hold the wood in, and this angle would make it annoying to pin into a frame.
I mean, all of this is no big deal, but it's all things I've thought and experienced to a pretty detailed degree while living with this board for a few years. Then one day, a month or so ago, I went to grab the board to work on the painting I've started on it. The freaking angled edge is now an even 90-degree angle. Totally normal now, just a regular piece of board, cut normally. No. Angle. This happened around the time that I was getting more curious for a "sign” even though I've been given a few already.
It felt like a cosmic joke. Like, "You wanted to see some stuff? Here's some stuff that literally no one would believe but is going to drive you crazy." I’ve examined all the edges, most with paint flecks from my working on it. The previously angled edge has fewer paint flecks but is still looking worn and real. My roommate laughed when I told her and said I must have remembered it wrong.
But I remember so many details, so many times that this weird, heavy, awkward board was in my thoughts and then just BAM, it's a different shape. It's like waking up to find that a plate you used to use all the time is now oval, not circular. But who would believe you when you point out such an innocuous thing? They would just say, it's always been oval, you crazy. But I KNOW this board was a different shape before.
85. Living In The McFuture
A couple of hours ago, I was in the midst of a coding frenzy when my stomach started rumbling constantly. I decided that my coding project can wait a few minutes and that I needed to go grab some food. I live in the western United States, so the nearest place is always a McDonald’s. I just wanted some quick food. I wasn't dressed and I hadn't showered all day, so I wanted to run to the nearest drive-thru and get back. McDonald’s it was then.
I picked myself up from the computer, threw a leash on my dog, and headed out. I loaded the dog in my car and turned the ignition. Outside, there was still a bit of light. The sun had just dipped behind mountains in the horizon and it was just dark enough to warrant headlights. As I'm winding my way out of my neighborhood, I started to notice that the streetlamps kept going out as I passed under them and then coming back on when I'm passed them, which I thought was strange.
I chalked it up to coincidence as I've had streetlights go out on me before. I eventually made it to one of the last turns to get out of the neighborhood, but as I pulled up to the stop sign, I felt a wave of...something...pour over me. I heard my dog whimper. I looked back at her and she had ducked back into the middle of the back seat, tail between her legs, with her fur sticking straight out.
It felt like I went through a thick sheet of static electricity. I began hearing a loud feedback noise inside my head and the world got blurry. This went on for a few seconds before it cleared up. My car had stalled during this time, so I turned the engine back on and made my way past the stop sign. When I pulled out into the main road, I immediately noticed that the streets were vastly different.
They were the usual black, but they had a bright white iridescent color to them as well, lighting up the environment. The streetlights that were usually on the medians on the road were gone as well, replaced by trees. McDonald’s was still right by my house. I could see the sign. It was in a different building, though. The building was much bigger than usual, but so far this is the least strange thing to happen on this drive.
This is where it gets really strange. I drove towards it, still very much confused as to the sudden change. My dog in the back of my car seemed to acclimate to this change much better, as she was back to sticking her head out of the window and sniffing the air. I pulled up to the only stoplight between me and my destination and the car in front of me was something I had never seen before.
The logo on the back was a silver circle with what looked like a silver Sicilian eagle in the middle. On the eagle's chest was the letter "G" in a cursive font. The model of the car was "Vapor." The license plate was the same as any other, though. So I go through the light, still wondering what the heck happened when I reach the McDonald’s.
I get to the drive-thru menu, which is all LCD screens updating to show featured menu items and looping gifs of people smiling while they eat. My usual is still on the menu, though for $2 more than I'm used to paying for it, so I order that. I pull up to the window with my credit card out and at the ready so I can pay.
The worker opens the window and greets me. I greet him and hand him my card. He looks at it and then back at me and says, "We don't accept that here," and then hands me a gadget that reminded me of my dad's blood pressure monitor. I guess I was supposed to put my finger in it, but I was so thrown off I just asked, "Uh, can I just pay with cash?"
"Cash? Sure, I guess." So I hand him $20 and he inspects it for longer than anyone should, and then proceeds to give me my receipt without my change. When I ask him about the change, he looked at me with a very confused face and said, "We don't have cash at this location, sir. We only can give cash vouchers." Okay…So I look at my receipt and, lo and behold, the bottom of it says, "Cash value: $11.26."
Good enough for me, I guess. I pull up to the next window. After waiting for a few minutes, the next worker opens up his window with my bag of food in his hand and a big smile on his face. He hands me the bag and I put the receipt in it out of habit. He then says to me, "Oh wait, I forgot your fries! Can I have the bag back, please?" This was the most terrifying part of the whole experience.
So I hand him the bag and a few seconds later he returns and says, "I hope you have a great day! I made this spe-sp-spespe-spe-mm-I-great day!-spe-spe..." This went on for a few seconds. His face and body motions were moving and resetting like when you tilt an N64 game slightly out of the console. I didn't have time to be terrified during the moment, because as this happened, I felt the wave of electricity come over me again.
Just like last time, I heard my dog whimper, and when I looked back she was crouched in the back, her fur extended. And just like last time, I heard a loud feedback noise in my head. My eyes took a second to adjust, but when the world came into focus, I saw that I was in a parking lot. I recognized everything. This was the parking lot in which the McDonald's I'm used to is placed. And sure enough, the McDonald's was visible in my rear-view mirror at its usual location.
So I go through and buy food, again. My $20 was missing, as was my cash voucher or whatever, and I drive back home.
86. It’s Not In Your Head
I used to work the cash register in this store in Brooklyn. One day, these two elderly ladies came in, and as soon as I saw them, I immediately thought there was a glitch. They were about 70 years old and looked like twin sisters. But the craziest part was the way they moved and the way they were dressed. It was the middle of January, so it was obviously cold.
They came in both wearing the same clothes—very bright green coats, neat black hats, the same black pants, and the same shoes. They walked right next to each other at all times while being inside and left in the same way after they bought something. This whole time, I was freaking out inside of my head. Even after they left, I was looking at their backs and it was crazy how glitchy they looked. Later, my manager told me they were twins that lived nearby and he honestly thought they do that to mess around with people.
87. This Takes The Cake
It happened about eight months ago. We lived in a small apartment with our two young children and our dog while we saved up for a down payment on a home. It was a typical Monday night around 7 pm. We had just cleaned up after dinner, my husband was surfing the web, and I was relaxing on the couch. I was reading the back of a cake mix trying to decide if I had time to bake it, let it cool, frost it, and eat it before I needed to be in bed.
My husband was watching a video on the internet, he said something funny about it, we both laughed...Then BAM! I woke up, face-down in bed. My clock read 8:00 exactly. My alarm hadn't been turned on. I was very confused and could smell the strong scent of coconut. I sat up and looked at my husband who was also just waking up.
He looked at me with a really confused look, and we both jumped out of bed and ran to our kids' room. They were in bed asleep. We went into the living room and the second our dog saw us, she started whimpering and sort of army-crawling toward us. It was such unusual behavior for her. I had never seen her act that way before, and have never since.
Nothing looked out of order in our apartment…aside from one small detail. The cake mix I had been looking at that night was gone. I searched everywhere for that cake mix and never found it. Another odd detail from that day is that we were all dressed in our pajamas when we woke up, except my youngest. He was in the jeans and t-shirt he had been wearing the night before.
Neither my husband nor I would have ever put him to bed like that. Neither of us have any memory of getting into our pajamas or anything else after laughing at the comment he made on the video. We were already late for work so we both called in sick that day. We spent the day talking about it and trying to make sense of it. At some point that day, he asked me a question that made my blood run cold.
He was wondering if I had smelled coconut when I woke up. We never found the source of the smell. To this day, I can't look at a cake mix or smell coconut without feeling a little anxious and sick.
88. In Search Of Lost Time
Six or seven years ago back in high school, I was dating this girl who went to a different school. I ended up going to her prom because honestly, I didn’t care at all about my own school's prom. We had a fun time and did all the sorts of stuff that teenagers do. I dropped her off at her house afterward and I ended up leaving her at around 3 am or so.
Now, she lived about 45 minutes away if the traffic was good. I set my mom's Tom-Tom to home and went on my way. I remember it being around 3 am because she called me to make sure I managed to get back on the highway and didn't get lost. I started my drive home, and the next thing I knew, I was pulling into my driveway. I don't remember the drive home; it was just a complete blank.
It was like I fell asleep but still made it home safely. Then it got much weirder. The part that screwed with my head was that she called me at 3:05-ish and I pulled into my driveway at roughly 3:15 am, even though it should have been a 45-minute drive. I don't know how the heck I did it. I know I didn't speed because it wasn't my car I was driving, it was my mom's.
And even speeding, in a 2009 Hyundai Elantra, there was no way in heck I could make a 55-mile trip in 10 minutes.
89. Total Recall
I occasionally have dreams where a few months or weeks down the line, I experience that moment. But I always forget what the dream was about right up until it happens. My first experience was in sixth grade, when I had a dream where I was having a conversation with my teacher. At the time I was sat in the back of the class, and that was about when I had the dream.
Fast forward two and a half weeks, and I've been moved to the front of the class and it happens. There she is, taking to me about some work I need to do because I was absent for a few days, and then I have this déjà vu moment and as she's speaking. I'm staring blankly at her remembering this conversation. I told her and her reaction was the exact same as in my dream, facial expressions and all.
To this day I still occasionally have these dreams and moments, and to this day there's no way in heck I can explain them.
90. Thoughts And Prayers
My kids and I went on a road trip when they were three and five years old. We prayed for protection before getting on the road as I am religious. We got a few miles down the highway and my car wheels started to jerkingly lock up, almost like a really strong emergency brake was on. It shook the whole car and we all wondered what it was.
It stopped and then happened again, so I decided to take the next exit because we were about to take a long road trip. The first thing I saw was a mechanic shop. The guy drove my car a few miles, brought it back, and said he couldn’t find anything wrong with it. I got back on the interstate and noticed the traffic was worse than before.
As I got up the next couple of miles, I saw that there were 2 x 4s all over the highway. They had fallen off a truck...and they had been in front of me before I exited.
91. Double Trouble
My husband recently took an overnight job to help us out. He's only been there about two weeks and works evenings/overnights, 9 pm-6 am. Last night was no different, and he left home around 8:15pm. Our 11-year-old daughter and I decided to make it a movie night. Around 11 pm, I heard keys in my backdoor and the usual sounds my husband makes when he comes home.
I creep out to the kitchen to make sure it was him, and it was. He told me he needed to grab his knee compression sleeve, walks down the hall, says hi to our daughter as he passes the living room, and goes upstairs. He came back down, gave me a kiss and left again. We finished our movie and went to bed. In the morning when he got home, I made a joking comment about him forgetting his knee sleeve.
He was genuinely confused as I recalled the previous night. Our daughter confirmed everything I said and he still was acting confused. I pulled up our security motion camera on my phone to show him when he popped in quick. That’s when I made a disturbing discovery. There was no footage from the night before, or any other night, of him coming home after he’d already left for work.
My daughter and I both heard him, saw him, and I touched him. But he was never home during that time. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened that night. We seriously have no idea what happened.
92. Music To My Ears
I had a dream that I got hit by a freight train on some tracks right in the middle of my town. As I was laying there injured and apparently about to pass, my girlfriend was holding me and the song “Where Oh Where Can My Baby Be” was playing. I eventually woke up to a call from her, asking if I wanted to go with her and her sister to a food festival that happened annually in town, which was coincidental because that was where I was in my dream.
I agreed to go and quickly told her about my dream and how intense it was. We had a laugh and I got ready. After they picked me up, we made our way into town and parked. As we were walking, I started to hear it. A band that was playing in one of the music tents was playing that freaking song. The very same creepy song from my dream.
I remember grabbing my girlfriend’s arm and being like, “Whoa!” Just kind of thinking it was a crazy coincidence. She realized what I was on about and also chuckled at the randomness. Just then, as we were standing there just being a little weirded out, we heard the dinging of the railroad crossing. The festival was on either side of the tracks and the train ran practically right through it.
The train went through the festival at the exact time the band was playing the song from my dream. The two of us would talk about that day for years to come, even after we stopped dating.
93. Never The Right Time
While I was living in Denver, I had a friend fly into town to visit. The Denver National Airport was about 30 minutes away and her flight was scheduled to get in around 11:15 pm. At exactly 10:30 pm, I got a text message from her. She said: "I just landed. Are you here?" Assuming her flight arrived early, we immediately started rushing to the airport while I kept trying to call her, only to have her phone go to voicemail.
I thought maybe her phone had kicked the bucket or something, so I continued to refresh the flight information page on our way there. It just kept saying the plane was still in transit. We ended up getting to the airport before 11:15. With no word from my friend or new information about the flight, we circled the airport and waited...then I got a text that sent a shiver down my spine.
At 11:15 pm or so, I got the exact same text message she had sent me at 10:30 pm. I called her and I asked if she texted me while she was on the plane. She said there was no way she could have since she had her phone turned off the entire time. When I finally met up with her, I asked to compare our text conversations on our phones.
I had two of the same texts from her, one at 10:30 pm and one at 11:15 pm, while her conversation only read 11:15 pm. She confirmed that she hadn't typed it out prior either. Her phone was completely off. This glitch in the matrix made me waste 15 minutes circling an airport.
94. Gotcha!
For a few weeks before this while out driving, I’ve observed pedestrians standing at the traffic lights who will reach into their pocket and look at their phone as they’re walking across the road when the light goes green. Nothing significant or strange about this, just one of those mundane things you notice while going about your day.
Today I was driving with my daughter and we stopped at a red light at a crossing and there was a man standing there. Nothing out of the ordinary, denim jacket, black cap, glasses, around 6’2” tall. I thought I’d try to weird out my young daughter, so I came up with a plan. She’s five, so I knew I was going to blow her mind.
I said “See that man? When the walking man goes green and he starts to walk across, he’ll reach into his pocket and pull out his phone and start looking at it. Watch and see.” I still can’t explain what happened next. As he walks across, he reaches into his pocket but then immediately takes his hand out.
He looks and points right at me with his mouth open smiling, like a “gotcha!” stance. Of course, my daughter found this absolutely hilarious and I sat there completely mind blown. I must’ve sat there in silence looking at him walk across for the next 10 seconds. I drove on and had a look at him as I drove past and he was smirking and laughing.
I’ve been playing it through my head all day. The windows were up. The radio was on. I wasn’t shouting. My voice was not even remotely raised. He must’ve been about 15-20 feet away from me. I can’t figure out at all how he could’ve heard me. It’s literally impossible. How did he know I was trying to predict he’d reach into his pocket for his phone?
95. The Waiting Game
I was visiting my mom for the Christmas break. It was December 23rd. I was exhausted after the 2-hour bus trip on top of the previous few hours I'd spent filling my mother in on what I'd been up to the past few months at university. My mother and stepfather were asleep on the living room couches, and I was sitting on the loveseat, flipping aimlessly through unappealing late-night TV shows.
Sometime between midnight and 1 am, I decided that I wanted to go to bed, but I kept flipping through the channels anyway. I wanted nothing more than to just crash after my long and hectic day, but for whatever reason, I felt like I couldn't just yet. There was something I still had to do before I could go to bed, but I couldn't figure out what it was.
After a while, I started to get angry. It was like I was fighting with myself, one half of me wanting to go to bed, while the other half insisted that I had to wait. Wait for what, though? All of a sudden, I heard this loud snapping sound from beside the TV. I stood up to check it out and realized to my horror that the cable to the little space heater in the living room had caught fire.
It was an old space heater with a cord my stepfather had spliced together to fix it after it had broken, and the exposed pieces of the wire had been wrapped in electrical tape. I yelled "FIRE!" at my sleeping parents and my stepfather jolted awake, lunging to his feet to grab the heater, by which time I had already yanked the cord out of the wall and ran outside with it.
Once I was sure that the fire had gone out and the heater was safe, I went back inside leaving the heater out on the concrete front stoop, flooded with adrenaline. After a few moments spent calming myself down, the adrenaline rush subsided and I thought once again that I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed. I realized that feeling like I was waiting for something was gone, and I fell into a deep sleep.
96. Playing Hooky
In high school, I remember going to English and the teacher did roll call. She called my name and I raised my hand and said, "I'm here," then she stopped. The eeriest thing happened next. The teacher looked around and said, "So he's not here then?" My friend and I laughed because I was obviously here. I thought she might be messing with me.
That night, though, my mom got a call telling her I wasn't at classes today. I was actually marked absent. I go back to school the next day and tell my friend, "Mrs. English Teacher actually counted me absent" and he just said, "Why wouldn't she?" Though to myself "Ha ha, you're not funny" but I just let it slide because I thought again I was being messed with.
Then one of my other friends sits down and asks, "You feeling better today? Or were you just playing hooky?" I was so confused. Then I go to my first hour and that teacher hands me the work I supposedly missed from that day. I looked in my bag and had the same stuff, the guide and assignments, already there. To. This. Day. I don't know if I missed that day of school or not
Pexels
97. Secrets Locked Away
My grandparents own a small cabin that my family uses from time to time. In the basement is a small laundry room, with a deadbolt that locks on the inside and with only one entrance. No windows. One day, my brother and I were watching TV and my mom comes and gets us. She tells us to go outside and wait for her there.
She comes out and calls my dad who was running errands, and then the authorities. Apparently, the laundry room downstairs is locked from the inside. We were not staying with anyone else. Officers come and get the door open. They revealed a chilling truth: No one was in there. It's a deadbolt so you literally cannot lock it from the outside. That was probably 15 years ago, and I still think about it all the time.
98. Non-Playable Character Failed To Load
I met a girl at university and after we graduated, we decided we'd move in with each other. The plan was whoever got a job first would pay the rent etc. while the other looked for a job in the same city. I got the job and we moved into a small house together. Months later, she's still having no luck finding a job. I feel like garbage one day, which is unusual for me, and come home from work extremely early, before lunch.
I walk in through the front door and I’m greeted by a bizarre sight. I look into the lounge and see her just...sitting there. The TV isn't on, nor the radio, and she's just staring straight ahead, not even moving. I stood there and watched her for a while out of curiosity. I'm sure everyone wonders what their partners/friends do when they think no one is around.
She did nothing, just stared dead ahead. The closest I can describe it is like in older computer games where you'd get into a room and an NPC hadn't noticed you yet and would still be stood there, waiting for you to get in and "activate" them. We'd had a fight the night before so I just shook my head and went off to bed.
At around 4, I get up and go downstairs again and she's still there staring dead ahead, at which point I obviously worry and try to get her attention. Nothing I did, even shaking her or shouting would wake her up from whatever it was, so I called my dad—he's a dentist but knows a lot about medicine generally—and ask him what I should do. He says he'll be round in 20 minutes, and to keep an eye on her till then.
Around 4:30 she suddenly gets up, goes into the kitchen, and starts doing chores, washing up and getting tea, etc. I follow her and watch before asking her if she's okay and she says she's fine, pretty casually like nothing had happened. I asked her what she'd been up to that day and she launched into this long explanation of how she'd gone out job hunting and where she'd gone and managers she'd spoken to that day. It was creepy.
I told her what had actually happened and she looked at me oddly like I was the crazy one, insisted that she'd been out job hunting and had only just got back. I told her I wasn't judging her and it was fine that she hadn't been out job hunting, but I was worried about her and she had definitely been sitting there all day.
My dad came by and suggested she may have been having an "absence seizure," which is a type of epilepsy. She had scans, etc., and nothing showed up (no tumors either). Since she didn't believe MY story things got pretty tense between us, especially because after possibly having an absence seizure, she had been banned from driving for a year.
Over the next six-ish months before we broke up, I did some pretty odd things to try and prove what had happened, including booking days off work without telling her and then pretending to go to work, only to park around the corner, come home sneakily and then observe her. A lot of the time I'd find her stood there doing nothing again.
When I asked her about it she'd still have these long explanations of what she'd done that day. It happened so often that I kind of got the feeling my girlfriend was only really "on" when people were around, and when she thought no one was around she'd just go into a default "off" state until people got back. It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s all I could come up with.
Weirdly, some of her stories were backed up by other people. Like she said she'd gone to meet a friend that day, and later when I checked with the friend, she said that it was true. This is the only part I can't really explain to myself, and I've kind of just dismissed it as the friend being nice and trying to back up her friend. We broke up, though we're still friends, and I haven't mentioned it to her since.
It still freaks me out though, and I worry about what other people are like when they think no one is around.
99. Swan Song
I was 12 and my brother was eight. We were living with our dad after he and mom separated. Dad ruled with an iron fist when it came to school attendance; he wouldn't let us stay home unless we were bleeding or hospitalized. Nevertheless, I still tried to stay home from school at times. One day, I tried faking a headache so I could stay home. His reaction was bizarre.
He immediately said yes, but that I would have to stay with him all day. I asked why, and he said: "Because I need you here." Fast forward to lunchtime and we're sitting at the table eating. I look at him and see he's looking at me with a look I had never seen before. Then before I could process it, he collapses onto the floor.
He had a massive heart attack that took his life almost instantly. If my dad didn't let me stay home, my little brother would have found his body after school, and he would have been there for hours. I don't think my brother would have recovered from that. It took me over 10 years to recover from it myself, quite honestly.
But then, another thing happened that I can't explain. I used to go to sleep with the radio on, and for the three nights before my dad had the heart attack, I would wake up during the night to a particular song playing. Same song, every night for three nights…until he passed. Later, they played that song at his funeral. I hadn't told anyone what happened.
100. Childish Game
I used to work in a nursing home where I cared for dementia patients. Every patient on the hall I worked on would steal spoons from dinner. It got to the point where once a week I’d have to go through everyone’s room to take back the spoons. It was the strangest behavior so one day, I just to ask why they were taking the silverware.
Apparently, the patients, all of them, took the spoons to give to “the kids” because “they like shiny things.” I asked the patients about the kids many times but never got a good answer. I’d hear things like “they just live here” or “they stand outside in the snow and look in the windows” or “they’re my friends who visit.”
It wouldn’t be so weird if they all didn’t do it but it was everyone—the ones who were still capable of speaking anyways. One time at three in the morning one of my patients started screaming so I ran into her room and found her lying in bed, seemingly fine. I asked what was wrong and she said, “That boy is here again and won’t get out of my closet! I’m scared!”
I was like, “Yeah, me too, Dolores.”
