A glitch in the matrix. Déjà vu. Seeing double. Whatever you want to call it, we’ve all had something happen to us that defies all laws of the universe. The fine users of Reddit shared their experiences of unexplainable moments and more, and they range from just plain strange to totally out of this world. Prepare to question reality with these freaky glitch-in-the-matrix stories.
1. Keeping a Watchful Eye
I remember driving my car to this intersection in this rural area and checking both sides because of the terrible blind spots. In the corner of my eye, my mother is sitting there and says something like, "it's all clear my way." I look back and she isn't there. On top of that, my mother had already been gone for a few years at this point.
This was also in the middle of the day and I've never had it happen since.
2. Skipping Ahead
I was driving about 50 mph when I saw a car run a stop sign on an on-ramp and pull out right in front of me. I remember bracing for impact, and when I was about 300 yards down the highway and I saw the car at the ramp in my rearview, just about to pull out.
3. Longer Than Expected
I was walking my dog and I was almost to the driveway when I looked down for some reason and when I looked back up I was down the road about six blocks away from where I thought I was. I was so confused but my dog looked completely fine.
4. Years in the Making
I remember being pretty young, like 9 or 10, and I was in the car park of a pub in England, South end. I remember seeing someone in their teens in the window of a house looking over the car park. They waved at me and I felt like I knew them somehow. My parents asked who I was waving at and I said just some lady in the window over there.
I didn’t think much of it. Fast forward 10 years. I was at my nan’s new house. I remember walking into her room—which I was never allowed to do—and going to the window. I then realized I was in the house looking over that same parking lot and remembering that interaction years before. Then a girl around 9 or 10, who was in said car park, waved at me and I waved back.
I felt like I knew her. I could not explain it and have never told anyone about it. It freaked me out.
5. Right Where You Left Off
When I was around 12 years old, I was watching TV when I noticed that the sun just turned off, like completely. I was confused, so I opened the blinds and it was dark. The show was still at the same spot, but the clock on the cable box said it was five hours later. My best guess for what happened was that I passed out without realizing it, like those nights where you lay in bed and blink and suddenly its morning.
So I'm guessing I fell asleep sitting up, for exactly enough time to have the cartoon network play a rerun of the show and get to the exact spot I fell asleep at. It was surreal.
6. Follow the Street Signs
When I was living with my parents, my dad was cleaning out one of his drawers and found a piece of paper with a postal code for a nearby city on it. When he showed me, I immediately recognized it as my own handwriting, except I had no memory of ever writing out this postal code. So I punched the postal code into maps and it was a random street I had never visited before and I had no reason to visit.
I wish I had gone to check it out. Maybe the universe was trying to show me something.
7. Don’t You Forget About Me
I lost my wife a year ago today. I had some odd things happen since then, like a couple of old meaningful pictures show up that I swore were in storage. The strangest one was when I vacuumed the carpet and as soon as I was done a diamond ring was on the ground right where I had just cleaned. It was like she was saying, "Hey, this one is real, don't lose it!"
Wikimedia Commons, Jennifer Dickert
8. Dream Vacation
I remember a trip my family took—but that they swear never happened. I wrote about it in elementary school and my mom was so confused and told me I must have dreamt it. I’m 29 and I still vividly remember walking through the field to this cool little house with my family. It’s so confusing.
9. Hit the Lights
I was on vacation in Florida visiting a friend. We were walking on the beach on a perfectly sunny day when everything went black for a second. I thought it was weird but explained it away by thinking that my eyes were playing tricks on me, but then my friend spoke, and my blood ran cold. She looked at me and asked, “Did everything just go black for a second?”
10. Same But Different
I played baseball as a kid, and every year at the end of the season, they handed out trophies. They called out the names of the kids while we received our trophies. There happened to be a kid with the same name as me. We met up after the ceremony. We both found that it was weird, since our last name isn't a very common one.
We had the same birthday and everything. We looked alike, both our dads were named Derek and both of our sisters were named Lilly. As a kid, I found it cool. As an adult, I find it cool and also disturbing.
11. One Last Goodbye
One day when I was about 8 years old, I didn't go to school because I was sick. My friend was supposed to bring me homework but he never came. My granddad came home from work and he told me that my friend had passed. I was devastated. That night, I had a dream. I was with my friend at a playground next to our school and we were talking, then he told me that he was safe and it didn't hurt when that car hit him.
The next day, my mother wanted to talk to me about that situation and she asked me if I wanted to know what happened. I told her that I knew everything because my friend told me. She thought that my granddad told me but he did not. He said that he did not want to tell me without her knowing it. But it didn’t stop there. That night, I had a dream again and I was talking to him again.
We were playing and having fun and he told me that he really had to go and we wouldn’t see each other ever again. The next day was his funeral, and I really haven’t had a dream about him ever since.
12. A Lovely Coincidence
This summer, I bought my girlfriend a last-minute birthday trip. The plan was to go kayaking around the San Juan Islands off the Washington state coast. After a long drive and ferry trip, we found the tour group of about 20 people and were then shuffled into a shuttle van for a ride to the beach. Now, my girlfriend has a unique name similar to the name of a famous painter.
Let's say it's Rebecca Warhol just for fun—it's not. She's a little ray of sunshine and started chatting with the middle-aged woman sitting next to her on the shuttle as we waited to leave. The woman noted that she had always loved the name Rebecca, as it was her mother's name. They made pleasant small talk in the van until the tour guide passed around the sign-in sheet for all of us to fill out. That's when things got strange.
My girlfriend wrote her full name on the sheet and passed it on to the woman, who immediately shouted, "Oh my God," and started crying. After a few minutes of total confusion, she told us "Rebecca Warhol was my mother's full name, and these islands were her favorite place in the world. She passed on this summer from cancer and we've traveled hundreds of miles to spread her ashes here."
We were STUNNED. I literally picked a random date, time, and tour company, and THEN we were split into the same group as this woman AND my girlfriend was sitting right next to her on the shuttle. What the heck? She continued by saying, "My daughter told us that Nana Rebecca would be with us on this trip, and I didn't believe it until now."
It was the most unbelievable coincidence we had ever experienced and has totally convinced me that there's more to this world than we think. As my brother later said, the universe winked at us that day.
13. Terrible Timing
When I was in college, I took a hard news/soft news journalism class where one of the assignments was to write an obituary for one of my grandparents. The professor told us to write it on a deceased grandparent, but if all of your grandparents were still alive we had to choose one. In my case, all of my grandparents were alive.
I procrastinated actually doing the assignment until the night before it was due because it seemed like a morbid assignment, especially since all of my grandparents were still alive. Scramming for an easy grandparent to write about, I gave my mom a call and asked her for some basic biographical information about my maternal grandfather.
As we were talking about my grandpa's career, my mom couldn't recall the name of one of the companies he worked at. She lectured me about waiting until the last minute to write the assignment because it was late—10:30 PM my grandpa's time. However, she said she would give him a call to see if he was still awake and would be able to answer that question since my assignment was due the following morning.
When my mom called my grandpa, my grandma answered the phone in a panic. My grandma frantically explained that the paramedics had just arrived and were performing CPR on my grandpa because he had stopped breathing and lost consciousness. My mom was able to stay on the phone with my grandma until they took my grandpa to the hospital, where they declared that he didn’t make it.
In the time that my mom and I had been talking on the phone about my grandpa's fake "obituary," he was actually dying. This was entirely unexpected as even though he was in his eighties, he was the healthiest of my grandparents at the time. We ended up using the obituary I wrote for that writing assignment as his actual obituary.
It still freaks me out when I think about the timing.
14. Real Life Pause Button
About two years ago, I went to collect my husband from the ferry after work. My husband got into the car and as I was driving very slowly out of the car park we both noticed two people standing a few meters in front of our car. It looked as though they were strangers, older looking professionals, both walking to their separate cars in different areas of the car park.
The man was reaching into his side bag and the lady was further ahead than the man, with her head turned to the right. I know the exact positions they were in for a reason I still can’t explain to this day—they were both completely frozen on the spot! My husband and I sat there watching the frozen strangers, not saying anything to each other.
Then, all of a sudden, it was like someone pressed play and the two strangers just continued on like nothing had happened. My husband and I promised to each other that we would never forget how weird the experience was. I can't remember exactly how long they stayed frozen like that but it was long enough to freak us both out!
15. Close Encounter
Every night I go to bed about two hours before my husband. I always wake up when he comes into the room. One night, he was gaming with a friend and it was hours later when I heard him sneak into the room and crawl across the floor so he could pop up and scare me. I felt the floor kind of shake and felt him bump clumsily against the side of the bed in the dark.
I held out my hand and asked him not to scare me, as I was already scared enough. I begged him to just take my hand and come to bed. I couldn’t see anything in the room, but knew he was there and just waited for him to jump up so I could move on and go back to sleep. That’s when I heard him talking to his friend in the other room.
I was frozen. I know there’s sleep paralysis or lucid dreaming or something that explains this, but I would have sworn on my son’s life that someone had crawled across the floor and jostled the bed. Eventually, I worked out of the fear enough to grab my phone and text my husband to come in and turn on the lights and check under the bed.
It still boggles me how real it felt.
16. Synced Up
It was 1985. My ex-wife and I were sleeping. There was a small sliver of light coming in through the window from a streetlight, so the room and bed were dimly visible. Our black Pomeranian was at the end of the bed asleep. I dreamt that I woke up, reached down to pet him, and he turned into a glossy black bivalve/oyster thing, which opened up to reveal rows of gleaming glass teeth.
I woke up to my ex backpedaling up the bed over the pillows towards the wall. I asked, “What's wrong?” She said, “What is that shiny black clam thing with the teeth at the end of the bed? Where's the dog?” We had had the same nightmare at the same time. This still gives me a chill.
17. Lose, Find, Repeat
One night, more than a decade ago, as teenagers, my friends and I were being delinquents outside of a museum. In the grass outside of the museum, I found a Taoist/Feng Shui compass, used for fortune-telling and the like. I've had it ever since. But it disappears—like regularly. I've lost it for months at a time before. It's at the point now that when it disappears I'm fine with it, as I just say something like, "Eh, it always comes back."
And then I find it under a couch cushion or somewhere else it has no business being. It's very strange. To be honest though, since I moved into my current house, it hasn't moved. Maybe it decided it's exploring days are behind it and it's just time to settle down.
18. Not Welcome Here
A friend and I went to a buddy's house for a birthday party and stayed up playing Halo 2 and hanging out. We all crashed in the basement. R, the friend who came with me, and I got up at the same time. Not like one after the other, we both got up at the same time after being asleep for a few hours and rushed to the bathroom. R was more athletic than me—probably still is—and beat me there.
I ran upstairs, barely getting my head over the toilet before puking my guts out. R was doing the same thing in the basement. I was wearing a wooden cross my grandmother mailed me from Romania—I'm not religious but I appreciated the gift, as I had never met her at that point. The cross somehow became detached from the cord, fell on the tile and broke into two pieces.
So we both call our respective mothers and get picked up. By now it's like 3 or 4 AM. I felt sick up until we left the house. Once I was in the car and a few blocks away, I felt perfectly fine. R reported the same thing to me that day over MSN Messenger—felt perfectly fine after a few blocks. We got the pictures developed a few weeks later.
There’s a picture of us on the couch rocking some Halo—but the whole room looks like it's filled with mist. Super spooky. I've been looking for the picture for a long time and I can't seem to find it anymore, but every few years my sister and I search my mom's photo albums for it.
19. Seeing Things
Once at a stop sign in a neighborhood, all of these little sparkles started swirling around in mid-air roughly three to four feet off the ground out of nowhere. They were roughly two feet wide and three or four feet tall. They lasted three to five seconds and then they were gone. No one was around and when I asked my passenger if he saw it too he breathed a sigh of relief and said yes. We spoke about it a little more but there was no reasonable explanation.
Another time, me and three friends were driving down an empty country road—it was a very straight stretch. Suddenly, a man on a bike appeared. Someone said to watch out for him—and then he disappeared. Our minds were blown, to say the least. Just “poof”, and he was gone.
20. Out for a Stroll
This reminds me of a creepy thing that happened when I was like 10. It was nighttime and my mum was driving myself and my two sisters home. She took a windy country road where there are no houses or bus stops. It’s just farmland all around for miles. She did an emergency stop so we are all looking out the front of the car to see why.
She and one of my sisters start angrily talking about how “that guy” shouldn’t be walking the road in the dark and wondering where he’s even going since he’s dressed in pure white and crossing to a field which leads to nothing. It’s also not a busy road so it makes no sense he’d choose to cross when a car is coming. My mum suddenly starts driving again, and she and my sister start freaking out that he’d “vanished” once he reached the other side of the road.
Not only that, but me and my other sister hadn’t seen anyone cross the road at all, and the whole time we’d wondered who they were talking about but assumed it was in the distance or something. Nope. They insist that it was right in front of the car.
21. It’s the Boogeyman
I've got several kids and night terrors are always a bit freaky, but once you know it's normal and what it's like, you kind of get used to it. But my middle child had something happen a couple of years ago that was no night terror—it was something way more terrifying. He's almost five now and has been pretty advanced in academics for a while.
He somehow learned how to read the names of numbers and colors and such and I accidentally found out one day when I caught him reading what I had written. He came into my room very upset one night. He had a night terror, except he was fully awake. I know they can seem like they're awake when they're not, so I had him doing some math.
I’m asking very high-level questions about things and he answers each question correctly. He seemed fully alert and aware. But he was seeing something my wife and I could not see—something threatening and scary. He kept telling us that "the fly" was going to get him. He shrieked ear-piercing screeches, consistently turning away and back to the doorway into my master bath where he saw this thing that was invisible to me.
This happened for a few nights, too. I could only reassure him that he was okay and nothing was there and we would protect him. "You're okay. You're okay, " I'd tell him. He always darted down the hallway between his room and mine for a few days after this, reassuring himself by saying "I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay" as he ran. Poor thing.
It freaked my wife and me out completely.
22. Bonus Time
I once clocked out of work at 6 PM—like I always did at the time—and began my hour-long train ride home. After I had found a seat, I went to sleep and woke up just before my station. From the station, it is a short bus journey—10-15 minutes—to reach home. During the entire journey, I didn't use my phone and I don't wear a watch, so I didn't really notice the time anywhere.
When I reached home, my family surprised me with, "You're home early, everything alright?" I looked at the clock and it was about to be 6 PM. I was too shocked to understand what happened. I checked my other watches, cellphones, etc., and the time was absolutely right. A few days later, the admin emailed us the timesheets for the month—times clocking in and out—and every single day for me was around the same time—6 PM.
So it certainly wasn't me having left work earlier. To this day, I haven't figured out how I gained between 60-90 minutes that day.
23. Polite Robbers
When I was a teenager, my family lived in a big 115-year-old brick house. Plenty of creepy stuff happened but one night I was heading to bed when the door between the first-floor kitchen and the basement stairs absolutely SLAMMED shut. It had a unique sound that I recognized immediately as the kitchen/basement door. There were no windows open that could've caused a draft.
Our dog was asleep on the second floor, I was on the second floor, and my parents were both asleep in the third-floor attic, which had been converted to a master bedroom. None of us could've shut the door. Absolutely terrified, I worked up the courage to go investigate, carrying my hilariously teeny pocket knife for protection.
As I went downstairs, I turned on every light. When I reached the kitchen, the door was wide open. Even more freaked out, I ran back up to bed, leaving the lights on. A minute or two later, I heard something even more terrifying—a definite “Shhh! OK, OK” from downstairs. I laid in bed, ready to accept my demise. Eventually, I somehow fell asleep and in the morning I was the first one downstairs—I woke up before my parents and dog.
I found that the lights were all off and the basement door had been shut again.
24. Sign of Things to Come
I always have weird visions or I’ll see something in a dream but I won’t notice that I’ve seen it, then like a week or so after I’ll see the exact same thing, almost like déjà vu but not quite since it hasn’t actually happened before. It would always be something so specific and it has happened multiple times so it can’t just be a strange coincidence.
25. Returning Home
Around 12 years ago I had a dark purple three series BMW, which I drove to work and parked in the same spot for around three years. I sold the car due to mileage and wanting something a little more reliable, and purchased a different car. One week later, I turn up to work to find my purple BMW parked in my parking spot. I was totally shocked.
It turns out that we had a work experience kid start that day, and his dad had dropped him off in my old car that he bought two days earlier. What are the chances of that? I've never met this kid or his dad, and yet here was my old car in my/its space.
26. Who Left the Dogs Out?
About five years ago, in November, we lost our family dog to cancer. She was the dog my children grew up with and was loved by all. At the next Christmas, at the end of the day after gifts, food, and family, I was cleaning up when I found a tiny pewter dog figurine sitting on the mantel. I asked everyone who had been at the house that day if they left it. No one had.
Okay, weird, but I took it as a good omen. When my eldest went back to college at the end of that Christmas break, he asked if he could take the little figurine to remember his dog. Of course, I said yes. A week or two later, while picking up around the house, there was the figurine again! I called my son and said, “You forgot the dog figurine!”
He said, “No I didn’t, it’s right in front of me on my desk!” I had now found a second figurine! Again, no one claimed any knowledge of it. No idea how it got there but I still have the two of them tucked away on a shelf to this day.
27. The V Stands for Vanish
I had just pulled into the parking lot of where I worked and was walking towards the building. It was like three in the afternoon in broad daylight. All of a sudden, I heard an ambulance’s siren start sounding. Naturally, I looked down the road to try and see the ambulance. I see it approaching and decided to watch it for a bit. It was quickly getting closer, and it was about to pass right by me.
However, there was a large SUV waiting to turn out of the parking lot and onto the road, blocking a few meters of the road from my view. The ambulance passed behind the SUV, probably about 50 feet away from me at most, and I vividly remember the siren becoming completely silent in that instant. The ambulance had vanished entirely as it passed behind that SUV. I was so confused.
The road did not have many cars on it at the time, and it was broad daylight. I did a triple-take and made sure that I didn’t just miss it. I had a clear view of the road going both directions, and there was no more ambulance to be seen. No more siren either. I walked up and down the road, trying to find it for a solid minute. But nope, it was gone.
I was well-rested, not on anything, and I didn’t have a history of hallucinations. It seems dismissible, but I was completely aware of what happened, and I can’t explain it to this day.
28. Picking up Where You Left Off
This happened about 15 years ago. I called my friend up and he wasn't home so I left a message on his answering machine. I said, “Hey, it's me, (name). Sorry I missed you. Call you later. Bye." Then I hung up and left the house. I made no other calls. Later that day he called back and says, "Wow, that was quite a message you left. Who was that girl you were talking to?" I was like, "What are you talking about? I wasn't talking to any girl!"
Well, as it turns out, the message didn't end after I said "Bye." I had to go over to his house and listen to this message a few times. After my initial message that I did leave—as quoted above—there was a slight pause and it continues on for another 30 to 40 seconds or so with me talking to some girl. It was my voice, but a conversation I never had with a girl whose voice I didn't recognize.
You could compare it to the message I know I did leave and the two voices were indistinguishable. Not just the voice but, you know, the talking mannerisms. It was my voice. Also, references to my occupation and activities were the same. Basically, in this conversation, I was talking to this girl about going skiing but I had to go down to my shop and work on a car first, which totally correlated to me.
Then the message just stopped. It was recorded on one of those digital answering machines that recorded the message to a chip so there was no tape I could have taken and had analyzed, unfortunately. Also, neither I nor my friend had party lines so that's not an explanation. It was very freaky. I can't explain it.
29. It’s Raining Money
I think most of the people here have experienced the "something falls down and seemingly disappears" thing, but the exact opposite happened to me a couple of months ago. Basically, I was with a bunch of friends and we were standing in a circle in our school's hallway when suddenly we heard something fall. We all simultaneously looked at the floor, and there was a small, silver, foreign coin—Swiss, I think—just lying there.
I picked it up and asked if any of them had dropped it, and they all denied. I looked around and there was nowhere it could've come from, and the hallway was empty, so there was no one who could've thrown it. Later we joked that someone in Switzerland probably dropped it, and is now frantically looking for it. I still have the coin in my locker.
30. It’s a Sign
Kind of reminds me of a rescue cat, Milly, my family had when I was a teenager. Milly had a hard life before us and had some brain damage, so she needed constant babying, including being supervised when playing outside. One day, I was watching her play, and she came to sit on the arm of the bench next to me and sun herself for a while.
It started to get dark, so I called Milly to follow me inside, and as she stood up, I saw this little metal thing that she had been sitting on. I had a closer look, and it was a little silver angel charm. I thought it should belong to her as she had found it, so I fastened it to her collar. That angel was with her on her collar until she passed last year.
A while after she passed, my mum wanted to adopt another cat and was going through the old RSPCA files from her previous rescues, when she came across Milly's file. It had all her details, markings, DOB, health conditions, and her previous name on the top of the page—Angel. The reason it's so weird is because of that the angel charm that Milly had seemingly fabricated out of nowhere when I had found it.
It didn't belong to me or anyone we knew, and it was found under Milly in our securely enclosed back garden. Another weird thing? Milly also had a particular hatred for Buddha, seeking out my mum's statues of him and throwing up on them, decapitating them, throwing them down the stairs and shattering them. Pretty close-minded, Milly.
31. Nightly Visit
This happened around 1991. It's the middle of the night. I'm standing in my sister's living room and it must be a full moon because even though it's around 1 AM and the lights are off, I can see clearly. There's a mixing bowl with popcorn kernels in the bottom on the floor in front of the TV and some rental VHS in a pile nearby. I hear a noise and turn around to see my sister's normally very friendly Labrador retriever looking like Cujo—fangs bared, snarling, hackles raised.
Suddenly, there's a bright flash of light and I wake up like I hit the bed from a great height. I think, "That was a weird dream." Eventually, I fall back to sleep and in the morning I call my sister, planning to tell her the story, but she preempts me by telling me about the weird thing that happened in the night. They woke up to the sound of the dog snarling at about 1 AM.
Her husband thought there was a prowler in the house, got something to defend himself and went to find the dog. She was standing in the living room, snarling at the middle of the room. He couldn't see anyone, so he flipped on the light—no one was there. The dog instantly stopped snarling and walked to her bed like nothing had happened.
He checked the property and went back to bed. We talked a bit and I found out they watched some rental movies and "Of course we had popcorn, why?" My sister is a little woo-woo at times, so I decided not to tell her about my night. She lived about 450 miles away, by the way.
32. Too Much of a Coincidence
I wouldn’t say that this was creepy, but it’s definitely one of the most surreal things I’ve ever experienced. So, back in 2016, I was injured at work and for about six months my life consisted of going to physical therapy and being confined to bed until I could walk again. With that in mind, I had a lot of time to read books. One of the books that I was reading was Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines.
Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but when I read a book I like to “cast” the characters in my head by coming up with how they look. One of the minor characters in this book was named Ilya and, because I know someone named Ilya, and because the book is set in Los Angeles where I live, the Ilya in the book became the Ilya that I knew in my imagination.
But then, something strange started to happen. The Ilya in the book made specific references to movies like Aliens, a movie that the Ilya I know is a huge fan of. The Ilya in the book was a big fan of firearms, as the Ilya that I know is. Put into words, these details seem slim, but there was something so strange about the character in this book that I eventually reached out to the Ilya that I knew to ask about it.
Turns out that Ilya knows the author—Peter Clines—who had put him in the book! What are the odds that I would choose to buy a random book, with a story that takes place essentially on my street in Los Angeles, and features someone I know in real life as a minor character? That blew my mind, and it’s easily one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had.
33. Ghost Dog
When I was 16, we lived on the other side of the state and my uncle had this little Jack Russell named Crue. Crue went missing for several months and then turned up at a humane society over an hour away, and we were all shocked this little dog had made it so far. Anyway, that was almost 20 years ago. The other day I was talking to my parents and was like, “you know, whenever I hear about Jack Russells I think about Crue and that stunt he pulled."
They had no idea what I was talking about. They insisted my uncle had never had such a dog, I must have dreamt it, etc. Honestly, anyone else who would have remembered this dog has been dead for a long time and I don't even have any pictures of my uncle. I have absolutely no way to prove this dog existed but I'm sure that he did.
34. A Different Kind of Change
I used to have a recurring dream as a teenager every night for months. I’m sitting at a table on the patio of a restaurant. I’m out there alone, waiting for my food. A homeless man comes up to the other side of the patio and asks for change. I'm digging in my wallet for a couple of dollars and then I hear tires screech and look up to see a crash in an intersection near the restaurant.
I run out there to see if I can help and as I run out into the road I get hit by a car and wake up at the impact. After a while, the dream stopped and I put it out of my mind. Fast forward to me being 28 and sitting at an On the Border, on the patio, waiting for my food. A homeless guy comes walking past the restaurant but doesn't stop and ask for change.
It made me think about that dream though, and I started to feel uneasy. Shortly after, I heard tires screech and I saw a wreck happen in the intersection near the restaurant. I begin to run out there but stopped at the sidewalk and look out toward incoming traffic. There was an SUV that was not slowing down. She was on her phone and blew through the intersection, completely unaware of what had just happened.
I ran out and checked on the people. Everyone was fine.
35. You Were There, And You Were There…
I was reading Kurt Vonnegut’s last book, Timequake, and had put it in my backpack to read while on the bus. I left the house and for some reason about a block later I thought to myself, “did I put the book in my bag?” I looked and it wasn’t there, went back to the house and couldn’t find it, retraced my steps to where I turned around and it was nowhere to be found.
I never found the book again and gave up on trying to get another copy. I think it was Vonnegut’s way of telling me it wasn’t worth the read.
36. Found Its Own Ride Home
I was working on my motorcycle in a dirt lot where I had crashed it trying to do a sick drift, breaking off the clutch lever and the gear shifter. I had brought a wrench set with me and I was using one of them to take off a bolt when I put it down on the ground to finish unscrewing the bolt with my hand. Two minutes later, I went to pick it back up and it was gone.
I ran all around this dirt lot looking for it to no avail. Luckily I had a spare in the car. I fixed the bike and drove back to my apartment to shower, as I was filthy. I walked into my room and sitting on my desk was the wrench. I was dumbfounded.
Wikimedia Commons, Santeri Viinamäki
37. She Has a Good Arm
This reminds me of when I was in dance as a little girl. I remember throwing my dance shoe over my shoulder, as I was getting ready in my room. When I turned around to grab it I couldn't find it anywhere. My mom and I searched for 10 minutes before we decided to leave without the shoe so we wouldn't be too late to practice.
We found the slipper in my winter boot by the porch just as we were leaving, which was across the house from where I was when I tossed my slipper.
38. One Last Prank
After my granddad passed, the next day my whole family was hanging out in his living room with my grandma. He was known for pranks, fun tricks, and joking around. As we were sitting around, we would all feel like a tickle on our foot or on our ear or a tug on our shirt. Just a bunch of things he would do to catch you off guard.
Even though I was just a kid, I remember everyone getting creeped out because it was like he was just walking around the living room and doing it to everyone. Maybe everyone else was pretending it was happening and I just thought it was happening to me too, but it just seemed like a really weird thing to coordinate with each other, just to potentially make my brother and I believe he was still here and that we would get to stay here after we pass.
39. Second Chance at Life
I lost my life. I saw it. I lived it. Either it was another world with a version of me I saw that passed or I'm going crazy, but I swear, I lost my life. We had a pep rally in school and after it was finished, we had to go back to class. Well, my friend and I were not into that, so we decided to go across the street to Sonic. On that street, there’s no heavy traffic, but if you don't pay attention you could get hit.
Well, I remember walking with him and he dropped something so I went across the street first. I just saw a red Tahoe heading right for me and I got hit. I remember everything. I remember gasping for air, I remember waking up and sleeping again. Then nothing. All of a sudden, I was back in the stadium again and the EXACT SAME WORDS came out of the principal's mouth.
My friend wanted to go get Sonic but I was freaking out. I was asking him everything. I thought it had to be a dream, so I went with him just to see what would happen. He dropped his stuff again and I waited. To my horror, that same red Tahoe showed up. I told him that I was going back to school, “I ain't leaving this world again.”
I can still see the other version of me on that street just messed up and not even moving.
40. Unintentionally Skipping Class
Well, my story is a bit creepy because I lost myself. This was like seven years ago when I was still in high school. It was a normal day. All my classes went well until my math class began. The teacher was explaining the lesson and how it was related to the previous lesson we had the previous day. But it was weird, because everything the teacher was explaining was completely new to me. I’d never heard any of it before.
So I thought yeah sure, I just wasn’t paying attention again during that class. I opened my notebook to check what I wrote about that class. I always wrote everything discussed during math class because I sucked at math and my dad was strict about it, which got my teacher to be strict also with me. Anyway, I found nothing about the previous class.
I asked my friend sitting next to me to give me his notebook to make sure and I found like a whole new material from the last class that I’ve never seen before. I started investigating after the class by going around and asking my classmates this crazy question, “Was I here yesterday during the math class?” And they were like, “What?” And I explained the whole thing to them and apparently I WAS NOT THERE!
I attended both classes before and after the math class and wrote everything from both classes in my notebook, but I have no memory of where I was during the math class. The schools where I live have a one class system, where students stay in their class and teachers come to them for the lecture then leave and the next subject’s teacher comes and so on.
We know each other well and everybody I asked said that I wasn’t there during the math class. So yeah, I lost myself for approximately an hour.
41. Quite the Imagination
Several years ago, I went home, turned on my PC, browsed the web for a bit, literally watched a video about The Matrix, then looked out of my window. Then I suddenly snapped awake and was sitting in my chair. I looked at my monitor to see that it had turned off. I thought, "Strange, I must have fallen asleep" and proceeded to move the mouse to wake my PC from sleep mode.
It did not wake up. I was confused until I noticed that the power strip was not even plugged in. It had never been turned on in the first place. That one weirded me out for quite a while. I must have gone home, fell asleep and dreamt the whole thing. At least, I hope so…
42. When You Know You Know
When the song “The Final Countdown” was released in the 80s, I already knew it. It was brand new, just released, but I knew the tune and the words and could sing the whole thing beginning to end. I believed for a while that it was a cover version, but it wasn’t.
43. Speaking To Yourself
It happened in early 2000 when I was working at a juvenile detention center in a small town in Oklahoma as a corrections officer. I was working nights at the time and went to work at 9 pm. This one night when I arrived for work my supervisor looked confused and asked me what I was doing there. I said "I work tonight," and he said, "But they said you called in a few hours ago saying that you were sick."
I was a bit confused and said: "It must have been someone else and they got the message wrong."
After everyone else showed up for work that night it was a bit weirder, but we carried on as usual and assigned everyone their places for the night; I went to work in the control room where I usually work. The control room is the center of the prison that has direct control over the cameras, doors, phones, and everything.
After I relieved the guard on duty and settled in for the night, I looked at the message that said I called in. It said that I had called at 6:50 and said that I had gotten sick while out cleaning up after the storm. There had been a storm the night before and it was a bit bad, but not anything that I had to go out to clean up. It was truly weird.
The supervisor came into the control about that time. He was also a friend of mine outside work and we started talking about it, and how odd it was. I decided to call my wife at home and tell her about it while he was still sitting there. I picked up the phone and dialed. After two rings a man picked up the phone and with a raspy voice said "Hello?" I did not know what to say for a few seconds. I looked at the phone to make sure I dialed the right number, and I had.
After a few seconds, the person said "Hello?" again in the same raspy voice. I said "Hello. who is this?". "This is Taylor who is this?" the person said. My head started spinning because my name is Taylor. I said in almost a scream "Where is Ann?". He said "Ann's in bed. Who is this?". I dropped the phone and told my supervisor to ring me out, I had to get home, and I took off towards the door. I could hear Dave pick up the phone behind me and say "Hello?" followed soon after by "What the heck!" rather loudly.
I ran to my car and drove home faster then what was legal, my mind racing the entire time. I busted through the door and my wife was sitting watching TV and was shocked at me being home. I asked her who was there and she said no one has been here. After a rather long talk with my wife, I went to call the prison to tell them what was going on, but the phone was dead.
I went back to work and when I came in Dave was acting weird and asked me "How the hell are you doing this?". He told me that when I left, he picked up the phone and the person on the other end sounded like me. He kinda freaked out and hung up the phone.
A minute later as he could see my car leaving the parking lot, I had called back from home and asked what was going on. He said that I was a bit irate and said I was sick and did not feel like playing these games and was telling him to stop prank calling me and hung up. After convincing him I had no idea what was going on we went back to work.
Later, I find out that the phone line for my area had been knocked down the night before by the storm. This is absolutely the strangest thing that has ever happened to me.
44. Nothing Is The Same Anymore
A long time ago I had a conversation with an old workmate who described much the same thing.
The detail is hazy, but he said one day he in his house when he felt a sudden NEED to go outside an stand on his lawn, he claimed it was the strongest clearest feeling ever, and on doing so he experienced a sort of "wobble" he just said everything was screwed up for moment, and he experienced a feeling of detachment/outside-ness. When it passed he turned to go back inside.
Now, while talking to me he got quite upset at this point and asked me not to think he’s crazy but he said the next thing he saw was his car parked in the street and it was the same model/registration but a different color. He was so thrown at this, and then more so because then his wife came out to ask what he was doing, and he said he realized "She was in all appearances his wife, but somehow not his wife.”
He said from that point on, she liked foods she had claimed to hate before, and sometimes brought up memories that he said had zero relation to things they had done in the past. He said things like his route to work, was still the same but somehow different, he said there were buildings on the way that either he had missed in the six years he'd driven past them five days a week or had just "appeared" overnight.
He even said some people he remembered from other departments in work had just vanished, and asking about them brought total incomprehension from other people. He was a totally regular healthy guy, but he said he measured his life in relation to that afternoon. There were things that happened before the change, and everything afterward.
He went to say he was now living his life with a feeling that about 15% of it had spontaneously changed that afternoon. We moved on and drifted apart since then (different jobs) but I've never really felt so sure about the permanence of "reality" ever since.
45. You Didn’t Say the Magic Word
I had a very important document that I only ever kept in one place. I kept it in the top drawer of a small filing cabinet. I never moved it and would always see it in that drawer whenever I opened it for whatever reason. The day came that I needed it and I didn’t sweat it because I knew exactly where it was. Well, it wasn’t there. Cue panic attack.
I tore that filing cabinet up. I removed everything and spread it out, flipped papers over, dug through envelopes, shook everything out, shined a flashlight all through the emptied cabinet in case it was somehow stuck to the sides. I mean, it was not there! I can assure you no one took it or was messing with me. I was so frustrated, I even looked through other parts of my house, but I knew it wouldn’t be in any of those places. And it wasn’t.
I was intermittently going back to that dumb filing cabinet. No luck. Super irritated, I searched the rest of the house again and, on my way back downstairs where my filing cabinet was, I called out in frustration, “Okay! Bring it back!” I don’t know who I thought I was talking to because I was alone, but you guessed it—I found it in the top drawer of my filing cabinet where it should have been in the first place.
I was both relieved and totally freaked out.
Pxfuel
46. All Doctors Look the Same
This is probably going to get buried, but I met someone who no longer seems to exist. In October 2018, I developed tendinitis in my hand, so I went to see a hand specialist at my regular hospital. I remember the hand specialist really clearly. She was a really happy, talkative Vietnamese woman with straight, dark brown hair and glasses.
She had a German-sounding last name, which I assumed was her married name. She was really, really nice and we had a long conversation about a medical conference that she goes to. She explained that my hand issues—caused by phone usage—were the "hot topic" of the conference and that she'd probably use my injury as an example when she goes there.
Anyway, she gave me care instructions and sent me home. I was told to return if it didn't resolve in a few weeks because then I'd need to be reexamined and sent to physical therapy. It didn't resolve and I went back. I had an appointment with the same doctor, but the woman who came into the room was completely different. She was a white woman with light brown hair, no glasses, completely different face shape, and really dull with an unwelcoming disposition.
I was so confused. I asked her her name, and she gave the same name the Asian doctor had. I asked if there was another doctor by that name and she told me no, it was only her. I described the doctor I had seen and she got annoyed and said she didn't know who I was talking about. I later went online to the hospital's staff directory and tried to find the Asian doctor—I couldn't.
I have no idea what happened to the first doctor. I even checked my medical records to see if maybe I remembered her name incorrectly, but I didn't. Both of my visits have the same doctor's name on them. I've always been super confused about this and it really bothers me that I met someone who doesn't seem to exist anymore.
To answer some questions, I couldn't tell if the white doctor actually remembered me. When I told her that I was confused about the situation, she just looked at my chart, confirmed that my previous appointment had been with her, and told me that she'd seen me before. I wasn't under the impression that she actually remembered me.
I didn't ask a lot of questions because she seemed extremely annoyed with me like I was wasting her time and she just wanted the appointment to be over. I'm sure that I sounded insane, so I don't blame her for her bad attitude. I don't think the Asian doctor ever told me the name of the conference, she just said that it was a conference for hand specialists, so I haven't been able to look it up.
Also, someone asked me if I was intoxicated during the first visit—no, I wasn't. A lot of people have said that it might have been a student/intern/resident or a physician's assistant. My hospital doesn't have students except in the pharmacy—as far as I know—but I agree that it could have been a physician's assistant. I'm not 100% convinced because I rechecked the hospital's directory of doctors just now and even though PAs are listed, I still couldn't find the Asian doctor.
It's 2020 so maybe she doesn't work there anymore. I also tried to describe the first doctor to the second one and she cut me off and told me she didn't know who I was talking about, but maybe she lied? Part of me thinks that this is like the Berenstein/Berenstain thing, and at some point, I got switched from the Asian doctor reality to the white doctor reality.
47. Girl of His Dreams
When I was around 20, a few years ago, I kept having dreams about a woman with long black hair named Aroura—pronounced A-roar-uh. They were different dreams but for some reason, her distinct face and name always ended up in them. It got to the point where I would wake up frustrated and confused, trying to Google her name or find out how I was connected to her.
After a few months, she stopped showing up and I dismissed it, thinking my brain was just messing with me. Fast forward a few years later, Halloween 2009, and I'm in the car with a friend stopped at a gas station. I'm about to pull out and merge onto a highway when I get a phone call from a random number, so I stop the car, but no one answered.
There was a person behind me who grew impatient, honked at me, and then swerved in front of me instead of waiting for two seconds for me to move. The second they got on the highway, some silver Civic loses control of their wheel and crashes into the car that swerved in front of me. I called the cops and waited at the gas station for them to come.
It turns out that the drivers of both cars died. It 100% would have been me if I hadn't gotten that phone call. I called it back a few hours later out of gratitude and curiosity. It rang three times and went to voicemail. The message stopped me in my tracks. It said: “Hi, you've reached Aurora, please leave your name and number.” I’ve never had goosebumps like that in my life.
I called it again the next day because I was that confused about the whole situation. Some woman answered, we got to talking and I tell her my entire story, including the dreams I had. She tells me she doesn't know how I got her number and that she never called me as far as she remembers. Weird. I ask her if she has a Facebook to confirm if she is in fact the woman in my dreams.
I check her Facebook and sure enough, it's her. If that's not a glitch in the matrix, then I'm just losing it.
48. More Like Lake Eerie
In the seventh grade, I had a friend that lived near a beach on a bay of Lake Michigan. One day in early May it reached 70 degrees, nearly unheard of for that time of year in northern Wisconsin. My two friends, including the beach friend, excitedly rode our bikes down to the beach to maybe dip our toes in, expecting still frigid waters, and then "tan" for the rest of the afternoon.
The water, though, was surprisingly warm. Like bathwater warm. In this particular area of the bay, the water was shallow for about a half-mile out, and we joyously splashed around, wading deeper and deeper until we were about chest-deep. As we dunked each other and swam with abandon I started to feel sick. Bad headache, nausea, wobbly.
Just then, my other two friends mentioned that they also felt sick. We headed back to shore, nearly crawling by the time we got out. The three of us collapsed under a tree and fell asleep for 2 hours or so. When we woke up we talked about how weird it was. I dipped my toe back in the water and it was freezing cold. To this day I have no idea what was in there.
I do know that there is a chemical plant in town that used to manufacture things like Agent Orange and that their practices were known to be less than environmentally conscious. I have never touched that water since.
Bay-Lake Region Planning Commission
49. Seeing Double Seeing Double
This happened to me in third grade and it scared me so much I started crying and had to go to the office to talk to the principal about it. I was in the hallway for misbehaving, and my neighbor Tad—a year younger than me—came walking out of a class to my right, passed in front of me and headed down some stairs. We said hello to each other.
About 20 seconds later, I looked up, and my blood ran cold. It was Tad. He walked out of the same class, passed in front of me, and headed down the stairs—just like before. I just stared at him, confused and afraid, and he looked back like, “Why are you looking at me like that”. I never realized how much it was like The Matrix déjà vu.
A few years after this incident, my sister and I were hanging in the living room, watching TV. We both saw our mom walk through the other room and through the adjacent hall. Maybe 20 minutes later, she came in from the backyard. My sister and I looked at each other confused and asked her how she got back outside. She didn't know what we were talking about, as she had been outside for hours.
No one else was home, of course.
50. Cherish Every Moment
So this has always bothered me. I was 13 years old at the time and my dad was a coal miner. He worked the third shift—known as the hoot owl shift—which was midnight to noon. As such, he got home around 2 PM and slept till around 9, got up, had dinner with us and left for work. My dad was always pretty gruff and constantly yelled at us if my younger brother or I made too much noise and woke him up after getting home from somewhere, which as an adult now I completely understand.
So one day I did something to wake him up, I forget what. Anyways, he calls me back to the bedroom and I'm expecting to get a dressing down but he just looked at me and said, “It's ok. Come over here and give me a hug”. What 13-year-old boy wants to hug their dad? I kind of squirmed a bit and he followed up with, “What if something happened to me?” and just laid there all grizzled and tired.
I didn't hug him—I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. That night there was an accident in the mine. He saved everyone on his crew, including the one person he went back in for. He was the only one who didn’t make it, and I'm convinced he knew it was gonna happen. I'll never forget his eyes that day. If someone asks you for a hug, give it to them.
I love you, dad.
Sources: Reddit,
