Strange things happen. Lucky things happen. Unlucky things happen. But sometimes, impossible things happen, leaving you to wonder whether your whole life has been scripted by a cheesy RomCom writer.
These Reddit and Quora users dug deep to share their best spooky coincidence stories.
What’s the most unlikely thing that ever happened to you?
I met a girl in Romania. As we were both solo travellers, we spent a lot of time together. When we parted, as the tradition goes, we said see you soon.
Last weekend, I went to Paris for some work and I was shocked to see her in an elevator. I screamed out of excitement but she didn’t recognize me and thought that I was just someone trying to talk to her.
I calmly asked, Have you ever been to Romania?
With a look of understanding, she asked, Do you come from Germany?
I somehow managed, Yes.
With a smile, she said, Im sorry. Im your friends twin sister.
What a small world.
Gaurav Deshmukh
I found my husband with his lover on a beach. He wasn’t supposed to be there. Neither was I. We didn’t even live close to the beach. But I walked straight toward him and immediately knew what was happening. I just kept walking and said, It’s a small world.
We were divorced 3 months later.
Kathleen Lloveras
When I was 17, I had a son I had to give up for adoption because the father was going off to Vietnam and we were unmarried. It was heartbreaking to say the least.
When the father returned, we married and had a daughter. But we were always looking to find the son we had to give up.
As the years went by, we tried every imaginable source to find our boy. Our daughter was told that she had a brother.When our daughter moved across the United States to California, I had given up all hope after 34 years of searching.
One night in California, she told her roommate about her brother; it was his birthday, and she was sad.
That night the roommate invited her to dinner with a male friend. During dinner, her friend questioned her about this brother. After everything my daughter said, the young man replied me too! He, too, was from Florida – adopted, this was his birthday, a miracle!
Millions of prayers had been answered. She was indeed sitting across the dinner table from her long-lost brother! Found at last! It all turned out beautifully. He had been blessed with an amazing adoptive family to whom I will be FOREVER grateful. Ive had many coincidences in my life – but this? Best one.
Ila Fox Manner
My family used to take little summer vacations. One summer when I was about 8, we stayed at a campground 4 hours from home.
There were a bunch of kids there, and one day we all started playing tag. I was it and was chasing another young boy. When I tagged him, I pushed too hard, and he fell and broke his arm. I remember the scene vividly.
In college, I became good friends with my neighbor in the dorm, and we ended up getting a place together our sophomore year. The following year, when we were no longer living together, we went out for a few beers and the topic of broken bones came up.
I’ve only broken one bone, he said, and it was my arm when I was 7. Some kid at a camp pushed me over while playing tag.
It was me. I still can’t believe it.
[deleted]
When my mother died I was a young guy just starting my own business and I could barely afford the plane ticket to attend her funeral. Of course, as the oldest son, and coming from a poor family, there would not have been a funeral if I had not agreed to pay for it.
But here is where the amazing coincidence occurred. I listened to the funeral director list all of the options for buria,l and I wanted my mom to have the best. In the end, it cost exactly $11,710.00 and I had less than $200 in my bank account.
At that moment, I asked for few minutes of privacy, and I prayed to God to ask what I should do. I am not saying God told me to write a bad check; all I know is that he lead me to do what you must do for your mom and I will take care of everything else.
So I wrote a check for $11,710.00, and her funeral and burial were handeled beautifully. That was on a Saturday. I flew home on Monday and knew that my check would bounce at the close of business.
I stopped by my PO Box to get the mail and found more bad news. I saw that all too familiar brown envelope from the IRS. I guess I also owed back taxes too!
I almost refused to open it because the stress I was experiencing was already enormous, but something led me to open it anyway. When I did, there was a letter saying that the IRS had recalculated my tax returns from 5 years ago, and they found a huge mistake in my favor.
I had overpaid what I owed, and they were returning that amount. It was almost exactly what I had paid for my mothers funeral.
When you consider the IRS audit had started months before my mother passed away, you begin to believe there are no coincidences.
Jim Stewart
As a college sophomore, I went on a trip to France by myself. I was sitting in Notre Dame Cathedral, listening to music, when a girl I dated in high school sat down in a pew near me – totally at random.
We were both speechless when we saw one another there, out of the blue, in a foreign country within a vast cathedral.
Back2Bach
When I was eleven, I was in the park like half a mile from my house flying a Winnie the Pooh kite. I was the only kid around with a kite at the time.
I was pretty zoned out, and I didn’t notice when the string came loose. One hundred feet of twine zoomed away, out of reach, and Pooh Bear was gone.
Later that night, my family and I went out to eat, and when we came home, there was a string dangling from the gutter above our front door.
My dad grabbed it and started pulling. The string seemed to go all the way up into the night sky – we couldn’t see the end of it.
A hundred feet of pulling later, there was my Pooh Bear kite.
It came back to me.
boyskissinboys
About ten years ago, I tried to get into Six Flags with a tiny keychain swiss army knife. It literally had a dull 1″ blade, but it was still against the rules. They told me I could either throw it away, take it to my car a mile away, or rent a locker for like 10 bucks.
So I decided to hide it in the planter.
I looked down and saw a big piece of bark sitting, in the dirt and figured it would be a good hiding place. I picked it up and found another mini swiss army knife!
I placed mine next to the first and went into the park. When I returned, the other knife was gone and a smiley face was etched into the dirt in its place.
robinson217
In my youth, I worked at a restaurant in my hometown, a pretty big city. There were a lot of young people who worked there. One guy in particular stood out. He was really cute, smart, and funny. We started dating.
We discovered that we had both lived on the same street as children, and his parents still lived on that street. We knew many of the same people even though we had gone to different schools and never met. It was a coincidence of sorts, but nothing all that special.
As we spent more time together, we discovered that we were both raised in musical families. My mother had been a professional singer. My sister and I had taken piano lessons and sung in choirs and school productions. All five children in his family had played various musical instruments, including the piano, and had taken lessons for many years.
We realized during one holiday gathering at his moms house that all seven of us — me, my boyfriend, my sister, and his four siblings — had taken lessons from the same piano teacher. Kind of a fun coincidence!
Years later, after he and I were married, we were again at his moms house for a family holiday. Somehow, the topic of Mrs. Edwards, our mutual piano teacher, came up. Hubbys mom jumped up and disappeared into another room for a few minutes, and came trotting back with a piece of paper. I couldnt believe what it was.
Yellowed with age, it was a handwritten program from a piano recital in 1973. The program listed the students names who had performed at the recital, in performance order. It lists me, my husband, my sister, and two of his sisters! That means the five of us, plus our parents (and probably the three other siblings between our two families) had all been in the same room, decades earlier!
Our music teacher had her students sit in the front row of the recital room, in performance order. So, as evidenced by the program, he and I sat just a few seats apart, eleven years before we would actually meet, nineteen years before we would marry! We celebrate 25 years of marriage next month.
Anne Arneson
Dakar, Senegal, 1946. World War II was over ,and a few German prisoners of war were on work furlough in local high schools.
A young Senegalese student from a once-wealthy merchant family walked by eating a rare baguette with butter and jam. A hungry German POW eyed the student who, understanding the situation, said, Im not hungry. Would you like this? A few kind words of thanks in French were exchanged, and they parted ways.
A decade later, the same Senegalese student was in Sweden for school. His train ticket for Montpellier France via Germany was on the slow train, but he hopped onto the fast train instead. When the conductor discovered he had the wrong ticket and had no money to pay for an upgrade, he ordered the kid to get off at the next stop.
A German sitting nearby stopped the conductor and paid the extra fee. The Senegalese man thanked him and, discovering that the German spoke a bit of French, asked him why he had done that.
The German sais, Don’t you remember me? Dakar, 1946. I was starving and you fed me.
My father-in-law, that Senegalese student, turned 90 a few months ago, and I heard that story shortly before his birthday from his wife, the woman he was going to see in Montpellier.
Ciaran Quinn
I was nearly killed by a squirrel in what seemed like an act of revenge, but probably wasn’t.
I was hiking in the Grand Canyon, and a squirrel was trying to get into my backpack. I yelled at it and threw stones in its direction, but it paid no attention (except to check if I was throwing it food). So I pegged it with a couple of small stones and it walked coolly away, as if it had just decided it had somewhere better to be (like cats do).
Two days later, and within a few hundred yards of the same spot, I was resting, leaning against the upslope, with my pack balanced on some rocks. Several people starting shouting at me. I got up and saw a big rock rolling down the slope towards me, so I got out of the way.
It was heavy enough and fell far enough to have killed me, or at least put me in the hospital, if other people hadn’t seen it coming and alerted me. Five of the people said that they saw a squirrel dislodge the rock.
Was it the same squirrel? No way to know.
Jonathan Dushoff
A few years ago, I stepped into a cab and headed out for the evening. Shortly after being dropped off, I realized I had left my phone in the cab.
I tried calling it with no luck. I called the cab company, but because I had flagged the cab and paid cash, they had no real way of knowing which cab I was in. I figured the phone was as good as gone and went about my night.
Many hours later, having moved around the city quite a bit, I flagged down another cab. Sitting in the back seat, I start to think the driver looks familiar and realize that I’m in the same cab I had taken earlier. He hadn’t found a phone, but I started looking anyways. Sure enough, there it was, jammed in the seat. Me and my flip phone were happily reunited – only for me to put it in a washing machine two days later!
myrevenge
An American friend of mine by the name of Tom took his family on vacation to check out Antarctica. He met an Australian guy named Paul on Christmas day while he was down there. They didn’t exchange contact info.
A year later, on Christmas day, they Tom his family on vacation to Machu Picchu. He was looking down at a map when he heard, “Hey Tom, how the heck are you?” It was Paul, taking his family on their annual trip as well.
stearman007
For my first semester of college, I moved out of state. I moved into my apartment and had a few days to myself before anyone else moved in.
After orientation, I found my new roommate sitting on his bed. I introduced myself, and he asked where I was from. When I told him, he said, “I used to have a friend named with your name.”
I said I used to have a friend with his name. We had been best friends in first and second grade until his family moved.
simplesimon6262
When I was a stupid teenager in the 80s, we would drive around town at night in my friends blue 66 mustang and spray people with an old water fire extinguisher.
Ten years later, I was selling a house. Our primary buyer, an older retired lady, backed out last minute.
Our realtor dropped by to tell my wife and I the reason. She explained that while waiting at our our gate to be buzzed in, some teenagers had driven by and shot the old lady with a air soft gun. Oh boy.
The realtor then continued: “Yeah, I don’t know what’s wrong with kids. When I first came to America 10 years ago, we were sitting at a bus stop when a group of boys in a nice blue car drove up smiling. When they got closer they drenched us with water spray. What kind of person does that?
On the bright side, the second offer we got was for $20,000 more!
rugdivot
Answers edited for clarity.