Is there ever something you've experienced that just doesn't feel quite right? Something where it seems like not everything is functioning properly? It's a sensation that's happened to more people than you'd think, and it can definitely throw people off in the craziest way.
These people on Reddit explain the strange circumstances that lead them to believe something was just a little off in their own world. These are their glitch in the matrix stories. Content has been edited for clarity and readability.
They Flapped Their Wings, But They Never Moved
“I was at my uncle’s house when we decided to go on a hike (he lives in the mountains). We went down to the local pond, climbed a bit of a hill, and when we were done, we decided we were hungry. We started to walk back when I saw a flock of birds just…sitting in the air. Flapping their wings, but just sitting there. Completely still. I even stopped walking for a bit, to make sure they weren’t just slow. The whole flock was just stuck. It was weird.”
Where Did His Pokemon Go?
“This happened maybe ten years ago.
My brother and I were playing Pokémon on our DS’s. My mom was nagging my brother to take a shower so he proceeded to do so. He left his DS on the bed next to me and I continued playing my game, just ignoring it. While shuffling around on the bed, I knocked his DS over and didn’t pick it up because I knew it would be there and it didn’t seem urgent. My brother got out of the shower, came back to the room, and asked where his DS was. I told him it fell over, but he told me it wasn’t on the floor. We started searching through the entire room and never found it.
A couple of years later, we moved out of the place and during the moving process, I believed we would find it, but it never showed up. I’m mad about it, too, because he was playing my Pokémon platinum which I never beat to this day.”
Did We Go Back In Time?
“I grew up in a small farming town in Victoria, Australia. I was around 8 in the late 80’s when this happened. One afternoon on a weekend, I went with my dad to one of the larger towns to run some errands. On this drive, we would pass through three other towns that had tiny populations, a general store, a pub, a school, a church and that was about it.
Dad liked to have a drink, so we stopped at the second town and went to the pub. It wasn’t unusual that I’d go with him to the pub and I’d eat a packet of chips and drink a soft drink while he talked to the publican and locals.
But this bar was something else…
It was like we stepped back in time. Everybody in there was in old clothing, like from the 1940s. There were only men in there, maybe 8 or 9 of them. They were wearing suits and their pants were pulled up really high, their hair was slicked back with pomade, there was one guy in an old-style military uniform. A couple of them were playing cards and smoking. All of these men were in their 20’s. It wasn’t normal for the 1980s.
I noticed Dad was kind of startled and stood in the doorway for a moment.
They all stared at us as we walked to the bar and took a seat. Usually, dad would strike up a conversation with whoever was at any bar… but none of them wanted anything to do with us and kept talking quietly to themselves, occasionally peeking at us but turning away if we made eye contact.
I vaguely remember the music playing, it was mostly trumpets and quartet bands like my grandmother used to play. Everything in the bar was an old style and reminded me of my grandmother’s house. The glasses behind the bar looked old style, the men were lighting smokes with matches, there was no tv, the patterns of the curtains and dining cloths were not 1980’s style. It was just so odd.
Dad drank up really fast and we left and told me to eat my chips in the car.
Back in the car, he said we left because it was a ‘weird place’ and we went to the nearby town to run the errands. We didn’t really talk any more about it. But on the way home, he stopped again at the pub in that second town and said he wanted to ‘check something.’ We walked back into that same bar and it was totally different! There were a couple of young guys in T-shirts playing pool, there was a TV showing a cricket game and two guys sat there in shorts and singlets watching it and modern rock music playing on a jukebox in the corner.
Dad looked really confused. We didn’t stay, we just drove home. He kept confirming with me the whole way home about what we had seen earlier in that bar.
We moved away from that area a few years later.
I brought up the incident with Dad at Christmas last year. He says he still thinks about it and has no idea what happened, but believes we stepped back in time somehow for 10 minutes. He said that he went back to the town and pub alone a few times by himself after that day, but he never had that experience again.”
There Were Probably Some Jedis Around
“I was sitting at the table, home alone. Suddenly, I was physically shoved out of my chair. I never felt anything contact my skin, but I absolutely 100% felt a force applied to the side of my face, as if a hand that I didn’t know was there was already resting on my skin, waiting for the moment to push. My head jerked to the side and I was knocked out of the chair and fell to the ground.
It was the eeriest moment of my life and I’ve never told anyone about it.”
She Couldn’t SEE What Was Going On
“A couple of years ago, I lived in a small one bedroom apartment. I am kind of a clean freak and kept my apartment in tip-top shape. I had a minimalist aesthetic, so I didn’t even have a lot of stuff and didn’t do well with any type of clutter. And I wear glasses – I have an extremely hard time seeing without them. I had recently gotten some new glasses – black/silver brow line frames – and I had been wearing them for about three weeks at this point. I ordered them online and still have the confirmation email.
Anyways, one Saturday around noon, I get kind of tired and decide to take a nap. So as per usual, I go sit on my bed, set my alarm on my phone, put the phone on my bedside table, take my glasses off and also put them on the bedside table (like ALWAYS), and then lay down.
My alarm wakes me about an hour later, and I reach over to turn it off and grab my glasses. I couldn’t feel them on the table, so I started feeling around for them on the floor in case I had accidentally knocked them off… Nothing. I’m immediately perplexed and fully get out of bed to try to find them. I start checking under my blankets and pillows, the head/foot of the bed, around the table… Again, nothing. I start getting frustrated, because where could they be? There’s nothing else in my room that they could be under, my room only has my bed and my bedside table. Also, I can’t see well at all, which I assumed at the time was probably why I couldn’t see them… They were probably in plain sight.
So thankfully, I had my old pair of glasses in my closet that I haven’t worn since I got my new ones (important). They are a wildly different style from my regular ones too. They are a dark purple cat-eye shape. Like there’s no way they look the same. So I popped the cat-eye glasses on and went back into my bedroom again to find my normal glasses. They were nowhere. Not a trace of them. So I start looking through my apartment for them. Nowhere.
Now I’m really weirded out, so I call one of my friends over to help me look for them. Important to note that I see this girl at least three times a week, we’re like sisters. She’s over at my place all the time and vice versa. I’ve worn my new glasses around here at least 10 times. So she comes over and she’s like, ‘Are you crazy? You’re wearing your glasses.’ So I tell her that I lost my new ones, the black/silver ones, and she acts confused like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. She says, ‘Did you just get them today or what?’ So I ask her what she’s talking about, and tell her that they are the new ones I’ve been wearing for almost a month now. She is again confused and tells me that I’ve been wearing these cat eye glasses (my old ones) for the last month and she hasn’t seen me wear anything new.
Now here’s the scary part – I am ADAMANT about having new glasses and was starting to get frustrated with her when she whips out her phone and shows us a picture we took about a week ago while out at dinner. I remember the dinner of course and KNOW that I had on my new glasses because I remember thinking to myself that they matched my outfit, which was also black/silver. But guess what – the photo shows me wearing the cat-eye glasses.
It’s just impossible though. It really is. As soon as my new glasses arrived, I packed the old ones away in my closet and didn’t touch them until that day. I KNOW I had been wearing them for the last three weeks. I remember my friend saying she liked them. I still had the confirmation email. But my friend, along with several other people I saw while I was wearing them, all said the same thing – that they’d never seen me wear any new glasses. They completely vanished. I never found a trace of them, even after nearly tearing apart my apartment in frustration. I had to go see a counselor for a few weeks after.”
Inconceivable
“I have a very vivid memory from middle school where I was hanging out in my yard with a friend and she described the entire plot of The Princess Bride to me in detail. Everything from the Dread Pirate Roberts thing to the ROUSes.
A couple weeks later, I watched the movie for the first time at an aunt’s house and knew everything that was going to happen ahead of time. I specifically picked it out from her collection because my friend had described it to me and I was really interested in actually seeing it.
After the weekend was over, I went back to the friend who had described it to me and told her I had finally seen The Princess Bride. She had no idea what I was talking about, she had never heard of the movie (or book) and had no recollection of the plot when I described it to her. I knew she wasn’t messing with me because she was never able to keep a straight face for that long when she was kidding around. She truly had no idea what I was talking about and didn’t remember ever having described it to me.”
It Had To Be Aliens
“At the end of grade 5, my school took us to a waterpark. I brought one bathing suit and when I went to change after the trip was over, I put it in the front pocket of my backpack.
A few days later, I was supposed to go to the beach. I realized I had never taken out my bathing suit from my backpack. When I went to go get it from my backpack, it wasn’t there. I searched that whole backpack and opened and reopened every pocket it had and my bathing suit was not there. I was so confused because I vividly remembered putting the bathing suit in my backpack but it wasn’t there. I thought that maybe the zipper had unzipped at some point and it had fallen out, or that I was getting confused and didn’t actually remember putting the bathing suit away but remembered putting it in the backpack.
A few days later, I decided to check the backpack one more time because I still couldn’t come to terms with it not being in the backpack and me remembering I had put it in there. I checked the whole backpack again but still couldn’t find it. I searched my whole house in case I took it out and couldn’t remember, but it wasn’t there.
Fast forward to the day before grade six starts. I was putting my new books and pencils/pens in that same backpack. I opened up the front pocket and my bathing suit was there.
I KNOW THAT THAT BATHING SUIT WAS NOT THERE. I KNOW IT WAS NOWHERE IN MY HOUSE THROUGHOUT THAT WHOLE SUMMER.
It seems silly and simple but I KNOW IT WASN’T THERE BEFORE.
I convinced myself aliens had taken the bathing suit for investigative and experimental purposes. I don’t think that anymore but I know something glitchy happened with that bathing suit and backpack.”
This Cat Has Powers
“My cat can open doors without touching them.
I was a kid, 12-ish, and I had a cat; I still have her. She’s neither an inside or outside cat – she’s both. Now, the following happened many times:
I noticed the cat meowing in our terrace, I let her in, then I start walking towards the computer room’s door to open it for her.
The cat walked in front of me, sat down for like three seconds and the door opens. The handle didn’t move, the door just clicked and creeked slightly open. This happened more than four times. My parents didn’t believe me in the beginning, and the cat kinda stopped doing this and I moved my pc to my own room so I didn’t get to see this. But then, one day I noticed that my mom’s room was locked when she’s inside taking a nap.
She never locked it before so I asked her about it. She said she must lock it otherwise the cat comes in the same way she left my room back in the day. I still don’t know how the heck she does it…”
An Eerie Similarity
“I’m engaged to a girl whose husband passed away before we got together. His name was also my name (Charlie). When he was 13, he had a lawn business ran by his friends and he was the boss lead that searched for new yards to cut; I literally did the same thing, literally exactly the same. His favorite color was green, as is mine. A lot of his favorite songs from when he was alive are my favorite songs. His daughter could pass as mine. I could seriously go on and on about how strange this crap is, but these are a few of the things that are like…wow. He kind of looks like me also, but you gotta figure girls kind of have a ‘type’ they like, so that part makes sense.”
He Told Me In Spirit
“In 2017, my grandfather was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. At this point, he had basically given up on life; my grandmother had died 20 years prior, he was disabled and generally just had a rough go at life.
We mostly kept up through text and email as he really didn’t want me to witness his fast decline. He had surgery in a half attempt at allowing treatment. I checked on him almost daily and knew he wasn’t doing well.
He texted me and told me his time had come and not to come visit because he wasn’t going to be alive. Having been partially prepared for this, I accepted this and had even told my partner that we were not going to see him again.
A week later, my aunt called to let me know he had passed a few days prior (torn family, it took this long for her to track me down). I told her I already knew because he had told me not to come.
Later that day, I searched over and over for the text he sent me. I never got that text. Every fiber of my being knows that he told me though. Almost two years later and I haven’t deleted our last conversation.”
They Call It “The Glitch”
“I was in the car with my friend and his dad. The dad was driving, my friend was in the passenger seat, and I was in the seat behind the passenger on the right-hand side. As we slowly passed a fire hydrant before pulling into my friend’s driveway, I notice that it looks as if half of the hydrant was a foot taller and off to the side a bit. Between the two halves was a shimmering digital cluster. It then quickly snapped back into the place before my very eyes. I thought I was just hallucinating until my friend upfront mentioned it. ‘What the frick was that?!’ he said.
‘You see what I saw?’ I asked, ‘The fire hydrant?’
He confirmed that we had seen the same exact thing. I just asked him about if he remembers it, he does. We call it ‘The glitch.'”
Did Our Dog Get A Tan?
“My wife and I got a dog from a shelter. It’s a pug. Yep, he is an inbred monstrosity.
Well maybe six months into owning him, we are out walking. He goes underneath a porch. This dog is just under there for 15 minutes doing his thing while we are frantically trying to get his attention.
He comes out with a slightly different coloration pattern on his back. He is fawn. And he came out much lighter. Like… you wouldn’t be able to tell with pictures but just by the fact we look at him every day, he was just lighter in color. He had a black and tan stripe down his back. Now it’s more tan.
It sounds weird I know. Like, how can you tell such a small change or difference? Well, we could.
So, that day we lost Otis 1.0 and got back Otis 2.0.”
The Boggy Bottom Boy
“My dad told me this from his childhood. He was born in 1922 and this happened when he was 12 years old, so the year was 1934. He lived in Southeast Oklahoma in a place called ‘Boggy Bottom.’ Extremely rural area – especially back in those days. Nothing around but lots of farmland for miles and miles.
It was a hot summer night and he couldn’t sleep, so he snuck out the window and went to a nearby cow pasture to look at the stars under a tree.
He said that after a few minutes of stargazing, three lights showed up in the sky. They were moving in geometric patterns across the sky very quickly – first in one part of the sky, then another. He watched these lights in the sky for hours and their methodical, geometrically patterned movements. Then, they raced across the night sky and disappeared.
Please note that my dad was always a stable, rock-solid guy, both emotionally and mentally.
I believe that he saw what he saw.”
A Barbie Girl In An Alternate World
“I was about 8 years old or so and was on my bed playing Barbies. I was using my hairbrush to brush their hair because those plastic Barbie brushes were trash.
Anyway, I was brushing the hair, then set the hairbrush next to me to reach for another Barbie. Reached back and the hairbrush was gone. No big deal, as I assumed it fell between the bed and the wall. Got on my stomach and peered down, nothing. No hairbrush. Looked under the bed, nothing. Shrugged it off and assumed it was wedged somewhere I couldn’t see, so I went downstairs to the bathroom cabinet to get another hairbrush. Opened it..and the brush I was using was front and center. I moderately freaked out and ran outside because it was really startling.
I still have no idea how or what happened.”
Brothers On The Same Wavelength
“My brother and I each had a dream about the same thing.
We didn’t mention it till a few days later as we both had drawn it somewhat and the pictures were eerily similar. We were around 10 and 13 at the time, so we didn’t think much of it. Well, our dream just so happened to be an update for a game we played and was released a year or so later. We had never talked about it before the dream, and after the update, we tried it out, only for it to look almost exactly (during an animation) like the pictures we’d drawn.
We can’t really prove we drew it before it happened, but I have the picture somewhere cause we like to talk about it every once in a while.”
You’re A Wizard, Apparently
“When I was a kid, I was into magic tricks. I sat my parents down to show them that I could make a large bouncy ball disappear by dropping it down my shirt. The idea was that I’d catch it before it fell all the way through and pretend it was gone. I failed a couple times as I demonstrated it, the ball falling through my shirt and rolling to the couch each time. The last time I dropped the ball down my shirt, I didn’t catch it and it never came out. I searched and searched, but I couldn’t find it.
My parents congratulated me and resumed their chores. I never did find the ball. I stopped doing magic tricks.”
What Are The Odds?
“My mum threw the key to our shed down our stairs to my dad.
Said key disappeared. She threw it down a straight flight of stairs to my dad in a 10ft x 5ft entrance hall. No weird hiding places, nowhere it could really have gone. But nonetheless, no key.
We looked everywhere, even borrowed my cousin’s metal detector to see if we could find it. Nothing. Ended up changing the padlock on the shed.
Five years later, my mother is doing some washing. Feels something hard on the leg of what had been my dad’s work trousers and were now his old gardening trousers (the kind that motor technicians use which have large outside pockets for notepads and slot for pens just above the knees). Checked the pockets, but there wasn’t anything in them. Checked again, still something hard. Found out that it was in a small pocket for a pen. Worked it out of the pocket.
Turns out it was this key. Somehow, my mother had thrown it down the stairs and landed it into this pocket which was so small that you couldn’t easily push it in by hand. No idea how she managed it.”