1. My wife and I were asleep. It was about 2 AM. I heard someone say MAX! It woke me up with a start and I sat up. We didn’t have kids then. It was only me and my wife. It sounded like it came from the next room. I thought… woah… that was weird. When I sat up I woke up my wife. I told her and we went back to sleep. Just a dream.
The next morning we got a call from my mom. My dad was killed in a head on collision. Sometime around 2 AM.
Thats all I know.
-Max Jones
2. A few years ago my cousins and I went to the fair. We bought a bunch of tickets and lined up to take a ride on a roller coaster.
We all took our seats and put the safety bar down. The right was just about to start, but then
Suddenly one of my little cousins started yelling. He said I want to get down! I don’t want to ride! The operator came and let him out. Wondering if my cousin was okay, everyone else in my family rushed to get off the ride as well.
So off the ride went, half empty… And we just looked on with a sigh.
As the ride started spinning, suddenly the railing broke off and everyone inside was thrown all over the place like ingredients flying out of an open juicer.
People were seriously injured – thankfully no one died. But we just stood there in total shock! My cousin had bailed from the ride because he “got a funny feeling.” It could easily have been us!
-Mustafa Hanif
3. My friend Gerard Senehi is a world class mentalist. He has performed for people such as Prince Charles and Billy Joel, and has been on TV programs such as Ellen and late night shows.
The most inexplicable experience I’ve ever had involved him. (continued…)
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His illusions involve moving objects without touching them, psychically reading peoples’ minds, and making objects appear and disappear. I have been with him when he has livened up parties by making cigarettes float in the air, or at restaurants when the restaurant staff was dull and Gerard would ask the waitstaff to watch as he moved chopsticks around the table without touching them.
I have seen people get really freaked out by the way he reads minds. Several of his acts involve having someone in the audience write down a word and he finds a way to guess that same word. He is famous for making predictions weeks before a show, and then proving each one right on the night of the show which may include guessing that someone in the audience would be wearing a particular color suit, or something to that nature. I cannot convey how thrilling his shows are.
Now one of the things about mentalists and people who do these kind of shows for a living is that everyone is always wondering whether everything they do is just a trick and can be explained. I have heard everything about Gerard from it’s all a sham, to he really is psychic and can read minds. I never made up my mind about that as I suppose, I always wanted to believe that there was some element of mystery there.
One day I was coming home from work on the subway, and as I entered a long ascending escalator, Gerard came into my mind. I had no reason to be thinking of him but there he was.
I began climbing the escalator slowly and as I got about half way up, Gerard was standing on the escalator backwards, facing me with a huge smile on his face.
When I saw him, my heart nearly stopped. It was extremely eerie. I said, “Oh my God! I was just thinking about you 2 seconds ago!” He just smiled.
-Jill Uchiyama
4. When I was a teenager, I was living abroad, near Brussels. I had been feeling very down and depressed because of certain personal issues and was not sure what to do.
One day I was standing on a train platform awaiting the train home. I am not entirely sure why now, but I was thinking about just jumping on the tracks as soon as I saw the train approach. (continued…)
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The platform was rather crowded, but I was near the front of the crowd.
As I was lost in these morbid thoughts, a man came up to me, grabbed my shoulders, kissed me full on the mouth, hugged me and walked away without a word.
I had never seen this man before in my life, and when I turned to look for him, he seemed to have vanished completely. I began, however, to smile and feel some kind of love from this stranger. I did not jump in front of the train that evening. I don’t know who that person was, or even if he was real, or just a creep, but in some inexplicable way, he may have saved my life.
-Beth Ann Mackenzie
5. I was 27 and newly married. I was a smoker but my husband did not smoke. I was out eating with my brother and his wife (who was a smoker) sitting in the smoking section. I had just crushed out a cigarette when I heard plain as day “That’s the last cigarette you’ll ever want.”
I became really calm and had this serene feeling. I told my sister-in-law about the voice. She said I was crazy. She said you’ll want one tomorrow. And you know what? That’s the last cigarette I ever had or wanted, 25 years ago.
-Kathy Shick
6. My mom had a really bad car crash when I was about eight. It was so bad that her face was crushed. I was taken home by my grandmother that fateful night.
In the middle of the night an elderly gentleman came to the house. He was dressed in all white and he came to my room and sat beside my bed. He told me that my mom would be okay and that I should not worry. I wanted to talk more but when I tried getting up I woke up from the dream I was having.
My grandma came to me asking who was I speaking with. I told her about the elderly gentleman in white and drew her a picture. She became quite emotional as and claimed it was my grandfather. He had died 25 years before I was born. My mom did survive the accident.
-Sunil Khaitan
7. I was once at one of my college friends houses, and she said, ‘Come here I have to show you something.’ She went and pulled out a biscuit tin of old photographs. She searched among them for a little while and then pulled out a picture. ‘I always wondered who this was, and I have no idea how it got here. She looks a lot like you. (continued…)
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It was a passport sized picture of my sister, about 16, in her school uniform. I looked at the back and there, in her own handwriting, was her name.
Reasons why this is weird:
i) I met this girl when I was in college; we had no contact as teenagers when this photo would have been taken.
ii) Our families didn’t know one another.
iii) We were from different towns. Neither of her parents worked the kind of job where they would get job applications for work experience or anything a teenager might send a photo like that for.
iv) Neither of her elder sisters, who would have been around my sisters age, knew my sister.
Obviously it got there somehow, but both families have wracked their brains for years and still can’t figure it out.
-Deirdre Beecher
8. Me and my girlfriend were staying at a Guest house in South India. A cottage/Guest house in the jungle, accessible by road though. Just wanted peace and silence, some time alone.
It was evening and we were just talking to each other and discussing normal stuff. She was sitting on one end of bed and I was sitting on the on the other. Door was locked and there was no staff there. The guest house guy used to come much later to cook dinner. In the conversation she told a joke. And we laughed. And suddenly someone else laughed from the center of bed, right between us.
We froze like .. I mean i have no words to describe that. Even as I write this, I can still feel that creepy feeling I had that day. It was the most surreal thing I have ever experienced. She shouted so loudly and ran out. I followed her and we stayed outside for a minute or two. Then I came back and checked the room. Obviously there was no one inside.
We waited for the guest house cook to come and told him what happened. He said, “It is possible. There used to be an old Cremation ground here for the village. The village people moved to city over the time and all this land was sold and built over.” My girlfriend refused to enter back. We spent the night out sitting in a wooden shed kind of thing and morning I went inside, packed everything and left the place.
-Manik M. Jolly
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9. I lived in a house in the Oakland Hills. After the Oakland Hills fire in 1991, there were a lot of new houses in the area where I lived. There were also a few of the original stucco houses interspersed with the new, so the neighborhood tended to be well-integrated with young families who wanted newer homes and older couples who had the smaller original homes from the 20’s and 30’s.
The house was beautiful, relatively new, and modern; I liked the design. But I never felt comfortable in the house. Even though the kitchen was fine, I ripped it out and put a new one in; still, not perfect. I read about Feng Shui (so not me) to feel more balanced; I still couldn’t feel at home.
As I got to know the neighbors better, I was explaining the discomfort I felt in my house to the older guy that lived next door. “Oh,” he said, “it might be because of the murder that happened here in the 60’s.” I was shocked. “What happened?” I asked. “We had a nice gal who lived alone in the house before the burn. She was killed and no one was ever apprehended.”
I found a realtor the next day.
-Jennifer Lee
10. When I was younger my family had a tradition of getting together at my grandmother’s house for a roast every Sunday night. This was back in 1987; my parents had recently separated, so my mother was living alone at the time and for some reason I don’t recall did not have her car with her and so needed my grandmother to give her a lift home after dinner.
At the time these family gatherings were frequently attended by a former student of my mother’s by the name of Sam, a girl whom my mother had helped through a difficult time in her life and who had become kind of de-facto family member.
That night, as my grandmother was preparing to take my mother home, Sam suddenly went ghost-white and told them not to leave. She said she had a “bad feeling” and that they shouldn’t go yet. They more or less laughed this off, but decided to humour her. So they had another cup of coffee or whatever, and after about twenty minutes Sam relaxed and said it was OK for them to leave now.
They headed off. When they turned off the freeway towards my mother’s suburb they found that police had just blocked off the road. (continued…)
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As my mother tells it, theirs was the first car to be turned around. However what is certainly true was that if they had left even five minutes earlier, they would have been driving down Hoddle Street when former army cadet Julian Knight went on a shooting spree, killing seven people and seriously injuring 19 others.
It seems impossible that this event was the result of chance. Sam was not prone to irrational worries or superstitious feelings, and the timing of both her premonition, and her feeling that the danger had passed, seem to me to be far too accurate to be dismissed as mere flukes.
-Pierz Newton-John
11. Four years ago my husband of 33 years died. I felt as if my life had blown apart.
Three weeks after his death, while I was asleep, I experienced his presence so vividly it was like a visit. It was as if he just came to hang out with me for a while. While overjoyed to be with him, I was confused. I reminded him he was dead and asked if he should really be there. He left and I woke up, happy for the first time since he had died. I had been with him again!
A couple of months later he “came to me” again while I was asleep. This time I enjoyed his presence but told him firmly that he shouldn’t be there- he was dead. He left but I awoke ecstatically happy.
During the third “visit” 8 months after his death, he began joking with me. We were both laughing. Then I said, “You are awfully LIVELY for a dead man!” I woke up joyous but with a nagging feeling that he was trying to get across something that I had not understood.
Three days later it hit me like a bolt of lightning. He was trying to tell me that my understanding of death was all wrong. His spirit is as alive as mine – it just is no longer attached to a body.
Since this last “visit” I see my life here on earth as a temporary journey, part of something much larger. I miss my husband, but no longer grieve him. And my own death does not seem scary.
-Karen Chamberlain