Have you ever experienced a moment where it seems like the threads of reality are tearing or breaking down? It can be something as simple as that day you noticed every second car you passed on the highway was a grey Ford—or as disturbing as a moment where everything and everyone else around you changed, but you were the only one to notice. These are what we like to call "glitch in the matrix" moments. Redditors came together to share their own personal ones, and their stories range from eerie to downright terrifying.
1. Playing Prophet
I remember begging my mom not to drive to the beach this one day, because I’d had a really awful and eerie dream that she’d get into an accident. Instead of asking me how I knew that’s where she was going, she told me to enjoy my day at school. I was proven right in the worst way possible. When my grandmother walked into my classroom to collect me, I burst into tears instantly.
All that dread I’d carried all day just came out. I ran over and asked if mom and my sisters were okay. Her and my teacher exchanged weird looks and I was taken home. Thankfully, my family somehow made it out unscathed despite having a telephone pole land on the center of the car. Still, I really wish my mom had listened to me.
2. Strange Happenings
You know the creepy child in a horror movie, the one who doesn't smile and just stares at you? I saw one at an IKEA one time. It just stared at me as if it can penetrate my soul with its eyes. I thought that was the end of it, but I was so, so wrong. I went to a wedding the following week, and there's that kid again, looking creepy as ever because now he's wearing a bow tie.
I asked its parent if they were at IKEA or if by any chance this kid could have been at IKEA last week. They said no. This kid's parents were actually nice. At the reception, they said they have a single friend they wanted me to meet. It turned out it was my first girlfriend's sister.
3. Secrets Locked Away
My grandparents own a small cabin that my family uses from time to time. In the basement is a small laundry room, with a deadbolt that locks on the inside and with only one entrance. No windows. One day, my brother and I were watching TV and my mom comes and gets us. She tells us to go outside and wait for her there.
She comes out and calls my dad who was running errands, and then the authorities. Apparently, the laundry room downstairs is locked from the inside. We were not staying with anyone else. Officers come and get the door open. They revealed a chilling truth: No one was in there. It's a deadbolt so you literally cannot lock it from the outside. That was probably 15 years ago, and I still think about it all the time.
4. A Unseen Presence
It was like 4:00 in the morning. I’m quite the night owl, so I’m headed downstairs to grab something to drink. The kitchen is separated from the living room by a dividing wall, but I realize someone is in there because I can see a person's shadow from around the corner. I think to myself, "Oh my roommate must be up already. Maybe he has something to do."
So as I turn the corner I say, "Hey, good morning." I then immediately get a chill up my spine. No one is in the kitchen besides me. I’m totally, completely alone. In fact, I search the entire first floor of the house frantically, and no one is there at all. So I head back upstairs and give a hard knock on my roommate's door.
No answer, so I slowly open the door. Roommate is passed out asleep, and doesn't seem like he is waking up anytime soon. There is no way he could have made it back up to his room that fast without running, and I would have noticed because the floors are creaky, especially on the staircase. When he woke up in the morning, I told him about what had happened. His eyes got real wide and he turned pale.
He looked me right in the eye and said, "That isn't a funny joke don't mess with me." It turns out, he had been having bad dreams all night about someone being in the house who shouldn't have been, but whenever he confronted the person, he could never see their face; all that was there was a black silhouette. Haven't had that experience since, and we agree not to talk to each other about it.
5. 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 law enforcement and waited at the gas station for them to come.
It turns out that the drivers of both cars passed on. 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.
6. 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
7. 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…
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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 than I should have, 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 heck 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.
11. Face Off
I saw a dude with no face driving a car. No features at all, it was just blank. I did more than just glance at him, too; I was staring. Just smooth skin and a men's haircut. I've never told anyone because it's so ridiculous sounding and I don't think people would believe me. Maybe there’s a rational explanation, but I know what I saw.
12. An Intersection Of Eeriness
I had an Android phone that had a Google "cards" feature option that could notify you like "15 minutes to home" if you were out. I thought this feature was annoying and useless, so I kept the feature off. After several months of no cards notifications, the strangest event happens. One night I'm at home and a card pops up saying "35 minutes to home."
It then pins me at a random intersection on the other side of town, let's call it 1st St. & Story. I think, that's weird, I'm not even way over there, I don't even know where that is, and I’ve never been to that area. I go to my cards setting to turn it back off…but it's already turned off. "That's weird." The next night, exact same thing happens.
"35 minutes to home from 1st St. & Story." What the? Still definitely not over there. I check the cards feature and the notifications are still turned off, so no idea why I'm getting a notification. A few days later, a friend and I are out running errands, and he misses his intended exit so he takes the next one. Once on the streets, I ask "Where are we? I've never been over here."
Suddenly, a car to our right tries to turn left and crashes right into us. It messed up my friend’s wheel, so he pulled forward to the curb to call a tow truck. We had our kids in the car, so I call my sister to pick us all up. When my sister asks me for the location, I was chilled to the bone. I look up at the street signs: 1st St. & Story.
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13. Coincidence Or Conspiracy?
I was 11 or 12, and this was in the early 1970s. Dad came home one Friday and announced we were going to King's Island, which was a fairly new amusement park, the next day. I begged him to let me invite my friend Chris to come along. He said ok, as long as Chris could pay his own way. Great! Off to the phone I went.
Pick it up, no dial tone. "Hello?" "Wait, is that you?" "Chris? I was just calling you, what's up?” I said. He replies, "I was calling to ask if you'd like to come to King's Island tomorrow, but you have to pay your own way." No phone ever rang, but we both called each other at the same time, to ask the exact same thing.
14. Bon Voyage
My family goes to a garden center near my town every winter for the pretty Christmas lights. Well this one year, the day before we were supposed to go, I had a dream that on our way, the tire of the car came off and we crashed hard. It was such a horrible, graphic dream. My mom’s legs had been crushed, my dad got stuck, etc.
Well, I told my mom in the morning and she joked that she’d check the wheels. She actually did—she said the car had felt weird and the dream unnerved her. Her discovery unnerved her more. Lo and behold, the tire is loose and needs to be taken to a mechanic. Really weird experience, especially as I’ve never had a dream feel so real before.
15. 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.
16. 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?”
17. Call On Me
One day, I visited my father for the weekend. At night, I put my phone on the charger next to my bed and went to sleep. The morning after, the phone is gone. Like, literally gone. I spent the rest of the weekend searching for it, inside every pot, box, drawer or small locker. I searched through my old man's ties and underwear looking for it.
Every nook and cranny in the apartment and NOTHING. I had to buy a new phone. About 10 months go by, I visited my father a couple more times. Last week, I took my wife with me. It was raining and we got soaked. She went to change in the small guest room and thought there were spare clothes of mine inside a small drawer. In there, she found a small folded pair of socks that were neither my father’s nor mine. Inside the socks? The lost phone.
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18. Drive Me Crazy
I'm so glad this question was asked because the craziest stuff happened today. After class today, my friend and I were driving back home and a car passed us…only there was no person in the driver’s seat. There was just a dog. A freaking dog and nothing else. My friend and I both saw it and freaked. A lot of weird stuff goes down in my town.
19. A Stitch In Time
I arrived 10 minutes early to school one day, so I put on my headphones and started to listen a 10-minute track I loved. When it was over, I started walking to the entrance…but nobody was there. It was usually full of people waiting for the school to open. At first, I thought I miscalculated the time and I was late, but the truth was much creepier.
When I checked my watch, only two minutes had passed since I arrived, and I sat there for the remaining eight minutes thinking what the heck had happened.
20. Mother Knows Best
When my mother was in high school, my grandma had recurring dreams where mom was marrying a brown-haired professor who wore a fisherman's cap and smoked a pipe. Well, my dad, who my mom met maybe five years or so after grandma had those dreams, is a brown-haired professor who wears a fisherman's cap, and smoked a pipe…until mom made him quit.
21. Doesn’t Make Cents
Early last month, I went online to pay a bill, like I've done for years. I get to the last page before finishing and the webpage freaks out, with a multitude of display issues before finally I receive an error message. After several attempts to pay I give up, assuming the site is having issues. I go back two days later and pay my bill, and it goes through normally, with me getting my usual text and e-mail notifying me I paid.
So I'm very confused a few weeks later when I check my e-mail and find a notice from the company whose bill I paid, with a semi-threatening e-mail saying the bill is due that day and do I need to set up a payment plan? I've been dealing with the company for almost a decade and have never been late in paying in that entire time.
I check my credit card account, and there's no record of me paying, nor of the text or e-mail I received. I pay the bill and chalk it up to a senior moment on my part. Last week, I get my one credit card bill. It says I never paid my last bill, so now I've got that bill to pay, plus the interest. I find my previous bill, open but with the invoice in place, in my living room. Thing is, this is actually terrifying. Here’s why.
I'm physically disabled and can't drive, and I always pay that credit card bill in person, after they messed up my payment years ago. So a family member always takes me to my credit union to pay that bill, and like me, he remembers us going down to pay the bill they say I never paid. He and I even remember a conversation we had on the way down to the credit union, and going grocery shopping afterward.
But yet the bill is unpaid and the bill is in my possession still.
22. An Honest Mistake
I was sitting in a seminar when I was in university, waiting for my girlfriend to arrive. She was late, and when she came into the room she looked around and took a seat in the same row of seats I was sitting in. I was a little confused since I kept the seat next to me clear for her. We’d made a plan to meet there and go to lunch afterward.
So I was looking along the row of seats to catch her eye and make her recognize me, since I thought she just didn't see me there and took a random seat. When our eyes finally met, it got weirder. She looked at me in a very confused way, then leaned back to let me see who was sitting next to her. The guy looked just like me.
Face, body, haircut, clothing. She thought he was me, took the seat next to him but realized that it wasn't me, since he didn't seem to recognize her when she said hello. We never saw him before and never saw him again after he left the room that day.
23. Disappearing Act
When I was doing my internship, there was a guy across the way from me as we were traveling on the public transport line. I noticed him because he was wearing an intricate brown suit and checking a pocket watch for the time often. When we both got off at the same stop by the school, he had a quick pace and was rushing ahead of me.
I thought he was crazy when he walked into traffic. He made it past the work van coming at him from the right, and I was terrified for him because a car was coming fast from the left. However, when the work van stopped and blocked my sight, so I couldn’t see what became of him...Then he was gone. What? The? Heck? I still wonder where he went six years later.
24. Made For Each Other
I dated this girl a few years back and our first date was…weird. She was a friend of my brother and we had known each other a while before going out. Anyway, we’re on the date and she tells me that she had a weird dream about me. But the creepy part was yet to come. See, I had also had a weird dream about her that evening.
She goes first: "I was driving my teacher's car on my way to see you. We were on the phone trying to find each other. You kept saying I just drove past your apartment, but I was in the middle of nowhere and got really confused." Without really thinking about it, I reply: "I was on the phone with you as you constantly drove past my apartment. But it wasn't your normal car and you were really confused."
She's just staring at me like I was pulling her leg. Then it dawned on me, “Oh my God, we had the same dream!" We shared four-five more dreams throughout the relationship at totally random times.
25. Altered State
I was staying in the hospital after a concussion when I was 15 years old from landing on concrete. I had been out for a few days, only waking for short periods, and I wasn’t able to keep food or drink down. They gave me multiple CAT scans as I wasn't “coming to” as expected and they were worried that I was badly brain-damaged. A lot of this people had to tell me later.
My hospital bed had the side rails up, and I was somehow strapped-in as my equilibrium was messed up and I couldn't get out of it without nurse assistance. Except that’s not what happened at all. This is hard to write, it's just so hard to explain the feeling of this moment, but I did get up. I got up, stepped over my mom who was sleeping on a mat on the floor, and walked to the window.
I saw the amazing view of the hills cast in early dawn light. I looked at the cars way down in the parking lot, the trees behind the wall, the houses and roads and nature leading to the hillside. I felt, I guess, reset. No pain, no memory, no idea why I was there or where there was. I knew it was me, the way you do, but all the "stuff" that would've normally been running through my head was absent.
I felt completely lucid, still, fresh, new, and very much at peace. I’ve never felt that way before or since. Except I didn't get up, I couldn't have, it wasn't possible. Yet I know to my core, in the way you feel yet can't describe in words, that I saw what I did, and I know that I was there, awake, looking out that window at one of the clearest visions my eyes have ever witnessed, with this incredible feeling of redemption.
I don't know, but it felt incredible and so true to me soul. I don't know, I remember it like a one-man alien abduction. The next few weeks I needed help walking, eating, etc. and it was months before I was “okay” again. I still have minor equilibrium issues 20 years later. I was at the hospital with a friend recently and saw the view from the same floor, but the wrong side. Chills, man.
I feel like maybe that was the first time I became aware of my “soul,” but everyone experiences that, and most don't need concussions to get there.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. As Seen On TV
When I lived with my dad, long before he passed, I was dozing off to sleep in my room while my TV was on low volume. At some point, my TV got super loud randomly, then low and then loud again. Thinking I was laying on the controller, I started searching for it. I spotted it on the floor and I adjusted the volume, then rotated the batteries in case of whatever and began to rest again.
A few moments later, it happened again and I sat up irritated. I'm thinking the batteries are low, so I go to turn off the TV—when my door suddenly swings open and my closet door creaks open. I just sat in bed frozen for a moment. I called for my dad and sister, thinking they might've opened my door for whatever reason.
There was no response, so I got up and hauled down the hall to my sister’s room. I woke her up and she was like, "whatever you big baby." Goes to my room, checks it out, and comes back. Her reply somehow made it even creepier. She tells me I need to stay in her room for the night. Never explained why, and refuses to tell me what she saw or heard.
29. School Boy Terror
I was around seven years old, and at the end of school we all had to line up in our year groups in the yard and we would be led by our teacher to the front of school and either onto the bus or picked up. The pathway from the back to the front of school was narrow, so we were all in single file. I was walking along, chatting and laughing with my friends in front and behind of me.
Next thing I know...I’m stood on the path completely alone. The teacher comes running back from around the front of the school and says, “Craig! Hurry, you’ll miss the bus!” I’d literally missed or skipped a few minutes of time.
30. Wibbly Wobbly Timey-Wimey
It was my senior year of high school, on my 30-minute lunch. My buddy and I drove all the way from my school to McDonald’s, which is normally about a 10-minute drive one way, so 20 minutes round trip. However, we stop by my house, which is in between the school and McDonald’s. I grab a shirt, change, leave, and we drive down the street.
While driving again, we get into an altercation with a guy who we flipped off for tailgating. His wife in the passenger seat starts yelling at him, we part ways. We finally get to McDonald’s and order food, and as we eat in the parking lot, we decide we are late regardless. We had no access to the time in my car and our phones were in our lockers at the school, but it’s been way over 30 minutes now.
Turns out this all occurred in 18 minutes on the dot. It’s freaking impossible, but it happened. My buddy and I still talk about it to this day, saying we went through a wormhole or something like that. Or my Nissan, rest in peace, could somehow time travel or slow down time.
31. It’s Not In Your Head
My brother and I lived in a small apartment together with his girlfriend when we were in our late teens. One night, I woke up in the middle of the night crying about my brother’s girlfriend having a bandage around her head in the hospital, with my mother in the background screaming “She’s too young.” She then passed on in my dream.
I kept telling her she needed to get her head checked out and that I think something is wrong with her head, but she always reassured me she was fine. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fast forward four years. My brother walked up to me at work, bawling his eyes out. He’d been up all night crying.
Apparently, his girlfriend’s mother hit her with her door of her car and she hit her head on the concrete. She passed from a brain hemorrhage. I loved that woman, she was so innocent and beautiful.
32. Clowning Around
I have one that I wish I had an answer for because I’d really just like to know what was going on. It was Christmas night and I was hanging out with a friend after we were done with our family get-togethers. We were just driving around listening to music, and I was looking out the window, people-watching. We drove up next to a four-door sedan and there was a family inside; a man, a woman, and two small children.
But they were all dressed as clowns. Like big, poufy red wigs, white faces, red noses, the works. The weirdness of seeing a car full of clowns and also seeing them on Christmas really freaked me out and I started screaming at my friend to look over. He’s afraid of clowns, so needless to say, he lost his mind, and as we were sitting there freaking out they all looked over into our car.
That caused him to really freak and he sped off. Why the heck were those people dressed as clowns!? Is there a weird association between clowns and Christmas I don’t know about!?
33. Total Recall
I occasionally have dreams where a few months or weeks down the line, I experience that moment. But I always forget what the dream was about right up until it happens. My first experience was in sixth grade, when I had a dream where I was having a conversation with my teacher. At the time I was sat in the back of the class, and that was about when I had the dream.
Fast forward two and a half weeks, and I've been moved to the front of the class and it happens. There she is, taking to me about some work I need to do because I was absent for a few days, and then I have this déjà vu moment and as she's speaking. I'm staring blankly at her remembering this conversation. I told her and her reaction was the exact same as in my dream, facial expressions and all.
To this day I still occasionally have these dreams and moments, and to this day there's no way in heck I can explain them.
34. Specters At Dawn
This happened to me several years ago, while I was living in California and working at a great job in a downtown coffeehouse. I loved everything about that job: I worked with fantastic people, and our shop was located in the city's historic district in a very old, very beautiful building that had once been a hotel in the 1800s, but had since been converted into apartments, lofts, and of course, the big coffeehouse on the main floor.
Being an early bird and living only a couple of blocks away from the coffeehouse, I was always scheduled to work the opening shift, which started at 4:15 AM. It was the most unpopular shift, but it happened to be my absolute favorite one because I loved walking to work in the quiet of the early mornings as the rest of the city was sound asleep.
Normally, downtown was quite loud and busy, full of people and constant activity, but in the early hours of the morning, it was still and silent and I felt as if I was the only person in existence, walking through a ghost town. Every day I arrived about 10 or 15 minutes early for my shift and would wait for my manager on the patio outside of the shop.
It was always just the two of us working that early shift, and my manager was often running a little bit behind and never arrived before I did, but I didn't mind at all. I liked to spend some time by myself on the patio outside of the darkened shop gathering my thoughts while I waited for him to walk up with his keys to unlock the doors. But one day, everything changed.
One morning, as I was walking to work and approaching our building, I noticed that the coffeehouse was brightly lit up, as all the lights were already turned on and shining through the store's giant glass windows. I was about 10 minutes early that morning, so I was very surprised to see that my manager had arrived before me and had already started opening up the shop.
I walked up to the glass door and pulled on the handle to let myself in, only to find that it was locked shut. That wasn't really unusual, as we often kept the doors of the employee entrance and main entrance locked while we got everything ready for the day and went through our morning procedures until 5 a.m., which was our official opening time.
What was unusual, though, was the sound of music I could clearly hear drifting through the speakers inside the store. This was during the holiday season, so we were playing Christmas music throughout the day, but we never turned it on until around 9:00 or so in the morning, out of respect for the all tenants living in the apartments above us.
But on this particular morning, I could hear the Christmas music already playing its familiar loop at a rather high volume inside the store. I thought it was odd, but decided that maybe my manager was just feeling extra festive that day and wanted to listen to some tunes while we worked. I knocked on the employee entrance door and waited for my manager to come and let me in. I looked through the glass and watched for him.
He didn't come, so I knocked again and waited some more. Now I start getting a really bad feeling. He still didn't appear, so I knocked again. And again. I then walked to the main entrance doors and tried knocking on those, with no luck. I checked my watch and saw that I had five minutes until I needed to clock in. I knocked again, much louder this time, and looked inside through the glass door for any signs of my manager.
And that's when I heard the muffled sound of voices coming from the back of the store, where the kitchen of our coffee shop was located. At that quiet, early hour in the morning, every sound seems to be amplified, and what I could distinctly hear was two male voices talking and laughing together. That was very unusual, as I had mentioned before that it was normally just me and my manager who opened up the shop, but I figured someone had probably just needed to pick up an extra shift.
I knocked yet again and continued to listen to the sounds coming from the coffee shop. The men kept talking and laughing (loudly). They seemed to be having a really great time. In addition to the music and the talking and the laughter, I began to hear the sound of clanging dishes and also the sprayer of the three-compartment steel kitchen sink being turned on and off, which was very, very unusual as there would be no dishes to wash before the store had even opened. But something else bothered me more.
I was also confused as to why my manager—and whoever was with him—were in the kitchen in the back of the store, because so much of our opening procedures—setting up the pastry case, brewing the coffee, preparing everything for the espresso machine—were done at the front of the store, where I was waiting to be let inside.
At this point, I was getting a bit irritated as I was supposed to start work in just a few minutes and I needed to punch in on our time clock. I hated clocking in late for work. I dug out my phone and dialed my manager's cell number. He didn't pick up. So, I dialed the number to our coffee shop instead, and the two phones inside the shop—one in the back office and one up front by the register—started ringing.
Once. Twice. Three rings and no answer. Now four rings. And five. I hung up and immediately dialed again, annoyed that they were making such a racket in there with the music and all the talking and the laughter that they probably couldn't even hear the phone at all. Just as before, nobody answered. I hung up and re-dialed the store for the third time.
The phone rang and rang and went unanswered, and so I banged on the door yet again, to no avail. I looked at my watch. I was officially late for work. As I was standing in front of the locked door with my phone against my ear, becoming more and more irritated, I noticed a pair of headlights reflecting in the glass, rolling up behind me. I turned around and saw something I did not expect at all.
It was my manager. "I'm so sorry I'm late," he said as he climbed out of the driver's seat and shut his car door and hustled up to the shop's entrance. "I tried to get here as fast as I could," he said, as he moved toward me and fumbled with his keys trying to find the one to the shop door. "You're mad," he said, "I can tell. I'm really sorry."
Completely confused, I put my phone away and turned to head into the store with him. And that's when I lost my breath for a minute. The coffee shop was totally dark. None of the lights were on. Not one single light. And it was completely quiet. The Christmas music had stopped and so had the voices and laughter—all of the loud noise had disappeared.
Every sound I had been listening to just seconds before had suddenly vanished. "I promise I'll be here on time tomorrow," my manager said as he fit his key into the lock. "I'll even be early! You'll be shocked!" Little did he know that I could not possibly be more shocked to see him than I was at that very moment, as he opened the door to the silent, completely empty coffeehouse.
35. An Act Of God
I used to collect cards as a kid—baseball cards, hockey cards, comic book cards, etc. I was collecting cards from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie at the time and there was only one card missing in my set. I couldn’t get my hands on it no matter how many packs I bought, and I was getting more than a little obsessed.
My family was on a road trip and I was in the back seat with the window open. A truck passed us on the highway and there was a huge gust of wind. My one missing Ninja Turtles card blew into the open window and landed on my lap.
36. 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.
37. 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.
38. Follow The White Rabbit
When I was first teaching myself to speak Croatian, I would come home every day from work with a few new words in my vocabulary and the day I learned the word for "rabbit," ("zec") I came home to my dog bouncing through a few feet of snow like a rabbit, so I nicknamed her "bielo zec," or "white rabbit" in Croatian. I called her that literally a half dozen times or so that day when there was no one around.
Later that day, my 10-year-old sister with Down syndrome came home from school. She doesn't speak English (or any other language) very well and she has trouble pronouncing more than a word or two at a time. But when she came home, she went right up stairs to my room, pointed at my dog, and to my absolute astonishment, she VERY CLEARLY said "white rabbit."
I had never called the dog that in English, and that was the first day I ever heard the Croatian word for rabbit, so there is nowhere for my little sister to have heard this before. Needless to say, the experience gave me goose bumps. My sister has continued to surprise the family and keep us guessing about the nature of our reality.
39. Higher, Further, Faster, More
In middle school, some friends and I were skating to the mall. We were in the street in a residential area when a car backed out of a driveway right in front me, on the right hand side of the street. There were cars parked at the curb so I couldn't see it coming until the back fender was already in front of me. Stupidly, I veered to my right, hit the curb and left my board, airborne and on a pretty flat trajectory.
I closed my eyes and braced for impact, and landed on my back in the grassy front yard of the guy who backed out in front of me. It knocked the wind out of me, but it wasn't too bad. When I sat up and looked around, I nearly had a heart attack. I was on the other side of a fence, wrought iron and brick with hedges, and had to be 10 feet from where I hit the curb.
There is no way I should've cleared both his car, the fence, the hedges and everything.
40. 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.
41. 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.
42. 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.
43. 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.
44. 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.
45. 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.
46. 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.
47. 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.
48. 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.
49. 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.
50. 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.
51. 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 weaponry, 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.
52. 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.
53. 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.
54. 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.
55. 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
56. Let’s Play A Game
When I was young, probably around ten years old, we kept all of our family board games in my bedroom closet. They were on a shelf that was much taller than me and I would have to reach to get them on my tippy toes. Over time, they started to dust up because I was the youngest and my older siblings were always out and about and didn’t care for our games anymore.
They were there for so long that I knew where each game was because I saw them every time I needed to grab a shirt. One night I’m sleeping in my bed, I’m still preteen at this point, but I’m sleeping and wake up to a super loud crashing noise in my closet, as if something fell or broke in there. Now I’m young, it’s dark, and I can’t really see anything so I’m absolutely terrified right now.
My door is closed and everyone is asleep, so there’s no possible way someone is in my closet right now for any reason. I was so scared that I was paralyzed, can’t move and I start to sweat. I was NOT about to go into the dark and open the door, and I wasn’t going to get up and turn on the light. I was just paralyzed. Eventually, I sit long enough in fear that I do fall asleep.
The next day, I wake up and look in my closet. I actually see a game on the ground, open with pieces lying everywhere as if it did fall off the shelf. But there was a reason it made me even more terrified. The game was one of the ones stacked under three or four others, and those were still up there, stacked just without the one on the bottom.
Those games had ALL been sitting there for months and months now, so there’s no way it was in a position to fall or anything like that, and there’s no way in the middle of the night an older sibling was coming into my room, into my closet, and throwing a game on the ground, then staying in there afterward long enough for me to fall asleep again before leaving.
So strange. I still remember the fear and confusion of that night as a kid, and have no idea how that happens. Or why. Why did that happen?
57. Banking On It
I was at a gas station getting a coffee. I went to pay for my coffee and I tap my card, and the lady at the till tells me it was declined. I try inserting it with my pin because maybe my tap wasn't working. The lady said it was declined again. There was no one else in the gas station at that time, so I’m like "Hold up. Let me check my online banking."
I had just gotten paid and knew I had money. I go to my online banking…and it says that I paid. I show her the transaction and she starts insisting that it didn't go through on her end. Like okay lady, I am not paying for the same coffee twice. Eventually, she lets me go and says she will check her settlement later. Next day, I go in to grab another coffee and the lady tells me that I stole the coffee the other night but doesn't make me pay for it.
I am angry because I just got a lecture when I know the money for the coffee came out of my account. I check my online banking later and there was no transaction for the coffee....
58. 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.
59. 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.
60. 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
61. 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.
62. 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.
63. 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.
64. 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!
65. Ring Me Up
When my son was about four years old, one night he started hounding me to ring Nana. I thought it odd to begin with as he had never asked to call her before, so I just put him off for an hour or so until he came back and insisted that I call her. It turned out to be an eerie premonition. It turns out, she was sitting on her lounger experiencing a massive tachycardia event and couldn't breathe.
I called an ambulance and met her at the hospital. That same week, she had a pacemaker and defibrillator unit implanted to fix the problem. To this day, I cannot explain what drove him to get me to call, but I’m very glad he did. He doesn't even remember it.
66. Satan Take The Wheel
I was driving home from work one morning and was waiting to turn right at a stop sign on a somewhat rural road. A number of cars were turning left onto the road I was on. As the last one passed, a blue minivan, I locked eyes with the driver. I nearly jumped out my skin from fear. I am 100% convinced that I either saw a demon or some physical manifestation of pure evil.
The minute I noticed him, the hair on my neck stood up and I felt physically sick. From what I remember, he had no deformities or anything explainable, but something still felt so...off and terrifying about him. It was like looking at something ALMOST human. This was probably two years ago now, and I've never forgotten that otherwise normal ride home.
67. You’ll Pay For This
I stopped at the gas station on my way to work one morning. I take out my debit card and take my car keys with me and leave everything in the car. Pay for my stuff and throw my debit card in the metal cup I have in my car. Literally half a second later, I look down and my card is gone. I pulled apart everything trying to look for it and couldn’t find it.
I go to work and go home…to find it sitting on my desk. But that’s exactly when it got terrifying. I double-checked my bank account to make sure it was the card I used, and it was. To this day, I still have no idea what happened. I had no carbon monoxide leak; we have a monitor in our house and that was the first thing I thought to check. And no concussions in my life ever.
68. All Doctors Look the Same
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. 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.
69. 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.
70. 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.
71. Multi-Tasking
My bedroom at the time led into the living room, which you could see into the kitchen. We also had a bathroom that was directly off our room, in the corner. You couldn't get to it unless you were in our room. I woke up one afternoon. I remember sitting up and checking my phone. I got out of bed, opened the bedroom door, and walked into the living room to turn the thermostat up.
I saw my ex in the kitchen fiddling around with the coffee pot. Then he started walking towards the back of the house, into the other bedroom. I said "Hey! You're up early." He looked at me, and kept on walking. I went back into our room and sat on the bed. I started to get a strange sinking feeling in my stomach. After a few minutes, I called his name.
He opened the bathroom door and said "Yeah?" Apparently, he was in the bathroom the whole time. I was very confused and super freaked out because I could have sworn I saw him in the kitchen. Except there's no way it was him if he was in the bathroom. It shook me up pretty bad.
Shutterstock
72. Seeing Double
I have a doppelgänger out there. This happened to people I know, not to me directly. A woman who works with my mom was out doing her grocery shopping one night and ran into “me” at the supermarket. She told my mom about the encounter the next day and asked why I didn't recognize her, as we saw each other once every few weeks.
My mom confirmed that it couldn't have been me as I was at home. The woman also mentioned feeling oddly nauseated during the interaction. I was about 16 or 17 at the time. Another woman I know said she didn't know I walked through the park near her home after work. Dumbfounded by her observation, I listened as she explained—and my blood ran cold.
She said she’d seen me every so often after work, walking briskly through a large park—which I do know of, but have only driven past—as if I was exercising. She said I walked close by her the previous evening and she was going to speed up to catch up with me and say hello, but as she started to she began to feel ill so she slowed down and then sat on a bench for a few minutes.
By then, she'd lost sight of me. This happened about three years ago and both occurrences were miles apart. Then, it happened again. When I was 20, I was living on campus on the ground floor of a three-story building. There were only 36 people in the building, so I knew everyone by sight at least when this happened. A new guy moved in on the third floor.
We'd exchanged pleasantries and I knew his name and what floor he lived on, but not much else. I was coming out the front door one morning and he was coming down the stairs. He said, "Oh I just saw your sister going up the stairs!" I asked him what he meant and he said, "Your sister, she's here all the time. She wears her hair the same as you."
I used to change my hair a lot. At the time, it was midway down my back and fire truck red. There was nobody on campus with hair like mine. I noped out and went back inside.
73. In The Cards
I'm a pretty big gym enthusiast. When I enter my condo unit, directly in front of me is a small shelf. It's there that I keep my gym gear: knee wraps, weighted belt, lifting belt, bands, boxing gloves, shoes, etc. On top of the shelf, I always leave my gym card. The shelf is black, the card is black and red, and the red stands out.
About six months ago, I couldn't find my gym card. I searched throughout my unit. Usually, I just leave it on my shelf as described, but sometimes it may be in my wallet or on my kitchen table. But after searching thoroughly, I couldn't find it. Over the next four weeks, I probably searched for it another half dozen times.
My girlfriend at the time helped me search a few times as well and we couldn't find it anywhere. I figured I'd lost it. One day, I do one last major search and when I can't find it, I figure it's definitely lost. I go to the gym front desk and tell them I lost my card—but I'd forgotten to bring my wallet so I told them I'd pick it up and pay for a new card the next time I came in.
I do my workout and head back home. I open the door and sitting directly in front of me, on the black shelf, in the same spot I always left it, was my gym card. I even called my girlfriend and asked her if she'd found it or seen it, and she reminded me we'd both searched for it and couldn't find it. Was so bizarre. But I've had multiple weird things happen in this condo.
74. He’s Got Your Number
My wife and I were driving out of Texas to come back home to Ohio. We stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Kind of a run-down little place, and my wife goes in while I’m filling up. I finish and pay at the pump and decide to head in and use the restroom real quick. I walk out, and my wife is at the checkout paying with the cashier.
I walk up, and the cashier just starts looking at me. He then calls me out by my full name. “John?” “Yeah...?” “Your name is John Lastname right?” “Yeah...do we know each other?” “Nope!” “Then how do you know my name?” “Ha, I dunno!” My wife and I look at each other and we both got the heck out of there. I don’t have a common name, I had never been to that gas station let alone that town ever.
Every time my wife and I think about it, we can’t explain it.
75. Missing Something?
I was playing with my friend when I was young by the pond. We spotted some boys, and being the bad girl that I am, I pulled a blueberry flavored lip gloss that I got free in a magazine out of my pocket for us both to use to make the boys like us. I thought that's how life worked. We started hopping along the stepping-stones on the pond, and the lip gloss falls out of my pocket into the pond.
Both my friend and myself saw this happen. I was angry because it was the only make-up my mom allowed me to have. Cut to about five hours later, I get home and go up to my room. The blueberry lip gloss was on my pillow.
76. Well-Read
One time when I was maybe seven or eight, my mom was reading The Hobbit to me, and we got to a spot I had heard somewhere before. I told her I think she read this part already. She insisted we had never read it and went back to reading it to me, so I started saying the lines with her, word perfect. She stopped and looked at me while I continued quoting it flawlessly.
77. 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.
78. 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.
79. Missing Time
After a bath, I went to put on clothes, blacked out, and woke up on the floor, sitting upright against the sink and dressed. I have no idea what happened, didn't feel sore anywhere (like if I had fallen over), and it was as if I sat on the floor and dressed myself while I was unconscious. It felt like 20 minutes had passed, even though the bathroom still had steam in it.
80. Night Moves
I was in my bedroom. It was winter, and night time, so the windows were shut, all doors were shut, no fans on, and no breeze basically. I think this is a thing other girls do, or maybe I just got it from my mother, but my bra was hanging vertically from the closet doorknob, like one of the straps was on the doorknob and the bra just hung down vertically.
It had been there like that all night. Out of nowhere, it swung like a pendulum, from completely motionless, to almost a 45-degree angle to the left, then to the right, back to the left, and did this a few times before coming back to a complete stop. It’s really weird, and doesn’t make any sense. There was nothing happening that could have caused that motion.
It also swung in such a stiff way. It didn’t twist or turn, just like a pendulum, back and forth a few times, then stopped. No idea what it was.
81. Recurring Dream
I had a dream when I was about seven where I got a T-shirt and hated it. In my dream, I decided to throw it away in a corner of my room in a pile of other stuff. About four years later, I got another shirt in real life exactly like the one I threw away in my dream. A couple of nights after I got the new shirt, I had a dream where I went to the corner of the room where I threw the shirt away and picked it back up, and starting wearing it.
Not unexplainable, but it was bizarre to know that I remembered such a random dream four years later.
82. 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
83. There’s Someone Sitting At The Computer
One time my wife and I were coming back from a dinner night out. When I opened the door of the house, she was sitting at the computer working, as I usually find her when I get home, nothing unusual. Except she was entering the house with me... I shrugged it off and carried on, we went to bed and I told her that I saw her sitting at the computer, and she goes dead serious and told me that when I opened the door, she saw herself sitting at the computer working...
Creepiest thing I’ve ever experienced... The fact that our neighbor's two-year-old daughter used to point to the TV when it was off and tell us that the person on the screen was making scary faces and that she wanted it to go away, didn't help us getting much sleep that night...
84. Physics Bends To Save A Life
I got in a motorcycle accident about six years ago. I'm going 45 through town and a woman, who didn't see me, turns left in front of me. It could only have been a millisecond but I remember weighing my options and thinking if I should try and go over the car or under it by laying the bike down. I put the bike down. It went straight under her car, I went diagonally.
I Slid across the pavement wearing no helmet, no jacket—just jeans and a cheap zip-up hoodie from Walmart. So I slide for 80 feet or so—not sure on the exact measurement but it was a long way—on the pavement and when I stop, I just stood up and the only thing wrong was that there was a hole in my hoodie cuff about the size of a dime. Not a scratch anywhere on me.
I remember looking at it, then at my mangled bike, and just screaming in my head "PHYSICS DON'T WORK THIS WAY"
85. You Are Dreaming
I have a sleep tracking app on my phone that has a setting for lucid dreaming. It will start saying "You are dreaming" repeatedly in a woman's voice with a bit of an echo. I was at work one day when I started hearing the voice randomly every few minutes or so. I checked my phone and as soon as the screen turned I woke up in my bed as the sun was rising.
A bit freaked out I went to take a shower. Then on my way to work, I started to hear the voice again through the radio. When I turned my car off, a bit freaked out again, I once more woke up in my bed as the sun was rising. This happened about 3 or 4 more times, all at different times of the "day." I didn't trust reality for about a week after that and still refuse to use that particular setting of the app.
86. Saying Goodbye
In about 2003 or 2004, my mother, who is absolutely not a believer in ghosts or "glitches in matrices" and would never exaggerate a story, told me about a dream she had which I have never forgotten. She said she had dreamt about an old family friend who was dying of lung cancer. In her dream, she was hanging out the washing on the clothesline in our backyard when suddenly he walked through the trees and called out to her. She noticed he was wearing a pilot uniform.
She was shocked to see him looking so well, and exclaimed “Oh my god! You look well! Why are you here? Come and talk to me!" He answered "Sorry, no, I've only come to say goodbye to you, and to tell you I'm so much better. But I can't stay, I've got to go now, goodbye." And off he walked, past her, through the yard and out of sight.
For some reason, my mother woke up, rolled over and looked at the time. It was 5:23 am. Later that day she got a phone call from his wife. He had passed on at that exact time.
87. Where Did My Time Go?
Ten years ago I was returning home from a road trip with two friends. I received a phone call from my parents asking when we would be arriving, and I explained that we were about 25 minutes away. About a minute later we came around a bend; it was a full moon and we could see the reflection from a lake below us and other than that the road was completely empty.
Suddenly everything went completely dark in the car, no lights from the dash or gauges or headlights on the road. The music also stopped and re-started at the beginning of the CD we were listening to. There was now a vehicle pulled over by law enforcement about 1/4 mile in front of us that hadn't been there a split second before. I assumed I had dozed off for just a second as it was late.
I thought it was still quite peculiar, though. After about a minute, the driver of the car turned the music all the way down and said: "did that just happen to anyone else?" The other passenger in the back seat sat forward abruptly and exclaimed: "I thought I just fell asleep...". We then realized that the clock in the car was reading an hour later than it just had a minute before.
To keep ourselves from freaking out we decided that the car had possibly had a momentary electrical failure and reset the clock to an odd time, turned off the dash lights, headlights, and gauges, and restarted the CD player. But when we arrived home 25 minutes later, we were one hour late. I am missing an hour of my life, and to this day have no idea how it happened.
88. Dream State Telling You The Future
When I was a teenager I had two really intense dreams one night. The first one was about an online friend of mine calling me to say she'd broken up with her boyfriend, and I sang a few lines of Seal's "Don't Cry" to her over the phone. The second dream was finding a (real-life) friend’s dead body floating in her bathtub.
I didn't think anything of it up until I went on my computer that evening and the online friend chatted me to tell me her boyfriend broke up with her. I immediately asked if I could call her, and she said no. I remember thinking that it meant something like I could change it. Not long after, my phone rang, and it was the real-life friend from the dream calling me.
I was completely freaked at this point, but talked to her normally... she was just talking about school and stuff... up until I realized I heard a splash in the background. I asked her, "Are you in the tub?" and when she said yes I felt like my heart had stopped. I asked her, "What did you do?". She didn't answer me right away, and then after a very long pause, she told me she'd taken an entire bottle of pills and chased it with mushrooms and vodka.
She'd gotten scared waiting for it to hit her... so she called me so she'd hear someone's voice. I hung up and called 9-1-1. By the time they got there, she was unconscious but alive. Today she's a mom to a beautiful little girl, and she's ok.
89. No Car Pile-Up
I'm way too late to this party but this is a true story that nobody believes. I was driving northbound on I-5 into Seattle at about 3 am. It was raining very, very hard and I drove under the Convention Center in downtown Seattle, which is like a tunnel. When I got out from under the center, I saw something that made me slam on my brakes and skid to a stop in the middle of the freeway.
There were five cars upside down in the middle of the road. I thought I had happened upon a horrible accident, but then I realized there was not a single person in sight... the cars were completely empty... no headlights on... no law enforcement.... no fire trucks... no ambulances... no tow trucks... and then I realized what made me hit the gas and get out of there... not a single dent on any of the vehicles.
They were just sitting there, upside down in the middle of I-5. It has freaked me out to think about ever since and everyone thinks I'm making it up but that was a glitch if ever there was one. I checked the news for days afterward and couldn't find a report. Weeeeird.
90. Feeling The Bug In The Matrix
I was waiting for the bus next to a busy road and I was starting to feel anxious, so I decided to stand up and walk about 50 feet away. I already felt better. So I started walking back and at that moment I saw a truck lose control and demolish the spot where I’d been 20 seconds before.
Since then, I believe that people have destinies.
91. Memory Error or Sage?
I was sitting in my car with my dad and I distinctly heard my sister (who was at home) say, "Are you guys almost home? I'm scared" in a very specific, concerned tone of voice. Two seconds later, my dad's phone rings. Guess who's on the line? My sister. She said, "Are you guys almost home? I'm scared" in the same concerned tone of voice. I was pretty freaked out.
92. Get Away From The Car
I was heading home with my dad, we stopped at a drive-thru. I start feeling more and more anxious for no reason, to the point where it makes me lightheaded and sick to my stomach. We have to wait a little bit ahead because they gave us the order wrong. So I sit there, feeling like garbage, and it suddenly comes to me an urge to call my brother.
He was trying to call us, he was in a car accident. No one passed on, some got seriously bruised, he was only shaken. I told him to shut up and get as far away from the car as possible. He didn't understand but followed through, trying to call some of his buddies, and I could hear them calling him a wuss, him giving up and getting far, and then a loud noise, people shouting.
After the whole thing was over he told me what happened. His drunk friend tried to impress some girls in the car, hit the gas, drifted, and hit the bottom of the car on some rocks, completely messing with the engine. They stood near the car, the driver still inside trying to turn the engine back on. The hood burst into flames and the car started to burn fast, the driver managed to get away but got severely hurt.
Some of the guys and girls who stood around were hurt and burned too, but not as bad as the driver. My brother was the only one with light bruises from the whole thing. He told me that when I ordered him to get away from the car he was in front of it, inches from the hood. I never experienced anything like this before and after, just this once. It's just a weird memory, I don't remember what I was thinking, I remember it like watching a movie and seeing myself and everything from an outside angle.
93. That Kid’s Dad Was The One
Hope this counts: I've stopped telling people this story as no one ever believed me. I'll never forget it. It's been driving me crazy for 30 years. I'm sorry for the length of this. When I was a kid in England, in primary school, around 1987-ish, a new kid joined the school on a temporary basis for a term. He had an American accent and was ginger.
His name was Lee. Before he left us, he brought into school what today would look sort of like a tablet computer but this was very thin with brown tanned glass. He had cartoons on it—he totally loved cartoons and movies. I swear this happened. I didn't dream it. It was amazing. There was a crowd of kids who saw it and their reaction was interesting because they liked it and wanted one, comparing it to the Nintendo Game, watches, and calculators, but sort of accepted it and didn't think it was magical—but it certainly was.
I said to him it was like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy prop used in the TV series. He didn't know what I meant. He kept it away from the teachers and didn't bring it back in. I kept asking him questions about his 'calculator TV’ and he just gave vague answers and saying he didn't know, but when I asked where he bought it, he said his Dad got it from the US.
One other thing he said, he saw a movie that "had every cartoon character ever". A few years later, I realized he was talking about Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which came out soon after. This was 30 years ago and you can imagine how difficult in all this time it’s been to describe this thing as we haven't had ubiquitous tablets everywhere. I used to draw diagrams of it and show it to people.
I went crazy when I saw the Tom Hanks movie Big—the scene where he pitches a hand-held comic book video device... my parents just sort of acknowledged it, humoring me. When Star Trek: TNG came out and the Padd was shown on screen I went "That's it! That's the thing!" Eventually, the tablet PC came out and I remember thinking “finally, at last.” The video iPod was further confirmation.
Today, it's obvious that it was a tablet computer, and my story sounds more convenient and bull. I suppose I could track some of the other kids down on Facebook to prove this—I bet they would remember. Naturally, no one believes me.
SlideShare
94. Your Cousin Is Inside Your Brain
Once I was sleeping over at my cousin's house. We were sharing the basement and I woke up at around 3 am. I remember looking around the room and thinking to myself: "I wonder if anyone else is awake?" My cousin then verbally responded in his sleep: "Yes, I am."
95. I Can See It in Your Eyes
My boyfriend’s younger brother and I were taking a bike ride down the street to the shops late one afternoon. As we get onto the main road, we notice a dude across the street heading in the opposite direction. He is walking with a limp, his head is bowed, and he’s got a plastic bag in his hand. We're only a few metres away from him when he crosses the street onto our side.
As the bro rides past him, this stranger lifts his head up and smiles in his direction as they pass each other. I'm a little while behind, so I don't pay too much attention to this—that is, until the bro stops, turns around, and gives me a funny look, just as this guy is passing him by. I still don't think too much of it at this point, assuming that he had just stopped to let me catch up.
As soon as I myself passed the stranger and made eye contact with him, I realized that this was not the case. When the stranger looked over and nodded at me, I saw nothing in his eyes. When I say nothing, I mean like black pits where his eyes should have been, or just an eyeball that looked entirely black. I don’t know how else to describe it.
When I finally catch up to the bro, we stop around the corner and he says to me "Did you see that???" "You mean his eyes?!" I asked. "Yeah, it looked like they weren't even there!" he replied. We then kind of sat there for a while processing what we had both just seen. Had the bro not related the same feeling and experience to me as I had felt when the stranger looked at me, I doubt I would have ever thought anything of it.
I probably would have just assumed it was the light angles playing tricks on me or some such thing. It was a sunny afternoon, so glare certainly could have played a part. He could've been wearing contacts, I don't know. But none of those explanations feel like they fit. We got home later on and told everybody what had happened, but no one believed us. They still don't to this day.
96. Ronald McSecrets
This one time when I was little, my dad woke me up at like 2 am said "Get ready, we're going to McDonald's.” I was so confused and kept asking why, but he wouldn't answer anything besides, "because" or "to have fun.” The rest of my family—my two brothers, my sister, and my mom—didn't come with us and they were still asleep when we left.
The play place was closed, and we just kind of sat there for an hour or so eating, then went back home. To this day, I still have NO idea why he frantically needed me out of the house, and he swears he doesn't remember that happening, but the whole thing was SO weird that I kept the toy that I got from the Happy Meal to remember it by, and I still have it to this day…
It's my only proof of this weird freaking night that my dad (almost scarily) hurried me to McDonald’s at 2 am. I have two guesses why. First, my sister pooped the bed and they were worried I'd make fun of her. Or maybe they somehow noticed something like rats in my room? Were they worried I wouldn't be able to sleep if I knew that there were rats and they needed an hour or so to get them out???
Either way, a very strange night that my dad refuses to tell me the truth about, which only makes me think it's something much worse. Like. I'm 23 now. If he said "Yeah, your sister pooped the bed and we didn't want you to know," I'd have been like cool, nice, good thinking. But he REFUSES to believe that it happened at all. WHAT HAPPENED.
97. Calling All Angels
After I totaled my car, a man with burn scars all over his face and hands came up to my window. He asked if I was ok and then came and sat in the passenger seat. He said, “I need you to know that everything happens for a reason.” I said, “I know.” The next thing I know, I’m talking to the other driver and the authorities, and the guy is just gone. No one else saw him.
98. Playing Hooky
In high school, I remember going to English and the teacher did roll call. She called my name and I raised my hand and said, "I'm here," then she stopped. The eeriest thing happened next. The teacher looked around and said, "So he's not here then?" My friend and I laughed because I was obviously here. I thought she might be messing with me.
That night, though, my mom got a call telling her I wasn't at classes today. I was actually marked absent. I go back to school the next day and tell my friend, "Mrs. English Teacher actually counted me absent" and he just said, "Why wouldn't she?" Though to myself "Ha ha, you're not funny" but I just let it slide because I thought again I was being messed with.
Then one of my other friends sits down and asks, "You feeling better today? Or were you just playing hooky?" I was so confused. Then I go to my first hour and that teacher hands me the work I supposedly missed from that day. I looked in my bag and had the same stuff, the guide and assignments, already there. To. This. Day. I don't know if I missed that day of school or not
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99. The Uninvited
Once, I walked into my living room from the hallway and saw my mom in the kitchen pouring a bowl of something. She was fully clothed, which is important to the story. I said. “Hey what are you doing?” Her response unnerved me. She ignored me, put something in the fridge, and walked into her room without a word.
I was rattled, honestly, because something felt off. But I convinced myself she didn’t hear me and walked into my room. Not even two minutes, later she walks into my room, soaking wet, in a towel, and tells me she had fallen asleep in the bathtub and had just woken up. Weirdest moment ever. I get chills just thinking about it now.
100. Nothing Is The Same Anymore
A long time ago I had a conversation with an old workmate who described his "glitch in the matrix" moment. The detail is hazy, but he said one day he in his house when he felt a sudden NEED to go outside and 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 a 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.
101. Glitching Your Life Away
As I type this I am already feeling deja vu. I've always wanted to share this part of my life with someone but have never been able to. So... I'll just tell a bunch of people on the internet. One day I was walking to work and all of a sudden had an urge to walk a different path than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a strange spur of the moment urge to walk a different way that changed my life forever.
I turned into an alley I had never seen before. As I remember it, I made it about 15 feet or so when an actual "glitch" happened. Everything in my mind scrambled. I felt like I didn't have a body anymore, just that I was a semi-conscious entity floating through some weird dimension. All of a sudden in the array of different colors and shapes a vision came to me. It was a bunch of strange-looking people that in my mind resembled businessmen in suits.
They looked startled and panicked that I could see them. One of the "people" made a quick movement and everything turned to black. When I regained normality, I was on a completely different street. It was the same street that I always use to walk to work. I felt sick, and severely disturbed/depressed. I've never done any illicit substances, never experienced any hallucinations, never have had anything like this happen to me.
The weird thing is, when the glitch was correcting itself and I could see those "people" watching me like a caged animal I had the feeling that I knew I was being controlled. It still bothers me very much to this day.
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