What is the strangest coincidence you’ve had?

[Yoloohno]

Mine was I met someone on holiday in place A and had conversations several times during the week.

Fast forward 6 months and I got talking to someone on another holiday in place b and thought I know them but wasn’t sure where from, but not from that holiday or home but it turns out it was from holiday A.

My parents owned a holiday home near the coast from me being very young. It was a normal house in a terrace in a seaside town near Whitby. We would play with the next door neighbor's kids as they were of a similar age, their dad was south African and had a very unusual last name. Their dad was killed in Uganda. They moved away and we hadn't heard from them since.

Fast forward about 10 years I was working for a friend at a kids summer camp in Andalusia. One of the kids had the same unusual last name. I got chatting to her mum, it turns out the dad was her brother and the kids were cousins.

I grew up in a house that had been in my family for four generations and knew all about the history of the area from my parents' and grandparents' stories. After three house moves, including moving to a new city, I realised that it felt odd living in a house/area whose history I knew nothing about, so I posted on a local history forum and a much older gentleman replied who had grown up in the street I was living in. It transpired that he now lived in the area where I had grown up , and when I asked him whereabouts, it turned out that he had lived in exactly the same four streets as me, in reverse order, and was now living a few houses away from my childhood home.

I've had a roughly parallel career with somebody, who has been in the same organisation and doing the same kind of work but usually more senior positions, as me, since about 2008. I have not knowingly met them (though have been in email contact and may well have been in the same room and event as they have, without actually speaking). In that time, about 3-4 different workplaces in 2 different towns have had periods of our crossing over. They have something that I'd consider an amazing job, now, though for the moment, we're not working in the same place.

I also met someone in the course of a (UK-based) job in the last few years, who may have been an early jobshare partner of mine if I had decided on a move abroad to their institution in about 2002 (though I didn't).

I was checking in to a hotel and gave my name as Pup InAPram. What a coincidence said the receptionist, that's my name. Another guest standing a few feet away along the desk said "I'm also Pup InAPram"! To be fair I have a pretty common first and last name, but still, what are the chances!

Today:

I had been house-hunting for months in the small town where I am renting with no success and was reluctantly on my way to see properties in a nearby town , which is nowhere as nice as the one I live in (aka rough as hell in parts...).

I was miserable, waiting for a train to arrive. Suddenly I told myself ''sod this I don't want to live in this other town'' and I walked away from the platform.

Went to seat in a coffee shop to cheer myself up. Got a call 5 minutes later from a local estate agent out of the blue to say the offer I had made 3 weeks ago on a house had finally been accepted.

Weird.

Working in retail a customers goods added up to the exact amount that was on her gift card and it wasn't a round figure . She swore blind she hadn't added up her goods first and had forgotten the amount left in the card . The look of surprise on her face when she realised , told me she was telling the truth .

This is amazing, how wonderful they got to meet a final time

My children attended a school in Germany for a while. We used to joke that every other boy was named Max.

Similar. I live in a small village two hours away from my place of origin. Met a chap from down the road at a neighbours’ party who is the same age as me and grew up in the street where my grandparents lived - our paths must have literally passed when we were kids.

My friend’s sister married a chap, nothing spooky about that except when they were looking at holiday photos of when they were young, there was a photo of them both in the beach ( they were around 7 years old ) didn’t know each other or each others families at that point.

my mum and gran both born on Christmas Day. My dad and my mil both born on the same day.

I am from London, I was newly married and living in Seattle, on the West Coast of the USA. We had a terrible snowstorm and the city ground to a standstill, we went to the local pub to warm up. Seattle as surrounded by lakes and the sea water Sound. Some people who were living on boats had come in because the boat shelter roof had collapsed, damaging their boats and they were trying to figure out where to stay for the night.

We began talking to them and a guy from Middlesborough was there. As fellow Brits we got chatting and I said how I had spent a lot of time in North Yorkshire as a child as our family had a cottage there in a small remote village. He then said his best friend lived in North Yorkshire and he mentioned his name was Mario. Mario is obviously an unusual name for a Yorkshireman and so I asked him “It’s not Mario Hxxxx?” and yes it was! My dad had sold the cottage recently and Mario had bought it! (I knew him because he had visited him frequently at the house next door where my dad now lived trying to persuade him to sell it).

Queuing up outside a night club in New York. Man in front overheard our accents being from the UK. We got chatting and it turned out he lived next to the place I worked in a town in the uk. He was also just on a holiday there.

That’s true, but the female version is rare

I had a best friend at primary school from aged 5. Our birthdays were about 3 weeks apart, so we always had joint birthday parties. We were absolutely inseparable. In the last year of primary school her family moved down south and we lost contact.
I often thought about her, but this was before social media etc.
In my first year at uni, (not local to either of us) I had to go to a different department for a one off lecture. I was walking past the lecturers rooms and there was a sign up sheet on the door. One appointment had a student signed up with the same name as my primary school best friend. I even recognised her handwriting! I wrote a quick message on a post it and asked the department office to get it to her tutor for her appointment.

We've kept in sporadic contact since. I've moved around Europe for the last 12 years. 4 years ago we found out that we both had daughters on the same day at the same time of the morning! We posted our pictures online within an hour of each other.

I’ve changed names but this is most bizarre thing I’ve experienced.

I used to work for the civil service taking phone calls, think tax helpline kind of calls. Tens of thousands of calls a week going to one of 7/8 call centres. You’d wear a headset and a beep would come through to tell you a call was coming.

During a brief lull in call frequency I had been talking to a colleague about where he grew up, which is where I’d gone to school. He mentioned a man’s name which I recognised and I said “I went to school with his daughter, Hayley”. Colleague said, “yes that’s right, Hayley and Harry were his kids” I’d not seen Hayley for 20 years and not spoken to her since leaving school.

My headset beeped and it was Hayley, who had called to query something. There were probably 1200 staff she could have got through to, amongst probably 100,000 calls that week but she came though to me at the precise moment a colleague and I had been discussing her.

my mind was blown

When I was little we had a nanny who looked after me and my sister. She loved us both very much (but me most!) and when she went on to have her own daughter a few years later she named her after me. We lost touch with her through the years but I never forgot her.

Years later when I was pregnant with my first baby I picked out the name Harvey for a boy. Turns out I had a girl so didn't use Harvey. On the day after my girl was born I was still on the postnatal ward and expecting visitors. Who should walk in but my old nanny who was visiting her daughter (with the same name as me) who was unbeknownst to me also on the postnatal ward having just had a baby boy - called Harvey! My old nanny had overheard my friends saying my name (with unusual and identifiable surname) into the ward intercom and practically broke down with excitement at seeing me again! It was so nice to see her again especially in the circumstances of having babies/same names.

@shieldmaiden7 mind blown! Wow

@Helendegenerate f! Me

Both my maternal grandmother and paternal grandmother shared a birthday with their oldest son but also both sons were born on the same date (day, month and year).

@Saucepots how beautiful 😍

DH and I were on honeymoon in south-west France and one night had had dinner in a nearby small town in a restaurant on the edge of a square. It was very pretty and there was music and local middle-aged couples dancing to a little band playing romantic tunes. So we had a dance and it was all very romantic. Someone interrupted us to say 'Hello' , it was my ex-boyfriend from school and uni (we had split up about 8 years earlier). We went across to where he was sitting to meet his new girlfriend who turned out to be an ex of DH's from uni. None of us knew about the other two.

Also, after we were married DH and I were looking through old photos and having a laugh. I came to some I'd taken at a very odd, very small, not very celebratory or happy wedding I'd gone to about 6 years earlier and DH said 'But I'm there - look'. Turned out he was also at the wedding and it was so small he was in my photos. We'd never noticed each other. He knew the groom and I knew the bride (not very well and had been surprised to be asked).

This had a different ending than I expected!!!

I got an urge to look up a long lost relative one day, after some internet searches I tracked down a photo of her grave. I hadn't been to her funeral or had any contact with her since I was a child, in fact I don't think I'd even mentioned her to other family members during that time. The date I looked her up, was the same date she died (different year obvs) It was on her gravestone.

I was on overseas on holiday walking down a busy high street and walked into some acquaintances from home.

Another time I was in the south of France on a quiet campsite. Saw another English campervan pull up and we got chatting only to discover they lived in the next village along from us.

When I first met my now husband, we went out clubbing so he brought a friend and my best friend came too. He's from another city and we had no mutual friends. His friend turned up, my best mates jaw dropped - turned out they were workmates and had been chatting that day about their evening plans not realising they were doing the same thing!