Weird coincidence - tell me yours

[RedPlumJammy]

The weirdest thing happened to me today. I was waiting at an international airport terminal for a family member and getting coffee when I thought I spotted a famous sports player next to me. I spent a few mins trying to surreptitiously look sideways and eventually he got up and I realised it wasn’t him.

I then went to the arrivals gate to wait for family member. About 15 mins later - I kid you not - the actual real life famous sports person exited the arrivals gate and walked past me. It was 100% not the same man from earlier.

Am I insane - or is that an insane coincidence?! I’m sure you'll all think I’m crackers but I’m always looking for a meaning or sign from the universe too 🤣

I worked in a bookshop for years. I worked in the basement, and one afternoon I received an exciting phone call that David Attenborough was making his way downstairs to collect a book. I could see him walking down the steps when another customer came from the lift and asked me if we had David Attenborough's Life on Air as an audiobook in stock. I was checking the system to see if we had it, whilst the real David Attenborough was standing right behind him!

When I fell pregnant with our daughter (first - and last!) child for DH, I was terrified of having scans because of previous losses and bad news at scans, but knew I should try to brave the "minimum" to check things were OK.
12 week scan date came through - my birthday.
20 week scan date came through - my husband's birthday.
I felt it was a sign that everything would be OK (and it was) 🌈

I hope your customer noticed Attenborough was behind him and got their own great coincidence story.

Browsing in the ephemera section on Ebay, I found a set of foreign-language personal diaries from the 1930's. As they were offered very cheap, I bought them thinking it would be good language practice (and interesting) to translate them. Turned out that the writer had often come from her country to visit the town I was living in (not a usual holiday resort, but in the industrial north). She was visiting friends. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the familiar place names, surrounded by handwriting in a foreign language.

Not sure if this is a coincidence as such but my mum had a best friend in the 60s. One day her friend was asked out by a guy. She said no. My mum convinced her to change her mind. They ended up married. My mum and her friend lost touch. 30 years later my sister brought her boyfriend home, it was the son of the couple. They are married now for 20 years and have two kids. So my mum influenced the birth of her grandchildren in a roundabout way.

Close family member of my dh died. When we were making the funeral arrangements we all agreed that we wanted the main song to be stairway to heaven by Led Zeppelin.
But we couldn't have it,
it's 8 minutes long. Sadly Just a bit too long for the service.
The day of the funeral we all got into the car for the 8 minute drive to the crematorium.
Dh switched on the radio.. and there it was ,the full song ,We smiled all the way there,
I am not in the slightest bit woo, but that day I could have been persuaded that that song was sent to us, just a hello from the other side.

In my 30s I met someone in a playgroup that had a daughter about 8 months younger than mine, a single mum. We became friends. About six months later, we were chatting on the phone and she mentioned something in passing about her ex/DD's bio father and the job he used to do, I said he wasn't called X was he, and she went a bit quiet and said he was actually. It turned out that her daughter's bio father, who used to work in the same company as she did but disappeared when she found out she was pregnant, was my ex husband. I had known him from my teens in another city about 250 miles away and hadn't seen him in about ten years.

Thornbury's coincidence was amazing.

My best weird coincidence spans a generation and two continents.

In the 90s I had two flatmates in London. Flatmate 1 was a Liverpudlian friend I met at Uni and Flatmate 2 was a friend from my work.They only knew each other through me.

We used to occasionally socialise with Flatmate 2’s friend who I didn’t really like, due to her entitlement about her long term affair with an older married man.

Anyway, Flatmate 1’s Dad was a semi retired Doctor from Liverpool who periodically stayed with us as he still attended medical conferences etc. At one of these events he sat next to a guest who he didn’t know who I will call J. He was astonished and delighted to realise J was the pilot who had given him flying lessons in Kenya some 40 years before.

When the Dad came back to ours, he told us of this quite bizarre coincidence - meeting J again after all those years. Odd in a city of 8 million + people. But the coincidence didn’t stop there. We realised J was also the married pilot Flatmate 2s friend was having an affair with!

Years ago, I was walking through Kings Cross Station and I thought I’d glimpsed an ex boyfriend walking towards me who I hadn’t seen in about a decade. It wasn’t him and I kept on walking with that sort of “omg”‘ tingly feeling as it was quite a shock to think I’d seen him (he broke my heart and I always felt we had unfinished business). About two minutes later, who was walking towards me? The actual ex boyfriend. It was so bizarre. It happens from time to time with seeing other people and also I’ll be thinking of a particular holiday that happened years ago whilst driving and someone will send me photos from it that evening as a sort of “remember this” even though it’s not even the same time of year the holiday happened. Or I’ll be thinking of a friend or family member and they’ll call at that exact moment.

When i was a kid we went to Venice Italy for summer holiday..we bumped into my headmaster in St Mark's Square. Had a little chat. 😂

My mind is blown

I'm from South Wales and when I didn't own family tree I discovered that I have distant family in Utah. Something to do with the Mormon church. If you and I are related that'd be another coincidence for this thread!

Yep. The American lady is Mormon. Do you have Ancestry DNA to see if we link somewhere along the line? Please PM me!

😁this was the place where I meet the people camping that had been on the same campsite 18 months previously - they remembered me, and my family and our children had previously played together 18 months before at the other campsite - this must have been about 15-18 years ago

I don't unfortunately. I tried to PM you but it says PMs are currently disabled?

Do you or your Utah connections have a surname that rhymes with 'bug', by any chance? (Trying to make this as vague as possible!) If so this is bonkers!

As a kid we always seemed to bump into people we knew when on holidays abroad. But then again it was early/mid 90s in Costa Del whatever and thats where everyone went 😂

Oh that’s brilliant. You chose an excellent wedding song!!!!
A coincidence of you quoting my post is that I work out of Gatwick airport and my commute is the M25 and then M23. There has been many a day I thought I’d be late for work. I shall think of your song next time I’m stuck in traffic.

I'm a hardline atheist but I agree with PP: there is something about sensing a relative has passed away. My late auntie swore blind she knew when my Grandad had died, and they were about 20 miles apart when it happened. I've heard similar stories from others too. I can only think there is a logical explanation, but we haven't found out what it is yet.

I have a story of my own. I come from a large rural village about 100 miles from London. I was at work and a male colleague was chatting to me about all our "origin stories" (very Marvel). We both were customer service assistants on a tube station in Central London. I told him I was from (village) in (County) and he said, you never guess what? My wife is from there! 😱 So I asked him what her unmarried surname was...turns out she's from one of the "well known families" of the village, and I went to school with one of her nieces!

Captain Cook ?

Friend moved out of the area post divorce and bought a doer-upper.

Some months into the doing-up she had a meeting in my office (we work in the same field, different employers) and was telling me about some toy soldiers she'd found behind a radiator. A colleague asked if she'd moved to xxxx village. Yes, she replied. Is it xxxx address he asked? Turned out she'd bought his childhood home.

Years ago I went on holiday to Zamte and walked bang into my best friend from primary school.
A few years later, while working in events, I had to book some rooms at a hotel. Phoned through to the Marriott reservation line and after giving my contact details the person at the end of the phone laughed and said “guess who you’re speaking to”. It was only the same friend!

I was watching classic Coronation street last year and just had a random wondering if the man who played Fred was still alive as I’d not seen him on anything for years. So I googled it and he was, later that day I saw on the news that he had died 😕 it really creeped me out

I started a new job and there were a few other new starters at the same time. We were doing an ice breaker activity and one of the questions was what is our claim to fame? I shared that my sister was the bridesmaid of a very famous person who had got married that summer. Another new starter looked surprised and said that his girlfriend had been a bridesmaid at that wedding too. We were in a totally different part of the country for it to geographically make any sense!

Went to work for a summer in Canada, and discovered the neighbour of the family I was staying with was the daughter of my mum's neighbour in Scotland.