AIBU to ask what is the weirdest thing that has ever happened to you?

[TheEighthMrsSK]

I had an utterly bizarre incident yesterday. For context DH and I are away at the moment, practically the other side of the world from our home country. DH and I were walking along a very busy street, it’s just getting dark, and I become aware of a woman who starts to alternate between walking a sensible distant behind me, to uncomfortably close behind behind me, to walking up right alongside me, with DH on my other side. We have a few repetitions of this, with her following me the length of the street, and then a flash goes off in my face. I am 100% sure she photographed me, it was at such a close range and there was no one else that could have been in the shot. I don’t say anything to her, because I’m not up for a confrontation in a language I only know a few words of. I tell DH she’s following me, and we move to stand in a shop doorway at the side of the pavement with the intention of getting out of her way. I was expecting her to pass us, but she walks right up to me and starts screaming in my face in broken English, the gist of it was: ‘why you look at me? You know me? You look at me! I hate you, you’re evil!’ DH tells her I’ve never seen her before I’m my life and to hop it, and she does. I’ve been trying to work out what the hell happened here since last night, and I’m a bit shaken by it, so please cheer me up and regale me with your stories of weird happenings.

**SheGotBetteDavisEyes that is amazing!

Best friend when I was 8 until we were 12 and fell out with each other, can't remember why, something to do with a birthday party I think. I didn't think it would matter because her parents had always planned to send her to boarding school in another town anyway.

Nope. I show up at our town's secondary school and there she is! Turns out they had changed their plans over the summer of that year.

We become good friend again from about 14-16 but then fell out again - can't remember why. Just grew apart I think but she also started being very bitchy to me, leaving me out of friends activities etc, mean girl stuff. Not many people liked her in school because she was very bitchy, always putting others down. I knew she had an eating disorder and a troubled family life but she didn't ever let her guard down to anyone else.

She went away to a sixth form college type of place in our final year of school so I thought that was the last I'd see of her.

Nope. She shows up on my first week of college in almost an identical course to me! Kind of like me studying Spanish and Politics and she is studying French and History. Eerie! We ended up having some friends in common but studiously avoided one another because she was a bitch

She graduated a year ahead of me because I did a year abroad. I assumed that was the last I'd see of her. We went out in the world, she went to France, I went elsewhere. Then on my FIRST DAY - not even joking - of an internship program that hires from across the EU, a girl I had just been introduced to said 'oh you're from town X in Y country. I just met a girl who's from there too. We're going for a drink tomorrow night if you want to come.'

Yes. It was her. So weird!! We followed similar career paths but not that similar that us meeting up would be expected. She was the same as always, putting people down, trying to be better than others, never anything good to say about anyone. She hadn't changed at all so I had to spend a lot of time going out of my way to avoid her

The one where you saw the builder you had just been talking about: he was on the same train as you or you noticed him subconsciously in the crowd making you think and talk about him. Same with the bartender.

@Lucylugs

You should take your friend to that address to meet her doppelgänger.

When I was in my very early 20s it was a lovely weekend day one spring/ summer and I went to sit next to a river with my dsis and bil to have a chat and a sunbathe. It was a relatively quiet stretch of river, not a particularly populated part of town. We were sat there having a bit of a laugh, when a barge drew up alongside us. I thought "I know that woman steering the boat!" And it was a supply teacher from my school days that nobody really liked, who we all called Robocop. Anyway, out came a group of Morris Dancers, they danced on the jetti I'm front of us for a few minutes (nobody else around), returned to their boat and sailed away again - captained by Robocop.

It sounds like some weird dream and I swear that had my dsis and bil not also experienced it, that's exactly what I'd think it was. But they both remember it clearly and it's caused a lot of laughter ever since. Weird.

Some of these are great and some are blatantly made up.

Someone called a public phone box by mistake and you just happened to be walking past.....and it was you they needed to speak to........It's a cool story, but 🤔

OP, I;ve had a man who looked fairly 'normal' (in his 70s/80s, dressed smartly, clean and tidy, so you wouldn't look at him and think there was anything 'off' iyswim' ) follow me through the town centre, pointing at me and yelling to passersby that I was evil, I knew what I'd done, I should be executed, I was a lying witch... It really unnerved me, though I could obviously tell from what he was yelling that he had MH issues I worried other people would think I was a murderer out on licence or something! I can laugh about it now but it was weird and unpleasant at the time. I actually went into the police station and reported it. They knew who I meant straight away (small town) and said to let them know if I had any future issues with him.

Maybe this was a case of mistaken identity, maybe she has MH issues. All I can suggest is that you report this woman if you see her again and she repeats this, as it is not okay for her to alarm people like this. Some people would be terrified in that situation.

Anyway, to answer the actual question...

Posted this before, but I was at my friends one weekend and we were reminiscing about our teenage years and going through her old photos. When she got to one poto she stopped dead - it was a photo of me dancing in a nightclub in another city that we only went to once. Next to me in the photo was my ex and father of my children - BUT - the photo was taken at least two years before I ever met him. 100% him, he confirmed it and remembered the evening.

He lived in a completely different city to us and when I asked him he said he'd only visited that nightclub once or twice ever. We eventually 'met' at uni (in yet another city!) a couple of years later, but now it feels like maybe we were always destined to meet at some point, even if it didn't last in the end. There's a few other funny coincidences with us too, we were both on holiday in the same tiny Spanish village at the same time as kids, our parents all had a mutual friend that no one realised until years later and so on.

A few years ago I used to get the bus home from work. My ticket was on my phone. My phone died, stupidly, and I had no money and no purse. No phoneboxes anywhere and then boyfriend (now husband) was away. I didn’t know what to do, shops were closed, v small place. Would take me hours to walk. I was cursing myself and started walking down past the car park, thinking ffs if only I had a fiver to get the bloody bus. Then, and I swear on my life, a £5 note fluttered down through the air from nowhere. I assume it came from the car park. I will honestly never forget it!

Not so much strange but I’m a nanny and years ago I moved from my home city Lincoln uk to America to be a nanny. They had this beautiful old tapestry’ on the dining room wall and I admired it and my new boss said oh that’s from the 1800s it’s a tapestry of Lincoln cathedral in the uk have you heard of it. I said yeah I am from there!!

The lady who made it had left uk to move to America and made it to remember the cathedral. Really is a small world we live in.

I lost my daughter when she was 5. About 3 weeks later - I was in such a dark, horrible state of mind, didn't know what to do with myself, but I'd drive for miles, aimlessly. Anyway, I was driving down a country road, and a man in my rear mirror waved - he was trying to get my attention. Then, bizarrely, he put on a clowns nose, waved, then put on a curly wig.... he proceeded to put on full clown regalia, waving all the time. I have no idea why. Also DD was terrified of clowns. It was almost like he was trying to cheer me up, most strange.

This was years before the recent craze of randomly dressing as a clown and this was a friendly clown, not a sinister one, if there is such a thing.

OP don't worry, the lady probably had a mental health condition. It sounds lIke she was psychotic and paranoid, maybe hallucinating and thought you were someone she knew. Hopefully she's now safe in hospital getting help.

The strangest thing that happened to me was driving through rural Lancashire lost on the way to a conference. It was about 1am, roads deserted, very rural (sheep all over the road etc). The moon was out so quite bright. I noticed that in nearly every layby there was a Land Rover/4by 4 parked up (mostly just little pulling in places by a gate with room for 1 car) and there was a man in th driver's seat of each car (no lights on, just sitting in the dark!) The first couple of cars I assumed they were villagers or farmers waiting for a secret lover, but I passed about 8 vehicles like this, a few miles apart! I then drove over moorland on a dirt road and had to keep getting out to open and close gates. On some of the gate posts and some fences someone had left a pair women's frilly knickers! Big knickers, mostly white ones. I've never been so freaked out. Can anyone shed any light on this??

When I was about 14/15, I was walking through the local town with friends heading home at around 8:30pm. It was late night shopping and there were plenty of people around. A group of slightly older lads (probably around 18/19) were walking towards us on a night out. One lad walks right up in front of me and lifts me over his shoulder into a fireman's lift and starts walking down the road with me... it felt like the whole thing was in slow motion. I start shouting and hitting him on the back and then I suddenly notice his friends falling about laughing and then my friends starting to laugh too. The lad starts putting me down, but lowers me to his eye level and says 'I thought you said you were coming out tonight', to which he gets a totally terrified/blank look from me - he then promptly puts me down/drops me looking completely mortified as says something like 'oh my god I don't know you' and apologises profusely!!! Absolutely bizarre, terrifying, but quite funny in hindsight

@dontticklethetoad
Maybe we look the exact same ! Lol !

@rainbunny

I don’t think I look like anyone famous ! (Sadly, else I’d make a quick buck lol) x

One-step, I'd probably assume that the men in land rovers were either sheep rustlers or farmers looking for sheep rustlers! Not sure about the knickers but they were probably left behind after an evening dalliance and some 'hilarious' person found them and decorated the gate for a laugh!

We used to find pairs of knickers outside work because we were near pubs popular with students who used to sneak into our carpark for romantic liaisons...

I just thought of another weird one.... In my class at school were 2 Helens. After getting A level results a friend, Jane, rang me and we were chatting about how everyone did. She asked 'How did Helen do', meaning Helen A, who was the class genius and likely to go far in life. I thought she meant Helen B, who I was slightly better friends with than Helen A and said 'Oh she got all the right grades but isn't going to Uni because she is going to marry her boyfriend' . Now this was an outlandish statement for Helen A was incredibly studious and was destined to do a biochemistry degree and work in the pharmaceutical industry. She'd planned it for years. Excelled at Chemisty. Her boyfriend had only been on the scene for 2 months and this would have been the most unlikely statement about Helen A you could imagine.

Whereas Helen B you could imagine marrying her boyfriend, and wasn't as academically gifted as Helen A and always said she'd probably not go to Uni after a year out.
However Helen A shocked her year group by not going to Uni, not having the degree and job in industry but marrying boyfriend and having a football team of children.

(Helen B had a year as an au pair then worked in a bank for 3 years before going to Uni and excelled as a primary school teacher, not married yet and no kids).
Jane cannot understand how I knew about Helen A. Over the years she has varied from 'She told you!' to 'You are psychic!'
Truth is I simply thought Jane was talking about Helen B. I'd not spoken to Helen A since the last exams.

I had a strange one when I was 18. Had been staying in wales on a sort of school trip/work experience thing. We’d been staying in a house owned by the local vicar who was a lovely, jolly chap.
On the last morning there, I went to find him to say thank you for his hospitality and all of a sudden he turned very serious. Looked me straight in the eyes and started saying “you have a hard road in front of you. I am sorry that it will be so hard and full of pain. But you will get there. But I’m sorry god has chosen such a difficult path for you”.
It went on for several minutes and had some rather specific details and completely freaked me out. Then suddenly, as if someone had clicked their fingers, he was back in the room and wishing me a safe journey home.
It’s stayed with me ever since. Especially as I then heard he died of emphysema only a few week’s later.

To top it off, two decades later, I was on holiday and my OH and I saw a fortune teller, simply for a bit of fun. He looked at my palm and he looked into my eyes and simply said “you know your fate. A priest told you many years ago how it would be”. And refused to do any further “reading”. Considering only my mum knew about what the welsh priest said, I was really unnerved.

When I was a teenager we were eating our evening meal and talking about people with mental illness living in the community (it was the time that care in the community was introduced) and a man with a mental illness walked into the room asking for a drink of water. My mum pointed to the kitchen and we ran out of the house. We went straight to our neighbours house and by the time they’d answered the door the man was in their house.

Purple hammer that kind of thing happens to a lot of people. You get so used to driving down a road you don't look at the details anymore and just go into auto drive. If you suddenly start looking, it will look weird as details will have changed like fences, flowers etc so your memory from before is wrong now and your brain is going 'eh? Where are we?'.

When I was a very small child I used to intermittently have the same, very specific nightmare.

At the age of 11 or so I read a horror book, only to find the identical nightmare contained therein.

I never had the nightmare again.

My sister went to uni in Leeds and I went to uni in Leicester, both about 10-12 years ago. She stayed in Leeds for a while afterwards but we are originally from Leicester

She brought home her new boyfriend (now husband) to meet the family and it was someone I knew from uni in Leicester although he was originally from Leeds and had moved back there after uni so I met her husband in a different city 5 years before she did

What is weird is she actually met my now husband (also from Leicester) at a party in Leeds 5 years before I met him (back in Leicester) and recognised him immediately when I introduced them

It's a small world!

When I was a teenager, I went skiing for a week with my mother. My older sister was at the mountain for the same week but staying in a house with friends separately to us. On the first day I broke my arm so mum took me off to the hospital.

It happened late in the day, so we weren’t able to get back to the lodge where we were staying, so we bunked down in a another lodge for the night after I was plastered up.

About 15 minutes after we arrived at this random lodge, the house phone rang (no mobiles), and it was my sister calling to say hi. She had no idea what had happened, or that we would be at this lodge - but she still called and found us!

Years ago, I visited The Eden Project on the way back from a weekend in Cornwall. We pulled into the car park, got out of the car and saw my sister and her friend pull in 2 cars down. They had no idea we were in Cornwall and they had driven from Bristol on the spur of the moment. It was really odd but really nice too!
Not at all terrifying like some of these other stories, but I do think of it every so often and think well that was a weird coincidence!

When I first got my smart phone I got a cheap PAYG sim with a new number to put in the old Nokia to leave in the car in case of emergency.

I switched it on, then straight off again, about once a fortnight to check charge (lasted for ages).

After about 6 months, I switched it on and it rang. It was an irate father wanting his son and wouldn't believe his son wasn't there, or that he had the wrong number.