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.

I've heard the walking past a phone box & the call was for me so many times.... clearly an urban myth

I think it wasn't exactly common but not exactly uncommon either back in the days before exchanges were digital.

I'm old enough to have had a 4 digit phone number as a child. You didn't dial the area code.

The 'switching' (I'm not an expert) was carried out automatically but mechanically.

Numbers in the same street were often similar and so were the numbers in phone boxes near by.

So if the switch made a slight error, or someone mis dialled (and it was a dial) it could easily connect to a similar number.

You call 1122 but are connected to 1123. So either the next door neighbour or the local call box.

Add to that the number of people on a party line who had the same number.

Wrong numbers used to be really common things, I can't remember the last time I received one.

Not that weird but strange thing to happen. I parked in a car park,which had three rows, at the beach facing the water. We got out and went for a walk and there were no other cars around. When we got back from our walk a truck had parked right next to me facing the other way. It was so close my wing mirror was touching his truck. He wouldn't have been able to get out and would've had to climb out the passenger side.
I stood and stared and looked around to see if someone was pranking me but didn't see anyone. I had to climb through the passenger side to drive away.
Very strange behaviour.

I was on a train a while back and the man behind me started combing my hair

I was on a train a while back and the man behind me started combing my hair confused

oh my god what did you say/do?

JaquesHammer I've been having a horrific and detailed recurring nightmare for the last 5-6 months, most nights.

2 weeks ago I saw on the news a really nasty murder in England that played out exactly how my dream had. Even down to the wife, the sons and where the body was found. It sent chills down me.

I haven't had the nightmare since.

*I was on a train a while back and the man behind me started combing my hair confused

shock oh my god what did you say/do?*

SuchAToDo I turned around, gave him a filthy look and moved to the other end of the carriage sharpish. It was rather creepy!

Locandi, my DH has had a similar experience on a bus, but the man did ask permission first! DH has got long hair, down to his waist ATM, and a bloke he knows a bit through work bumped into him on the bus home and asked if he could stroke his hair! Dh was getting off soon so said yes (wtf!) And let him stroke his ponytail for a few seconds. Odd but harmless, he thought.

We bumped into the same bloke in Tesco's a few months later and he talked to dh, largely ignored me and then asked if we were 'friends'. DH was like 'this is my wife' and the bloke was like 'oh.'

I think someone has a wee crush on my hubby!

I was at a football match which very unusually for my team was being televised. Just before kick off I rang my mum to remind her to watch it. She said, yes I can see you ringing me - the camera panned onto me just as I made the call!

Another telephone one. I have a theory about this that kind of blends science and woo... Anyway. I was going through a crisis and desperately needed to talk to my best friend. Couldn't quite remember her number so I dialled my best guess while praying (or whatever) 'please be xxxx, please be xxxx'. Call was answered by a female voice but didn't sound like her, I said 'is this xxxx?', she says yes, I say 'it's xxxxx', I have quite an unusual name so she says 'who?', turns out it was the wrong number but the right name. I obviously wasn't specific enough with my plea!

I have two that are strange.
I was sitting on a beach with some friends, leaning against the sea wall. We were chatting about things that people dropped and I was saying how it would be great to have a metal detector and examine the sand for valuables. At that moment a gold ring flew through the air and landed at my feet. I looked up, thinking that it must have dropped off a finger of someone standing above me on the prom., but there was no one there. I can only think someone was walking and gesticulating away from the railings causing the ring to slip off, because it was travelling at some speed. Very odd and coincidental.
The second was in Florence. I was browsing in a leather goods shop when one of the elderly male assistants marched up to me and said "if I saw you walking in the street, I would come over and slap your face". What? I was so bemused by this statement I didn't even respond, just walked out. It has bothered me ever since. He looked really angry. I was only looking quietly at the purses, and had only been in there a few minutes.Did I look like someone else? Was this person nuts? I just don't know.

In about 2007 we went on a cruise around Miami for fans of the band The Barenaked Ladies, about 3000 people in total, mostly Americans because of the location.

In 2016 my friends and I were on a London train. My friend had picked up the rucksack they had given as a freebie at the end even though she never took it out usually.

A woman tapped her on the shoulder and said ‘I’ve got that rucksack, i was on that cruise!’ What are the chances

Years ago I answered a call in a phonebox (was at the bottom of my street as they were before mobiles) Told person on the other end they’d called a phonebox. They said oh and ended call. I turned to go out of the phonebox and a girl came running up saying “was that for me?” I said it was for someone called Sarah. She said “that’s me!” She given the phonebox number to a guy she’d met as she didn’t have a phone at home. She’d told him to call at a set time but she hadnt made it to the phonebox in time. Years ago it wasn’t unusual to pick up a call in a phonebox that was meant to be for someone you knew as phone lines DID get crossed and there were so few people with home telephones and numbers were similar. Equally you could be on your home phone to someone and you’d hear a conversation between 2 other people - hence the phrases crossed line.

Wow! These are fascinating. Keep them coming.

When I was younger, my Mum and brothers where at a train station waiting on the platform for our train, there was a old couple on the opposite platform taking photo's of us, smiling and waving over then a train came speeding past and they disappeared. They didn't get on the train as it sped straight past and didn't stop and the only way to the platform they where on was to walk over the bridge from our platform. Totally freaked us all out.

I worked in America as a teenager and made some really good friends. Unfortunately I've never been very good at staying in contact and the inevitable happened.

About two years later I was studying in London and was waiting at a random bus stop. When, you guessed it, one of my old friends was also there! Neither of us had talked about going to London and we came from opposite ends of the country! It also turned out that we had friends in common. Weird, as obviously London isn't a small place!

pippop my FIL has a similar story. Back in the 1950s he did a PhD as an external candidate at the University of London. At the end you have an Oral exam on your work called a Viva. He travelled down to London for his, gave his name and was then called and taken off to a room with two people he hadn't met, as he was an external candidate. They started chatting about the Dolomites in Italy. He thought this was a bit of an odd way to put him at his ease. Until he realised they thought he'd done a Thesis on the Geology of the Dolomites. At which point he pointed out they seemed to have the wrong candidate.
Although his name wasn't that unusual, having two of them having Vivas on the same day (especially back in the 1950s) did seem a bit weird.

I went on holiday to a Greek island when I was about 18 and met a group of boys there who we got in with quite well. I lived in NW London (very outer) and when I got back decided to go to Oxford St for the day and on a whim got my photos developed in boots there (1 hour photo). When I went to collect them it was one of the boys who gave me my order! We'd never spoken about where he worked or anything just 'from London' and we know London is massive! Really weird! He was in some of the photos

I posted earlier about my face getting recognised everywhere I go, well - something wierd happened this weekend ....

Sunday we went to a wedding which was in the county we live in, with friends we made from this county also. Very closed off type wedding, mainly ‘locals’ iykwim

Anyway, there was a musician playing music as the bride walked in, and also while we had canapès etc. I thought he seemed familiar but didn’t want to make a tit of myself by asking (and him being a doppelgänger!)

During the break he came over and said ‘I know you’ turns out he comes from the village I do, which is a tiny tiny tiny village 300 odd miles away. The bride had heard him at a wedding fair and booked him then and there. We used to go drinking together (as a group, I don’t know him well at all) and I haven’t seen or thought about him or our old ‘group’ for blooming years...

How bizarre !

I have jamais vu if I have a seizure on its way. But it's very weird I agree to an above poster

Funny this thread has come up - this literally happened to me hours ago!

Had a voicemail addressing me by full name asking my immediate attention re some sort of vinyl application to a wooden plinth.

Had no idea what the caller was talking about. Called back and the caller had intended the message be left to a director at River Island, who appears to have the same name as me, and same phone number barring one number. Very odd!

When I was younger we used to go camping in France. My dad would just drive around these tiny villages in the south and go to whichever campsite he liked the look of. Once he went into one and they told us they weren’t open yet as it was a new site and their opening date wasn’t for four weeks. If we wanted to stay without electricity however they would do it cheaply. They mentioned there was one other couple staying who had turned up on the off chance also. It turns out the the couple were the people who lived across the road from us!

Stopped at a services for a prearranged stop with family members in their cars. Big hoo hah when we got there a bit later than everyone else, as a set of car keys has been lost. I needed the loo so off I went. Loads of empty cubicles, I walk towards one then stop. Something makes me go to one 2 doors across instead. Keys were on the loo roll holder.

As a child (and still now actually) I used to have extremely vivid dreams, and on a couple of occasions they turned out to be weirdly prophetic. Once I had a dream that there was a huge house fire on our street; the next day the house behind ours went up in flames. Another time when I was about 10 or 11 I had a dream about an old friend of my parents who we used to visit often (he lived a couple of hours away) but for one reason or another they'd sort of lost contact with him a few years beforehand. The next day he turned up on our doorstep and said he was passing through the area and thought he'd drop in!

When I was pregnant with my DS, my younger brother who I am very close to got sympathy morning sickness! We first realised it when I was complaining to him one day about how I'd been up at 3am being sick and he said he had too, even though he wasn't ill or anything. On several other occasions he would ring me and say (for example) 'were you sick around 8am this morning?' and it would always be right! His girlfriend confirmed all this so he wasn't winding me up!

I've had the same best friend since I was 3 years old. We live quite far apart from each other but speak on the phone about every 3 weeks. More often than not, even though we haven't arranged a time to ring each other, we will ring at the exact same time so the line is engaged, or one of us will ring just as the other has been thinking about picking up the phone.

Just the other day, my mum and dad were at home, mum got a lasagne out of the oven then made a comment to my dad about the oven needing cleaning. Literally within minutes they got a call to the landline with an automated voice saying 'do you need your oven cleaned? call blah blah blah to book an appointment now.'

Also just yesterday I had been thinking a lot about a friend of mine who died 5 years ago. I was playing music on youtube on the tv (reggae) while doing some cleaning and it did that thing where it just rolls onto the next music video. The next one it played was 'nothing else matters' by metallica, which was played at my his funeral, and I hadn't heard it since. Even weirder because it couldn't be further from reggae so no idea why it had come on next!

I once got chatting to a former colleague on the way home from someone’s leaving drinks (I’d left the job but was still friendly with quite a few people still there). We both lived in the same town on SW London/Surrey borders at the time, and were travelling home together on the tube.

As it happened we’d sold up and were in the process of buying a house in Essex. I mentioned the particular town we were moving to, and she told me a story about how she’d visited that town just once. She’d stayed over at a work colleague’s house after some sort of function, but years ago he’d married a Japanese woman and the family had decided to relocate to Japan...

Well, that was the very house I was buying! I just sat there stunned. I’d heard all about the owner living in Japan and, obviously, knew his name. Just the most ridiculous coincidence