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 once left work and a man looking very distressed stopped me outside the gate. He was trying to speak to me but he had broken English and it was hard to understand what he was saying. Eventually I managed to work out he was saying something along the lines of “hospital... you take me...”

I explained to him that I didn’t know where the hospital was, and anyway I didn’t have a car to take him, at which point he pulled his hand out of his pocket and it was covered in blood.

I told him to come with me into the office as I’d left early and reception would be able to call for help. He said something like “no, you take me hospital”

At this point, two ladies opposite the road called over and asked if I was ok. I turned around to respond to them and he ran off

They said they’d seen him hanging around for a few days. My best guess is it was some sort of trick to convince me to get out my phone at which point he’d grab it and run. Or maybe a distraction technique so an accomplice could rob me. I don’t know. I’m glad I was wary enough to not get my phone out in front of him and very thankful for those women who got me out of a sticky situation

This isn’t related to the OP at all but all the talk of people having familiar faces reminded me of it.

I look like a completely different name. Say my name is Nicky. All my life I’ve been called a completely different name, say Amelia. I used to think there must be an Amelia in my town who looks like me as I was forever getting “Hi Amelia!” But it’s followed me all over the place and I guess I just look like I’m called Amelia. Even when I correct people, they’ll forget and call me Amelia the next time I see them.

I don’t understand it because my real name and the assumed name are so different. If I was called Amy or Emily or Olivia and people got muddled up, I’d understand it. But the two names are nothing like each other

(On the topic of people looking like their names, I was once served in a bar and my brain went “DAVE”. When he handed me my receipt, sure enough: “You were served by Dave”. When I got back to the table I asked my partner to guess this guy’s name and without missing a beat, he said Dave. I know it’s a very popular name, so I’m not saying this is woo or a funny coincidence, just that I’ve never seen anyone else look more like a Dave )

Many years ago, I was doing a cold-calling sort of job, with a male colleague. I was new to it, and we visited a regular customer together. I remember that the guy was a washing machine repair man, but he was also tremendously entertaining and a total timesuck .

He brought out a pack of cards and did the old 'pick a card, any card' routine. I don't remember exactly the sequence of the trick, but it ended with him asking me to look in my bra, from where I pulled out my chosen card .

I know that he MUST have placed it in there somehow, but I have absolutely no recollection of him even touching me.

I was genuinely wowed.

Not me but my sister. My sister just recently moved to Canada with her bf. They decided to go there for 2 years before coming back to settle. They've travelled all over and made friends everywhere.
There are groups you can join on fb to ask about accommodation, work etc. My sis joined one for couples looking for temporary lodgings. A woman contacts my sister and offers her an appointment to view her flat.
When they go there the woman says she is flying to oz. Her brother owns 3 apartments. She will stay in one rent free in exchange for looking after the other two while he comes to Canada to do similar. My sister's boyfriend lived on that road and recognises her brother who is a hippy with very long dreads and bright clothing. They all can't believe the coincidence but go about their day.
A few weeks later the brother turns up. He lives at the flat officially but is rarely around. He isn't on social media and doesn't have a mobile so his sister rings the landline and my sister answers.
The woman adds my sister on fb and asks if she'll message her when he comes in. My sister clicks on the woman's profile picture of her and a friend hugging and sees herself and her boyfriend sat directly behind them. Apparently the travelling world is quite small and this isnt that unusual as my sister also had another woman spot herself in pictures from an Ibiza boat party my sister posted on insta.

I was at work one night and a bloke the spitting image of my late father came to the bar. I couldn't take my eyes off him. He asked if I was ok and I told him he looked like my dad. He laughed and said "Well my name's Patrick what was his name?" My dad was a Bernard but went by his middle name Pat (Patrick). We had a laugh about that then he asked my name. When I said it he calls over his daughter with the same name as mine.

Weird pass I get that too with names my old drama teacher insisted I looked nothing like my name and decided I was a ‘Tiffany’ , as an adult my old manager also said the same about my name and said ‘hmm you’d suit something more like...Tiffany’ to which the whole office agreed, on Facebook there was a quiz too see what first name you were most suited too...you guess it!
Wondering what a ‘Tiffany’ looks like?!

We’d just moved in to our new house (the previous owner was an old lady who died) when the home phone rang. The person asked to speak to the old lady so I apologized and said it wouldn’t be possible (didn’t want to be the one to break the news to this person). The person kept on and on so in the end I informed them that she had passed away. The person was very shocked and couldn’t believe it considering he’d been for an interview with her that very morning. Turns out he’d got the wrong number but was looking for someone with the same name (and it only occurred to me afterwards that the number he called wasn’t even hers as we had transferred our old number over when we moved. Doh!!)

I definitely have a doppelgänger in London. Many people swear blind they have seen me in place X when I definitely wasn’t even near it or abroad.
I used to (am older now) have men give me creepy smiles and/or do double takes which convinced me there must have been a porn star who looked just like me.
Weirdest and creepiest thing that’s not supernatural or woo is one day I was walking down an empty street smoking and behind me a tall, thin black woman wearing quite old fashioned clothes (hat, green buttoned up overcoat, black tights, old fashioned shoes) said to me in the creepiest voice ever like she didn’t have a voice box “stop smoking!”. I was spooked and hopped a bit further down the road, turned around and she had vanished. Freaked me out. Still smoked though for decades.
Funny story was an an airport I ran up to a man, hugged him from behind and kissed him on his cheek. He spun round and I realised he wasn’t my Dad who was standing 10 feet away looking at me like “WTF?!”. I was mortified. The man thought it was funny though!

When my son was tiny, he once woke up earlier than usual and so I picked him up and switched the TV on to the BBC morning programme in the hope of it lulling us back to sleep. Until I realised I was watching my dad being interviewed about a hobby I didn't know he had (TBF we're not close, so it's not unusual that I didn't know he was doing it).

My husband and I also once booked a random day off together and were having a long lie-in when he got a phone call. A friend of ours who was also having a random day off had just switched on the TV and spotted a mutual friend of theirs, Mark, on Bargain Hunt! We switched on, and not only was Mark on Bargain Hunt, but his team mate was another friend of ours, Jenna. We had no idea Mark and Jenna knew each other, let alone were close enough to go on Bargain Hunt together!

Also, I once had cause to open the bonnet of my car and when I did, there was a banana skin and a prawn cracker perched on top of the battery. The banana skin was relatively fresh, so it had obviously been put there within a few hours of me looking, but there had been no reason to think that I would open the bonnet until about 5 minutes before I did, plus you needed to pop the bonnet from inside the car, which had been locked the whole time. No idea what that was all about.

I had to travel to another town for a work related meeting/training thing. I'd only recently moved to the area I live in and I wasn't familiar with the town centre. I was late and couldn't work out the one way system so I stopped the car and asked a random bloke (who appeared to be heading out of town) how to get to the train station. He was an odd looking chap, very distinctive...had a plaster on his forehead, but he pointed me in the right direction. I made it onto the train by the skin of my teeth. The train journey wasn't direct, I had to change twice, but I got to the other end and walked to the taxi rank. In front of me in the queue was the bloke from my home town with the plaster on his forehead. I'll just point out that the journey I did wasn't from one major city to another, not a typical work related journey by any stretch of the imagination, it was over a hundred miles away and as I said it involved two changes. I was bit freaked out.

I travelled home the following day. Guess who was in the seat in front of me on the train?

Years ago on the phone to my mum one evening I discovered that we had both gone into town that day and bought the same dress in the same shop in the sane size. When we checked our receipts we had bought them within a half hour of eachother. Recently I saw the car that my ex and I had owned in a nearby street. Its quite an old car and I have moved to a different area and it was weird to drive past it.

Ex boyfriend and I had gone for a walk on a beach in Cornwall, climbed some rocks and he threw his coat down from the top onto the sand. Later we climbed back up the cliff path to the car park only to find we'd lost the car keys. They were in the coat pocket! He ran all the way back down to the bay, while it was getting darker and darker, and found them sitting on a rock about 30 cm from the incoming tide!

Blame one year, my Mum, myself and two of my sisters all bought the same card for my Auntie! She had four identical cards.

Mel my Nan lost her wedding ring when my Dad was a little boy in the 1950s.

She was telling him off in the garden and pointed her finger at him in a sort of thrusting gesture...her ring flew off and away into the very long grass.

So she ran inside, wrapped some wire around her finger and stood in the same spot and repeated the gesture! She watched where the wire flew to and went to the spot and there it was lying beside her ring.

I was in a lovely, quite village/small town with my family. Just wandering around browsing the market and shops. It became clear we were being followed by a quite smart middle aged man. He literally came into every shop we went into and just stared at us with a sort of weird vacant stare.

It was utterly terrifying. When we sped up he sped up.

We eventually went into a busy bank and managed to lose him. We literally ran back to our car and drove off. I was shaken up for days after that.

I was in a hotel in the Mediterranean, it was a really old building and a little spooky. One afternoon, an elderly gentleman started talking to me by the pool. He seemed harmless enough. He asked me and my husband if we wanted to join him for a drink that evening. The more we spoke to him the creepier he seemed.

He told us he was a wine dealer and that was why he was there. In the morning, we opened our door and found several bottles of alter wine outside. I was totally freaked out how he knew which was our room, it was a large hotel.

We heard he was later asked to leave the hotel because he refused to allow house keeping into his room to clean it.

I've told this before I think. Something that happened to my dad.

I'd been playing out in the snow with my sister and step brothers. When we came in to warm up my dad was almost trembling, and said when he lived in the Shetland isles, long before we were born, he'd looked out into a blizzard and seen four children playing in the snow, exactly how we were. Only he lived miles from anyone then, and there's no way four children would have been out alone so far from anywhere in such bad weather. He'd been shaken up by the kids at the time, as they kind of faded away as the snow came thicker, but was more shaken by seeing the exact same children, 20 years later, outside his kitchen window.

I had a very close friend who cut me out of his life when he had serious mental health problems. I was so sad to lose his friendship.

About 7 or 8 years later, I saw him at a gig. I was so pleased and went to say hi. It was surprising as the gig was in a different part of the country to where he lived, but it was the kind of music he liked.

The man I went to say hello to said he wasn't the person I thought he was.

My friend was adopted at birth. So either
A) that was my old friend but he was lying to avoid talking to me
Or
B) that was he long lost identical twin brother, who he didn't know about because of being adopted.

I've bumped into people I knew from school , old job etc in America and South Africa which I found odd.

But the weirdest one for me, was at work. A prisoner came in which isn't unusual where i work, but there was something about this man.
He was pleasant and smiled etc
But the hairs on my neck stood up. Felt like running away. There really seemed something massively off and he scared me.

Then all of a sudden the prison officers all seemed to get really edgy too and sort of surrounded him more if that makes sense.

I googled his name when I got home as it was such a weird reaction from me with no real reason and it turns out he was a very prolific serial killer from a few years back. Who murdered only women.
Young women

And I can guarantee the look he gave me I truly believe he would have liked to do the same to me.

This isn’t wildly exciting but never mind, I like to join in. I was on a date a few weeks ago with someone who has only recently moved to my island. We were walking alongside a railing, with the harbour the other side, and he asked me if anyone ever falls in. I said it’s happened but not often and I can’t remember the last time. A couple of hours later we walk past the same spot where he said it and there’s people peering over the railings and emergency services everywhere because a tourist fell in! I said he cursed them.

Me and my friend were discussing her brother's new girlfriend. She was lovely but her family not so much. My friend said they were the type of people to appear on Jeremy Kyle accusing each other of shagging around or stealing their grandmothers life savings. A few weeks later I get a text telling me to put itv2 on. There's her mother and aunt accusing the aunt's son of stealing money another family member was saving for a sick childs wheelchair. My friend's brothers gf had no idea who the child they were referring to was

Coming up to traffic lights at a 4 way junction, they turned red. My mum said "you could've got across then". I replied "Yes but it would be just my luck that 3 police cars would be coming along". At that moment the lights to the west of me turned green (I couldn't see the cars in that queue due to buildings) and 3 police cars drove across the junction.

Another odd one was years ago we had a cordless phone that you had to be in a certain range for it to work. One morning I called my dad, he lived 25 miles away. We had a chat then I went off to work. My friend who lived 2 miles from me asked if I'd been talking to my dad on the phone. Apparently she'd been eating her breakfast in her kitchen, her phone was on the table. Suddenly she heard voices coming from it so picked it up. She said even though she couldn't hear what I was saying she could tell it was me from my voice pattern, and she could hear every word my dad said and recognised his voice. She was able to tell me his side of the conversation word for word.

I used to live in central london so as per standard never spoken to my neighbors. Went on a hen weekend to Edinburgh. was at bar and commented how cheap drinks where to what I was used too. And got talking to some woman sat alone at bar. Turns out she had come up to meet some guy shed met online who turned out to be not her type so shed decided to just make most of her weekend. Anyways. Turns out she lived next door to me!!

My mother has a full on dopelganger. Funny as the other woman is a vicar apparently. She gets some funny looks when shes out doing the most un- vicar like things.

Adopted my dog from a rescue in greece. Bumped into a dog in an other city miles away from where I live. that was image of her. Got talking to owner turns out from same liter. It was such a small rescue and bit of a horrible story. So there was no deneying it was same liter.

I was in Tescos once and a woman came up to me and was like hi random how are things etc. I can honestly say it never seen here before in my life but tried to blag it, even though I didn't know her name. She even asked after my brother by name. However after a couple of minutes she realised that I had no idea who she was and I owned up to it apologetically. She then says she has her wires crossed and got me confused with someone else and off she went. I was with sil at time and we live in a small towm and neither of us had laid eyes on her before. And I'm mixed race and don't look like anyone in town neither! Was very bizarre.