Can we have a thread where we share unlikely but true stories?

[letsgowiththat]

I'll start.

My (non English speaking) DGF received an email (in English) from the solicitor of a man who claimed to be the son of a long lost relative from Africa claiming he was basically of princely status and there was an inheritance waiting for my DGF and his siblings.
So basically like the Nigerian prince scam.

Except it was all true and it was a relative who escaped my DGFs home country as he did not want to be drafted into the war and ended up never contacting anyone again and building a small empire in Africa, getting married (multiple times) and having DCs. He willed a small part of his accounts to my DGFs by then deceased mother who was his cousin and then it got passed down and split between my DGF and his siblings by default. Not life changing money but one of our favourite stories to tell!

The majority of the emails was done through google translate as well

Does anyone have any "sounds like a lie but is true" stories they'd like to share?

@Ratched

My dad was killed when I was four years old, in the Far East. When I was getting married, my mam gave me her wedding ring, which needed adjustment to fit me. I took it intoma back street jewellers in the north east, only for the chap to say ' oh my goodness.....Singapore late 50s, early 60s???'. When I said yes, he told us he had actually made the ring. He made the ring my mam had, in Singapore in 1959. He adjusted the ring for her daughter to wear in 1977 in Sunderland .

As a Mackem I find this story both touching and BRILLIANT!

I learned to dive late(ish) in life. For my 40th birthday I went to Australia for 6 weeks and travelled West to East, ending up in Airlie Beach, where I spent a few days and took a PADI course. A couple of years later, in the UK, diving now a passion, I continued diving and then joined a very niche cave/tech diving group. I collected another member from his uni as he didn't have a car and we drove to our training site. He learned to dive in his gap year, travelling in Australia - in Airlie Beach.

I was tracing my family tree and trying to find a great, great, grandfather. I went on a genealogy forum and saw that another person was looking for the same person. I sent her a message and she contacted me back and it turns out she is my cousin several times removed. She lives on the other side of the world. She came here on holiday a couple of years ago and we met up. She is the same age as me (one month apart) and we look so alike we could really be twins!! Same height, weight, hair, eye colour etc. No one who sees pictures of us together can believe it. We are now also really good friends. We also have lots of other personality similarities. Just a shame we live so far apart.

Sorry the penguin is a total urban legend. That, or this happens regularly in many towns all over the world.

"You lying sod - Percy! You're a bleeding urban myth! All those bloody sardines you've conned me out of!"

My cousin has asd and was non verbal for the first 6 years of his life. When he was 6 we were all sat round the big family dining table at my grandparents house for Sunday lunch and he piped up to ask 'can somebody pass me the ketchup?' There was absolute silence as he had literally never spoken a word before. When asked why later he said he had never had anything worth saying before!! He talked a fair bit after that and is now a normal talking adult!

Isn’t that the well known Albert Einstein story? Didn’t talk for about 4 years, then one day complained about his soup? Said he hadn’t spoken before because he had nothing to say.

The church I used to go to had a drive in the front so people could be dropped off at the door. It wasn't really wide enough to have cars park on but, inevitably, people would.

A friend drove me to choir practice before Evensong one week. He was going to park on the drive but I said he shouldn't as it would make it hard for an ambulance to get past. In the 20 years of going to that church I had NEVER known them to need an ambulance.

During the first hymn a man walks into the church. I didn't know him, and nor, did it turn out, did anyone else there. Despite the church being mostly empty he chose the same pew as my mother and sat right next to her.

I looked at him from the choir stalls and thought “he's going to die here tonight” but then dismissed the thought as nonsense.

Not long after he slumped onto my mother, dead. And the ambulance was delayed getting to the building due to idiots parked on the drive.

@TableFlowerss

My uncle told me that when he was a kid there was a lady up the street, who had family from Liverpool. One day this 11/12 year old boy was outplaying and my uncle started chatting to him and they hung about together for the duration the boy was here.

The boy was called John Lennon! He swears it was ‘thee John Lennon’!

A friend of mine knows ‘Lucy’ from ‘Lucy in the sky with diamonds’!

Aww sorry to rain on your parade but Lucy Sky Diamonds song is code for LSD. It's not about a real girl. I think your friend is saying she's taken LSD? Or maybe that's what you're saying too and I've missed the point.... Anyway as you all were Great thread!

I also walked past the house where a friend used to live (and, as far as I knew, still did) and despite it looking the same a usual I thought to myself “He's dead”, then “He killed himself”. Shook the thought off.

A year later I randomly bumped into one of his old colleagues, who told me that he had committed suicide two years before.

Both of my sisters had a baby on the same date 5 years apart.

@TableFlowerss- it wasn’t in Fleetwood was it? John Lennon’s aunt lived there.

Ah that’s lovely @CheesecakeAddict
Also love the birthday kitten, the dogs going mad at 4am, the lightning, the invisible old man reading to the boy and the ball catching silhouette.
Lots of lovely coincidences, too.

When I was about 13, people in a house about 5 doors up from us were having a swimming pool put in their back garden. I could see from my bedroom window and spent many hours watching people digging the massive hole for it.

When I met my DH (I was 20), we discovered that it was his stepsisters house and he had helped dig the hole. I didn’t recognise him but must have seen him operating the digger at some point.

When I was in my 20's (in the 90's) I visited Australia for 5 months, my aunt and cousins emigrated there in the 60's so I combined it with a trip to meet family I hadn't ever seen.

One night in a nightclub in Cairns I met a random guy who was in town selling his sheep. I ended up going home with him and then the next day we took off on a 6 hour drive back to his farm where I hung out with him for a few days. While I was with him this guy told me that recently he'd been in Darwin (long way away) and met up with another woman who was just like me. He told me her name, I thought nothing of it. He was super nice but around 5 days later I returned to Cairns and carried on with my trip.

I then met up with my cousin and we hit it off immediately. I told her about the guy in Cairns but never mentioned what he'd told me about Darwin. Whilst we we chatting one night she told me she'd been to Darwin recently and slept with a guy who was a farmer.... turned out to be the same guy.

So before we knew each other my cousin and I had both slept with the same guy after completely random cities in cities very far apart.

I had one Fallopian tube following a ruptured eptopic pregnancy. The other tube had been a bit battered as I’d previously had sterilisation reversal performed on it. My family was complete so was happy that given the above, I was unlikely to fall pregnant again. Just to be on the safe side though, I also received the depo vera contraceptive injection.

Started bleeding very heavily, like haemorrhage heavy and doc gave me medicine to reduce blood loss and sent me for a scan in a few days. Given that I was on reliable contraception and the fact I was bleeding so heavily, pregnancy wasn’t even considered.

The day of the scan I was told scanner was off sick and could they rebook me for two weeks.

Two weeks later they cancelled on me again due to staff shortages.

Was still taking medication to control bleeding and continued with my regular contraceptive shots. I was becoming weak so Dr pushed for them to hurry up with this scan.

By the time I went for the scan I was really thin, weak and all my family thought I was terminally ill because I’d bled constantly for so long and felt so unwell.

To the complete shock of everyone in the room, I was 20 weeks pregnant. DD is 3 years old now and perfectly healthy.

Needless to say DH has had the snip just to be quadruple sure but I’m still terrified of falling pregnant again.

My ex, at a bar in Butlins, was approached by a man who greeted him by name and started chatting. My ex didn't recognize him, but thought the conversation might give him some clues. Eventually, he apologised and said "I don't think I know you" The man said "Of course you do! you're Jack Jones, aren't you? (Not real name) Jack said yes, he was, but he still didn't recognise the man. The man said "You must remember me, we played squash together twice a week for 10 years in Brixton!" My ex had to tell him that not only did he not play squash, but he'd only ever driven through Brixton!

I was in jewellers 20 miles from where I lived, dh and I were collecting my engagement ring. Exdh walked into the same jewellers with ow to pick her engagement ring............Ex lived in a different towm 20 miles in the other direction, jewelers was part of a chain, nothing special.
It was very odd!!!

Mine is quite trivial, I suppose, but still a bit weird. When I was about ten, my friend invited me to her new house which was miles away. Her mum was supposed to come and pick me up, but there was some reason I needed to contact her - I honestly can't remember why but it was very pressing at the time.

Anyway, I panicked because I didn't have her new phone number, but I did know her new address. I lifted the massive phone book (this was the seventies) and told my mum that I was going to find my friend's number using her address. Back then people often kept the phone number of the previous occupants of a house.

Of course, my mum told me not to be so ridiculous - thousands of pages, she might be ex directory etc - and I knew she was right, but I couldn't do nothing or I would EXPLODE (all very dramatic at that age). So anyway, I started to run my finger down the addresses. About fifty or so addresses down the page, I stopped and there was my friend's new address. I honestly thought I was seeing things. But I phoned the number and her mum answered the phone!

I still think about this and wonder how long I would have kept ploughing through that phone book if her address hadn't turned up so early on.

I’m adopted - had original birth certificate at 18 but only contacted birth family over 50 when birth mum had already passed away. Anyway after choosing eldest daughter’s name i then realised her middle name was birth mum’s name, so spelled it same deliberately- 2nd daughter got my original birth name as her middle name, as it went well - 3rd daughter was having my adopted name as her middle name but just couldn’t think of a first one - the one I liked sounded awful with the surname, found one popped into my head after a few days - no middle names left for final daughter so just randomly picked the one I’d first wanted as my 2nd daughter’s first name. The random first name of my 3rd daughter and the random 2nd name of my 4th daughter when put together turned out to be my birth mum’s pet name as an adult.

A few years back I took my daughter on a camping holiday in France. We stayed on a site which was more popular as a stop over with generally older people. As such they all made a fuss over my daughter. One couple in particular were really lovely.

Three months later I went on holiday with my parents and daughter who had specifically booked a family hotel with kids slides and entertainment etc. At breakfast on the second morning I recognised the couple from our camping trip at a nearby table with their adult daughter. They had booked the hotel as a last minute deal!

We spent the week with them and they got on with my parents - closer in age - and I got on well with their daughter who was just a few years older than me!

We are still in touch almost 10yrs later!

When I was a child I grew up in Africa and went to primary school there. There was one particular teacher I remembered, I was about 7 at the time, and could still remember various things about her years later.
Many years passed and DH and I retired to a tiny rural village in Spain.
Eventually I joined a book club and there met a very bright elderly lady in her nineties. We got chatting and it turned out she had lived in the same place in Africa at the same time. She then told me she had been a teacher. I asked her if she was Miss X and she said yes.
It was the very same teacher who had taught me 60 years before.
It was surreal to meet up again in rural Spain all those years later.

My parents bought a holiday cottage on the south coast some years ago.

The first weekend I was staying there with DH and DS (only at toddler at that point) I spotted one of the NDNs in the next door garden. He looked like a nice chap, about my age, so I leaned out of a bedroom window and shouted hello over the hedge.

He suggested we go for a walk in the afternoon, which we did, and got chatting about our backgrounds.

We discovered that each other's parents are all Northern Irish and worked out they must have been at Queens in Belfast at about the same time. What an amazing coincidence, we thought, and wondered if they might have known each other.

It turns out they didn't just know each other... our mothers were roommates at Queens.

They are now back in touch 😃

My parents once went on holiday
They met another couple and got chatting
Turned out that not only did they share the same forenames but the other couple had a shorter version of my parents surname
Their children had the same names as myself and my brothers and where the same ages as us kids
The daughter was pregnant and due about the same time as me
We had our babies within two days of each other-both girls and almost the same names (think rosa Louise v's rose louisa-not the real names but similar)
My parents live in a street thats named after a village a few miles away-this couple lived in that village and had the same house number as my parents
Both women drove a car and the men a motorbike-similiar makes of car/bike and the same colours unusual colours you wouldn't see everyday
Both men where vegetarian and both women love eating meat
I'm not a vegetarian but my brothers are-ditto their kids

My dad was so freaked out he refuses to talk about it-my mother stayed in touch and still speaks to them-she sees them at least once every few weeks!(in non lockdown times)

Oh thought of another one!

My partner is older than me and we have followed fairly different paths in life. Talking one day about his teenage years and he mentioned a good friend of his who I realised lived on the same street that I did during my childhood. He recounted a story of when he was kicking a ball around with said mate on said street and accidentally hit a little girl off her bike. This rang a bell with me so I checked with my sisters (without telling them why) one had no recollection but the other remembered being knocked off her bike by a football! Being the feisty older sister I had berated the teen boy for his actions - now over 30yrs later he’s my partner.

In a final twist he had lost contact with his mate but bumped into him at a funeral not long after we got together after over 20yrs! We now socialise with him and his wife - his wife has the same first name as me (and the friend randomly has my exH name!)

And another...

A few years back I worked for a large charity. We had some volunteers and had a closed Facebook group for them. The volunteers came from all over the country. One day I mentioned something on the group which included my local area. One of the volunteers said his wife was from said area as a child. We were similar age so I asked what her maiden name was. I instantly recognised her as the girl I lived next door but one to almost 30yrs previous!

A few months later they moved back ‘home’ and bought a house on the estate I lived on with my ex which is 5 min walk from my new house! We’ve got together a couple of times and our daughters went to the same brownies etc!

I hadn’t seen or spoken to her since I was about 13!

My father died and I inherited his house and was living in it as I'd been his carer.

I bought off a fb ad some cube magnets about 15 of them. They arrived and were tiny i laughed about it and eye rolled and put them in the junk drawer. I would get them out occasionally to play with as it was quite relaxing stacking them.

Later on I got a new puppy and I became paranoid she was going to eat the magnet cubes and make her poorly. I couldn't find them, my partner and I both searched as I'd managed to wind him up into a frenzy of panic too. Skills 🤣.

So months passed life was pretty bad as grief hit me hard. A lady I know did my tarot cards for me. It was more therapy than anything as she was so kind and understanding and patient (she doesn't charge for the record). One day she said to me that my dad was going to send me a sign that all was ok. The sign would be teleported to me and it would be clear. She apologised for using the word teleported a few times but was adamant that this was the word she was told to use by my dad. So I rushed home and started looking for a sign. For weeks on end I watched and waited, nothing.

The house went on the market it sold really quickly and moving out day came. It was bloody hard work moving out but eventually I walked through the house checking every room as I went and finally I was in the kitchen. I felt ok .. unusual for me but I was alright. I walked to the door for the last time and looked at the boiler and stacked together and stuck horizontally to the metal casing were the tiny cube magnets. It was so funny and of course there will be an explanation but to me it was the same shock that I'd get seeing Tom Cruise juggling tortoises in the back garden.

Still feels so weird. That night I had a dream, my dad told me that of course he wasn't gone because he is part of everything and everyone. Yes I'm sure all a coincidence and explainable. But it has given me considerable comfort and head scratching.