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?

Really weird but if I think of someone randomly I'll usually see them within the next few days in a random place.

For example an ex from when I was a teen hadn't seen him in years. I woke up one morning and my mum sent me a pic of poster of him that the police had put out saying he'd escaped from a secure unit and had serious Mh issues and to call 999 when you spot him, as he was a danger to woman.

I was sad at how he had ended up in life & went to visit my nan in another town about 50 miles away and there he was just standing outside a shop slouching on some railings!!!! We spoke I hugged him showed him my new baby I'd had and said goodbye. I then sadly called to say where he was and I've never seen him since. I hope he's ok now.

I became pregnant for the first time after five years of trying to conceive.

When I was around six weeks pregnant, I had a dream of a little girl (aged 2-3) looking at me and smiling. There was no story, and there were no surroundings, just a ‘vision’ of her. When I woke up, I knew this was the baby I was carrying, but for some reason, I wasn’t happy about seeing her in my dream at only six weeks.

I didn’t think much of the dream, and when I was 10 weeks pregnant, I developed a fever. My sister-in-law advised I try to lower the fever with paracetamol as it wasn’t healthy for the baby. I kept trying to lower it during the next two days and would wake up to take my temperature/take paracetamol/use a wet towel. The fever wasn’t going away, and I was feeling increasingly unwell. I was feeling defeated as I wasn’t able to keep the fever down as it would go back up after two hours. At around 4 am, I remember telling God, ‘I can’t do this anymore; it’s okay, you can take the baby’. Thinking back, this was very unlike me, but I was more unwell than I knew.

Later that morning, I started bleeding and began miscarrying. When I arrived at the hospital, they began IV antibiotics. I thought I had the flu, and this killed the baby. It turns out, the baby had already been dead for some time, and I had had a septic missed miscarriage. I didn’t know missed miscarriages existed. Sometimes I think that because I had wanted to become pregnant for so long, my body refused to let go of the baby until my brain said it was okay.

As for the dream, I think I miscarried at six weeks, and it was my little girl saying goodbye to mummy.

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For anyone who’s experienced a loss, I’m so sorry ♥️ I now think they’re waiting for us in heaven, where they’ll stay young forever and never grow old.

Now I've got tears flowing down my cheeks like a river. Silencednotsilent

The teacher one in africa/Spain is touching.

Name changed because everyone who knows me knows this!
When I was 9 my family and I lived in a different country. My brother was collecting me from a kids club (he was 11). He had his hood up as it was raining and a girl approached him and asked him “are you (e.g) ‘Beth’?”
We all found this hilarious that he’d been mistaken for a girl and it’s been a long running joke in my family, much to his annoyance.
Anyway over a decade later I was visiting said country and was in a church, and the old woman next to me was staring at me for ages before asking “Are you ‘Beth’?”. Word for word.
I couldn’t stop laughing and she thought I was insane probably. I just couldn’t believe it was in the same country, worded the exact same, mistaken for the same name and everything. No idea who ‘Beth’ was/is. No one in my family believed me that that’s what had happened!

A childhood friend of mine married a South African girl and they moved back there. Years later, I married a South African guy - when DH & I were back in SA visiting I arranged to meet up with my childhood friend - turns out my childhood friend had married one of my DH's childhood friends.

My Mum's family has LOADS of these stories. Mum's Mum (my nana) was the seventh child of a seventh child and everyone believed she was very Woo.

1. When she was pregnant with my Mum, Nana was planning to have the baby at home. (This was in the 1940s.) There was no reason she shouldn't as the pregnancy was all progressing normally.

But one night, Nana had a dream where she saw her own Mum (dead IRL) standing at the end of her bed, pointing out of the window towards the hospital. Nana took that as a sign she should go to hospital when the labour started. She did. It turned out to be an awful, awful birth, and the doctors said she and the baby (my Mum) probably would've died if they'd been at home.

1. Nana's first husband died tragically long, leaving her penniless with 2 young kids. One night she had a dream where she met a good-looking older man who was wearing a black armband - the type people used to wear when they'd had a bereavement. In the dream he said to her, "Where are you going?" She burst into tears (in the dream) and said, "I don't know." He took her hand and said, "I don't know where I'm going either. Shall we go there together?"

A couple of weeks later, Nana applied for a job as a housekeeper to a widower. When she got to the house, the door opened and she saw the man who'd been in her dream! They fell in love and got married a few months later.

1. My own Mum did a ouija board when she was young and asked for the initials of the man she was going to marry. It spelled out AW. Years passed, then she was set up on a blind date with a bloke called Brian. The date went brilliantly, and she went home thinking, "I'm going to marry him." She laughed because the ouija board had got it wrong.

On the second date she went back to Brian's flat (the harlot) and saw loads of birthday cards on his shelf. He went to make coffees and Mum nosily browsed through the cards. They were all addressed to Brian, except one at the back from his Mum which was addressed to Andrew. She was like, "Huh?" and asked him - and Andrew was in fact his real name, but all his friends called him Brian because it was a childhood nickname that'd stuck. And yes, they did get married. Brian's my Dad.

When I was a teenager we went abroad in the school summer holidays, me, my parents and siblings. There was a problem with our hotel room as it had been given to another family with the same (rare) surname, dad had same first name as my dad too, but it was quickly sorted and we got on with our holiday. We saw them at dinner each evening and made a joke we’d have to be renamed W1 and W2 as we were accidentally given their reserved table twice and our bill was mistakenly charged to their hotel room.
2 years later we went abroad in a different country we hadn’t visited before and we bumped into the same family on their last day of the holiday as we got to hotel check in. My dad pretended not to notice them The chances of it happening once were incredible, but a second time was more than coincidence!

I went to the theatre once with an ex who was a serving soldier on leave. The stranger in the seat next to me kept talking to me in the interval. He asked what we both did etc and said he had real respect for us. He said he worked for the MI5 He bought us drinks, merch, the lot. I thought odd, but nice. When the performance was over he gave us 2 £50 notes and wouldn't take no for an answer.
Nobody believes me but it did happen

My 2nd dd was born on my step dads death anniversary. When she was 3 she come down stairs in the morning telling me we need to look after auntie a i asked why she said grandad told me. Confused i was asking questions ahe described him to a tea. Never met him never even seen a pic, that night at 4am his mum died and my sister (auntie a ) was distraught

My partner was ill and went for an emergency test, for esophageal cancer. He was fine but I had problems with indigestion too, so because he went I decided to also get checked out. I lied to get test (said I was worse than I was) I had tumour!

Travelled to New Zealand from the UK, first time travelling on my own and so far away. On my first day there I was doing a bus tour and the kiwi driver asked us all to introduce ourselves over the mic and where we are from. So I say UK and London, he says where, so I narrow it down, he keeps asking me to be more and more specific, turns out he worked as the chef in my small local pub! The world really is a small place.

@garlictwist

I don't get the millennium twin one?

No, nor did I, glad it’s not just me.

Opposite where I lived when my son was 2, was a little boy the same age as my son who was always with his nanny. We didn’t know the family at all but always said hi to the nanny and the boys would play at the bus stop together. After a year the family moved away.
Fast forward 11years and my son went to a boarding school in a different city. He made great pals with one of the boys in his dorm and it was a year later when I met his mum and we got chatting that we realised that he was the little boy opposite!

When I was about 3/4 my parents took my sister, brother and I to a zoo. My brother and sister walked past the wolves enclosure and they were all sleeping. As I walked past every wolf got up and they all started howling. My dad was so freaked out he took us all home. I was a bit spooky as a kid apparently and weird stuff like that happened a lot.

Working in a town South of Swindon on the other side of the M4, I booked my BMW in to have a wing repaired at an out of town facility right in the sticks.
The owner wasn't around at the time but had left the keys to a hangar in a pre-arranged place.
Parked the vehicle and walked out onto the lane and along to the bus stop. It being a 2 hourly bus service I had quite a wait and no mobile signal.
This was circa 1998 - 2002.
After what seemed like a decade and no traffic or people to be seen (no pavements either) a sporty red car passed by going in the opposite direction to my way home.
A minute or so later it came past again on my side of the road and a blonde wearing a beanie hopped out of the passenger side and asked if I wanted a lift and where was I going to.
I said I wouldn't trouble them and was waiting for the bus but she insisted I got in the passenger seat and she folded herself into the dicky seat behind.
The driver, who I assumed to be her husband or b/f, wore a beanie too and said little except 'Hi, nice to meet you' which I thought a little weird given the circumstances.
When we reached my destination I thanked them profusely as she asked her OH 'Chris' to give her a card from the door pocket.
After waving them off back the way they had come, I looked at the card which was a ticket for two to see Coldplay and the after-party.
I wondered why I had a sense of knowing her (but not him) as, a few days earlier, I'd watched a YouTube video of her singing ' Betty Davis Eyes'.

A few years ago I worked with a lady and we got chatting turns out her husband was previously married to my mums best friend!! Furthermore her husband was best man at my Aunts first wedding !!

When my DM and DF found out they were having me my DGF (my dads dad) said I will see her born, christened and her first birthday, he did, he died 1 week after my first birthday the day I started walking.

When my DGM died (my dads mum) I was 4 and she lived with us. I was asleep in bed and woke up because I felt something was wrong, I stood at the stair gate on my bedroom door and asked my mum what was wrong, she told me everything was fine and to go back to sleep, but I knew something was wrong. I made a pile of my toys by the gate and climbed over it ( I had never done it before and never did it again) and my DGM was lying at the bottom of the stairs. My dad was helping her up to bed and she just collapsed. She died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

On several occasions I have thought I should text/call my friend and just as I have picked up my phone to do so she has called/text me.

Also on many occasions I have dreamt about something very mundane, usually having a specific conversation with someone and that a couple of months later it has happened. One of remember clearly was when I was teenager I dreamt I walked into school and upstairs with 2 girls I was friends with as a child, but not really very friendly with anymore having a conversation (I cant remember what about) and about 6 months later I walked into school and up the stairs with those 2 girls having that exact conversation.

I had a dream that my brother died but I couldnt find out which one, I have three. I woke up crying it was awful. The next day I phoned my mother and she told me that HER brother had died. I have had a lot of similar things happen and it creeps me out.

just remembered another one my parents split up when I was young and from about age 5 had no contact with my real dad . when I was about 12 or so we were going on holiday to a town in the north we lived in the south so this involved several changes of trains. Got on a train about halfway through the journey and mum and stepdad said we would be on this train for a while but we were rushed off it after about two stops turns out my dad was on the same train in same carriage!! I sidnt recognise him but they told me after!!

Another one my son was born 9th April 2002 the day of the Queen Mothers Funeral!!
What happens on 9th April 2021 his 17th Birthday Prince Philip dies what is it about that date!!

sorry 19th birthday not 17th lol

I won an I pod music player at my sons school fayre there was only one ro win the next year there was one to win andI won it again!!!

@Iwantacookie the phone thing has happened with me and my best friend so many times, from When we were teenagers to now. It's bizarre.

When I was 9 I was taken into hospital with Appendicitis with subsequent Peritonitis leading to a Cardiac arrest. This happened in the early hours of the morning so both my parents were at home asleep. At 2am. my mum was woken up by the sound of a little girl screaming for her mummy. My dad was woken up by my mum shaking him awake to say something was wrong with either me or my little sister. Dad reassured her that she couldn't have heard either one of us as we were both away from home. A couple of minutes later our next door neighbour knocked on the door to tell my dad to get to the Hospital quickly as I was very ill and not expected to survive the night. Neighbour was the only one who had a phone so he took messages for my parents. Mum and dad were taken to see me in Recovery and a Nurse explained that I had developed septicaemia and that I had been delirious and screaming for my mummy. My mum looked at the Nurse and simply said 'it was at 2am wasn't it? "
Nurse replied," How did you know? "
My mum" I heard her! "