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?

When I met my ex partner, who was 10 years older then me, he took me to meet his family and his mum pulled out photos of me as a child- she knew my family. We had never met before.

Of course, having this belief may well have changed his behaviour but…

A relative was the sole survivor in 1917 from the cohort of regiment he'd joined in 1914 and had served in all of the major fronts in France.

One morning he woke with the conviction that there was a bullet with his name on it and that day was his last. A few hours later, in a push from the trenches, he'd been shot and his leg seriously injured with shrapnel. He survived (interesting story) but he said he just knew that was his day.

After my Dad passed last year I really struggled to get the house cleared out and all the admin done. Once it was all over I was in a taxi on the way to the train station to go home and the licence plate of the car in front of us was his initials, age and shortened version of his surname. So if he was Paul Lee Davis aged 75, the licence plate was PL75 DVS.

My sister in America had a strange dream about finding a lost cat in the snow.

A month or so later her son asked for a kitten for his 10th birthday. They went to a rescue place and chose one to be collected the following week.

A day or two later they had a snow storm. My sister’s dog kept going to the front door and whining. Eventually my sister opened the door and there was a tiny kitten cowering in the snow!

They never found out where she came from but kept her and didn’t get the one from rescue.

I’ve name changed for this as it may be outing.
I have a biological father I have met only once, about 5 years ago. His choice. We do communicate sporadically via email, usually Christmas, birthdays, that kind of thing.
When we met, he told me that he had gone on to marry and had two other children, they live in Yorkshire and still do.

I am keen to meet them but he has been putting it off for a few years for various reasons. They’re both in their early 30s and neither of them know I exist.
He has finally agreed to tell them about me and make an introduction. When we spoke and he let slip where they live. Transpires that they both moved to London after university and bought a place together.
They live 2 streets away from me.

(Not that I’ve met them yet, as he still hasn’t made a bloody intro, but that’s another story, I’ve probably walked passed them regularly without knowing it.)

At the very moment my MiL died my DH woke up with a start and shouted 'Mum!'.
Minutes later at about 11.30pm we had a call from her care home to say she had died.

A man named Charlie was evacuated to the country as a young child during WW2. He went to the same church as a baby named Grace. At one point he also went to a birthday party of a girl named Shirley as her mother wanted to be kind to the evacuees (didn’t know them). Shirley and Grace’s family had mutual friends but didn’t know each other. Charlie went back to the city aged 8 and didn’t keep in touch with the family as they were fairly mean. Charlie later married Grace and had my dad. My dad married Shirley’s daughter. So 3/4 grandparents had met each other 50 years before their children got married.

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 .

In 1985 I went to a nursery school down the road. I remembered there was a little boy there who always wet his pants, like literally every day 😆

Fast forward 28 years, I met a nice man and we got serious quickly. On talking about our childhoods, I told him about the boy at my nursery school who always wet himself.

Dh asked me the name of the nursery and then went very red. He was that boy!! We've been married 3 years now and sometimes I still call him pantwetter 😆

I used to be an aid worker with Medecins Sans Frontieres, and I worked for a while in Burundi. We'd have a couple of days R&R somewhere safe-ish every 6 weeks but there wasn't much to do, so a couple of colleagues and I used to loaf about make up a Hollywood-style daft film script about an aid worker love story. We had a typical hero (an Irish-Colombian who was the seasoned aid worker, rather cynical but really he was an idealist and took great risks to help people blah blah) and an American journalist who was also an idealist but a bit naive and new to and of course, drop dead beautiful, and she didn't get on with Mr Aid Worker at first- very Pride & Prejudice. We made it as hammy and Hollywood as we could imagine. Some years later I saw a film called Sans Frontieres with Angelina Jolie and it was almost identical to the spoof script we'd made up. Then she called one of her children the same name as my eldest child. Later I heard she'd gone to live in a town in Namibia for several weeks when she gave birth to another child- it was the town where I'd gone to high school (I lived in Namibia.) Then I read in a doctor's waiting room magazine something about the name she'd chosen for the kid she was expecting there and it was the same as my second child's middle name. They're not common names so it was pretty weird. Luckily the article was wrong and she chose something else in the end so the spell was broken but apart from the money and the face I felt like she was stalking my life for a while :) .

I was backpacking in Malaysia and stayed in a small hostel one night. The only other guest was the older sister of someone I was in primary school with.

My SM introduced my DF to an old friend of hers. It turned out he had taught my DF radar in the RAF over 40 years earlier.

A story that I am 90% sure is true and is now urban legend in my home village.

Family of 4 including 2 little boys had a day out at the zoo. Got home and kids were in the bath together. Mum hears some thudding, shushing and giggling from the bathroom. Goes up and there's a baby frickin penguin in the bath with them! They had picked it up during the penguin parade and put it in a backpack while nobody was looking. The parents had to contact the zoo who were by then looking for it and wait for it to be collected.

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

At our wedding we discovered that my uncle’s, uncle, is my dh’s Godfather. They hadn’t seen each other for many years due to a family rift and were in tears when they saw each other. Nobody had any idea and we come from different parts of the country.

www.snopes.com/fact-check/birdnapped/

@babbaloushka

My Nephew was once in San Fransisco for work, and went into a bar of an evening. He heard a man order a drink in a familiar accent and struck up a conversation, asking him where he was from. DN is fantastic at small talk, and they managed to ascertain that the other man lived a street away from the house DN had grown up in, another tiny rural village in the UK. It really is a small world, and I think the chances of that happening must have been very small!

Similar happened to us. Over 5000 miles from home chatting to another British couple in the hotel bar and they asked where we were from. When we told them they said they had met someone else from our hometown the previous night. As if on cue this other couple came in and the man was someone dh had been at school with and couldn't stand.

Spent my teenage years scoffing at the unlikely long lost relative stories on Home and Away and Neighbours, then got my own unlikely long lost relative!

We lived in the Midlands for DH job , I was a SAHM and went to every baby group I could find as I count stand being in the house all the time
I started chatting to another lady who had 2 boys with Welsh names , she had a northern accent , my DH is Welsh
Discovered her DH is from the same town as mine , think no more of it until ... we’re invited to one of the boys birthday parties , bring your husbands she says ,
So off we go
DH looks at friends DH
Friends DH says to his DW is he from Wales , as my DH asks me the same
Turns out they were at school together , and still in touch over 20 years later

We moved back to Wales years later , and went to a local village fete where the police helicopter was doing a flyby and land
Oh that’s funny , says DH , old friends sister works in the police helicopter squad
She was only the pilot ! ( as we found out when he asked her if she was xxx sister ! )

Another one I forgot about....

In August of 2012, I was walking down Knightsbridge, it was really busy and I was rushing between appointments (I was an estate agent in that area at the time) when a scruffy looking woman stopped me in me tracks. I still to this day don't remember much about her appearance other than that she was wearing a sweat shirt and a gilet which was unusual as it was absolutely boiling. She told me that she could tell that I was very lucky and that I had two men in my life who loved me, but that neither of them was going to be the man I would make my family with, but that I was going to meet him soon. She was absolutely spot on, I had just left my boyfriend at the time for another guy. That relationship didn't last, and in December of 2012 I met a man at house party. We've been together ever since and have 2 children together.

When my mum was pregnant she got chatting to another pregnant mum at a hospital appointment and they became friends. Our mums gave birth and we became very close childhood friends. I was in love with him when I was 5 as he was clever and beautiful but I could tell that although had lots of fun, he didn’t feel the same about me. I remember very clearly at lunch with his parents at Christmas, wondering if, when I was older, I could make him fall in love with me.

Anyway, his family moved to the other end of the country and I was really gutted. We kept in touch for a while, but lost touch eventually, last time I saw him was when I was 6.

Totally forgot about him. Grew up. Went off to university. Got friendly with the guy in the room next to mine in college, he mentioned he was born in the area that I lived in. You know where this is going. Neither of us twigged as we’d both forgotten about each other. Told my mum, mentioned his name and she was the one clicked and got out all the childhood photos. Cue big reunion with his family.

The answer was: yes I could make him fall in love with me. But while he is undoubtedly very clever and handsome, he is also a bit selfish and self-obsessed so we are just good mates. I call him my long lost evil twin.

During a bank holiday weekend while at university, I went to visit my boyfriend who was attending university at the other end of the country. One afternoon, I heard someone playing guitar in the living room and went to see who it was, and was astonished to see that it was the guy who lived in the flat next door to me in our halls of residence at the other end of the country. It turned out he was visiting his Sister who happened to live in the same house share as my boyfriend.

God these are great!
This is kind of geeky but when I was about 7 I was really keen to find a stone age arrowhead. The whole family went out for a walk one day and I picked up some stones at random and shoved them at my mum going "Are any of these arrowheads?"

And one of them was

@JoBrodie

Went for a walk around the backstreets of Pinner with my mum and bumped into the ex-girlfriend of my ex-boyfriend from Uni who was visiting her friend. We were all pals so no awkwardness but very strange sensation to encounter her in the middle of nowhere (OK Pinner isn't nowhere but it was still quite surprising).

Possibly less surprising was when I was with said boyfriend on a record-buying recce in town and he bumped into an old friend of his that he'd lost touch with, also buying records (Berwick Street, peak indie record shops, early 90s). I was less impressed, though stoic, when he announced he'd see me later and trotted off to hang out with his chum ;)

Jo

I live in Pinner !

I know this will sound made up but it’s weirdly true, and I’ve name changed, having told this story a few times!

I am nearly 50 now, and had my first “proper” boyfriend, the first boyfriend who had a car so we went on proper dates, when I was 17. Our first date was at a very lovely country pub quite a long way from where we both lived. We split up very acrimoniously after a few months and I hadn’t seen him in thirty years, or been to the area the pub was in.

Just pre COVID , I had to go to a work meeting a long way from home. I drove home very late, it was dark and raining and was fed up. As I was driving along a song came on the radio, which had been “our song” in my mind all those years ago, and I was having a little smile to myself. I then realised that I was right by the pub from our first date. I was having an even bigger smile, when suddenly someone ran across the road in the rain so I slammed the breaks on and only just stopped.

This person then stayed in the road and looked towards me, he was so close to the car it was nearly touching him, so I was mouthing “Oh my god are you OK?” but was a bit scared to get out. I then realised it was my teenage ex. We both just stared at each other for a couple of minutes. He was mouthing “Oh, oh it’s you! How are you? Wait, give me your number, find me on Facebook!”

It was weird, and nice, but I decided to just smile and wave and drive away, as I’m very happily married now. Maybe he lives near there now, but he didn’t when I knew him, so it was a very odd set of coincidences!

For MaryBoBary
I was once flying along the road, minding my own business, when a woman started following me about 10 yards away in her car for what seemed like forever. I thought about slowing down and pooping on her windscreen... but I didn't want to scare the life out of her. Eventually her car disappeared into thin air. I never saw her again. Coo.