Strangest encounter with a stranger?

[elevenspowers]

Today I went to the cash point outside Tesco and a man walked in front of me diagonally and we almost clashed and so I moved back (assumed he was walking to the entrance) and he just stared at me.

He was on the phone talking, with his back to the cash point, staring at me carrying on his conversation. So after about a few seconds I was like “are you using the cash point” - he responded yes but then still carried on his conversation. I was just like 😬 ok ….

Probably not that weird, but it’s fresh in my head.

My work colleague will talk to anyone and we ended up talking to an elderly lady in the queue for the US border in Mexico. She had two massive suitcases and a dog. Somehow I ended up in the US with her dog while she was still in Mexico being questioned by border control 🙄

We also met a man in San Diego who wanted us to go and sit in his hot tub with him. My colleague has never forgiven me for turning that down but I definitely saved him from some weird naked situation.

in Debenhams, i was followed around with by a much older woman making the sign of the cross with her hands and arms. Everywhere I went she was behind me, she looked terrified of me, only thing i can think of was she may think redheads evil??

Yeah I did find it odd that someone would purposely walk in front of me to cut me off. Then stand blocking the cash point with his back to it, having a conversation on the phone and staring face to face with me about a foot apart.

Does it matter? Are things only allowed to be deemed “odd” by another person if you dictate that it is in fact odd by your standards?

I think it says more about you that instead of just finding interest from the countless stories posted or adding your own instead you decided to try and mock me and make the least funniest joke of the year. No one is laughing with you. You’re clearly extremely miserable:

A women was peeling the dry skin off her foot on a busy train. She took up several seats as she was laying down. It was very grim.

We had a bit of a drive home from holiday once so had a quick stop, some food and we were asking our young daughter if she needed the loo. (She is one of those children who always needs the loo! And like most children when tired etc she gets very emotional so was crying) when out of the toilet (she did go!) This mad lady started shouting at us, saying I was abusing my daughter for asking her to go the toilet, she then got her phone out and took a photo of my daughter and i then ran off! So I left my daughter with her dad to take a photo of said crazy lady 😂apparently she is a known round there for being an oddball anyway but she was absolutely crazy!!!

When I was about 11 or 12 I had a row with my mum on the train and moved carriages, a man of about 25-30 sat next to me and began chatting and offered to take me for a look around and dinner, I told him I’d need to ask my mum, funnily enough when I came back he had gone.
I was on a train alone one night when I was about 20 and a man sat with me and sat really close and wouldn’t stop starring and I chatted to him and he began to confess his love and ask if we could go home together, it all got weird, somehow I managed to convince him I had a boyfriend and was able to leave and get a taxi home.
Thankfully now I’m in my 40s trains are less scary.

Serial killer disposing of human flesh.

@Joni234 Without wishing to put unnecessary ideas into your head, this reminds me of a story a friend told me about his mum's funeral. Another woman at the funeral ended up turning out to be his real mother. She'd been forced to give him up for adoption, and had always kept a respectful distance until his "mum" died.

Today an older man I've never met before stopped me to inform me that "Global warming doesn't exist because people used to swim outdoors when he was young, then it got too cold, and now people are into wild swimming again". I've not redacted his logic for comic effect - that really is it 😂

I've been known to adopt an unorthodox line of argument in conversation before, but this really did push the boundaries of my sanity. I can only imagine he's the Daily Mail readership's equivalent of a missionary. I'll stay heathen, I think!

Whilst I was at work a young man (early 20’s) came up to me and ask me if we sold rubber bands for his teeth (I’ll get onto that in a bit) we didn’t (I work in a pharmacy) I took him to the dental isle to see if we have anything similar. I knew we didn’t but he wouldn’t stop talking about his brilliant plan and we “MUST SELL RUBBER BANDS”
He proceeded to take his Face mask off and he started telling me his plan. The young man had a lot of gaps in between his teeth and he wanted to get rubber band and hook them round his teeth the “close” the gaps. I stood there blinking wondering if I was being pranked. He was being serious. I told him that he should go to the dentist. That was the WRONG answer apparently. He had gone and they had told him it will be £4,000. He kept asking me if his plan would work and I kept telling him no. I stupidly suggested if he WAS intent on doing this idea smaller elastic bands would be better. He looked at me as if I was a alien. Looked me dead in the eyes and said “ you want me to CHOKE?! You’ve been really unhelpful” he flounced out the shop. I just stood in the isle gobsmacked before I went back to tell the pharmacist what happened. I have so many stories 😂

Got chatting to a guy, an actual scientist ( I looked him up later) at an airport who believe that the moon landings were fake and that the earth is flat. He had a briefcase full of ‘proof’, maps photos etc.
he was very plausible, other than being mad as a box of frogs that is .

@Alcemeg honestly it seemed something like that. Could have been an old preschool teacher or something - but why would she be so emotional about it? And say anything about my future?
I had been at the tail end of a pretty shit time and starting to feel hopeful so maybe she could just tell I looked worn down.
I did meet my now-husband two weeks after this encounter though.

I always disliked coming out of Charing Cross Station onto Trafalgar Square but when DDs were young we’d do a lot of workshops at the National Gallery. I used to immediately head for the edges and walk around the sides. I was just scared of a terrorist attack. One day, I was meeting my sister alone to go to an exhibition and had the same sense of foreboding as I climbed the steps. As I checked my phone to see where she was, a man walked up to me and said
‘You have to leave the square immediately, a bomb is going to go off!’

I asked him why he would say such an awful thing and he said he had intelligence from MI5.

I watched as he walked around telling other people. Before I left to meet myself sister I walked up to him and took his photograph. He didn’t care …. He was dressed as the MI5 agent he obviously believed he was …

Not as odd as some of the stories, but I often find that random people start talking to me... Here's one, while waiting in a takeaway with my daughter.

Random guy: I like your trousers.
Me: Er, thanks.
Random guy: Are you a programmer?
Me: Yes.
Random guy: No, you're not
Me: (thinks, eh?) Yes I am
Random guy: Well, what do you program in, Java
Me: No, perl

There was a bunch more stuff, including, "Your girl there, she'll be fine, she's with the bourgeousie."

I now call those trousers my programmer's trousers, since that's obviously how he guessed my job.

Also just thought of the time were I had to speak to a patients partner on the phone,
The patient had this person listed under as HORNY STEVEN
I was so glad we are wearing masks because I was dying 😂
All I could think of when i was talking to him was "you don't know that I know you are known as horny Steven"

When I was 16, about to turn 17, I used to travel to college by train every day. It was usually just after rush hour so the carriages were often empty. One day I noticed this middle aged man started getting on at the same time as me. He stood out because he wore very tight fitting shorts and a large backpack. And he always sat somewhere he was facing me. One day he sat closer and I could feel him watching me the whole journey. When I got off he chased after me and asked if I had a boyfriend and thrust his number into my hand. I told him I had a boyfriend and I was only 16 but he seemed undeterred. Finding the whole thing equal parts unnerving and also funny, I called my boyfriend as I was leaving the station and as I started explaining and giggling a little at the message he'd put below the number, the guy was behind me again! But this time he looked really hurt and ran off back towards the platform. I never saw him again!

Not me but my DH.
he was in Canada and needed to find a B&Q type shop.
He was driving and pulled over in an industrial estate type place with lots of shops and asked a lady walking if she knew where ‘Home Depot was’ she looked at him blankly so he asked her again.
she replied ‘I’m sorry I don’t speak French’
He’s British…with a British accent.

Working in a shop and telling a customer my feet were cold. 2 hours later he turned up with a pair of hiking socks with a 13£ price tag. I offered to pay him for them, he refused to take the money. Random but it’s stayed with me for the last 25 years

A couple of years ago, I was on a train in Paris with DD10. Two women got in and sat opposite us. The elder was dressed normally, but the younger was in a very short, skintight, cheap mini-dress and scruffy trainers, with her boobs all but hanging out. Both had huge handbags. They started asking me very strange questions about a closed station and where the train was going, and other super-obvious stuff, and the the older going on and on about how cute DD was (she was well past the cute stage) and patting her cheeks etc. Broken English, but not French. I held on tight to my bag and was polite, but super-wary. They got off and I saw them positively pelting down the platform out of the window. I assume pick pockets, and the boobs were a distraction, but why try me? Surely a forty something, distracted mum wasn’t a good target? And why the endless wittering about where the train was going and how adorable DD was, when it was obvious I wasn’t going to be too busy staring to not notice my rucksack go missing (on my lap with the pockets facing me)

Years and years ago now, a man came to the front door saying he was from the council and I needed to show him my council tax bill. Something about it being a new build and needing to register for something or other, but he insisted I needed to find the bill to prove to him I was registered for whatever it was. It was just not quite right and I flatly refused. (It didn’t help that I was about to get into the shower and wearing only my dressing gown, so I was grumpy and very short with him). It’s the only person I’ve ever known my dopey dogs not to like on sight - I’d never heard them growl at anyone before, not before or since. I’ve no idea what he was trying to do. The police said they try to keep you at the front door and an accomplice robs via the back, but it wasn’t that. The dogs would have let me know if there was anyone else. We lived in the middle of nowhere and nothing was taken. There’s a possibility he was after whatever was handy in the hall while I went to find the wretched bill, but surely he’d give up when he got grumbled at by a pair of dogs? They weren’t going to let him in, so why keep arguing? So weird.

Could both be just unsuccessful petty thieving, but they seemed so peculiar. I’m astounded I’ve never been robbed - I’m so distracted and always lost, confused and harassed (DD is not an easy child). I’d be easy to rob if you stood back and watched for your moment, so why not just get on with it? We were lax about security in the middle of nowhere, the back door won’t have been locked, and I said I was just about to shower. He could have waited five minutes and just wandered in. I would never have known. No need to argue about something I knew was BS and said so for so long. And if he didn’t because of the dogs, again why not just give it up and move on. So odd. I’ve no idea what either incident was really about.

When my first baby was about 8 months old, I was standing outside one of the small shops in our village, when a woman I knew by sight but had never spoken to, walked by. She got about 50 yards up the road, then stopped as if she'd forgotten something turned round and walked back. She stopped by the pram, looked at the baby, then said (more or less to herself) "Hmm - lovely eyebrows!" and walked off again!

Some of these are killing me! Dying at “HORNY STEPHEN” 😂

I’ve thought of my only actual nice example of one of these situations (the rest have largely been grim!) Years ago I was on a date with a gorgeous guy I’d been obsessed with for months - he was an arsehole and blew hot and cold so I felt really insecure around him (especially as I wasn’t conventionally pretty and my confidence was shit). A few minutes after we’d met up, a group of young men around our age (early 20s) walked past and started grinning at me, then stopped to pat my date on the back and tell him what a “lucky bastard” he was. Next we got to a restaurant and the waiter came up to me and asked where I was from, because I was “far too beautiful” to be English (!), and asked if I’d like his number, within earshot of my date. At the pub afterwards, a guy slipped me his phone number while my date was at the bar, and another winked at me while his back was turned. On the way home, a beggar on the street shouted as we walked past “what the hell is that beauty doing with a twat like you, mate?!” to my date. It literally happened everywhere we went and he was visibly weirded out by it! Now this all sounds like a massive stealth boast but nothing like this has ever to me before or since! I can’t explain it, but it gave me the confidence boost I needed to dump the wanker a couple of weeks later as I finally realised I didn’t deserve to be strung along for months on end. After that day I went back to being completely invisible to 99.9% of men, but for that one afternoon I felt like a goddess thanks to a bunch of unconnected strangers!

Walking along Watford High Street on lunch hour back to college with my best friend... a joyful woman suddenly bursts out of Holland & Barratt, stops us, opens her bag and proclaims 'soya! Soya! They have SOYA !!!!!! SOYA'!!!'' It was the 80s, we'd never heard of soya. (We thought we were sophisticated as we'd recently discovered halva from said shop). It was our catch phrase for the next 30 yrs or so...
Oh she did a little jig down the street too.

When I was 13/14ish I was walking back from a Chinese takeaway with my friend. We were dressed in scruffy jeans/trainers/T’s and eating a greasy spring roll each.
A very fancy car stopped and rolled down the windows down and it was Gary Glitter who asked if we wanted to go to a party!
thus would have been around 1979ish. We were quite naive and therefore flattered but said we weren’t allowed and he curb crawled us to the corner of the road. He wasn’t driving though - I wonder what his chauffeur thought if such behaviour.

I used to get that when I was out with my equally stunningly handsome arsehole ex boyfriend too! I actually managed to get asked out on a date once while I was out on a date with him (he abandoned me to go and speak to someone else and the other guy's friends invited me to go outside the pub for some fresh air and then the other guy asked (and got) my number). I NEVER got so much male attention as when I was with him. Even his friends (well, social circle) asked me out at one time or another.

I even once noticed a guy giving him a really disapproving look and me a sympathetic one when we were sitting on a train.

What I suspect it was is that they could tell that he was an arsehole a mile off while I was blinded by adoration/taken in by his fake nice guy act, but anyway, the guy was an absolute date magnet!

I was in McDonald's with my daughter who was about 5 or 6 at the time. The elderly guy cleaning the table's started chatting to us and telling us about his sideline writing novels. I'm nodding and listening politely whilst waiting for him to go so we can eat our food in peace then he comes back with a bit of paper with his name and book title on it. He proceeds to tell me in detail (in front of my daughter) about his erotic novels and where I can buy them on Amazon 😳

This would be about 30 years ago ... we used to go to Alderney in the Channel Islands every summer for a couple of weeks with my Dad. From quite a young age, we were allowed to walk by ourselves to the main street to spend our pocket money etc.
I think I was about 9 and was heading home and had realised I'd taken a wrong turn and wasn't sure how to get home. I saw an elderly man standing near an entrance in a big stone wall, and he asked me if I was lost. I said yes, and he said 'don't worry I know where you live, it's just through here and keep walking forward'. I didn't think anything of it since everyone there seemed to know my Dad, so I walked through the entrance and realised it was the cemetery! I could see my Dad's house across the square. I turned round to look back at the man and he was standing there laughing. I didn't really know what to do so looked back to my house to work out what direction to go in. When I turned around to go back out I couldn't see the old man anywhere.
When I got home my Dad was waiting for me and looked quite stern. He told me that my sister had said she'd seen me skipping and dancing all over the graves and that my behaviour was very inappropriate as that would be very upsetting to the families of people who were buried there. I tried to explain about the old man and can't really remember what Dad's response was. I could have sworn all I did was stand there, I knew better than to go skipping around graves and nor would I want to. But my sister was insistent that's what I was doing. Could have just been exaggerating but the whole thing freaked me out and I was always afraid of walking that way after that!
Years later on the same island when I was about 18, I was walking along the Main Street with my then boyfriend and we were laughing about something. An older lady came over and took my hand and said 'I hope you are eternally as happy as you are right now', gave me a gentle smile and walked away. It was so lovely, and a much nicer stranger experience! :-)