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.

Couldn't agree more. This has been a brilliant thread, especially the nicer encounters people have had.

This was a common thing in Glasgow when I was growing up. The shoplifters used to go round the pubs selling it 😆

I rarely take a train (six times a year) and if I do it is a three hourish journey starting point from three different stations and to about four different cities.
One journey, a lady sat next to me and mention her plans for the day and that she was worried that one place she had to go to had no seating. I knew the place well and told her where there was a seating area on the top floor (no where near a bathroom). She thanked me and said she would be going there a lot over the next year and that she was delighted to know where the seating area was.

Three times since I have met her on train journeys to and from different places. She recognised me and reassures me that she says a prayer for me when she sits on a public loo!! Sadly at the top of her voice and half way down the carriage.

When I was about 18/19 I worked in a shop in the city centre. Thursdays were late night shopping and the shop didn’t close til 9, which then meant I had to wait almost an hour for my bus home at 10. One night I was waiting for the bus and there was no one else around. I noticed a car slowing down across the road and a man in his 50s got out, came up to me and asked if I needed a lift somewhere. No pre-amble, he literally stopped his car in the middle of the road and made a beeline straight for me.

I don’t know what made me say it (I’m usually not good at thinking on my feet) but I immediately replied that I was waiting for my dad and he’d be there any second. He scuttled quickly back into the car and drove off.

Obviously he could have just been a kind-hearted stranger but something about him rang alarm bells and I instinctively knew I needed to get away from him as quickly as I could.

I then sort of hid at the back of the bus stop praying for the bus to be early 😂

I was in Wilko, looking at seed potatoes.
Some random guy told me, as if imparting a secret:
'You can't actually grow potatoes from seed, only from other potatoes you know'
I briefly thought about this and said
'So how do they breed new varieties, then?'
'Ah!' he said, meaningfully 'They have secret methods that we are not allowed to know about'.
Of course They do......So how do you get new varieties??

@Orla83 gosh! thank you!!! I think other stories are waaaaaaay more interesting. However, since you've been so kind, I'll tell you another one 😋

When I was 18 and first left school, my best friend and I went youth hostelling in Switzerland. It was an eventful holiday (long story!), which culminated in us having to spend the night in Geneva just before flying home the next day. We had nowhere to stay, and not a penny between us. (This was, again, the early 1980s; there was no TripAdvisor, we had no credit card or mobile phone.) We just wandered the streets, looking in shop windows etc.

We were just gazing at the menu of a very expensive restaurant when a man in his 30s approached us and offered to buy us a meal. Of course, we said no. Of course, he insisted! And in the end, hunger got the better of us. It was either that or spend the next 15 hours wandering around, too scared to unroll our sleeping bags in a shop doorway. I don't think Geneva would have tolerated that for one second.

So, we ended up well fed. And it was a very pleasant meal conversation, in the kind of restaurant we'd never have set foot in normally as it was way beyond our means. Between us, my friend and I combined probably had the common sense of a small rodent, but we were quite good at intellectual conversation and hoped to impress him with our education. Not that he cared, I'm sure!😁

He offered us to stay at his place for the night, and by then, who were we to argue?! I don't like to say that he plied us with drink, but in retrospect I think he probably plied us with drink.

When we finally went to bed, we asked, "So, where are we sleeping?" He wandered into his vast bedroom, lay on the bed, and patted either side of the mattress. "In here with me," he announced.

Not bloody likely! We set up our sleeping bags on the floor in the lounge, and couldn't sleep for hooting with laughter, poor man.

When we woke the next morning, he'd already left for work and had left us a very sweet note telling us to help ourselves to food, shower, etc, and to post the keys in his postbox on the ground floor when we left.

Only by daylight did we realise that he had a superb penthouse suite overlooking Lake Leman (he was a private tennis coach). We made ourselves breakfast, noticed cards from his girlfriend on the shelves, and left, posting the keys in the letterbox as instructed.

When I look back on this, I wonder if this kind of innocent encounter would be possible nowadays in the age of internet porn. It would be all too easy for him to tell himself that we were sluts who knew exactly what we were getting into, and the price to pay. 😥

At the time, I had got myself into a mindset that life was all about taking risks or it wasn't really worth living. It all paid off back then, yet later in life this recklessness fed into some shockingly bad relationships. I feel very privileged to have had some very positive memories just through the kind of trust I wouldn't risk now.

I've thought of another. At a previous address, let's call it 27 Green Street, I used to regularly get sent a sample pack of nappies - no name on the package and the covering letter began 'As per your request, we are pleased to send ...' DH and I were child-free and the previous owners weren't of child bearing age, very puzzling.

One day I opened the door to a lady who had a birthday card, present, and a party invitation and her small child was clutching a balloon. "We've come to the party! Oh, is this the right house?" Er, sorry no. Her friend (school gate parent?) said she lived at 27 Green Street but no, she didn't.

I never did find out where they should have gone and wonder if the nappies were frequently requested by the mysterious mother who really lived elsewhere and wondered why she never received them.

I was having lunch at a cafe and was with my (small and very non threatening) dog, I chose a café with outdoor tables but needed to go inside to order. The sandwich counter was right by the front door so I asked the boy behind the counter if I could briefly bring my dog inside while I ordered (it was about two steps inside and my dog is very clingy, I was perfectly happy to go elsewhere if he'd said no but he said it was absolutely fine). A woman sitting inside the cafe then started absolutely screaming at me for bringing the dog in, ignoring the fact I'd been told it was fine, I quickly ordered and went back outside and she kept screaming about me for the next ten minutes, a couple of policemen walked past and she then accosted them and tried to persuade them to arrest me! Now I might find it amusing but at the time I was pregnant and hormonal and sat there with tears streaming down my face, which didn't stop her screaming at me! I should have just left but I'd paid for my lunch and was waiting for it to arrive.

oops, forgot to say in my story about the Swiss tennis coach... He actually said, when trying to coax us into his bedroom, "Have you ever done it in a threesome?" so he wasn't just offering us a comfy bed with no strings attached 😎

One from today. Heading out of my village and towards the duel carriageway to head into town. Village roads were quiet, so it was just me and the car in front. I was in no rush, just bimbling along at 20mph, with a big gap between me and the car in front.

She kept randomly standing on her brakes so I'd catch up a little bit, then waving her blue badge out of the window. I'm really confused at this point and decide to pull over and let her head off. Sitting in the car at the side of the road, admiring the jubilee decorations, when she pulls up next to me and starts screaming at me that she's disabled and I shouldn't be following her, and to stop tailgating her. She waved her blue badge in my face again and drove off like a mad woman.

Really weird experience! I swear to god I wasn't tailgating her either - there must have been four or five car lengths between us!

A city in the Midlands. The customer I'm thinking of looked to be early twenties so I assume too young to be married. But you never know. He had strawberry blonde hair.

That was meant to be a reply to @poetrylover !

My partner, dog and I were on a train back from London and sat down across the aisle from a young Lithuanian woman. We chatted for a while and she was clearly enjoying the free drinks in first class and her supplementary carry out. My partner leaves to use the toilet and comes back to find her serenading me and the dog on her ukulele with Radiohead’s “Creep”. I still can’t think of that song without thinking of the drunk girl on the train!

@poetrylover @whiskersonkittenss This is exactly like the road sweeper I mentioned earlier in the thread.

Black eyes, evil stare, I actually felt pure hatred like he wanted to kill me.

The weird thing is I had such a feeling of doom and hatred whilst I was stood waiting for my friend, I looked around, saw him staring at me and realised it was coming from him.

I’ve seen him a couple times since and he stood what he’s doing and stares at me and every time I get a sense of panic, like I want to run away from him. 😦

Oh gosh I've just thought of another one!

Family holiday at a Yorkshire seaside town with family. Me and my sister were maybe 12 and 11.

We had gone for a walk through a cliff top park alone (safer times) after breakfast and along the way there was a jogger running towards us. He stopped and quite urgently asked where the nearest toilets were.

We pointed him to a cafe a minute or so up ahead and before he could start running he actually shit himself and it ran all down his legs and on to the pavement.

We were horrified and ran away! I can't even imagine how he must have felt though!

I don't think I'd have started a thread about it, as it wasn't that weird at all, but it's given us this interesting thread to read.

The person at the checkout and the atmosphere of the keys jangling she remembered years later I agree with. I think the author of the post was the strange one. Sorry!

So many strange things
1.walking my nervous dog who scared of everyone this lady came up to us started talking to him in a foreign language (he was then putty in her hands) she spoke to me then said she had to go as she was on her way to Russia ( uk here) I said goodbye she walked away,when I turned back to look where she was she had vanished
2.in the supermarket pushing my trolley but leaning on it for support,two old ladies poked me on the bottom hard with their umbrellas then said stand up straight (I’m disabled

When my DS was 6 months old I met my friend and her 1 yr old in a coffee shop. A grandmother took her grandson to the toilet who must have been about 2. When she came out she approached me (not my friend) and said 'I thought being a mother yourself you would offer to help an old lady change her grandson's nappy, instead of just sitting there letting me struggle'. I was stunned. As if I'd leave my 6 month old to go and wipe a random kids arse!

Ah - I was in the north west. Out of all the parent's evenings I have ever been to, I remember him. He had really black hair. He also just stared at me throughout the appointment. It was horrible.

Did he ask for you to make it snappy 😆😆

I had one a bit like that and it was always stuck in my mind because it was so odd.

I was driving along a suburban street one mid morning, when I realised I'd gone the wrong way, so I indicated and pulled over into a really large layby intending to turn. A woman in her sixties was walking along the pavement and so to be extra polite, I waited briefly before starting my turning manouvure, but not very near her and not looking at her or anything. As she walked past my car she stopped, banged on the bonnet 2 or 3 times really hard and started shouting at me. I couldn't hear what she was saying so rolled down my window and she came over and started screaming at me, really angry and in an absolute rage, what did I think I was doing, it was terrible, and she was going to report me to the police.

I was so astonished. I'm a particularly mild looking individual whom people sometimes mistake for a pushover, I wasn't on my phone, I was literally being polite and letting her go past on the pavement before turning, in case I alarmed her or part of the car intruded onto the pavement. It was a really obvious place to turn and it would have been obvious what I was doing.

I still have no idea why this happened. Imagine if I'd wanted to ask her for directions or something. There was literally nothing to set her off.

@QuebecBagnet @whiskersonkittenss

I posted on here ages ago under a different name about how I had read about this and was terrified they were going to knock for me as I was home alone.

I won't go in the hot tub at the end of the garden on my own if it's dark . Ie probably eight metres from the kitchen French doors incase they come and drown me.

There was a poster who said they'd had a personal experience with black eyed kids but they didn't elaborate and I was too chicken to ask.

Had one yesterday! Had cycles into town for a change of scene and was sitting reading on a bench. A man walked up to me (looked homeless) and I shook my head. 'i wasn't going to ask for money' he said. Ok. 'do you know where I can get a needle kit - I usually get them from boots but they're closed.'. I've never even had anyone ask me if I need to buy drugs, so it was pretty random!

He's wrong. Potatoes have flowers that then produce berries (they look like little tomatoes) and inside are true potato seeds. I'm growing some right now! But the seed will grow lots of different variants and if you like one of them you then use the seed potato (the clone) to continue that variety the next year

When I was about 12, I was with my mum and we were driving down a deserted country lane. We saw a man by the side of the road who was naked apart from his pants who had been hog tied and left there. I got out of the car and untied him and he ran off! I can only think it was a stag-do prank or something as he never said. So bizarre and I wonder how long the poor bloke had been lying there 🤷‍♀️