We humans are curious creatures, and our desire to know how everything works drives us to explore as far as we can see. But the universe isn't always willing to give us all the answers.
On the contrary, as one Reddit thread shows, sometimes we're left in the dark and simply have to accept the limits of our perception and cognition.
Created by platform user elibwell, it asked people the question, "What is the strangest thing that happened to you that you can’t logically explain?" and quickly went viral.
Since then, people have shared plenty of interesting stories, proving that life can easily be stranger than fiction. Here are some of the most memorable ones.
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In 1996, I had just dropped out of University and was moving home to my parent's place. My tail was firmly between my legs, I had almost no money and no job prospects. Basically I was screwed.
I had an old Jeep Comanchee with all my belongings in the back and 200 miles to go. I borrowed $20 from a friend for gas and started the trip. I got to a point that was 30 miles from home and was on empty. I pulled into a gas station/rest stop and sort of cried for a minute in my truck. I needed $5 for gas to make it the rest of the way and had nothing. There was no way I could call my dad and ask for help...he was already so disappointed.
After a minute I started searching around my truck for change...anything...I opened the glove box and there were these paper 'loyalty bucks' for a gas station that I never used. It turns out it was the exact gas station that I was stopped at. $4.70 worth of bucks. I found another $2.00 in change, put $6.00 in the gas tank and bought a coke.
I made it home.
Fast forward 20 years, I had sorted my cr*p out and am a lawyer...that Gas Station hired me as their outside counsel...I got to tell this story to the President of the company.
I’m a firefighter and we got a call for an overdose around 3 am to a rough part of our district in the middle of winter. Unfortunately the patient was long gone and her dealer or whatever found her like that when he dropped some stuff. As we were packing up our stuff mind you this is a absolutely trashed mobile home, I hear something down the hall that said “lights?” I ask my partner if he said anything as it was just him and I cleaning up he said no. I walk to the far end of the trailer where I heard it and shine my flashlight I get a reflection out of the window. They have a small tool shed and it had a flickering light, it peeked my interest so my partner and I go out there. We hear crying and notice the door is padlocked. We cut it, and this little six year old girl was in there. She said her mom puts her in there when she gets mad at her. She said she got scared when she heard the sirens and didn’t know what to do. To this day I have no idea what happened or where the voice came from, but I’ll take the win on it.
Was the 25th anniversary of my dads death. Was as always, thinking about it all day long. He was only 49 when he passed.
Was passing a funeral home and got kind of sad, little more than normal. Was just hitting me hard. I was as at a stop light.
Looked at car in front of me...
License Plates read: LUV DAD
As a child visiting my Grandma's house (My Mum's - mum), whenever I left the house I'd wave next door to Ken who was always sat in the bay window looking out at the sea. They lived right on the coast off the North Sea in Hartlepool (UK) We'd never really talk, but just a little wave before I went to get into the car.
One time I'm leaving my Grans house, I'm in front of my Mum who's stopped at the door to talk to my Gran. So I head down the steps and towards the gate. I turn back and see Ken in the window. Big smile as usual, waving at me. I give him a wave back. He stands up, gives me the thumbs up, and wanders towards the back of the room. My Mum comes walking down the steps and asks "Who are you waving at?" I replied "Ken".
To this day, I can remember my mam's face. She just went white, but didn't say anything to me.
It was only a few weeks later when she plucked up the courage to tell me, that Ken had died a few days prior to our visit to my Grans.
I don't believe in ghosts, but I know I saw him. I can still picture his striped grey sweater with light stripes across it. Him waving and getting up out of his chair. There was no-one else in the house, he lived by himself.
Brains are weird.
My mum alway swore that when she was seven she heard a knock at the door at 1 am and when she answered it , she saw her nan and said she'd wake everyone up, but her nan said" no I just came to see if you're all alright" and walked away. 2 days later they found out she died the night of her visit. My mum never believed in anything supernatural but always swore this was true.
When I was 10 years old I didn't want to go to school one day. I faked a stomachache so my Grandmother would let me stay home. Ive always been a bad liar, so my Gma tried to call my bluff. She told me if I was too sick for school then she would be scheduling me a Drs Appointment. 3 hours later I was rushed into emergency surgery. My fake illness was actually appendicitis and It was so inflamed that if I hadn't come in that day my appendix would have ruptured potentially killing me. I felt 100% fine that day. Faking sick saved my life...
One morning I woke up and noticed my camera was on top of the sofa opposite my bed. I knew I didn’t put it there because it was a very expensive camera and it could very easily fall from this place. I had placed it in my cabinet. I went over, picked it up, and turned it on and clicked the button to view photos. There were hundreds of photos of me sleeping, all seemingly taken from the back of the sofa. I was literally so freaked out, I couldn’t stop crying. I lived alone. It was just photo after photo of me sleeping. The photos were taken in “quick snap”, where the camera takes approx one photo per second. I later realised the camera didn’t even have a “quick snap” setting so technically it was impossible for the camera to take the photos at all. The time stamps suggest all photos were taken between 2 and 3am. I’ve never figured out wtf happened, how the camera got to the sofa, or how it is even possible for a camera with no quick snap to quick snap, but I still have a USB with the photos on it and it still freaks me the f- out.
When my daughter was little and she would get upset, something in the kitchen would randomly break. Happened way too many times to be coincidental and the things that broke did so in inexplicable ways. I clearly remember one instance very early in the morning standing in the kitchen, telling her she couldn’t have cake from the night before. She immediately looked angry and I heard a weird “plink” sound in the cupboard. Opened it to find the plate on the top of the stack was cracked in several places.
No signs of this in later years. She’s 24 now and I often allude to this and remind her boyfriend not to piss her off.
Hubs and I going up to my parents’ house on Christmas Eve. Hubs is driving, we’re in the mountains, there’s snow on the ground. It’s just past midnight.
I see a woman wearing shorts and a striped tee shirt, walking a dog, wearing no shoes. She has brown feathered hair- think Farrah Fawcet in the 80s. I turn to my husband to ask him if he sees this crazy woman... and she’s gone. Weirded myself out, but laughed it off.
Next day, I tell the story to my parents. They give each other a weird look, and my Dad says...
“I’ve seen her, too.”
Long story short, I lost a jacket at a roller rink when I was in 3rd grade. I had a lucky rabbit foot in the pocket that I bought at the skate shop inside.
Months later, my mother, who is adopted, found her birth mother and her half sister. The first time I went to my newly found Aunt's house, she said she had a jacket that might fit me. It was my jacket, rabbit foot still in the pocket.
Time slipped by my friend and I one day. We got a contract in another town and drove out daily for 2 weeks. It was 1 hour to get there and 1 hour back but one day it took us 3 hours to get back to town. My friend realized something was wrong when his wife called him up asking why he turned his phone off and why he was so late. We left a little before 2pm and the call came almost at 5pm.
To this day we can't explain it, and to further complicate matters we both have receipts from a gas station we stopped at just before we got on the highway that are time stamped a bit after 2pm. My theory is that the aliens took us for 2 hours but who the hell knows.
It usually takes me 3.5-4 hours to drive through Ohio. One time it only took an hour, but I didn't notice till someone asked how I got to their home so fast.
So this still baffles me but when I was a kid we had moved into a new house and while the realtor was showing us around the house I saw a lady sitting at a white dresser in a pink room and she even waved at me but when I asked my mom who that was she just brushed me off because she was trying to listen to the realtor. The weird thing is that there were no rooms painted pink in the house and my family just played it off despite me being adamant of what I saw. Anyway fast forward a few years and I'm in high school at this point and we start renovating the house and while stripping the wallpaper in the master bedroom we found out it was painted pink at some point. Still low-key freaks me out.
I think the lady who lived there previously was just being friendly:)
Not to me, but to my dad. He would get horrible nosebleeds as a teen/young adult so he had cauterization, and they all but stopped by his late twenties. Fast forward 20+ years and he’s driving on the highway with my mom and sister, approaching an area where it drops to one lane. His nose starts hemorrhaging out of nowhere, hadn’t happened in forever. He pulled over for about 2 minutes to staunch the bleeding, then they were on their way. They were quickly stopped by a small line up of cars, dead stopped. No emergency vehicles were on the scene yet, but there’d been an accident. Turns out a head-on collision with at least 2 fatalities had occurred about 2 minutes prior. A bloody nose quite possibly saved my family’s life.
When I was in college, a drunk dude fell from a 3rd floor balcony and got up and walked away like it was nothing. Seriously one of the weirdest/freakish things I’ve ever seen in my life.
This has been researched. Drunks don't tense up the way sober people do, so they're less likely to be hurt or killed when they fall or are in a car accident.
I used to fence (the sport, not stolen goods). I was at a tournament and had just started a bout against a competitor. You win the bout by being the first to 5 points. I score what I believe to be first point, but the official indicates the match is over and I've won. I stood there confused for a second, but my opponent seems to agree and salutes and approaches for a handshake, so I go along with it. I check the scorecard and it says I've won 5-2. Totally lost probably 4 or 5 minutes of time. Hasn't happened since to the best of my knowledge, but it's been 20 years and I still wonder what happened.
You were so into the moment you didn’t feel the time fo past presumably
I have a vivid memory of being at the Statue of Liberty as a child, on my dad’s shoulders, seeing the skyline of NYC. I remember what we ate for lunch that day, etc. I remember the ferry we took. I’ve always thought about this memory and talked about it, but my family denies I ever went to NYC. I didn’t go for the first time until I was 23, but strangely enough, when I went, I remembered everything just how it had been when I was there with my dad.
I was driving across the US and drove into Salt Lake City. For whatever reason, I got a craving for IHOP, so I punched it into Google Maps and followed the directions to a spot in the middle of town.
I walk in, and the place is....empty.
I don't mean like there were no customers. I mean there is literally not a person in the place. No wait staff, no customers, no cooks. Nobody. There was partially eaten food on all the tables. Bags and purses in the booths. TVs on everywhere. Burgers on the grill slowly burning. And there wasn't a soul in the place, like they all just vanished at once.
I was so freaked out I hopped in my car and drove until I hit the Nevada border before stopping to eat. Still have no idea what the f- happened.
I hit a patch of black ice in the dark going 60mph down the highway. At the time, I drove a 1 ton cargo van. It hit the guard rail and flipped. Not only did I walk away without a scratch, the car was drivable and I was only 30 min late to work.
I had recently watched an early episode of criminal minds where an arsonist would lock people in their homes before lightning the house on fire. For whatever reason it kinda got to me. A night or two later I woke up out of a dead sleep and couldn’t get that episode out of my mind so I finally decided to just get up and check the front door. I swear I could not open the door. Unlocked it, but it was totally stuck. I woke up my husband because I was so freaked out. He also tried and couldn’t get the door open, and he’s a big guy! I ended up climbing out a window so I could push the door from the outside while he pulled from the inside. We finally got it open. I didn’t watch criminal minds for a long time after that.
when I was younger we lived in a 110 year old victorian house. Everyone would notice weird things.
I was home alone organizing the silverware when I dropped a fork on to the table only to have it bounce once and fly at the wall like someone slaped it. I still have no idea how you can drop something strait down and have it launch horizontal for 5 ft
my parents when they first bought the house turned off all the lights (5 floors if you count basement and attic) My mom did the top 2, father did the bottom, the met in the middle, went to the first floor, left, got to the car and noticed not only was the 3rd floor light on but the blinds were now up.
we had a seesaw, my mother turned on the light and saw it violently going up and down
I was in the basement and felt a hand brush down my back. I jumped and turned and saw no one there. I convinced myself it was just my shirt moving weird. As I went up the steps I heard giggling.
when I was older I was sitting on the couch and heard my dad say "What the fu waTCH OUT" right before a framed puzzel we had fell on me. My dad said he saw it lift it's self off the hook
we had a Mastiff, A rottweiler, and a German Shepard. They refused to go to the attic.
our entrence had two sets of doors. The front dors, then a small room, then the second set of doors. We never locked those doors as it was two large bolts that went into the floor and then a 3rd bolt that held the two doors together. Locking it was very hard with a key so you could only do it from the inside with considerable force. We came home one day and the door was locked with all 3 bolts. In other words our completly sealed house was locked from the inside. My mother flipped, grabbed us, and ran to a payphone to call the police because if that door is locked then there is someone in the house unless the left via a second or 3rd story window. 3 cop cars came, they unlocked the door with my mothers key and swept every last inch of the place down to one of them going into our crawl space. Nothing. Not only that my mothers gold necklace was laying on the table and all the windows were locked. We had a family friend who is a cop and one of my uncles who is a cop come spend the night. Next morning everyones is up and my uncle goes to leave only to see that the door is again locked from the inside. We removed those locks that same day.
Mastiff was laying next to me while I was watching TV. Suddenly he jumps up and backs into me. He's growling and snarling while staring up the steps. The other two dogs run in and immediately have their ears go back and their mohawks go up. This went on for several minutes. Our german shepherd started inching toward the step and did a little lunge nipping at the air bearing his teeth. about a 5 seconds later I heard what sounded like someone full sprinting up the steps of the first floor from the landing to the second-floor steps, then the third. I called my mom from the house phone. While on the phone I heard what I can only describe as a wail from the the 3rd floor.
Years later, parents are divorced, I'm with my dad for the weekend. I helped him clean the 3rd floor. We put the toys in a large toy chest from the closet they where in. While we our brushing our teeth I go pale. I'm hearing something so I shut off the water and ask my dad to listen. We both are completely quite. The sound starts again. it's the sound of clink clink but a bit of rythm to it. I couldn't place it at first then said "Dad I think that's the xylophone" we go up and the toy chest is open and the xylophone is on the floor.
Both of my lungs collapsed at the same time (almost over 50% collapsed) and I was walking around like I was perfectly normal. Until I decided to go to the ER for bubble sounds in my chest. None of the doctors could figure out why this had happened to me. They didn’t know how I was just up and walking around and laughing
Several times a year I'll suddenly get a though that it's been a long time (usually months) since I last spoke with a particular friend or relative, then I will get a voice call or an email from that person within a few hours. Can't explain it. I never tell them about this because I fear losing this strange thing that I have. Anybody else have this?
I was in traction in hospital, a guy who said he worked maintenence came into my room to repair the light above the shower. I was in traction and could never leave the bed I was in, we joked sarcastically how the light would be so handy for me. He asked what happened to me, and he told me about the terrible industrial accident he was in. He said he would come back and visit me and bring photos of the injuries that the Dr.s said would leave him unable to walk (same diagnosis I had been given). He did come back with photos, we had a good talk, I felt very encouraged when he left. The next few days I told different staff members about this nice young man. They all told me no one with that name worked maintenence in the hospital. They had not heard of him and said maintenence was not working on our hospital floor that day nor the whole week.
I turned to the other person in the room, who I barely knew, and said "My sister is getting engaged right now," without having the intent of speaking at all.
He politely asked why I said that, and I had to shake my head and say "I don't know."
A few days later I found up that, sure enough, ah that exact moment on the far side of the world, she had said "yes" to Mr. Right.
I hadn't even known she was dating.
When I was about 12 years old I went up to Lake Tahoe with my friend and his parents who had a condo in Incline Village. One day, the two of us are walking to the bowling alley and cross a street in a crosswalk. Right before we get to the curb, a car comes really close to hitting us. All of a sudden, we're both up on the curb, like we were lifted a few feet. We both looked at each other strangely.
"Did you jump?"
"No, did you?"
"No"
We spent the next hour kind of dumbfounded. It didn't feel like a shove or any use of force. We were still in the street, then we weren't.
Ok, so it's not that I can't explain it, or if it even needs explaining really, but was just so bizarre I still recall it at least a few times a year.
When I was about 18 I worked at a grocery store and one day this young man entered, that I sh*t you not, looked EXACTLY like me. Like, weirdly too much alike, he and I. This young man was wearing the same damn outfit as me, khakis, a blue polo, and a brown coat, though his coat was a little darker. When this gentlemen met my gaze we were just eye-locked at every point we could see one another throughout the store, both with the stupidest perplexed looks on our faces. The only difference I could tell was this person was a little older than I and had a goatee. I assume this was my evil twin. He left the store after buying his stuff and life went on.
But...It doesn't end there.
The next day a strange woman approached me asking "stupidd**kface, why are you here?!" I turn around to to see someone I do not know. "How do you know my name?" , I ask, "Do you know me?" She says, "Oh my gosh, I thought you were my son stupidd**kface, you look EXACTLY like him!" The dude even shares my f-ing name. This sh*t is weird. I confirmed with the lady that her son stupidd**kface did come in the day before and was home temporarily from college. Another very perplexed person from this oddity.
So. I continue to ask her about her son since we look identical and she told me about his age(2 years older) and where he grew up(the town over) and he has two older brothers and a younger sister. I have two older brothers and a younger sister....I asked this womans name and of course, "Oh my name is Karen, nice to meet you." My mothers name is Karen... I didn't probe on any further, but I'm not even sure I want to know how far down that alternate universe me went. It was just so unbelievably strange, the circumstane overall. But the weirdest thing by far that is what sticks with me most is this weird a*s feeling I had when stupidd**kface and I were staring at each other. I assume he felt this too by the look on his face. A feeling I've never felt and still have since felt. A feeling that I can really only describe as knowing that the other person I'm looking at is me some how. I don't now, can't explain it fully. I wonder if identical twins feel that same stuff.
For anyone wondering, the lady did not swear at them/her son, it's op's username. Probably just me who needed the explanation though lol.
At friends house. Friend was in garage working on dirt bike. Driveway empty because parents left a while ago. Go inside to grab a soda but decide to look for his cat. Who I haven't seen all day. I walk into the office and as Im calling her name, a deep man's voice goes "Meow" right into my right ear. I jump and run around the main floor looking for who said that. Didn't find anyone.
I had a sleep paralysis nightmare when I was a kid, where I saw a red-eyed dark figure standing in the doorway. It's always stuck with me, and I've called him the boogeyman ever since. One day I was browsing Reddit and somebody painted a picture of their "sleep paralysis demon". It was like the guy had painted my exact dream. And then a bunch of people commented that they had seen the same creature. It always makes me uneasy to think about.
I think that most of us have a pretty basic idea of what a “boogeyman” looks like, so it’s not that surprising that multiple people has the same image in their minds.
My dad owned a small garden shop, so I'd stay behind the checkout after school till the shop closed. This was until I see a tall man wearing all black, like a trench coat, walking past my dad and smiling at me before going into a staff only area. I jump up to stop him, even though I was 7. This back area filled with new shipments. I turn the corner but nobody is there. There was nowhere he could've gone. I ask my dad to check the CCTV after closing, but it's only shown me jumping up and running, and running out of frame. Weird stuff, never felt comfortable there again.
sounds like the start of most horror movies dont believe the kid then all hell breaks loose
I was just a 6-year-old kid deciding what to do after school while I was in my grandparents living room. I saw a red flash shoot out of the wall and go from that side to the other wall and into it.
A second later a big earthquake hit.
I saw some sort of visual shock wave from the earthquake. And no it wasn't those weird lightning ball things. In my childish mind I thought that I just saw the flash (The comic book character) run through the room.
Another cool one that is explained by sheer unbelievable coincidence is that I phoned a friend so I hadn't spoken to in at least 3 years and it went to voicemail. After I left a voicemail I saw I had a voicemail notification. It was a voicemail from the person who I just called. The weirdest part is that we must have called each other at exactly the same moment otherwise it would have done the call waiting thing instead of sending to voicemail. We immediately called each other back and tripped out about how weird that was.
My girlfriend got out of the shower and called me into the bathroom to show me the mirror. There was a very strange, distinct handprint placed on the mirror.
I lived alone and she was the only adult that had been to my house in about two years. We each placed our handprints on the sides of the mystery handprint for reference and neither look anything like the mystery print. I still have no idea how it got there.
It's hard to pick the strangest, but there was the time a can of soda exsploded, and then didn't.
I was working in my garden and had gotten myself a can of coke zero. I cracked it open on my way out the back door, took a few hearty chugs and sat it on my small garden table I keep out by my raised beds, and got back to working in the garden. I have on wireless earbuds and listening to a podcast as I work on cleaning the pumpkin patch of weeds, when out of the blue I hear and practically feel a loud BANG, to the point I exclaimed louded "what the f*ck?!" and pull my ear buds out.
I live in a rough neighborhood, there's been shootings and what not so I kind of duck down and start looking around to get a feel of things. That's when I see it. My can of coke is knocked down to the ground and just spitting foamy coke every where. No way that's the noise, right? But I run over and pick it up (with the logic being diet coke probably isn't even good for plants) and I wipe it clean and start looking it over and I realize not only is it full, it's completely unopened. I know I opened it, I know I drank half of it, and I know moments before I had seen it laying on the ground shooting coke up into the air. I even had to wipe it off.
I have no idea what the bang was, or how my open spilled coke suddenly became full and unopened in my hands.
I think the plants you are growing may be a little dubious?
When I was like 8 I had a battery operated lamp that worked for like a week with no battery’s in it
This one is strange to me because it was so long ago and I'm convinced I have to be remembering things wrong. I was a young kid at the grocery store and I saw this toy helicopter (like hot wheel sized) that I really wanted for some reason. I, of course, didn't buy it, but it the memory of it stuck in my head. A few nights later, I had a dream where I was playing with the helicopter, but I realized it was a dream and stupid young me thought that if I put it under my pillow, it would still be there when I woke up. After that, I woke up and eagerly checked under the pillow to get it. For some reason, it was right where I left it in the dream. As a kid, I wasn't surprised to find it there as it all made perfect since to me then, but years later I have no clue how the toy helicopter actually got underneath the pillow.
Parents saw him take an interest in the toy helicopter, bought it for him, and put it under his pillow.
I'm too young to remember this, actually. But my mom always tells this story.
Apparently, when I was younger, like barely able to speak, I was sitting on the floor playing with some toys nonchalantly with my mom when I just said "when I was in heaven, I met a woman who said you'd be the perfect mommy for me."
I apparently held the belief that I was in heaven before being born, and an angel looked at me and chose the mom I went to. My mom asked me to describe the woman, and I apparently described my mom's great grandmother perfectly. Down to the eye colour. I had never met my great great grandmother, nor seen a picture of her.
I was in my room watching Hulu (The Simpsons, doesn’t matter) and a Burger King commercial comes on but it’s just the king mascot and he’s like “let’s have a staring contest” and I’m like “hmmm, okay” and I’m staring, he’s staring and suddenly I blink... IMMEDIATELY he says “gotcha, I won” and I was like WTF!??? I slammed my laptop shut and was creeped out the entire night. I watched Hulu all the time in hopes of running into that commercial but I never saw it again.
I've had a really bizarre and unpleasant experience very recently. Somebody here on BP has decided to report literally every post I make as inappropriate, which gets me an automatic one day ban (presumably while they look into it). So every day I have been getting bans and then when I ask them, they say it's a mistake, except their algorithm then banned me for five days because of "repeated violations" except there hadn't been violations in the first place. It's been really sad, because this is a happy place for me and someone has just randomly decided to spoil it for me. So whoever you are, please leave me alone.
I'm sorry, Jo Choto. I understand how infuriating that would be. I hope the a hole doing that gets caught.
Load More Replies...Wow! Reading those stories brought back a memory.... When I was 10 yrs old, I was home with my mom when the phone rang. I then - for no reason at all - said "It's the hospital. Dad has been in an accident.". Well, I was wrong, it was not the hospital. 5 minutes later, the phone rang again and it WAS the hospital, calling about my dad having been in a car accident. Ok, that is spooky in itself. Now, what I feel equally spooky, is that I am thinking about this today. My dad's accident happened on April 1st 1982, 40 yrs ago today... BTW, while dad was hurt pretty bad in the crash, he healed nicely. He turned 80 last week and us in perfect health.
I've had a really bizarre and unpleasant experience very recently. Somebody here on BP has decided to report literally every post I make as inappropriate, which gets me an automatic one day ban (presumably while they look into it). So every day I have been getting bans and then when I ask them, they say it's a mistake, except their algorithm then banned me for five days because of "repeated violations" except there hadn't been violations in the first place. It's been really sad, because this is a happy place for me and someone has just randomly decided to spoil it for me. So whoever you are, please leave me alone.
I'm sorry, Jo Choto. I understand how infuriating that would be. I hope the a hole doing that gets caught.
Load More Replies...Wow! Reading those stories brought back a memory.... When I was 10 yrs old, I was home with my mom when the phone rang. I then - for no reason at all - said "It's the hospital. Dad has been in an accident.". Well, I was wrong, it was not the hospital. 5 minutes later, the phone rang again and it WAS the hospital, calling about my dad having been in a car accident. Ok, that is spooky in itself. Now, what I feel equally spooky, is that I am thinking about this today. My dad's accident happened on April 1st 1982, 40 yrs ago today... BTW, while dad was hurt pretty bad in the crash, he healed nicely. He turned 80 last week and us in perfect health.