A lot of stuff that happens is inexplicable, on one level or another. But there is a big, biiiiiig difference between that one level and the other. Inexplicable things like picking up your phone to look at it right before you get a call, well, that could be coincidence. Inexplicable like you remembering to go feed your neighbor’s cat right before your house explodes – that seems a little less coincidental. More like there was some…influence. Or something.
All of these 19 AskReddit stories are bizarre and unexplainable, but some of them seem downright haunted:
19. Statistically Improbable
I was doing an audit of a public program. I pulled a sample from something like 60,000 people. There was 12 people with the same name in the same town. I thought this was a clerical error so I asked for backup. I found out 6 were really different people but 6 others had the same middle initial and Birthday. I asked for ids and they sent me 8. There was 8 people with the same first and last name, same middle initial, same birthday, born in the same area. The two extras were two people with all those similarities but they both had died. Here is the kicker, they died on the same day.
I think about this all the time.
18. Missing Person
My cousin dropped her kids off at Daycare 11 years ago and was never seen again. Her face has been plastered all over my state, she’s been on countless news segments and was even featured on the missing persons segment of America’s most wanted. Then a few years back her name came up in a torture case where the guy threatened to put his victim in the same hole he put Melanie in. Her case is still no closer to being solved.
17. “…told me you were on your way”
My great grandmother was in hospital and died. Because my great grandfather was elderly and it was 2 am, they rang their daughter, my grandmother, to go and break the news to my grandfather. So, at 2 am, my mother and my grandmother head over to his house to find him up, dressed, coat on, hat on, waiting for them. “Oh did the hospital call you already?” “No, my wife just came and saw me, told me you were on your way to take me to say goodbye to her body.” Utterly true, and always gives me chills when I think about it.
16. “No way it could have been working”
My grandma passed away on Christmas day of 2009. She was my next door neighbor, and left her house in my dad’s name. After her passing, we completely emptied out the house, cancelled the landline, cable, everything. The house had been completely vacant for months, but on my birthday the following year we received a call from her to my house’s landline. Her same phone number, even with her name on the caller ID. I freaked out, and so did my parents. we were all too confused to answer, so we just let the phone ring. My dad called the service provider to ask what was going on, but they said her account was closed, and since nobody had been paying for the service, there was no way it could have been working. Weird.
15. Cigar smoke, saving the day
When I was 13 or so, my mother and I were driving along a two-lane country road, when she said, “Do you smell that?” I didn’t smell anything.
“It’s a cigar. It’s one of my grandfather’s cigars. Keep an eye out, every time I smell it something happens.”
Less than 10 seconds later an oncoming car crossed the center line and she had to swerve onto the shoulder to avoid being hit head-on.
14. Dreaming the Future
I had a dream where my dad was fishing with a man in overalls, when suddenly some black, smoke-like monster surged from the woods and impaled him in the heart. Woke up from that dream to a phone call from my stepmother. My father was on the operating table for a heart attack. He’d been smoking since the age of 17, and it nearly killed him at 38… He had two more by the age of 41.
The kicker? He’d been replacing the toilet when it happened. Had his buddy over to help (a plumber). Hence the man in overalls.
I still get chills thinking about it.
13. Doppelganger
I was at a dueling piano bar with my girl for a night of laughing. This girl my age and who I figured was her mom kept looking at me. The night went on and they eventually came up to me and apologized for the staring and had decided to explain to me why. The old lady told me her daughter had taken her out to this piano bar tonight to celebrate her now deceased husband’s birthday and that I was actually a perfect match and looked exactly like her husband and was the same age for when they met decades ago. They asked me my name and age when I told them they both started crying as I had the same name as the husband and was the same age as when they met. They kept saying they wish they had a picture with them to show me the resemblance. The old lady and daughter asked me to please take a pic with them so they could document this and to have the pic to show the rest of family this as nobody would believe this happened. They were pretty emotional about this happening and the old lady almost pulled some tears out of me when she asked me to hug her because it was like she was going back in time and was given the chance to hug her husband once again. The daughter, to her this was like seeing her father in his prime and they were both blown away. I couldn’t say no to the pic and hug etc. The whole thing was very strange and really got me thinking about life etc. I’m a tad emotional right now thinking about this again.
12. Disappeared
My dad disappeared when I was 6 months old. Left for work one morning and we never heard from him again and he never showed up at work. He took nothing with him and didn’t touch the bank accounts. We assume he started a new life somewhere. I’ve been trying to find him for years with no luck.
11. Secret Testing
In 4th or 5th grade, we stopped all of our classes for the day. Two people came into our classroom, a man and a woman, and they didn’t say why they were there or where they had come from. They handed out questionnaire booklets, that seemed like standardized tests, except for the questions within them. 50 or so questions, all of them “true or false” format, but with really, really weird content. Some that I can remember were “T or F: Worms talk to trucks” and “T or F: Apples are blue” We all answered them while looking really confused, and our teachers were silent the entire time. The next days, nobody said a word about the tests. I remember asking people what they were, but nobody could recall where the people were from. We never saw them again, and no faculty of the school ever once mentioned the tests. We didn’t have them the next year, and had never had them before. I still have no clue what they wanted from us.
10. Ghost Story
I don’t believe in ghosts but my dad has told me about a couple of his own experiences. I can’t think of a single reason why he would lie to me about it. But the craziest one he told me was from when he was about 16. He was staying the night at his best friend’s house as he had done many times before. Everyone had already gone to bed and he was watching TV alone in the living room. Then, the TV shut off on its own and he heard the floor creek like it does when someone walks down the hall. But nobody was there, and then he saw the seat next to him on the couch become depressed, and the TV turned back on, but instead of playing his show it started playing some old black and white cartoons with subtitles. He said at this point he was petrified and couldn’t even move. Then the TV shut back off, the seat inflated, he heard steps back down the hall, and his original show he was watching came back on.
9. Lost at Sea
My uncle, never had a chance to meet him, hired a small yacht with a small group of friends and were going to use it to do sailing holidays as a business. Anyway. They radioed in very early one morning saying they were out of petrol off the coast, and were told they would receive petrol in the morning.
They went to deliver petrol and never found the boat. They have only ever found one life doughnut thing and that’s it. They think the boat was pirated, and we have reports that they’re still alive in different countries but they’ve never been substantiated. They also have a sneaking suspicion that the yacht owner had something to do with it, as he acted SO dodgy after it all went down. They literally have absolutely no idea what happened. There were no other ships in the area at the time (they thought they could have been run over and sunk by a large ship).
Anyway. It is called the Patanela. There is still a huge reward out for any info.
8. Haunted House
When I was younger I used to sleep over my best friend’s house a lot. He has an enormous, old house which is also quite beautiful. One night, I woke up and went up this long stairs to the bathroom while it was all really dark and I cant start to describe the noises I heard while I was in the bathroom. I heard steps right outside the door, heard someone scratching the door and I thought “This must be my friend pranking me”, so I went and opened the door. Nothing, absolutely nothing. the noises stopped suddenly as soon as I opened it.
I slept in the bathroom that night and recently told my friend now that we are older what happened and he told me they had their house “purged” a year ago due to weird things happening specially with his little sister.
To be honest, I dont believe in ghosts nor anything of that kind but that event was a complete horror.
7. Tranced
Was about 17 and learning to drive. Mom and I had just been to the grocery and running a few errands. It was almost dark out and we were heading home. Was first in line at a left-turn stoplight in a large intersection. The turn arrow light turned green, and I just sat there. It was a very odd sensation… I knew the light was green and needed to pull through, but couldn’t. It was like all motivation to move was gone… almost like when you’re staring off into space, but I was fully conscious that the light had changed and turning was what I was supposed to be doing. Mom didn’t say a word either, just stared at the light. About 5 seconds later, a full size Suburban came barreling through the red light. The speed limit on the road was 45, but he had to have been doing 65-75. The car shook hard when he passed us. After he ran the light, I turned like normal and mom and I both kind of “woke up.”
Afterward, we both described the same feeling coming over us at the light. If we hadn’t both been tranced-out or what have you, the Suburban would have struck us broadside. A Suburban vs a Saturn at 60-70 mph wouldn’t have been pretty. Mom would have probably been killed on impact, and I highly doubt I would have survived as well.
We still talk about it every now and then. Just a weird experience.
6. “That cool car”
When I was pretty young my mom would always go for runs around the neighborhood during the summer. One afternoon after she had been home from a run for a while I asked her “hey mom can you take me to see that cool car you saw on your run this morning?” and I described it in really great detail, based on how she had supposedly described it to me (it was a Plymouth Prowler.) She said she had no idea what I was talking about and probably had heard about it on tv or something, and not from her.
Well the very next morning she gets back from her run and is super excited and kind of freaked out, because down the street is the exact car I had described. We went and saw it, it was cool.
That was like 13 years ago and we still don’t really know how/why that happened.
5. Radio Broadcast
I used to have a clock radio that would tune to a weather frequency when my alarm went off. The day after my dad died, I woke up to the alarm, and after listening to the broadcast, I realized that it was in Danish. And it was a station in Aalborg, Denmark, where my dad had grown up. There was no way I could have reached the frequency since I was in California. I still can’t explain what happened, but I really hope it was him.
4. WTF??
It was back in high school. We were in the middle of class listening to a lesson when my vision went pitch black for a second. I assumed the lights went off but we had windows. Turns out everyone saw the same thing. Finally the teacher just bursted out saying “ok…. let’s just pretend we all blinked at the same time.” Yep… a very memorable unexplained moment for me.
3. Time Freeze
When I was in middle school, cell phones weren’t widespread yet, and I also didn’t carry a watch, so I would often do things without knowing the time.
I used to walk a mile or so to a bus stop, and I was usually the only kid that rode the bus at this time. Our schools started at staggered times, and I was the only middle schooler who rode this bus at this particular time.
I would leave my house at 6:50 and get to the bus stop by 7:20ish. I had gone with a watch before, so I knew the timing, and the bus would always arrive by 7:35, so I always had a bit of extra time.
On this particular day, it was the dead of winter and it was overcast out, so it was quite dark. I left the house at the same time I always did, my family was doing the same things at that time they always were and there was no indication of anything being weird.
I swear, I got to the bus stop, and time froze for a long time. Everything about my walk was normal, but while waiting on the usually busy street for my bus, no cars drove by, no pedestrians walked by, and my bus didn’t come for what felt like hours. The sky did get a little brighter as the day went on, but something felt really weird.
I swear I stood there for hours before, suddenly, things returned to normal and there were cars driving by and a few people walked by. My bus pulled up, and I walked on feeling very strange. I looked at the time – it said 7:33am.
I don’t get what happened.
2. Heart Attack, Attack, Attack…
My dad has told me this story a few times – sometime in the 50s or 60s some of his cousins had gathered together at their parent’s house after their mother unexpectedly passed away in that same house just days prior. One of the cousins, upon crossing the threshold entering into that house, suddenly had a heart attack and died.
Of course this was incredibly shocking and tragic, considering that not only the mother but now one of her sons had passed in the same week. The family then has ANOTHER gathering at the same house. After a few hours of having the family together in the living room, one of the brothers of the recently deceased cousin clutches his hands to his chest, pretending to have a heart attack.
Apparently this cousin was known for his morbid sense of humor so this, while in bad taste, wasn’t out of the ordinary for him. But he wasn’t joking.
That cousin ALSO had a heart attack and died in the exact same room that his brother died in, in the same house that his mother died in, all in roughly a week’s span.
1. Pregnant Precognition
When my sister and I were kids, we were out front of our home, playing near the mailbox. Mom and Dad were there by the window watching, and according to them, my mother turned to my father and asked him to bring us inside. He shrugged her off, but she became more urgent. He asked why it was a problem, and she suddenly panicked and actually started heading towards the front door despite being less than a week away from giving birth to our youngest sister. He stopped her and stepped outside to call us in, and we complied.
Less than a minute later, a car came barreling down the street at high speed and struck our mailbox, destroying it. We would have both been killed instantly.
My parents have never felt entirely comfortable talking about it.
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