39 Times Real Life Was Much Weirder Than Fiction, According To The People Who Lived It

I crashed my car on the way to homecoming, and my date and I rode up to the venue in the back of a police car.

A seagull once dropped a whole mackerel on my head. I smelled like fish all day.

One time as I was leaving the mall I balled up a piece of paper and flicked it at the trash can and hit a fly in mid-air.

At church one fine sunday, when I was around 16, I was leaning back in my chair against one of those flimsy fake walls/room dividers. The wall (of course, because I really was kinda asking for it) gave way and I slipped and hit the wood floor of the gymn with a sonic BOOM. At least it feels that way in the reverence of church meetings... It was loud enough that even the classroom theyd set up next door fell completely silent, to find the source of the racket. The collapsible metal chair I'd been on folded in on me, and in my embarrassment, I began to laugh very loudly and awkwardly, as I tried to untangle myself. The judgmental eyes of my peers, booring holes through my ability to focus. Because of the building pressure on my abdomen from laughing and being folded in half (and perphaps because god wanted to punish me for interrupting the reverence of the room) I then proceeded to fart. The *loudest* fart ever produced. It reverberated off the metal chair seat that was still *firmly* attached to my tushy, like a drum roll from hell, ending in a sound barrier shattering squeak of a finish. Everyone in the room at this point was stunned and just stared as I laughed hysterically at the misfortune of my existence... Finally I had separated my body from the stupid chair and collected my self enough to just walk out. Only a few people giggled. For the most part everyone else just stared in stunned silence as I walked, head held high, from the chapel. Never to darken the doorway again. Litteraly. I never went back to that church. I prefered eternal damnation I spose.

I can laugh now, at the time it was a bit of a horrifying experience.

TLDR; I got stuck in my chair and farted in church...

Edit: Ah yes, also I have a smaller side story. I once power walked approximately 26 miles. Alone. 1/3rd of the journey was through a windey canyon. I left at roughly 10 pm, arriving at my destination at around 630am. I did this entirely on a whim, with only a snack and a few water bottles in my backpack. I would have walked even more miles through the canyon, but was stopped by a park ranger, and all but forced to ride with him to at least the next town. It wasn't easy to explain to him I definitely wasn't on illegal substance. Just bored. And enjoyed walking.

I went to Disneyworld when I was 7 and split my eyebrow open sliding down a slide. Blood everywhere, ruined my Tshirt.

Disneyworld in all their sympathetic glory gave me a new T-shirt that was way too big and nothing else.

I once nearly unalived my older brother with a spear...
He and I were playing cowboys and indians, and being the only one with a bb-gun, he was by default the cowboy. I had about a 5 foot long stick sharpened to a dull point on one end, and was the indian.

He walked up to me (summer in Georgia) where I had a pair of shorts between me and the lord, and shot me point blank with that bb-gun barrel full of sand, and then took off running. He went across the yard, turned right at the fence and continued running hard away from me.
I didn't even think about the consequences, took the spear and made a javelin throw that an Olympian would be proud of, and hit him in the back of the neck at between 35 and 40 yards away. He faceplants with the spear standing upright like a proud flag I had planted on the moon, then the spear falls over. The tip of the spear went between two vertebra in his neck, the spear fell because the tip broke off in his neck.
I CELEBRATED the victory, then walked over to see what remained... We ended up in the emergency room, where the doctors decided NOT to operate, but rather to let the spear point work it's way out on it's own. (It took 25 years to completely do that)
My punishment for this act was that I received a bb-gun, figuring that the worst I could do with that was to put his eye out, but that at least we would be on level footing in combat...
Child rearing in the 60's was a different thing, and having a big family (built-in spares) helped a lot... :).

My stepdaughter acquired a guinea pig that, big surprise, turned out to be pregnant. She gave birth to two normal babies and a runt that was too weak to walk or drink milk from the mother. The little guy was on the way out so I got my stepdaughter to hold the mother in a sort of sitting position while I squeezed some milk out of a papilla that was about the size of a decent pimple. I jammed the baby onto the papilla and he finally got the idea, drinking enough to kickstart his growth, while we held mom still for about 20 minutes.
He lived and we eventually gave the 4 of them to someone else. Shortly after a fox broke into their hutch and ate all of them except the runt.

I had a 8-9 hour brain surgery with complications. To fix one of the results of those complications I needed surgery on my optic nerve, both eyes. It didn't take and I needed it again. I also had two lumbar punctures which took literally 8 attempts each, needle in the spine, to get fluid.

The original surgery was to remove a brain tumour. It grew back.

My grandfather brought a sword to the office and tried to behead my dad for a poor quarterly performance. Family businesses are tough.

My grandfather has Alzheimer's/dementia (not sure...Asian family in Asia, everyone denies mental issues) and before that incident, our family didn't know he was unraveling.

**EDIT:** Yeah, this story is so incredible, that the whole family was in a dilemma about what to say to the doctors/lawyers/bankers/etc. when they needed to declare my grandfather was mentally unfit to make his own decisions. My dad was going, "What do I tell them? My dad tried to k**l me? With a sword? Who's going to believe this???"

I mean, even my dad thought the calls he got from his employees were part of a prank. Went to the office, got stopped by the freaked out security guards asking him what they should do, and finally realized it was for real. Everyone just hid and waited it out until my grandfather got tired of waiting and went home.

It even took a few more crazy incidents before the entire family believed my dad. Most of his siblings thought it was an elaborate ploy to take over the company for the longest time, and it nearly turned into a crazy court case.

I spent two years as a child in a christian school in Guatemala that turned out to be a cult. They would lock us up for weeks in tiny cages isolated out in the jungle because we were suspected of having bad "thoughts"

www.shimberberis.com.

An internet conspiracy theorist implicated me in 9/11.

I watched a man with two peg legs walk up a harbor ramp at low tide. It was one of the singly most inspirational events I've witnessed.

Edit: Harbor ramps connect land to the docks which move up and down on pilings as the tide changes. When the tide is out the ramp is at a steep incline. At high tide the ramp is nearly level with the land. This particular incident occurred on an abnormally low tide where the ramp was at a near 90 degree angle. I did not offer help as clearly a man with two pegged legs is the captain of his own vessel. He achieved this great feat of human mastery by placing one peg in front of the other while using the railing as leverage and pure grit and determination for traction. He offered a level glance at me as I passed him on my way down and the heavy rain motivated us forward without conversation. I've mentioned his story to people before and invariably the response is either 'I know of him' or 'Get lost, let's get whiskey drunk'. Any more of his story that I know is lost to the walls of dingy fishing bars that were once saloons.

My family lived in Hong Kong for awhile when I was younger. From what I understand we had to take a ferry to get to some sort of beach like area to spend the day at. On our way back to the mainland I was the first on the ferry, with this man assisting all the kiddies back on the ferry over the gap between the dock and the boat. I turn around to welcome my tiny adorable brother, who's like 21/2 years old, onto this exciting ferry ride when this dude goes to jump onto the boat and slips down right through the crack and proceeds to fall into the ocean. My mom jumps in to save him, and starts freaking out splashing and yelling at the guy who dropped Kevin into the ocean. Seriously yelling "get away from my family!" As he's trying to get them into an inner tube and to safety. They get back on the ferry, brother's head is all damaged from barnacles and everyone is alive. Cool.

Mom calls dad who is in NYC for business and tells him the story, dad was freaked out because he had a dream that night that Kevin fell off a building. With the time difference the two events would've been happening at similar times. Always weirded everyone out.

I was taking illegal substances with a friend in a rather isolated area. We were lying in the grass on a hill maybe 100-200m away from the nearest path where people would sometimes walk by.

At some point an older white haired man with weirdly dirty pants walked all the way up to us. After some initial questions about whether we had seen his sheep (which at that point we didn't realize was a rather weird question) he asked us what we thought was most important in life.

Friend: "Friendship?"

White haired stranger: "No. God."

At that point he started to glow from the inside in my perception and during the long monologue about god he proceeded to give us I couldn't stop laughing, which I still feel a little bad about. And yes, he was real: He handed out flyers in the end that we still treasure. I will never forget Johan, the shepherd.

I played 11 Degrees of Random Internet Separation and wound up at myself.

I was working on my Geocities website in 1998 on campus at UT-Austin. I was looking for design ideas (to poach HTML code) from a friend's website, but he didn't have anything I didn't. So I went to his list of 20+ friends, picked a random one, and looked at that guy's page for design ideas. Then I thought, "I wonder where in the world I'd end up if I did 'friend of a friend' ten times like that. New York? China? ISS? So I did. Went to that guy's friends list, picked a random one, went to that person's friends list, and so on.

The tenth person was an employee of UT, so I didn't even make it off campus, let alone to another country. But he had a webcam in his office, one of those that refreshed an image every 30 seconds. The lights were off, there were open miniblinds, but I couldn't really see much beyond them. Then I noticed that he listed his office number: FAC 222. Flawn Academic Center, second floor, room 222. I realized that I was doing all of this from a computer on the second floor of Flawn Academic Center. I looked up to see that the computer I was on was at the end of an aisle directly across from room 222. I went to the window. Open mini-blinds, lights off, webcam on top of his monitor. I go back to my computer to see my own face in the webcam image peeking in his window.

Vanilla Ice left me a happy birthday voicemail.

15 years ago, I was friends with a guy who is a professional guitar tech and travels all over with different bands. He was in Miami with a fairly successful band, and Vanilla was at the show. Later, on the tour bus, my friend called me at like 3:00 am to wish me happy birthday and handed the phone over to Vanilla Ice and he wished me happy birthday.

Unfortunately, my service provider's voicemail system only allowed you to save a message for 7 days, and I couldn't figure out how to save it any other way, so it's disappeared into the ether.

Last time I went kayaking I nearly got hit by a train.

Edit: we were stopping for lunch and headed up a launch ramp, where there was an "abandoned" railway line crossing. Guide said it was fine to leave stuff near the line as he'd never seen trains go through. Started to take some humourous photos of me not grasping the concept of the outdoors or sport when we heard a train coming. Plenty of time to get out the way, but we did have a giggle at what the insurance claim would say if something happened.

Sorry I kept you in suspense.

When I was a little kid I convinced a friend to restart Pokemon Blue and trade me a Squirtle, claiming he'd be able to just reload his previous save anyway. I knew full well he'd lose all his progress but I wanted to catch them all. After we traded and he realised, crushed, that he'd lost everything, I told him he must have messed up somehow.

Then, around 15 years later on Christmas Eve I posted this story anonymously in a "confessions" type thread on 4chan. He was in the thread. By insane coincidence I got a chance to apologise for my misdeed as an adult. I would have screencapped it for posterity, but I was a little nervous to keep records because he had to reveal a bunch of personal info to prove he knew me. Suffice to say, even the people in the thread didn't believe it wasn't just me acting both parts.

Taylor Swift pushed me out of a swing when I was in 3rd grade. I used to go over to my neighbor's house to play just about every after noon. He had an older sister and she just happened to be friends with the then unpopular Taylor Swift. I went over one day doing typical first grader things on the swing set with my neighbor when they came out. Taylor demanded that we get out and let her swing. Rebel me said "No" and she said "Fine then, I'll push you". The next thing I know I had a skinned up knee and a mouthful of dirt.

I ended up going to the same middle school and high school as her and always heard about how great she is. To me, she'll always be that b***h that pushed me out of a swing.

TL:DR I refused to give up my swing to Taylor Swift so she shoved me out.

Edit: After asking my parents and doing math, I was actually in 3rd grade at the time.

Edit 2: I forgot to mention this but since she became famous she has contributed quite a few times to the community. One donation, coincidently enough, was a plaground.

[Link](http://littletikescommercial.com/country-western-star-taylor-swift-helps-rebuild-flooded-playground/).