“To This Day It Still Gives Me Chills”: 30 Bizarre Experiences People Still Can’t Make Sense Of

A couple of weeks after my mom died, I was driving home from work, feeling very sad. And a bit angry. I was pissed off at the universe for leaving me alone (I have no other living family left; she was the last).

I was thinking about how we both loved birds, and would always point them out to each other. I thought: "If all that hippie spirituality stuff Mom loved is real, then the least she could do is send me a bird, maybe, as a kind of sign." It was a long drive, and I saw no birds at all. I thought: "Of course it isn't real. What a silly thing to think. I didn't see so much as a robin, or a wren, or anything." I parked and walked down the path to my house. While I was putting my key in the door, something colorful caught my eye. I turned.

There at the end of the path was the most astonishing bird I've ever seen. Every color of the rainbow - a bright yellow/gold head; scarlet chest, iridescent blue back, orangey/gold wings, black striping - it was jaw-dropping. It was the size of a chicken, but a bit taller, with a long tail. It just stood staring at me. I started to laugh, and it got spooked and flapped away over the fence. I lived in a large city, which made it even weirder. My neighbor came outside and saw it too, so it wasn't an hallucination.

I got into the house and started Googling colorful birds of that size and shape, and eventually found it - it was a Chinese Golden Pheasant. WTF?? There were no bird sanctuaries or zoos nearby. I never saw it again. I took it as my mom, rolling her eyes at my cynical rejection of her hippie spirituality stuff, saying: You want to see a bird? I'll send you a BIRD. It was so great.

A few years ago, shortly after adopting my dog, my then gf and I were getting ready to go out for food (or whatever it was). Right as we are getting ready to go out the door our dog starts FREAKING out.

He’s losing his mind whining, jumping at us, biting at our arms, and trying to pull us to the living room. We take a few extra seconds, calm him down, say goodbye and head out - we had a train to catch. Took all of 30-60 seconds.

As we were approaching the bus stop, about 30 seconds away from the stop, a BMW comes barreling around the corner and jumps the curb exactly where we would have been standing. Had we left when we originally wanted we would have been standing there, we never would have seen it coming.

To this day I’m convinced my dog knew, and he delayed us for that reason. He’s never had an outburst like that since.

My mother passed away in 2008. When she finally passed and "gave up the ghost", my 2 brothers and I were all holding onto her and doing our best to comfort her. At the foot of the bed both my dog, and her dog, both Jack Russell's, were both very still and staring at her and when she finally passed both dogs heads went up and over to the corner ceiling. They were in complete unison as they watched something go up and out of that bedroom. I'm not a religious person, but I find comfort in what I saw that afternoon.

I came out of a store one day and turned the corner to see a crow trying to read a paper-back novel on a park bench. He was perched on the bench, turning pages with his beak. When he noticed me staring, he hopped away like I caught him red-handed, and took flight a moment later. Ended up getting a tattoo of a crow reading a book because the incident left such an impression on me. No one really seems to believe me, but dude, corvids are f*****g *smart*. I figure it was either imitating a person, or trying to harvest the pages for a nest, but either way, strange experience.

One of my brothers and I remember this as clear as day. Our older two brothers were at camp (math or robotics, they’re nerds) and our neighbor was watching us as our parents had to leave abruptly. She turned the tv on and started to flip through pages of magazines. My brother said he needed to use the restroom and somehow didn’t come downstairs for a while and so I went looking for him. I found him having a conversation with our grandma in the guest bedroom. I was surprised to see her cos I didn’t know she was visiting us that day. The neighbor called out our names and so we told our grandma that we’d see her later and went downstairs. Our parents had just walked in and the neighbor was telling them what we did that evening and then she left. My brother goes, “We didn’t even know grandma was home this whole time”. Our parents look at us visibly shaken and then they proceed to tell us that they were at the hospital where grandma passed.

I am 38 and my brother is in his 40s. To this day we swear it was true. We saw our grandma and talked to her at our home while she lay on her deathbed at the hospital. It’s been 30 years since she passed.

One of my earliest memories is being in a Blockbuster looking at the back wall of new releases. I was there with a bunch of teammates for a slumber party a few towns over. I was looking at the wall of movies and suddenly has this weird deja vu feeling that the boy standing to my left was going to come up and talk to me and tell me about a movie I was looking at. I hadn’t seen his face yet in real life but I saw it in the “vision” if you will. After the deja vu passed the boy turned and did exactly that, his face was the same as what I had just seen in my head. He picked up a movie that had Rosie O’Donald on the cover and told me that I should check out that one because he saw it the weekend before and it was really good. He was a few years older than me and really cute so of course I grabbed it from his hand and said a quick thanks and ran to my friends, completely freaked out at what just happened. I never had deja vu or anything like that happen again.

Fast forward 12 years later and I was standing in the same Blockbuster with my then boyfriend who I met in college. He had grown up in that same town and I was spending the night for the first time at his parent’s house. We had been dating for a little over a year at that time. We were browsing together and trying to agree on a movie and he started telling me this story of how he scared a little girl while trying to be nice at that same Blockbuster when he was younger. I immediately had a weird fuzzy feeling and asked him if the movie had Rosie O’Donald on the cover and he looked at me freaked out and said yes it did. After a there-is-no-way-that’s-possible discussion in the aisles of Blockbuster, we got our movie and left thinking maybe it was just a weird coincidence because of course it had to be. When I walked into his parents house I saw that his mom had gotten out old photo albums for me to see and sure enough there was the same boy I saw in that Blockbuster. We looked up the Rosie O’Donald movie that night and it was the same cover we bother remembered. We’ve been married for 15 years, have four kids together.

The day my dad had a heart attack was such a weird and wild day for me. I had weird vibes all day at school, left early and went to go home and sleep it off. I got home and napped; a few hours later I woke up and felt sick to my stomach & I had the weirdest feeling that I needed to be with my dad.

I drove almost 2.5 hours in toronto traffic for those that know, know. From Toronto to Vaughn to a hockey arena. My dad was playing happily and everything was normal. As he was walking me to the car after his game - he was staying with the guys for a drink— he told me ‘ baby girl- I don’t feel well’ and my father had never called me that before. .5 seconds later he collapsed flat; dead. 210 lbs of dead weight crashing right down on top of me- I screamed and yelled and a few people came rushing out of the arena and started CPR, and got an AED and were able to administer life saving results, with the assistance of the paramedics as well. 45 minutes later he was transferred to another hospital for 2 surgeries & survived both of those too.

I still have no idea what told me to go be with him or go to that arena, to be there, to witness? To help? To catch him before he fell? Idk but weird to me

A few weeks after my husband passed away, I was cleaning his clothes out of our bedroom. I moved a pile of shirts (he was messy) and I found a folded up piece of paper with my name written on it. He used to leave me little notes all over the house. Not wanting to get upset, I put it on my dresser and kept cleaning. The next morning my best friend called me and said she saw him in a dream, and he asked her if she would tell me to read the note. I hadn’t told a soul about it. I opened it up and it was a goodbye note, specifically for me to read after he was gone. I should add that his death was sudden and absolutely not a s*icide.

My husband and I were coming back home after college and he turned to look into our next-door neighbor's patio. It was piled to the top of the fence with years of junk and garbage. He loudly exclaimed that it was a fire hazard. He huffed and started going on about a negligent HOA, and how they would hate to have to pay to fix everything. It wasn't something he'd ever brought up before. I had honestly never even thought of it as a fire hazard, just a nuisance.

He refused to sleep. ASMR wasn't working. He had intense anxiety all night. I fell asleep first, but I'm guessing he eventually did too.

We woke up to our dog screaming at flames at 4 am. She saved everyones lives.

Our neighbors had gone out to smoke at 10 pm and both threw their cigs into their junk pile, as they had done for years. But that is the time it went up in flames.

I later asked him about why he had announced it was a fire hazard, just hours before the fire. He shrugged and told me that something felt wrong.

A few months later during finals week, he woke me up in the middle of the night and demanded I take my final test right then. He would not take no for an answer. He woke his brother up and made us both coffee. He then monitored us and made sure we had everything submitted and every test taken. He let us go back to sleep at around 6 am.

I thought he was just being a di**head, but when we were all fully awake at a normal hour he just shrugged and told me that he had a gut feeling and that it hadn't gone away yet.

Hours later, I was gaming when the wifi cut out.

The same neighbors who had started the fire cut our wifi wires with our stolen gardening sheers. He was grinning at us from his patio. He asked us how our finals were going. It took 2 weeks for them to fix the wires and for us to have working wifi again. My husband saved all of our grades that day.

Like other people I occasionally have very prophetic dreams. They always are about something tragic but I’ll describe my most vivid one.

About 5 years ago I had a dream I was in a horrible 3 car accident with my then-gf and my younger brother. The car was totaled, there was smoke, my gf and my brother went to the hospital and I that I died because I was pierced through the head with some sort of rod.

Fast forward 2 years later, and my brother and I get a ride from girlfriend to go to a graduation party for a mutual friend. Gf pulls out into an intersection. I immediately recognize everything from the dream and I flinch to the left. Everything goes black for me for a few seconds after that, but when I regain consciousness I look around and see the exact same scene as in my dream except I lived. The car we were in was totaled. There was smoke from the other two cars involved and a rod that went through the windshield about 6 inches to the right of my head.

It was the most intense moment of my life. Since then I have always kept track of my dreams and paid very close attention to them.

I can smell if someone is sick. To me it seems like your body gives off a specific smell when it is fighting something.

For at least 15 years now I will occasionally -- maybe 2 or 3 times a month -- mistakenly think I see someone I know when walking around. Then, within the next few minutes I will actually see that person.

It's frequent enough that I call it now; I'll be like, "is that Jon? Nope, not Jon. But I bet I'll see him in the next 10 minutes"; and then I do.

I don't read into it at all. It's just an odd little quirk in my life.

On a boat, trolling for yellowtail amidst a school of dolphin about 4 miles off San Diego (dolphin are too smart to take lures, aren't shy near small boats, and feed on the same bait schools as yellowtail and tuna, so it's strategic to follow them). As if cued, all ~50-75 dolphins simultaneously stopped jumping and disappeared into the depths for about 30 seconds. Immediate, unnerving quiet. With great fanfare, they all suddenly burst out of the water in a near-perfect row about a football field wide, and for a while, synchronized jumps ahead of our boat. Then they were gone. Showing off for my dad and I? Normal behavior? Who knows, but it was awesome.

I had a dream when I was a teenager.

We lived on the hillside overlooking the city. I was standing on our terrace just watching the world die. Water covered most of the city. What wasn't drowned was burning, pillars of smoke covered the horizon. But oddly enough it was serene. You couldn't hear screaming or choas, just tinders snapping like a campfire along the shore. It smelled like the sea too.

Then I looked to my right, and there was my dad. To his right, was my paternal grandmother. They both just smiled a sad smile which made me realize that I couldn't move. We were stuck standing in mud.

I woke up after that.

After breakfast, I didn't say anything until my dad and I were the only ones left at the table. I asked him if he had a dream last night. He described the exact same thing and he said he saw me too.

Later on that day, my dad, who had checked in with my grandmother, said that she had the exact same dream.

I grew up in Texas, close to Louisiana. I was around 11 and playing on my grandmother’s driveway with my little sister and cousin. A “bird” (or something of the sort) flew over the driveway, which was wide enough for two vehicles, and it’s shadow covered the entire width of the driveway plus several feet on each side. My grandmother began screaming at me to grab the babies. She and I each grabbed a child and ran inside. She was pale and trembling and I asked her what is was. She said she didn’t know and had never seen anything that size. My grandmother is very rational and non dramatic. To this day, I’m not sure what flew over her driveway. I think about it once a month.

We live in a small town, and my daughter and I were making a quick trip to get some crickets for her gecko. The store is at the end of the road, about 2 city blocks from a park.

On the way there, the entire length of the park was road construction. It was bad. We sat and sat, there was a traffic director, cones, etc. Got to the pet store, I waited in the car and she ran in, got crickets, came out. Less than 5 minutes. The only way to get home was through the construction, and we were complaining how it sucked but...it was gone. Zero sign of there ever being construction there.

She and I are still completely baffled.

When I was in 5th grade a friend gifted me a hardcover copy of all three Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark volumes in one book. This book quickly became my most prized possession, so I wrote my name inside the front cover just in case I ever lost it at school.

At some point I took my book with me to my dad's house for the weekend; which is in another city about an hour away from where I lived with my mom. I had left it at my dad's house that weekend and I guess I just forgot to ever bring it back home with me. Well eventually my dad moved into a new home and I figured my book mistakenly got thrown out. I was very sad about it but accepted my reality lol.

Fast forward a few years to 8th grade. I make a new friend in one of my classes and we become very close very fast. I was hanging out at his house one day and decided to look through the books on his bookshelf. I see a copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the same one I had that contained all three books in one. I pull it out saying to my friend "wow I used to have a copy of this too no way!" I opened the front cover and right there at the top was my name exactly how I wrote it back in 5th grade. My friend had absolutely no recollection of where that book came from.

In 2008 I was driving by myself down a dark interstate highway in PA late at night when one of the map lights turned on by itself in my Nissan Xterra. I turned it off and it turned back on. So this really got my attention. About 2 minutes later I see an entire herd of deer in the middle of the road in front of me and I have to stop to avoid hitting them. I’m fairly certain had that map light not turned on I would have been zoned out and plowed into the deer at 65 mph. I never had a map light turn on by itself before or after that occurrence.

On multiple occasions spanning at least 15 years, I've had people tell me I had been speaking fluent Spanish in my sleep. Took some classes sporadically in school but I've never been fluent, barely conversational level, in waking life.

My uncle is a pilot and wanted to take me and my grandparents to my cousin’s college graduation when I was 13. We were all waiting at the small airport outside when he touched down on a single engine 4 seater plane (don’t know the real name of it).

When he landed, I immediately got a gut punch/stomach dropping feeling. I wasn’t scared of flying, but SOMETHING inside me told me that something was wrong/off. I don’t know if he landed funny or what because nobody else seemed to react the way I did, but I had a very hard time shaking that uneasy feeling.

We all loaded into the plane and took off. Not even a minute or two passes by and we’re now high above the tree levels when suddenly the engine stalls….

I didn’t realize it right away, but noticed that something was again, wrong and noticed my uncle was intently focusing on turning the plane around. That’s when I saw the engine had stopped.

In a blink of an eye we bank hard and start nosediving down. I closed my eyes and said my goodbyes to myself and we all silently went down.

There was a loud crash/noise and I felt my whole body snap forward and back and I saw a flash. Next thing I know I feel like I’m Ok and so I open my eyes and see that I’m alive. I very quickly gather my wits about me and check on everyone else and everyone seems to also be alive. I look out the window because I hear something to my side and see the gas pouring out.

I shake my uncle and tell him we need to get out now and he springs into action and unbuckles his seatbelt as do I and I start asking if everyone is Ok. My grandparents are in shock, but responsive and we reach over and swing the door open and get everyone out. We start walking away from the plane and see an ambulance arriving at the same time. People had seen the crash and called 911.

The entire plane was destroyed, wings snapped off, nose smashed, tail broken, and yet the area we were sitting in was completely intact.

My uncle and I were ok, we had a massive bruise later on where the seatbelt had held us, and I had a small headache. My grandpa was fine too and my grandma had like 2 broken ribs, but otherwise ok.

Still to this day don’t know how my gut knew something bad was going to happen. Biggest mystery of my life besides the fact that we survived something catastrophic like that.