53 Bizarre, Confusing And Fake-Sounding Things People Experienced And Learned About

I spent a summer in Louisiana selling books door-to-door. I'm from Missouri, and while driving around, I pulled into a gas station so I could grab a quick bite to eat and check my map.

As I sat there, someone knocked on my driver-side window. I look, and there's a woman who's probably in her 30s. I rolled down the window, and she said that she saw my Missouri license plates and wanted to say hi, as she grew up in Missouri. She introduces herself, so I say my name. Her mouth drops.

"I know this will sound crazy," she said, "but my maiden name was (my last name)."

To prove it, she pulls out her old driver's license, and sure enough, her maiden name is my own.

She then goes on to tell me a story about how, when she was growing up, her dad met a truck driver with the same last name and whenever he was in town, the two men would try to figure out how they were related. That man? My dad.

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.

The Placebo effect. I know it's not new and shocking, but man is it strange.

For example. Someone with Parkinson's disease will not produce enough dopamine and are often given dopamine as medicine to slow down the horrible effects of Parkinson's. Researchers gave a patient with Parkinson's a placebo pill when he thought he was given dopamine and the brain started to produce dopamine's because it believed it was given it. This in spite of having a disease which hinders the production of dopamine.

My great grandmother was in hospital and passed away. 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.

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. That I was 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.

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 moment for me.

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 weren't alive anymore. Here is the kicker, they passed on the same day.

I think about this all the time.

Ocular Migraine. Had to be the wierdest thing I have ever experienced. I really thought I was having some form of major health problem. Undulating rainbow vision in one eye. Took about an hour to clear up.

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.

We still talk about it every now and then. Just a weird experience.

Edit - Since there's a lot of comments about subconsciously seeing/hearing the truck... Yes, that is possible. However, the way the intersection was laid out meant I didn't see that vehicle until it was on top of us. The lanes facing me were downhill slightly, but I wasn't stopped far enough forward to see over the small incline. I didn't see the truck until it crested the hill, and that speed, it was almost in the middle of the intersection before it really registered.

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 phonecall 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 took 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.

Anesthesia. Seriously, we don't know why anesthesia works exactly, just that it does. We really just kinda figured it out over hundreds of years of trial and error and a lot of people dying.


Well, let's see if THIS gas will knock him out and he'll survive while we do a surgery... Oops!

Astronomer here! I just attended the first ever conference on Fast Radio Bursts. These are radio signals we have only known about a few years, where you get an extremely bright radio source for just a few milliseconds from beyond the galaxy. So far, only one of these has repeated, and its origin was traced to a puny galaxy less than a tenth of the size of ours... two billion light years away.

So yeah there are some ideas out there as to what can be causing FRBs- perhaps a magnetar for the repeater, but there could also be more than one source for these signals- but whenever I think of something bursting radio signals so bright from so far in such a boring corner of the universe my mind definitely freaks out a bit.

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 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 passed away instantly.

My parents have never felt entirely comfortable talking about it.

My dad is driving back from visiting his father in North Carolina. We live about 12 hours away and he plans on driving straight through. When he pulls over at the first rest stop a guy walks up and asks for a ride. Dad turns him down.

2 hours later he sees the same guy hitchhiking on the side of the road, he drives past.

Dad stops at a rest stop for a coffee, the man is there and asks for a ride "as far as your going" but dad still says no.

Sees the man again hitchkining on the road.

Dad's car starts to have trouble and he pulls off the highway. At the end of the ramp - yup, that guy again. He offers to help with the car and together they get it running again. Dad offers him a ride this time.

The man doesn't talk, and they drive for a few hours. Next thing dad wakes up in the hospital. The doctor says he passed out at the wheel and witnesses saw a his passenger take over the wheel, pull the car over. When they stopped to help, though, the passenger wasn't there.

Hypnahohia

This is one that I have experienced personally. It was a mystery to me, until many years later when I found out the real explanation.

I had been sleeping in a locked room, and woke up to see our cat jumping towards my face. She disappeared, as though she had jumped straight through my head, leaving me sitting up in bed wondering "what was that?" I got up and checked. No cat in the room.

Long afterwards, I read a book with a chapter on alien abductions, that described how people can hallucinate when different parts of their brain don't wake up at the same time. It can lead to feelings of being trapped, helpless in your bed while strange beings from your imagination surround you. This century, it has lead to people believing aliens were experimenting on them. Further back in history, it probably explains a lot of tales of ghosts, demons, witches, or whatever.

It would have been easy to believe that what I saw was a ghost cat, but it was a half-awake dream imposed on the real world.

In the seaport town where Mom was raised, there's an abandoned lighthouse. It's decommissioned and boarded up - no electricity or utilities.

Yet, on some nights, residents would see lights in the tower windows - very bright and steady, as if the lighthouse was inhabited.

Each time it was inspected, the report was that the building was securely locked, no power available, and no signs of vandalism.

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.

"Deja Vu" - sometimes I get it, a relatively common occurence such as a work commute or something suddenly becomes that little bit more familiar. But other times in completely unique environments and circumstances I've been able to talk through the rest of what someone else was going to say because i've lived it or something before and far more than just once or twice.

Freaks me out but also pretty cool.

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.

About 5 years ago, my uncle went missing for four days. My aunt came home from work one day and he wasn't there. None of his clothes were missing, all his shoes were still at the house, and the contents of his wallet, including his cash and credit cards, were meticulously laid out on the bed.
Fliers were put up, search parties were organized, news segments were aired. Then he just showed up for his next shift at work a few days later. His coworkers were shocked when he walked in and they said he was completely oblivious to it. He hasn't told anyone why he left or where he went and I don't think he will.