24 People Share The Most Unbelievable Coincidences That Still Baffle Them

Article created by: Rugile Baltrunaite

Luck, serendipity, chance, fate—call it what you will, but unusual coincidences likely play at least some sort of role in your life. There are moments in life when things line up a little too neatly, whether for good or ill, and it can make you question a lot of things about how life works, even if there are perfectly rational explanations for what’s happening.

After diving deep all over the internet, our team here at Bored Panda has collected some of the most interesting stories from people who opened up about the most bizarre coincidences that they have ever personally experienced. Scroll down for their mind-blowing tales.

We got in touch with Jodi Wellman, MAPP, for some advice about handling bad luck, as well as figuring out which things we can and can’t control. Wellman is the founder of Four Thousand Mondays and the author of You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets, and you’ll find her insights as you read on.

#1

This happened about 12 years ago. My daughter has epilepsy, and she was about 9 at the time that this happened. We were having a lot of trouble with her going into absolute uncontrollable rages. A lot of this could be contributed to the epilepsy medication Kepra that she was taking at the time. It is well-known for causing aggression and rages in children. But they were getting worse and worse, and it was mentally, physically, and emotionally so draining. I knew it wasn’t her fault, but that doesn’t really make you feel much better when you’re getting hit, or things thrown at you, and screeching going on and on and on, and all your things broken. My husband and I spoke with a pastor of our church about it when he came up to visit her in the children’s hospital during one of her stays. Just for the emotional support for us as parents because he was very good about that kind of thing.

Anyways, these rages were happening more and more frequently. One day I answered the phone and a woman introduced herself and said that she was calling from the church, and that Pastor Marty had asked her to give me a call because she had dealt with some of the things I was going through, and she was a pediatric nurse. So I started talking with this woman, I was at a very fragile moment that day because things had been really rough as far as the raging went. So I really unloaded, and I told her what was going on. And she said to me “Do you by chance use Pine-Sol to clean your house?” It was a pretty odd question. The funny thing though was that I did indeed use Pine-Sol to clean my house. In fact I had a lot of it because there had been a going out of business sale somewhere. So I told her that I did, and she told me to immediately stop using it. She said that she didn’t know exactly what the connection was, but she had spoken to many many parents who are having behavioral problems with their children out of the blue, and out of the nature of the child. She said that the one thing they all had in common was that they all used Pine-Sol. So I thought that was pretty strange, but I was more than willing to stop using it if it was going to help our situation any.

So here is where the weird coincidence kicks in. We spoke for a little while longer, and I thanked her for her time and told her I was going to try this, and then I said something about the pastor and his wife. And she said “Wife? What wife?” Apparently her Pastor Marty was not my pastor Marty. She was not even in the same state as me. She had dialed the wrong number! She just happened to also have a pastor named Marty, and she just happened to accidentally dial a wrong number where there just happened to be a mother, me, desperately needing help with their rage filled child. We were both completely surprised, and we laughed about it, and I thanked her for her advice.

Just so you know, I stopped using the Pine-Sol, and my daughter’s rages went down about 90%! I don’t even know the woman’s name. She introduced herself at the beginning of the call, and I cannot even remember her name, but what she did for me that day, and did for our family that day, I will never, ever be able to thank her enough.

Image credits: Victoria Gonzalez

#2

When I was a kid our class had a cake raffle in relation to mother’s day. I went around our area and sold tickets. People were so friendly and brought me in for tea and cake. I had a great time. We had ten cakes people could win and nobody I had sold tickets to won. I was so disappointed and angry I decided to bake a cake to the lady who bought most tickets from me. I went to her house on mothers day to give it to her. Turns out not only was it mothers day, it was also her birthday and we delivered the cake in time for her birthday party. Best accidental cake gifting ever.

Image credits: buheeh

#3

When I was a kid, we used to drive past this old abandoned school on a hill on the way to the grocery store. I always thought it would be cool to make it a house and live there. Years later someone tore down the school and built a house there. I was an adult then and had my own kids and was living in a house with a leaky basement. As I was driving my kids to the grocery store, I would pass this house and think, it must be nice and dry living up on that hill. I bet he doesn’t have a leaky basement. Fast forward a few more years, I am divorced and remarried. We are looking to buy a house. A guy my wife works with is selling his house. It turns out to he that very same house on the hill. I live here now and am writing this comment from my nice dry house on the hill.

Image credits: Wyzard_of_Wurdz

#4

I used to work at a movie theater. One day a group of people from an organization that helps mentally handicapped people experience a sense of normalcy in their life come through. They each had their own cash and came to concessions for candy and popcorn.

One girl in my line had a bunch of candy but was 1.25 short, and when I told her this she had this look of defeat and was about to start crying so I just told her she was fine and covered it myself. She happily took her candy and went to watch her movie.

The next day I got a “keep the change” tip from a random customer of 1.25. That was the only tip I ever got at that job.

Image credits: explosively_inert

#5

I had been living in Japan but after two and a half years I got ill and had to return to the UK. I took the opportunity to visit places along the route, and in Cambodia I met a woman who was returning to New Zealand from Hong Kong. We visited Angkor together and ended up on the same flight to Bangkok where we said goodbye. We didn’t keep in touch.

Fast forward a couple of years and one day I went to a supermarket in the Kings Road, Chelsea, an area I had never been to before, while a friend went to a nearby shop to return a purchase. As I waited at the cashier a woman in the next line called across to me and said “Don’t I know you?” I wracked my brain and she said “Didn’t we go round Angkor Wat together?” As coincidences go that one is hard to beat.

Image credits: Vivien Tarkirk-Smith

#6

My mother and I had a thing where we would always tell each other “Be careful” before the other would leave somewhere. Once, I forgot and that day she was in an accident on the way home. 6 months later, I forgot again. Again, accident. So I never missed saying it again.

She died in 2012 and I remember driving to the funeral home to plan her funeral, past this church that always changed their signs on Wednesdays. The sign for that Wednesday said only “Be careful”. That was it. No other words. No Bible citation, just that.

Image credits: Stalked_Like_Corn

#7

Not mine, but my friend’s story. Her cousin moved to Japan and noticed that someone in their building had the same last name (looking at the apartment buzzers or mailboxes or wtv). It’s a relatively unusual Moroccan Jewish last name, and obviously they’re in Tokyo so that’s pretty weird to begin with to see a non-Japanese name let alone the exact SAME name.

So they knock on the door and are like “Hi… this is weird but I’m you’re neighbour and we have the same last name… are we possibly related?” and it turns out the neighbour was a branch of their family that had gotten “lost” – nobody knew what had happened to them. It’s a MASSIVE family with literally hundreds of cousins in the same generation, and this particular bit of the family had just gotten lost in the mix. The parents would have known these people’s parents, and so everyone got back in touch and they got reconnected with the whole rest of their family! I thought that was crazy… what are the odds?

Image credits: goodhumansbad

#8

My wife and I backpacked around Vietnam for three weeks. One place we stayed in had a television so while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to go out one night I flicked on the TV to see what Vietnamese viewing was like. We could only get reception on a few channels and since the other two were Vietnamese talk shows I left it on a program that was doing current affairs in English. It was a strange mixture of footage from Australian programs so I recognised the presenter from TV back home.

I had the TV on for about five minutes while I waited and was about to switch it off when I looked up and saw my brother on the screen. The network was showing a program from Australia about marriage and it included couples showing excerpts of their wedding videos. My brother officiated at the wedding of one couple and so he was clearly visible on the screen for about ten seconds.

When I got back to Australia I mentioned this to my brother. He had no idea he’d been on Aussie TV let alone replayed on Vietnamese TV. I can say with almost one hundred percent confidence that my brother has only appeared on Vietnamese TV for ten seconds in the entire time they’ve been broadcasting, it blows me away to think that it happened to occur in the ten minutes of Vietnamese TV that I happened to be watching.

Image credits: David Stewart

#9

Many years ago, when I was about 5 years old, one day I noticed my dad had a big burn scar on his chest and back. I asked him what happened. He told me he was in a train wreck when he was young, it got on fire, he was OK but many of his schoolmates were unconscious and would die, so he saved as many as he could by taking them outside, going in again, etc. and got burnt. I didn’t believe him, I thought “My dad is tricking me, he wants me to think he is a super hero like superman”. But I didn’t say anything and didn’t ask anymore. He always told us stories at nighttime that he invented, so it wouldn’t be odd for him to tell me a fantastic story.

When I was 12 years old, my dad died. I have missed him all my life, and I’m 63 so it’s a long time.

At the age of 19, I went to Colombia and stayed many months, at an uncle’s home. His wife worked at the Chilean Embassy and got me a job as a receptionist. One day, an old man asked me for help because he had lost his passport, so I gave him directions to get a new one. A few days later, he came back to thank me, and asked my name. “Solange De Vidts” I said. Then we had this conversation:

“De Vidts? Are you Carlos De Vidts granddaughter?”
“No, I am his daughter”
“Oh, please send him my kind regards”
“I’m sorry, he died”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! Your dad saved my life”
“What? How come?”
“Well, when we were at the Escuela Militar (Military School), the students of the last year were to go to Argentina, to march for their Independence day. Your dad wasn’t supposed to go, because he was in the penultimate year, but asked to go and as he was the best student with the highest grades, they let him go. We were on the train and had a terrible accident at Alpatacal, it was a tragedy, many died. I was unconscious and your dad took me out, I don’t know how he managed because he was small. So he saved me.”
At that moment I remembered the story my dad told me, and realized that my dad had told me the truth. Felt so guilty for not believing him!

It was a very strange coincidence, that accident is called “The tragedy of Alpatacal”, it was in 1927. To meet one of the survivors decades later, who recognized my name because it is not common in Chile, in another country, is a huge coincidence, that allowed me to know better my dad, years after his death. I even found photos, where I could identify my dad.

Image credits: Solange De Vidts

#10

When I was 8, my best friend and his family came over to bring me a Christmas present. “Guess what it is?” my friend said. I had absolutely no idea, so I just said the weirdest, most random thing I could think of. “An inflatable dinosaur,” I guessed. And it was. It was gigantic.

Image credits: Quartersharp

#11

I grew up in a small town in California, then moved to Missouri as an adult. Before moving, I spent my early 20s working in a local video store in that small town. 14 years later, I was in hospital in Missouri, having surgery to break up a kidney stone. The overnight patient care person looks familiar to me. Every time she comes in, I keep thinking I know her, but can’t figure out why. She mentions she’s from California, and I say I am too. Turns out, we’re from the same small town, and she was a regular customer of mine. She said she’d been trying to figure out why she recognized me too.

Image credits: rivalconga

#12

I was living in America and went for holidays to Mexico. There, I matched with a hot Mexican girl on tinder in Cancun. We chatted but never met. I never unmatched her neither she did.

A year later I have noticed her 2 miles away. She was a summer student in the same town in the UK where I relocated.

I messaged her, she still didn’t want to meet.

Image credits: oliverjohansson

#13

There were a number of strange coincidences that occurred to me and others in and around the 6 month period from April 2007, when my 16 year old son Kyle passed away suddenly, and unexpectedly from a brain hemorrhage.

They began just a few weeks before he died, when the step father of his girlfriend drowned in a diving accident. He stayed with her constantly, supporting her and comforting her. On the day of the funeral Kyle travelled to the crematorium by taxi with their group of friends when he (as relayed to me separately by two people present) calmly asked them what they would do ‘when’ he died; my son proceeded to ask his best friend to take care of his (Kyle’s) girlfriend as she would have two losses to cope with.

Almost 4 weeks later, on 15th April 2007, my son created a single page on MySpace with a profound statement about life filling the page. He also had music playing automatically when the page was opened. The song ironically was ‘How to save a life’ by The Fray.
The following day, Kyle died.

A month or so after Kyle’s funeral, I was driving alone in my car listening to local radio. Suddenly the broadcast stopped and there was around 10 seconds of dead air; a song broke the silence, blurting out from the start of the chorus, ‘…How to save a life…’.

I told my husband what happened, and I was quite shaken up, but he said it was probably just a glitch by the radio station and it was brushed off.

A few days later exactly the same thing happened. I concluded that the station were having technical issues and maybe this particular song is what they always cut to.
Another few days passed and my husband and I went shopping in the car. I decided to listen to a different station and flicked through to find one we liked. No sooner had I chosen a station when the sound cut out; my husband and I both visibly jumped when the chorus ‘How to save a life…’ jarred the silence. We had to pull over to take in what had just happened, yet to this day we cannot explain it?

Incidentally, Kyle’s best friend did indeed look after his girlfriend, so much so that they fell in love and moved in together. Alas it wasn’t to be and they split up 2 years later.

There are a number of other incredulous coincidences that have occurred since Kyle passed away, but I will leave them for another post…

Image credits: Dawn McManus

#14

The summer before grade 5 my family moved 2 provinces west. I was sad to leave all my friends but I was especially excited to get away from my bully, a loser named Geoff. On my first day at my new school, the teacher introduced two new students to the class. Me and my bully Geoff from two provinces away. We had both moved from the same Small Town, Saskatchewan to the same Small Town, British Columbia. What are the chances.

Image credits: _incredigirl_

#15

I used to spend my summers working in the office at a church camp in northern Iowa. I became friends with some of the people who spent their vacation there, especially this one little girl who would stay for two weeks every summer. I was sort of a big sister for the two weeks her family was there.

Then came the summer I had my internship in New York City and I didn’t go to camp. I was sort of bummed that I wouldn’t see this girl.

One weekend a bunch of us decided to go to Washington DC, and I wore my staff shirt from the camp; it had very distinctive stripes across the shoulders.

We are in the Smithsonian and I feel someone touch my arm. I turned around, and it is that little girl who was my friend. She had her parents had gone from Iowa to DC for part of their vacation. They’d missed me at camp that year. But they didn’t quite believe her when she said she saw me until they spotted the stripes from across the room. .

Image credits: TootsNYC

#16

I was w/ a friend and he’s chatting up this girl… I end up sitting in her car while they talk on her porch and I guess I was fiddling w/ the knobs and switches on the dash; I left everything as I found it but I must have inadvertently dimmed the console lights all the way down.

Years later I meet the same girl, end up sitting in her same car and it’s night time, her dash lights are out; “have been for years” she says.

I lean over and turn the dimmer up.

Image credits: HouseAtomic

#17

When I was in the early stages of dating my spouse, I brought her to my hometown to meet my parents. While looking at an old family photo album, she pointed to a picture and said “how do you know this man?” I answered, “that’s my uncle” and she said, “No, he’s my uncle!” Turns out her mother’s sister married my mother’s brother.

Image credits: Bongo_Goblogian

#18

I worked with a lady called Linda about twenty years before this happened. We got on really well and were on friendly terms, but not ultra-close. Time went by, we both went on to work elsewhere, and we lost touch.

I started my own business, and, after a few years, I had a vacancy for a new member of staff. To be honest, although Linda would have been perfect for the position, I didn’t think of her at all: it was years before social media and she had fallen right off my radar.

One day, I got my bank statement. I was just about to open it when I realised that the glue on the envelope had adhered to another bank envelope. The two statements were firmly fixed together, meaning that they must have gone through all the postage procedures as one.

I carefully eased the envelopes apart, so that I would be able to put the other person’s back into the post. Then I saw to whom the letter was addressed. It was Linda (I knew instantly because she actually had an entirely unique surname). I couldn’t help but smile delightedly.

The bank was one of the giant high-street banks, and Linda’s surname begins with an “A” (mine begins with a “P”; it’s not even adjacent in the alphabet!): there are nearly 230,000 people in Brighton. What are the chances?

I wrote a little note on the back on Linda’s envelope (joking that I now knew all her financial secrets), before I put it back in the post. She phoned me in amazement the next day. We got to talking, one thing led to another, and Linda ended up happily working for me for at least 10 years-until we retired.

Image credits: Plumb

#19

This happened recently.

I went back to my alma mater to watch a football game. After the game, i was supposed to spend the night at a friend’s parents’ house. We got separated so he texted me the address – only problem was he messed up the street number. I then spent a good ten minutes trying to convince the woman that lived in the house next door that i knew her son and we were friends so she should let me inside. It was very embarrassing when i realized my mistake.

The very next day i got dinner with a different friend from college who has never met the friend i went to the game with. I’m telling him this story and i happened to mention the address. He immediately got really suspicious of my story. Turns out It was his house and his mother i tried to stay at. Everything i told that woman was inadvertently true – i really did know her son!

Image credits: anon

#20

My father was a naval officer, so we lived in a lot of places – some fairly unusual. When I was 13, we moved to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Our home was 8500′ above sea-level and 600 miles from the Red Sea – not a place you’d expect to find US Navy.

Dad got to know the Marines in the security detachment at the US Embassy well, and one day Bob, the Gunnery Sergeant, came to him with an unusual request. His fiancee Carol was coming to Addis; they were to be married at the embassy. Bob wanted my dad to stand-in for her father – to give the bride away. My dad agreed immediately. In fact the reception was at our home.

A few months later Bob got orders; he and Carol left Ethiopia, promising to keep in touch. A year later, on a Thursday in September, Bob was walking into the American Embassy in Amman Jordan on his day off; he’d forgotten something. One of the on-duty Marines asked, “Hey Gunny, weren’t you in Addis before you came here? Some Americans from there were in a car accident on their way back from Petra. Do you know anyone on this list?”

My name was on that list. You can read about my NDE in another thread. Bob sent the ambulance which brought me from the government aid station, in the middle of nowhere, to a private hospital, in Amman, the next day. He cabled my parents that I was seriously injured; that they needed to come at once. For the next two days, until my father arrived, every time I opened my eyes either Bob or Carol was sitting next to my bed.

Probably just coincidence.

Image credits: Geoffrey Walton

#21

I was working in a small shop and the owner was away and the till broke, it wouldn’t power up or do anything. This was a nightmare because a typical customer would buy many small items – it was mainly crafts.

While we were still wondering what on earth to do, a guy walked in and asked if we were interested in getting a new till and would we like one on trial? He was a till salesman.

Image credits: Dave Smith

#22

I live in Canada. In summer 2001 my family went on vacation to Florida and we stayed at this hotel in Daytona Beach. One night while my dad was getting ice from the machine, our next door neighbor from home came up behind him to get ice as well. When my dad turned around and saw who it was, they were both surprised. Turns out our next door neighbors from home were staying in the room next to us at the hotel, and not only that but they had booked their room for the same 4 days that we did. Considering neither family even knew the other was going on vacation, it was a pretty amazing coincidence.

Image credits: EventHorizon5

#23

I was around 16 and travelling with a few schoolmates for a sports competition in another city. Boys were sharing one hotel room, girls another. We were lying around mid-afternoon with the TV on and an add for Fruit Loops comes on. They looked so appetizing at that moment and it dawns on me that I have the freedom at this stage in my life, on this trip to just go and get some. I put my coat on, rally a friend to come with me down the elevator and across the street to the variety store. As I go to exit the hotel room door there is a knock. I open it to one of the girls from next door, standing at the door to ask us what’s up. In her hands, is an opened box of Fruit Loops that she’s snacking on.

It was not any kind of theme or discussion point prior to that moment.

Image credits: therealfarmerjoe

#24

When I was 12yro, an exchange student stayed at my house for a couple of weeks, and we became friends. One day we had a conversation about how we spent our birthdays, and we found out we happened to be exactly the same age. We were born on the same day, month and year.

Image credits: cheturo