AskReaders: What is the most unbelievable coincidence you ever experienced?

We asked our regular contributors through e-mail, What is the most unbelievable coincidence you ever experienced? We got many interesting responses. Here are some of them. We have just copied and pasted their responses, not editing them in any way and most of the respondents have requested to stay anonymous, so no names will be published.

1-5 Unbelievable Coincidence Stories

01. When i was about 6 years old we had this cat. I loved it. But dad decides that we don’t need a cat because they’re ‘useless’. So one day kitty was gone. He said he drove out of town and just kind of kicked her out. Sometime later, my mom found a new boyfriend. My parents have been divorced for some years now and things between mom, boyfriend and us kids we’re going great. We decided to move in with him and upon opening the door i instantly see this cat. I mean, what are the odds? The two places have been 30 miles apart and 3 years have passed, but this exact kitty was my kitty. He got it from shelter back in the day.

02. I got into an argument with somebody on an online forum. He ended up saying that I knew nothing about the topic at hand and that he was doing a PhD in that very topic which showed X results. Unfortunately for him the PhD he tried to claim as his own was in fact mine. Turns out he is a student in my department and was in a lecture I gave a few weeks before. So I get into an argument with someone who was pretending to be me.

03. I met a cool couple (French guy and a Canadian girl who recognized my Jays cap and wanted to say hi) on the street in Bangkok. Didn’t exchange info with them. Saw them 2 weeks later in Pai in the north of Thailand, had a beer and a burger but again didn’t exchange emails. Then 4 months later in Buenos Aires I’m walking down a street and who do I see there but the couple! (on the day of my goodbye party there, because I was moving to France, AS WERE THEY!!!! :P) We exchanged facebook info.

04. Our power had been out for about 6 hours. I said watch this to my roommate, flipped the light switch, and the power came back immediately. I’m pretty sure she forgot about it within the week but I still remember.

05. When I was 5 and living in Ohio, I watched a boy just a few years older than me mow a lawn near my best friend’s house. I remember thinking he was cute, and very young to be mowing. My friend didn’t know who he was because an old lady lived in the house. Fast forward 15 years and I was living in Indiana and working with a guy that I kind of liked. I was driving back to Ohio one weekend to do my laundry at my parent’s house, and notice that he is driving next to me on the highway. Turns out that his parents live less than 3 miles from my parent’s house and he was going home to visit his folks as well. Come to find out, he grew up in Arizona and his grandma lived in a small Ohio town. He visited. One summer, mowed her lawn, I watched. His parents moved to a small Ohio town near the Grandma years later, and my parents bought a house near his parents. He and I both moved to Indiana, where we met at a job. Stranger yet, we ALMOST met 6 months before we started working together. I was in marketing and had an event at a bar. He ran the kitchen at the bar and would have met me that night. Instead, the police came and shut the bar down that very day due to a bankruptcy that we didn’t know was coming. We have been married for 21 years.

6-10 Unbelievable Coincidence Stories

06. We gave my uncle a coffee table book commemorating an NFL team for his birthday. He immediately opened it to the center spread, a panoramic shot of the fans in the stadium. Unbeknownst to any of us beforehand, right in the center of the page was him in the stands.

07. 6 years ago I dated a girl in Texas who was also (unknown to me at the time) dating some Marine. We broke up because of it obviously once I found out. 2 years ago I dated a girl in Afghanistan (more fooled around since its illegal there for us). Turns out, back in Georgia where she was stationed, she was dating THE SAME MARINE from 4 years prior. I’ve dated two blonde women in completely different countries 4 years apart who were both playing both me and the same marine at the same time.

08. Hadn’t seen or spoken to a friend of mine who lives in a different country for a couple of years… At lunchtime, decided to send him a “hey what’s been happening?” email.. Two hours later he comes into my work to see me as he was back in town for a few days.. He hadn’t yet got my email at that point.

09. When I was 13, I ding dong ditched a house in my friend’s neighborhood and the dad came out and chased us down the street, took our phones and called our parents. He ended up being an ex-Navy Seal and superior court judge. 2 years later I’m at a summer camp two states away and I tell that story to a group of girls that I’d never really hung out with and it turns out that the girl sitting next to me was his daughter. Grew up in the same small town, hung out in the same neighborhood, went to the same summer camp for 8 years and had never spoken before that day.

10. I was getting close to my due date and sent in my resignation to my manager and HR. Losing my salary was going to put us in a financial mess. The very minute I sent the email, my husband received one from a company he’d interviewed with six months prior, with a job offer out of the blue. The kicker is that his new salary was the exact amount that our two jobs added up to.

11-15 Unbelievable Coincidence Stories

11. I am from Florida. I moved to Hartford after college and took a day trip with some buddies to NYC. Walking down Broadway on a very crowded day I hear a lady yell my name. She’s running across the street at me – it’s my kindergarten teacher who I haven’t seen since I was a kid – she knew it was me and was there on vacation with her husband as their retirement celebration trip. A few years later when I moved back none of my family believes that it actually happened – then my mother ran into her in Savannah GA and she told her the NY story.

12. I was born in NY and moved to NC when I was 5 years old. Then in middle school band I was sitting next to a boy who played clarinet, was born in the same town in NY, same day, and same hospital. All same as me. We ended up going to the same college too.

13. When I was little, I had an imaginary friend named Ada. Ada had long brown hair, green eyes, and loved the color green. In the 3rd or 4th grade, I met a girl of the exact same description who also happened to share my first name and we became best friends.

14. My dad worked in politics in DC. When I was about 6, our family rented out our basement to a longtime coworker/friend of his. She was just out of college (I think she had been an intern) so we gave her a fair rental price for what was a pretty nice apartment somewhat close to Capitol Hill in DC. She lived there for two years or so, then moved out to better digs. She still was around though, both her and my dad being involved in the same political issues and stuff. A couple of years later my dad is at a family wedding, and he sees her there. Turns out they were second cousins by marriage. It took like five years to figure this out.

15. I moved to Medford, Oregon from Tucson, Arizona. When I was buying my house, I was on a walk through with the previous owners and we got to talking about where they were moving. Turns out, they were moving to Tucson, next door to the house I had just moved from. Not that crazy, but I thought it was kinda cool.

16-20 Unbelievable Coincidence Stories

16. Years back my grandfather had a stroke, and died about a month later. I flipped a coin toss with my brother and ended up the designated driver to help my parents drive the 15 hour trip to Florida. There was a funeral, a burial, and brief goodbyes. Such is life. Afterwards I got a call from some old family friends who lived about 50 miles away inviting me to spend a couple of days with them at their beach house. I spent the night talking with their daughter and then after about about four hours of sleep their son, who was the same age I was, showed up and decided I had to get out an spend some quality time with him on the beach. We had been out about two hours when he runs into an old girlfriend and some of her friends. We spend the afternoon with them swimming, and then make plans to meet them that night at a beach bar . I end up spending half the night talking with one of the woman, just casual stuff. She ends up having to take off to work, so I walk her out to her car around two in the morning. I asked her what sort of job she had. She was an occupational therapist, and at that point (lack of sleep) I had no idea what that meant, so I asked her what that involved. “I work with people who have had severe injuries, strokes and such.” “Oh, my grandfather had a stroke. He died a couple of days ago.” “What was his name?” I told her. She gave me an odd look and then hugged me. “I was with him when he died.” We sat for a while on the beach and she told me about my grandfathers last days, then she had to leave for work. Such is life.

17. My family used to take little summer vacations. One summer (I was about 7-8) we stayed at a campground about 4 hours from home. There were a bunch of kids there and one day we all started playing tag. I was “IT” and was chasing another young boy, and when I tag him, I pushed him too hard and he fell and broke his arm. I remember the scene vividly. Fast forward to college. I became good friends with my neighbor in the dorm, and we ended up getting a place together our sophomore year. The following year (no longer living together) we went out for a few beers and the topic of broken bones came up. “I’ve only broken one bone, and it was my arm when I was 7. Some kid at a camp ground pushed me over while playing tag”. It was me. Still can’t believe it.

18. A few years ago I got into a cab heading out for the evening in downtown Toronto. Shortly after being dropped off I realized i left my phone in the cab. I tried calling it with no luck. I called the cab company but because I had flagged the cab and paid cash they had no real way of knowing which cab I was in. I figured the phone was as good as gone and went about my night. Many hours later and having moved around the city quite a bit I am ready to call it a night so flag another cab. Sitting in the back seat I start to think the driver looks familiar and realize that I’m in the same cab I took earlier. He hasn’t found a phone but I start looking anyways and sure enough there it is, jammed in the seat. Me and my flip phone were happily reunited, only for me to put it in a washing machine two days later.

19. An American friend of mine by the name of Tom took his family on vacation to check out Antarctica. He met an Australian guy named Paul on Christmas day in Antarctica. They didn’t exchange contact info. A year later, Christmas day, they take their vacation to Machu Picchu. He is looking down at a map when he hears, “Hey Tom, how the hell are you?” It was Paul, taking his family on their annual trip as well.

20. My first semester of college, I moved out of state. I was first to move into the apartment and had a few days to my self. After orientation I found my new roommate sitting on his bed. When I introduced myself, he asked where I was from. When I told him, he said. “I used to have a friend named simon.” I said I used to have a friend named will. We were best friends in first and second grade until his family moved.

21-25 Unbelievable Coincidence Stories

21. When I was eleven, I was in the park like half a mile from my house and I was flying a Winnie the Pooh kite. I was the only kid around with a kite at the time, and I was pretty zoned into it, and didn’t notice when the string came loose. One hundred feet of twine zoomed away and out of reach, and Pooh Bear was gone. Later that night, my family and I went out to eat, and when we came home there was a string dangling from the gutter above our front door. My dad grabbed it and started pulling. The string seemed to go all the way up into the night sky, we couldn’t see the end of it. A hundred feet of pulling later, there was my Pooh Bear kite. It came back to me.

22. I was once mugged by 4 guys on one of the main shopping streets of Nairobi, Kenya. One of the guys had me in a choke hold and just before i was about to pass out, they dropped me and ran. At the time i didn’t know why. 12 months later, sitting on a beach on an island in Thailand, i meet a British couple who did business in Kenya and we start to talk about how dangerous it was getting for foreigners. They described an incidence the year before of turning a corner and seeing a white guy being mugged and a shopkeeper rescued him by hitting one of them over the head with a bat. They were in the same street, on the same day, at the exact same time I was there. It was me who they witnessed being mugged. What are the odds of randomly meeting up on a beach in Thailand a year later?

23. About ten years ago I tried to get into Six Flags with a tiny keychain swiss army knife. It literally had a dull 1″ blade. They told me I could either throw it away, take it to my car a mile away or rent a locker for like 10 bucks. So I decided to hide it in the planter. I looked down and saw a big piece of bark laying in the dirt and figured it would be a good hiding place. I picked it up and found another f**king mini swiss army knife! I placed mine next to the first and went into the park. When I returned, the other knife was gone and a smiley face was etched into the dirt in its place.

24. I went to a concert in Dallas and took two lawn chairs. They wouldn’t let me bring them in, so being 6’5″ I threw them on top of a very tall bush. No one would have even seen them and hardly anyone would be able to reach them. As I’m pulling them down after the concert, I pulled down 4 of the exact same chair. I only brought two though. Up walks a guy who is as tall as I am, wearing the EXACT SAME Blink-182 tour shirt from 2009, and the other two chairs were his. It was pretty wild. We smoked a doob, did a tall guy high five, then parted ways.

25. I’m an American who moved to Amsterdam some years ago, and my first year there on a random Saturday I decided to head out for a drink. Sat down next to a cute German guy who was in town for the first time from six hours away, helping a friend move kind of thing, and it turns out he’s doing a PhD in physics. I am doing mine in astronomy and have a physics background, so we spend maybe ten minutes discussing our research topics, when he mentions offhand how he used to study in New Zealand. I get a confused look, and then get all excited. “Johannes! Prof W’s E&M class in Auckland, first half of 2007!” Freaked him out until I explained- I was a semester abroad student in Auckland that year, and not were we only in the same class we even did homeworks together and such. But lost touch once I left the country, with no one having a clue what happened to the other. Only to randomly run into each other five years later in a random bar in a random city on another continent! I don’t know if I can ever top that one, it was pretty darn cool. 🙂