If you’ve ever had something strange or inexplicable happen to you, then you know how a seemingly insignificant yet mysterious moment can stick in your mind for years (or even decades). Recently, people on Reddit shared their most baffling real-life experiences that haunt them to this day. Here are some of the top stories:
1.“I lived a partial lifetime in a dream recently. I had a family, a different job, and friends. And it was years long. I slept and woke up and dreamed and lived, and then I woke up years later here in this world. No words to decently explain how it was. I just lived a life that was not in this reality. I miss home.”
2.“I gained a few hours one day. I live in the country and have to take my garbage to a dump. The dump is open Wednesday from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. I had a Wednesday off, so I decided I’d take the garbage that day. I took the garbage, dumped it, and chatted with the guy who works there. When I left, I felt very strange. Lightheaded. I pulled over to the side of the road and took a deep breath. When I went to turn my car radio off, I noticed the time said 11 a.m.”
“I thought that was weird so I looked at my phone. Also 11 a.m. I made a U-turn and went back to the dump. I was still on the same road as the dump, just about half a mile away.
The gate was closed and locked. It wasn’t open yet.
I went back on Saturday and chatted with the guy who worked there about Wednesday and he said he opened at his regular time but didn’t see me. I asked about our conversation (he chats about DIY stuff using scraps from the dump), and he said he isn’t doing anything DIY right now and that he didn’t see me Wednesday.”
3.“I’m Indian, and when I was about a year old, my family held a Kar Vidhi (also known as Mundan Vidhi), a Hindu ceremony where a baby’s first hair is shaved. Nothing unusual so far. But here’s where it gets strange — when I was around 10 years old, I had a dream in which I saw my Kar Vidhi as if I were an outsider watching it happen. I told my mom about the dream and described everything in detail: the color of the clothes I was wearing, exactly where I was sitting, who was present, and even small details about the setup.”
“This wasn’t some grand event with a photographer, so there were no photos or videos taken. It happened over 30 years ago, and nobody had mobile phones back then. Yet I somehow saw the entire ceremony accurately, even though I was just a baby when it happened.”
4.“When I was a kid, my dog passed away. Naturally, I was devastated, crushed, heartbroken, and feeling all the emotions. I didn’t grow up particularly religious, but I remember praying for a sign that my dog was ok wherever he was now. Moments later, I found a yellow bow in my bed. He wore bows sometimes after grooming (he was a shih tzu), but he hadn’t had long enough hair to wear bows in years, so it was strange to find him randomly in my bed. I took it as a sign and kept it for as long as I could remember.”
5.“Back around 2006-ish, some friends and I went to a matinee movie in Jacksonville. We come out of the movie into the super bright afternoon Florida sun, and there is a guy yelling for help who is chasing an ostrich around the parking lot. We jump in and help him. He is trying to get this ostrich into the back of a van thing. We even got other people to help us. The cops show up for some reason.”
“I dunno, a bunch of people chasing an ostrich in a parking lot is unusual or something. The guy we were ‘helping’ is nowhere to be found all of a sudden. At some point, a guy in a cow costume joined us, by the way.
Eventually, the ostrich is captured by legit animal control and taken away. We find out the van was just another patron at the movies who had no clue about anything and had just left his van unlocked.
The cops questioned us a bit, but we were clueless and had no answers, so we all just left eventually.
Where did the ostrich come from? I do not know. Why was the guy trying to put it in someone’s van? I do not know. Why does Tarzan not have a beard? I do not know.”
6.“This is so stupid but it bothers me to this day. I was doing math homework in college with my calculator on my bed. My room door was closed, and none of my roommates were home. I could not have been doing the math without a calculator so I know it was there. I went to use the restroom that was in my room, and I could see the bed from the restroom, so I know nobody came into my room. When I got back on the bed, the calculator was gone.”
“I looked everywhere for it and couldn’t find it so I figured it fell somewhere weird, but there really wasn’t anywhere for it to fall.
When I was moving out, I tried to find it because it bothered me. I never lose anything. I never found it and have since still never seen it again.”
7.“My family and I were going fishing. It was meant to be a trip just for us. In the car, I had a random feeling that these specific family friends would be there. I don’t know why. We arrived at the site, and they were, in fact, there with another family we didn’t know! We spent the day together.”
“On the way home, my sister said, ‘I kinda knew this would happen.’ So did I! We both felt as if the family friends would be there for some reason, although there was no concrete evidence to back it up. Everyone probably forgot by now, but it’s something I still think about sometimes.”
8.“One day, I woke up and felt like everything in the entire world had been adjusted 90°. Even though my bed was in the same place in the house, and the house was the same place in the neighborhood, and the neighborhood was in the same place in the city, my consciousness was aware that everything was at a 90° angle to where it should’ve been. That lasted about three days, and then I woke up and was like, ‘Cool, everything went back to where it was supposed to be.'”
9.“I was at a guy’s townhouse, and we started talking about his late mother, who died and was very sick in the house for a long time. Still had all her medication in the basement. The minute we started talking about her, the TV turned on. It was one of the old TVs. Not digital. No remote. You’d have to physically go to the TV to turn it on. We were startled. Her spirit, maybe?”
10.“My dad was always really good at finding four-leaf clovers. He would find a couple any time he looked and give them to me as a kid. I could never find them on my own. The day after he died, it was suspiciously warm. I was in the front yard and decided to look for one. Every time I bent down, I found another one. I started bagging them and had at least 20 by the time I stopped. I had never found a clover in my life before then. Now, occasionally, I will look for them still and usually find one right where I look. I wish I still had that bag of clovers he left me.”
11.“When I was about five years old, I was at my grandma’s house, and we were about to visit her friend who lived right behind my grandma’s apartment. I was walking right behind my grandma when I saw a huge wolf-like dog crossing our path. I immediately froze because I was incredibly fearful of dogs back then. My grandma kept trying to tug me, but I told her there was a dog in front of us. My granny kept trying to convince me that there was nothing there, but I insisted that there was. Eventually, the dog passed, and I continued walking.”
“Later that night, my grandma got a call that her nephew had passed. I was very close to him and was saddened by his passing. The next day, we went back to my grandma’s friend’s house, and she told her about the passing. The friend told my grandma that she had seen the dog hanging out on the back porch the night before and that it was an omen. She didn’t tell my grandmother because she didn’t want to spook her. Still not sure how or why I saw the dog, but yeah. I always think about that.”
12.“I was visiting a friend’s cousin in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere in the Florida Everglades about 20 years ago. Three bright lights appeared in the sky, spaced well enough apart to be separate objects. They just hovered there for a while, then disappeared.”
13.“My mom died in mid-January. It was ridiculously, unseasonably warm during her last couple of days and stayed warm for her funeral, but with a quiet, steady rain. Then it got cold again, and the season went on as usual. On the first anniversary of her death, there were a couple of feet of snow on the ground. I insisted we go to the cemetery to leave flowers, although my dad was certain we wouldn’t be able to find her grave.”
“I’d been there twice at that point, and even now, decades later, it always takes me between 5 and 15 minutes to find her grave. That day, though, I walked straight out into the blank expanse of snow, stopped when I almost tripped over my long hippie skirt (yes, I wore those in the snow. I was 16), and began clearing the snow immediately under my feet. I was standing on her gravestone.
I’ve had a couple of other things happen that assure me she’s still around and watching me, but that was the first and the most direct.”
14.“No one ever believes me, but here goes. When I was in college, I shared a room with a friend of mine from high school. One night, I was sleeping and had a dream where he and I were on this huge pile of garbage, searching for something. We were both digging in the trash. Then I woke up. I got up and went to the bathroom. When I climbed back in bed, my roommate kind of stirred and mumbled, ‘I found it. It’s over here.’ And then rolled over and went quiet again. The next morning, he didn’t remember any of it. I didn’t dream getting out of bed, I didn’t dream his response.”
15.“Once, I found a perfectly intact large cheese puff in the middle of my living room floor. I lived alone and do not even like cheese puffs. Nobody else had keys to my place other than the landlady.”
16.“Two of my family members died in a fire right before my tenth birthday, which is in February. The next year, for about a week around the anniversary of their death, our smoke alarms kept going off. Almost all of them bought the year before cause family dying in a fire will do that to you. Sometimes it was the same ones, sometimes it was different ones, and it kept happening even after changing batteries and switching out a couple of them with new ones. Now, every once in a while in February, multiple will go off still, and I have PTSD attacks every time I hear smoke alarms.”
17.“I went to camp in middle school and slept in a little dorm room with about six or seven other girls. We saw some writing on the wall that read, ‘I died here, may I haunt you forever,’ so naturally, we were shit-talking the ‘ghost.’ The next morning, when we woke up, one girl’s nose was broken, and another girl had blood on her hands. No clue what happened, and I’m a light sleeper.”
18.“I was sitting in a parking lot. A lady pulled up alongside a bunch of seagulls, got out of her car, grabbed a bird, stuck it in her car, and drove away. Anytime I approach a flock of birds, they fucking skedaddle. I was wondering if they knew each other.”
19.“One time, my grandfather took us kids to the movies. Now, these old movie houses date back to the days when they had live stage entertainment, Vaudeville. This old theater my grandfather took us to had an orchestra pit even though it hadn’t been used in decades. I was following my grandfather in the area between the front-row seats and the orchestra pit. Out of curiosity, I peeked into the orchestra pit. There was no floor. One could see into the basement. But on the basement floor was….well, you ever heard of the old ‘Humpty Dumpty’ poem?”
“On the floor of the basement was a large man-sized egg with a happy face painted on its shell. It had arms and legs. It was on its back, flailing its arms and legs as if it were trying to stand up but couldn’t due to its egg shape.
I looked away at my grandfather for a second, then looked back into the orchestra pit. This time, the painted expression on his face changed. Now, the painted expression was one of grief and frustration. The eyes were closed, and the mouth was in a grimace.
I looked away for a brief second or so and looked back into the orchestra pit. This time, there was no egg. Just the bare floor of the basement. I looked away again. Just for a few seconds. I guess looking to tell someone what I saw. But then I looked back into the orchestra pit. This time, the orchestra pit floor was there. I couldn’t see into the basement anymore. The orchestra pit floor had only a small handful of wooden folding chairs on it. Nothing else.
As the years passed, sometimes I went to that very same theater again. Each and every time I did, before the movie started, I’d go take a look into the orchestra pit. But I never saw anything like that again. Just the plain old bare floor of the orchestra pit (without the wooden folding chairs).
That old theater is now gone.”
20.“I knew this little kid years ago who had this uncanny ability to start talking about someone, and then they would just show up. One time, he brought up a relative no one had heard from in years, and then they dropped by for a visit a day or two later. Another time, he reportedly guessed the first name of a new teacher starting at his school before anything was said about her, and it wasn’t a common name. But the weirdest one was when he described feeling like someone ‘really, really important’ was going to swing by.”
“The next day, his dad’s company’s vice CEO dropped by to personally deliver a surprise recognition bonus, something his dad was apparently not expecting at all. This was enough for people to start speculating about the kid being psychic or having some sort of prophetic gift, and I still can’t explain how he got everything right every single time.”
21.“When I was 12, we moved into a brand new house just after my grandpa died. When we moved in, my middle brother (who was around 8 or 9 at the time) and I shared a room with bunk beds, while our youngest brother (who was 4 or 5) had his own room right next to our parent’s bedroom. I remember one day hearing my littlest brother talking to someone in his room, but I could only hear my brother’s voice. I opened the door and saw him alone. I asked him who he was talking to, and he said he was talking to Grandpa.”
22.“I was driving, and there was a dip in the road in front of me, like in a rollercoaster. Another car drove in the opposite direction while I was approaching the dip. The other car went out of my sight while it was at the bottom of the dip. When I reached the position where I should have been able to see the car, it was nowhere to be seen. There were no other roads intersecting at that point where the car disappeared. Still baffles me.”
23.“I bought a JVC flatscreen TV about 15 years ago. It was in our front room. The TV in our backroom went out and had to be replaced. We went TV shopping, and I found a JVC that matched the one in the front. Got a salesperson to grab one from the back. Here is the weird part. Once they left, I got light-headed, had tunnel vision, and almost passed out. I leaned against a shelf and collected myself.”
“Around that time, the salesperson came out. He was bringing out an LG TV. I asked about it. It was the same specs and price, and the salesperson thought it was the TV I asked for. No worries, I’ll take it.
Get home, and while setting it up, i needed a cable from the other tv to test something. I say something along the lines of, ‘I’m not sure it will work because of the different brands.’ My wife says that the TV in the front room is an LG and should be fine. I argued it was a JVC. Go to the front, and it’s an LG. Per my family, it has always been an LG.”
24.“A few years ago, some of my friends all lived together in a house. It was a typical bachelor pad where four guys in their mid-20s lived. It was a nice enough house, and right across the street was a river. It was a river that people might go fishing in, but it wasn’t really big enough or deep enough for boats, and nobody would ever go swimming in there because it was all basically just mud. Anyway, one night, my friends threw a party. Lots of drinking and music, but nothing too crazy. There were probably no more than about 15-20 of us there.”
“So, I’m playing beer pong outside when we see something come out of the river. It’s like 11:30 p.m., and it’s very dark. There’s nobody else around — just us at the party and this figure that comes out of the water.
It just walks right up to us, and it’s an older man. probably like 50 years old. He’s on the shorter side, and stocky of build. It seemed like he had a bubble of silence following him. I swear the music stopped, and everyone stopped talking as this old, wet man walked right into the party. he was wearing nothing except a very small Speedo bathing suit.
He asked what game we were playing and just stood there watching us for like five minutes. After that, he just turned around and walked back into the river.”
25.“I lived in a cabin where objects would inexplicably fly around the room. My roommate and I would invite people over who didn’t believe us, and they’d freak out when things would fly at them, lol. To this day it was the only thing I’ve seen that I legitimately have no explanation for.”
26.“I was asleep when I was about 19 and was dreaming I couldn’t stop my car from rolling backward. In the dream, I was stomping the brakes and panicking, but nothing worked. My mom woke me up to tell me to get up because my car had rolled backward into the road. Our driveway was uphill, and I had to park in the driveway because that was the only spot. I have absolutely no idea why my car suddenly decided to go off on its own, but somehow I knew it was happening.”
27.And finally, “I was walking down the street downtown late at night when I noticed a faint light hovering in front of me a few yards. It was pretty small but stood out against the dark backdrop, kind of like a firefly. It definitely wasn’t a firefly; they’re not even native to where I lived. I was walking towards it and it seemed to just be hovering, but I could not at all tell what the source of it was. I was about 2 feet away from it, and I legitimately did not see any source. It was just a wisp of light.”
“Then, it quickly went straight into my chest and disappeared. I didn’t feel anything. Such an inconsequential moment, but I’m still so fucking confused, like 15 years later.”
Has something ever happened to you that you simply can’t explain? Tell us your story in the comments or via this anonymous form.
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