I’m going to be honest here; one of my favourite shows of all time is Lost. You guys remember Mr. Eko? He once said something that really stuck with me. He said “Don’t mistake coincidence with fate,” and that got me thinking. Is there such a thing as coincidence? Or are things meant to happen they way that they do?
This Reddit about some insane coincidences that people have experiences, will make you wonder about that exact idea, starting with this one.
“I am. I have a rare genetic disorder called Wilson’s Disease. Roughly 1 in 30,000 have it. Basically my body can’t get rid of copper and stores it and I am now suffering from the effects of heavy metal copper poisoning. It’s an autosomal recessive disorder meaning both my parents carry the defective gene. My mom was born in France, my dad was born in Uruguay. What are the chances that two people from pretty much on the opposite sides of the world meet and have the same genetic defect for the same rare a– disease? BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! I was born on February 12th. Who else has a February 12th birthday? Abraham Lincoln. What coin is he on? The penny. What are pennies made of? (At least the outside part) Copper. I’m pretty much made up of a lot of coincidences.” – WilsonsDiseaseAnPony
“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?” – magicsonar
“My aunt died young on October 3 of 2007. On October 3, 2008, I was a senior in high school. I was in my art class one morning sitting at a table of four, when the teacher tells one person from each table to go and grab a stack of newspapers for us to sculpt on so that the tables don’t get all messed up with clay. Another guy spreads out the newspapers and then I begin to work. I noticed that the paper at my seat is the obituary pages. I casually begin to read it and realize that the paper is a year old and the obituary listing exactly under my right hand was that of my aunt, who had died a year before. I’d like to think it was her way of saying hello and what’s up, and to make sure I wasn’t sculpting anything grossly sexually inappropriate.” – RaggedJagged
“I was on a road trip from San Fran to San Antonio for a wedding. During this trip, Me and my friend decided to climb Mt. Whitney. It was important we only spend 2 days on the mountain, as we had a tight schedule to get to a wedding in San Antonio. During over 14 miles of covered trails, I got to the bottom of the mountain realizing I had lost the rental car keys. We are both freaking out, trying to come up with a plan to get a new key shipped to us, etc. We go to a little burger joint at the bottom of the mountain, and while discussing what we should do, the guy sitting next to us asks what kind of car we are driving. We tell him it’s a mustang, and he says ‘I have your keys. Do you mind if I finish my burger before I get them for you, they are in my car.’ Turns out the guy had spent a couple weeks in the wilderness, and by coincidence he came back the same day we finished our 2 day trip, and ate a burger right next to us. He wouldn’t even let me give him some gas money or pay for his burger. Good man.” – TooLateForCoolName
“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.” – robinson217
“Had a dream where I:
1. Wake up and go to work on a Friday.
2. Boss isn’t there but 5 other coworkers are.
3. 2/5 leave at lunch and won’t be back.
4. At 3pm another leaves due to an emergency.
5. At 4pm the last 2 leave because they aren’t getting any work done.
6. I work till 5 alone and drive home.
7. I die in a car accident on the way home.
I thought it was a bit freaky. On the way to work I feel like the dream is happening. I get to work and the boss isn’t there for some reason so I laugh and tell one of the co-workers about my dream. Lunch comes around and 2/5 say they are heading out to lunch then home for a longer weekend. My coworker instantly tells the other 2 the dream and I’m starting to get a bit wearied out. I ask the others if they are leaving early and all 3 say they are staying to 5. So crisis averted, dream can’t come true.
At 3 one gets a call and their wife’s car broke down so he needs to pick up his son from school. Ha… OK this is funny guys. Please stay till 5. The other 2 are also starting to get freaked out but ya know, we are all staying to 5. Then at 3:30 the company server goes down. We sit around for a half hour and the other 2 say ‘dude we don’t want to make your dream come true but we are just sitting here doing nothing.’ They leave at 4. Awesome. I am in charge of getting the server back up so I’m still working. Till 5… and it goes back online at 5. Right at 5. At this point I’m sitting in my chair questioning everything. I figure, f–k it. I get in my car and drive home because I don’t believe in the Cosmic Owl. Craziest coincidence especially given I told 3 people about it and nobody diverged from the dream. Free will be damned.” – Pustulio18
“My junior year in high school, we had a transfer student come in from out of state. He immediately started hanging out with me and my friends. We lived together in college and worked together at many different restaurants and odd jobs. I was the best man at his wedding. Prior to transferring into our school, I had never heard of him or his family. As it would turn out, our mothers went to high school (not the same high school we attended) together and actually knew each other quite well. Our grandfathers built houses together back in the 1950s and knew each other very well. Now our children are friends. That’s 4 generations linked by coincidence.” – jpgonzo24
“When I was about 14 I was walking around the neighborhood with my friends in the summer. I happened to notice a napkin on the ground with some writing on it. It was a woman’s name with her phone number. For some reason I felt compelled to pick it up and hold on to it. A few days later my mom was doing laundry and found the napkin that had been forgotten in my pants. The woman turned out to be her best friend from when she was in grammar school, but my mom had lost contact with her when the woman moved sometime around middle school. My mom ended up calling her and has been getting together with her regularly for lunch and whatnot ever since.” – They_call_Me_Dave
“When I was in high school, I was aimlessly playing around our library one day. Like any large public high school, our library had literally thousands of books quietly tucked away in shelves, and rarely, if ever, touched. That day I pulled a book at random from a shelf in the back, and sat down to read it. After opening it, a slip of paper fell out, and I quickly recognized the dashed ten digits written on it as a phone number. I hastily read the number, and it was my older sister’s number, who had graduated my high school years earlier. Someone wrote her number and tucked it away into a random book in the back, until I found it years later.” – ImA10AllTheTime
“I was going to a My Chemical Romance and Blink-182 concert back in college. I went with a couple friends and we got a hotel nearby Jiffy Lube Live in order to get plastered. I got some Wendy’s on the way to the concert to eat in the parking lot before hand but left it in the taxi, I was drunkenly devastated. After the concert we hail a cab and I get in, feel a brown paper bag at my feet and look down. That beautiful ginger on the bag was smiling up at my inebriated eyes as if to say, ‘I knew you’d come back.’ And yes, of course I ate it.” – phi186
“Never could explain this payphone incident. Saturday night out with friends, we decide to call my friend Al to see if he wants to join us. This was in England long before mobile phones, so we had to use one of the iconic red phone booths. Someone was already using it so we had to wait a few minutes. Guy leaves and we cram in the booth. Now, in those days, in order to make a call you would first get a dial tone, then call the number. When the person answered you would hear a bunch of beeps at which point you insert the coins. So I pick up the phone but hear no dial tone. I hang the phone up and try again. Still no dial tone. Seems to be still connected to the previous call. I say ‘hello’ to see if anyone is still on the line. Person answers ‘hello?’ It was my friend Al. He had just picked up his phone to make a call, and somehow, miraculously, without even dialing his number, we were connected. We all went to the pub after and tried to figure out how the hell this happened, but it remains a mystery. If I did not have my friends with me at the time as witnesses, I would have believed it was my mind playing tricks on me.” – autonicus
“My first semester of college, I moved out of state. I was first to move into the apartment and had a few days to myself. 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.” – simplesimon6262
“Every year there is a salmon bake at a lighthouse across the water from where I grew up. When I was 12 my parents drug me along (this was the only year I ever went). I was bored and walked away from my family, and spent the next while skipping stones on the beach when this girl with curly hair (about 10) walks up to me and asks me how I do it. So I teach her to skip stones and flirt the day away. At the end of the day, she gets called away suddenly and I’m bummed out. My mom asks me what I was doing – and I tell her ‘I met the girl I want to marry!’ Life happens, I meet girls, I get engaged, it falls through. Eventually I meet this girl and we date for 5 years before getting married. Married for 2 years when we are talking about our childhood ‘love’ interests. I tell her about this girl I met at this salmon bake. My wife gives me a weird look. She asks me when this was – and what the girl looked like. So I described this girl with curly hair (my wife has curly hair) that had to leave early to perform (my wife was in theater when she was younger) and then I said ‘and I remember she had this yellow shirt with a butterfly on the front.’ My wife thought I was making this up. Why would I? She calls her mom, and 20 minutes later her mom texts us this childhood picture of my wife @ 10 years old wearing a yellow shirt with a butterfly on the front. My wife performed at the salmon bake that year. And she remembered this boy that taught her how to skip stones.” – ghallo
“I was on vacation in Germany. I was reading a book and accidentally left it there. I was only halfway through the book. About 5 years later I was living in the Midwest US in a small town. I was browsing in a used bookstore and saw the same book. I bought it so that I could read the second half. When I got home and opened it, there was MY bookmark! Someone had handmade the bookmark for me and it was very distinctive. It was the exact same book I had left in Germany that somehow found its way to the US to the small town I was in.” – OneRedSent
“I once went camping with about 5 or so other friends. This was in Pisgah national forest in the mountains of NC. There are some amazing waterfalls in this area, one called Rainbow Falls, it’s about 125 feet from river above to ground below. There’s a spot that’s about 1/3 the way up the side of Rainbow Falls where you can climb up some branches, then basically repel down a rockface, shimmy out on a ledge and jump about 30-40 feet into the nice deep pool in the river at the bottom of the waterfall. My friends and I had climbed out on the ledge and were about to jump when we noticed that there was another group of people hanging out in the river below us. They started cheering us on and encouraging us to jump (as it is slightly terrifying). Anyways we ended up jumping and once in the river below we talked some of the other group of people, they seemed pretty cool.
Fast forward 1 year, we had so much fun a year earlier that we decided to go back again. This time we camped a little further down the river, and we decided to climb on some rocks down river from the waterfall, about 3 or 4 hundred yards from the waterfall. I was climbing on one rock and found something that looked like a strap of some kind. Assuming it was trash, I didn’t touch it but when I pointed it out to one of my friends he noticed it was actually a Gopro camera in a waterproof case, so he decided to keep it.
Fast forward a couple of days, my friend and I purchased a charger for that type of camera and decided to see what was on it. We start watching the video and see some guys climbing up the place where we jumped off the side of Rainbow Falls in front of the cameraman. The cameraman starts to get closer, and we see something that made us instantly start to freak out. On the back left shoulder of the person in front of the cameraman was the exact tattoo that my friend has, when he gets even closer we realize that the person on camera was my friend who I was currently sitting right beside! Later the cameraman gets up to the ledge and we see me and the rest of my friends from over a year ago. There are also some pictures and videos of us jumping from the ledge. We watched the rest of the video in a stunned state, and the last 30 mins or so of the footage is of the cameraman going up to the river above rainbow falls, and apparently losing his Gopro in the water. The camera sinks to the bottom and you can even see fish swimming by and staring at the camera. Now think about where we found the camera 400-500 yards downriver from the BOTTOM of the large waterfall. So apparently this camera made its way down river over a 125 foot waterfall and got lodged in a rock 500 yards away and my friends and I found it a year later with video footage of us from the previous year on it. It took us a little while to decide on this as being the most reasonable explanation.” – jeremyneedexercise
“I have a unisex name, lets say its Ashleigh. Anyway I was at a nightclub and was talking to this girl. I ask her her name and she said it was Ash, and I said ‘Haha weird, I’m Ash too! But what is your last name?’ She says ‘Green.’ I just stare at her for like 10 seconds then reach into my wallet and pull out my ID. We have the same first and last name. Currently engaged.” – anonymous
