30 People Share "Glitch In The Matrix" Stories That Made Them Doubt Their Reality

My mother did all her GYN appointments with a doctor in downtown Austin. He was in the 5th floor of this hospital building and had a long time nurse/receptionist named Alison. I remember attending her appointments when I was little and my mother would make a game out of finding the office and being in the waiting room, which was colorfully decorated with a forest scene.

Alison was a super sweet woman who was half babysitter for us kids, too. She would read us books and give us coloring books and occasionally even listen to our dreadful knock knock jokes. We all referred to her as Alison Wonderland.

Anyway, years down the road, I got married and pregnant and started searching for an OB since I had moved back to Austin relatively recently before that. My mother suggested I go see if that Dr, who was super young(low 30s) when I was born, was still in business.

Well, I could not find his name in the hospital directory, so I figured I would just swing by the office and check. My mother happened to be in town(she had moved years ago) and came with me. We both joked about it being so familiar but reversed situations now.

As we reach the stairs, we ran into a problem. There was no fifth floor of this hospital office building. Odd. We both must have misremembered it. We knew it was on the top floor, so it must have been the fourth. Nope, not there.

We thought maybe we were in the wrong building. Except we parked in the same parking garage thing from 20 years ago and walked the same route.

That Dr does not exist. Never did, apparently. My mother and my brother and I are the only ones who remember him and Allison Wonderland. We have asked around, including among the hospital staff. We even looked up our birth certificates which are new copies and just list "Attending physician". One of my childhood memories is fake but shared with my brother and my Mother.

When I was little my parents had a painting of a soldier in uniform. I could see it from my bed when the door was cracked. SEVERAL times I saw the man in the painting move his head and look at me. The scariest experience was after I begged my parents to get rid of the painting. My dad calmed me down and I started to drift to sleep. But I had that feeling where you know you are being watched. When I opened my eyes (and I have never forgotten this) the soldier turned his head and SMILED! The next day my dad threw the painting away."
"Years later my dad told me he had heard me moving around in my bed and was looking down the hall trying to decide if he should go check on me again. While glancing down the hallway, HE saw the man in the painting turn his head and smile!

It was after my Mom died and I dropped an earring she gave me down the sink. They were both on my dresser the next morning. Cannot explain it.

This is a relatively short story but still creeps me out to this day because of how certain I am of it. So I was working in Pittsburgh, PA in a travel job where I would stay in hotels throughout the week and then travel home for the weekend. I got off at 5:00 per usual and before I got on the PA turnpike I stopped at a mom-and-pop style gas station to fuel up for the trip home. Got my gas, went in paid for it and headed for the turnpike. I drove for maybe two an a half hours before I decided I was going to pull off and get a quick bite and use the bathroom. I punched in my GPS the nearest gas station and headed to it. And I swear to god I pulled into the EXACT SAME mom and pop gas station!"
I walked in to get a burger and almost fell over I was so freaked out. Finished up in the station walked out to the truck and my GPS reflected I was in the same spot. Those two and a half hours of driving completely erased as it was after 7:00. I should've been halfway home. The only logic I have is I fell asleep at the station, but surely someone would've woke me up if I was there that long. I remember the drive and the gas in my truck reflected I had been driving. It's my only ever glitch and still baffles me.

This just happened and my fiancé and I are a little freaked out.

He couldn't find his phone and I offered to call him. When he found his phone he answered on speaker and said 'hello' while next to me. I answered with 'hello' too, but when we heard my voice coming from his phone it was me clearly saying 'hey.'

We looked at each other and I ended the call. We couldn't come up with a rational explanation (which does not mean there isn't one, we just couldn't think of one).
It made me feel like those scenes in horror movies where a character is standing in front of a mirror and their reflection doesn't match their movements.

Just a bit of backround, no serious mental health problems other than some mild anxiety and depression, I take 25mg of Zoloft so I don't think I'm tripping or hallucinating. This morning I woke up for work, left a little earlier than usual because I woke up before my alarm. Filled my water bottle, grabbed my access card and got in my car and drove off. My commute is the same every day..."
"Forty minutes, its mostly interstate, theres ALWAYS traffic. While my car is warming up, I pick an album to listen to for the drive there. I usually make it about 3/4ths of the way through an album before I get to work. Every day is a new album. So I did all that. I drove to work, I remember being cut off, I remember being in standstill traffic towards my exit, I remember the album I listened to, I even remember responding to a text using Siri. I remember seeing a type of car I've never seen before in the US, I remember thinking to myself Im glad it's not as hot today. I definitely drove.
So I get to work, pull into the same parking space I take every day. Step out of my car and lo and behold...I'm still in front of my apartment building. Forty mins later, almost done with the album I put on. Wtf was I doing?? Where did I go?

Before making an offer on our house, my husband and I went for a viewing with our 3-year-old daughter whom we'd left with a babysitter the first time we saw the house.

As we walked in, I told her she could choose a bedroom. She said, "I want the Dinosaur Room!" and ran upstairs. Ok, 3-year-olds say random stuff. A moment later, she called out "Here it is!" and sure enough, the closet of her bedroom was covered with dinosaur stickers.

My husband, the realtor, and I were all freaked out. The kid acted like she knew the stickers were there, but none of us remembered seeing them before and we certainly hadn't talked about them. The house was vacant and immaculately clean; it was an estate sale.

We left the stickers up. More coincidence than glitch, but another fun layer: My daughter shares a name with a Pokemon, which we didn't know at the time. Years later, when she got into Pokemon, she recognized her namesake was also part of the sticker collection.

This one doesn’t have to do with me but more with my mom. This happened on a Friday. I was walking home from school. Everybody knows the feeling, you're done with all the c**p from the past week and ready for the weekend. Once I got home I left my backpack on the couch. My mom had a shocked look on her face. I asked her what was wrong. 'I picked you up early for a dental appointment, but now you’re here,' she told me. I was not spooked, just a little confused. I gave her a hug and went to grab my backpack off the couch, where I left it when I got home. It was not there. Keep in mind there was no one in the house but us. I asked my mom if she moved it, she didn’t. After looking for a while, I found it in the passenger seat of my mom’s car. I felt confusion and shock at the same time. I walked home, there is no way it could’ve just teleported to the car like that. I still have no idea how it did that.

One Saturday night, several months ago, I attended a birthday party at a friend's house. There were about 40 people in attendance, split between the basement and the main floor. I didn't go down to the basement even once, because the music down there was extremely loud (which I hate) and most of my friends were on the main floor anyway. My best friend had given me a ride to the party, and we stayed together the whole night. A few days later I ran into a distant friend of mine at school, who had also been in attendance. He took out his phone and started showing me some of the photos he'd taken that night. He got to one that showed him and a girl posing for the camera, in the basement — with me standing in the background, smiling and looking in the direction of the camera, but not quite at it. I obviously freaked out and told him I hadn't been in the basement. He told me he had seen me there for several minutes. He said he had tried to say hello, but I had seemed distant and distracted. I called my best friend, and she confirmed that I had been with her the entire night. I was not drunk/drugged, I drank nothing all night but a water bottle that I brought with me. To this day when I think about the picture, it scares the [hell] out of me. There must have been another me in the basement.

I'm not sure if this really counts as a glitch but still creepy and unexplained.

A bit of context, I dated my ex (important detail, she had long hair at this point) then we drifted away for a while then we went back together in a relationship (she cut it short at that point).

During the relationship I had a dream where she was there, however her "dream version" was in the past as she still had her long hair. In the dream she avoided me and acted really strange as if we weren't together, just like it would've been during the "drifted apart" period... I was weirded out but not much since it was a dream, right?

Well... I told her about the dream and turns out that she had dreamt the EXACT same dream as me... Except little detail, hers was 2 years BEFORE. Exactly during the time when she had long hair and we weren't in each other's lives. She remembers being weirded out because in the dream I acted like if we were together and our both descriptions of both the place and the people present in the dream matched perfectly. It was a house party with lots of people and some common friends, also it had lots of strange rooms with bizarre stuff like certain animals, objects or simply the layout of the rooms that made it impossible to just be a coincidence.

TL;DR "multiplayer" dream with my ex with a two year gap between both perspectives.

Something weird is happening in our town and only my family seems to notice. The first thing we started noticing were duplicates. We would see someone somewhere only for them to inexplicably end up somewhere else. For example, my mother and I saw and chatted with an old friend at the grocery store and when we arrived home later we saw on Facebook that this person was out of the country on vacation and had been for a few days. They have no memory of speaking to us either."
"I've taken phone calls that were duplicates of calls I had already taken with the other person swearing we hadn't spoken yet.

The scariest thing though has been the deaths. There have been four deaths in our community of very well known and influential people and every one of them has died twice. We hear about their deaths and see all the RIP posts on Facebook. We see the community fundraisers put on to raise money for the funerals and even see the cars at the church or funeral home only for these same people to die a week or two later and all the RIP posts and fundraisers happen again.
Only our family seems to notice these things happening. My mother and siblings and my two kids. We don't know what's happening and it is starting to scare us."

If I told you what I saw last night you would not believe me. Like i can't even wrap my head around it. So here it goes... I went to do laundry around 2:00 a.m. with my oldest son. After we put the laundry in, we went to a McDonald's drive thru to get something to drink. The drive thru was packed with about five or six cars ahead of us. I noticed none of the cars were moving forward and it had been like five minutes already waiting. So I decided to go around the car in front of me to the next drive thru lane (McDonald's has two lanes). As I'm pulling around them I look into their car to see why they are not moving, and I kid you not both people — driver and passenger — looked dead! Heads tilted all the way back, eyes shut, not moving, dead! I freaked out and tried to pull out of the drive thru entirely going around the other cars just to get out of there, and the next car I passed, all the passengers also looked dead! Heads tilted back, eyes shut. I panicked thinking maybe they were all shot or someone killed them all so I f***ing hit the gas and got the f**k out of there. My son called 911 and told them what happened and they sent an officer to check. A few minutes later the cop called us back said everything was fine at McDonald's. Mind you, my son saw it too. We both saw the car in front of us the people looked dead. This s*** was terrifying, it literally looked like one of those rapture movies or end of the world type of s***. Needless to say I can't wrap my head around what we saw or why. I'm still scared over it.

While I was living in a Denver I had a friend flying into town to visit. The Denver National Airport was about 30 minutes away and her flight was scheduled to get in around 11:15PM. At exactly 10:30PM I get a text message from her saying "I just landed. Are you here?" Assuming her flight arrived early we immediately started rushing to the airport while I kept trying to call her, only to have her phone go to voicemail. I thought maybe her phone had died or something, so I continued to refresh the flight info page on our way there, but it kept saying the plane was still in transit. We ended up getting to the airport before 11:15 and with no word from my friend or new information about the flight we circled the airport and waited...until 11:15 or so when I get the exact same text message she had sent me at 10:30PM. I call her, she picks up and I asked her if she texted me while she was on the plane. She said there was no way she could have since she had her phone turned off the entire time. When I finally met up with her I asked to compare our text conversations in our phones. I had two of the same texts from her, one at 10:30PM and one at 11:15PM, while her conversation read only sent at 11:15PM. She confirmed that she hadn't typed it out prior either. Her phone was completely off. Glitch in the matrix made me waste 15 minutes circling an airport.

One night I was scrolling back in my Instagram feed, not sure why I felt like doing that but I was weirdly compelled to. And I came across a selfie of myself where I had a very strange and unattractive smile. It had no likes — most of my photos have around 50-80 since my friends are active on it — and I don’t remember taking it or posting it though it was from a week before, max. It spooked me bad and I deleted it. I did not see a copy of it in my camera roll.
It happened seven years ago and I still think about it. What happened? Was that even me?

When I was about 17, my friend and I used to hang out at the mall religiously. But there was one day that we went that still sticks out in my mind years later. It was closer to evening and the lights were all half off which we’d never seen before. But the mall was still open as far as we could tell, although at least a third of the shops were closed and empty. We couldn't figure out why, there wasn't a holiday or anything else that we knew of. That was unusual, but not so strange as to have no plausible explanation. Maybe they had a power outage or they were doing electrical maintenance or something. Something about the atmosphere made it feel eerie though. the dim lights, the setting sun, the familiar bright and bustling area now darker and quieter. But the part that struck us was the other people there..."
"There weren’t as many people around as usual but almost everyone we encountered would watch us. Their eyes would follow us and people openly stared expressionlessly at us. Not the typical glance at a person walking past. It was as if they seemed surprised to see us there and their eyes would trail us long past whats considered socially appropriate.
We both noticed immediately and at first we felt like celebrities. We drank it in thinking we must’ve looked really good that day. But we weren’t wearing anything special enough to garner this much attention. We kept checking with each other, looking at our reflections, making sure we didn't have something on our face or something otherwise attention drawing, and we didn’t.

Still, it continued. I remember that we both saw two parents with a young child in a stroller all watch us simultaneously as we walked by. and that was when we were both like, 'Ok this is getting weird, why are people looking at us like this?'

We tried to ignore it but around 85% of the people we passed took notice of us. People of widely varying demographics: elderly people, children, other teens we didn't recognize, shop clerks and other customers when we’d enter a store, people at other tables in the food court.

We thought maybe it was because there were fewer shoppers around. We started trying to see if people were staring at everyone that passed by, but we didn't see a single person looking at anyone else like that. Instead we’d catch people looking dead at us from like 40 feet away ignoring the other passersby. I remember people eating pretzels on a bench stopping as they saw us. Watching us as we approached, watching us as we walked past, looking over our shoulders to see them watching us as we walked away. It started to feel like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
It wasn't like there was open malice, annoyance or intimidation exactly but it wasn't like they were amused, attracted, or intrigued either. These weren’t friendly glances. It was uncomfortable, like we didn't belong somehow and everybody knew it.

We’d normally spend hours or even the whole day at the mall but we barely lasted 45 minutes before we called my dad to pick us up again, to his surprise. And he noticed it too when he got there! We were super creeped out, but when we went back the next weekend everything was normal and we never experienced anything like that again.

This happened to my family, if not me personally. Thanks to time zones, it's also a confusing story to tell.

My brother was taking a trip out west. From my dads perspective, he dropped my brother off at the airport before work. My brother was supposed to have over an hour before his flight, followed by a four hour flight. After work (about eight hours later), my dad received a phone call from my brother. So, from dads perspective, my brother should have been at his destination for less than three hours.

But, to my brother, he took his flight, got to his destination, was picked up by his friends, went to dinner, spent the night, spent the following day sight seeing, and called my dad that evening. He thought he had been there over 24 hours.

the confusion ended in a weird argument, but both stick to their version of events and both have things like print outs of flights to prove that they were right. I have no idea how either dad lost a day or my brother gained one

I did tae kwon do for 10 years, and my do jang always had yearly summer picnics with food for everyone and games for the kids. One year, the picnic was held at a pavilion in a forest preserve. My friend and I got bored (we were 12--over the games, but not "cool" enough to hang with the teenagers) so we decided to follow this tiny path we found leading into the woods. The path came to a few crossroads, but we decided not to split up, just in case one of us got lost. We left stick markers at each crossroads in the shape of arrows, too, just in case!
We walked for what felt like hours, eventually having to cross several roads that cut through the woods, and at one point passing what looked like an old factory or mill.
After a while of following a stream, sweaty and mosquito-bitten, we came to an old, crumbling set of stone walls and an open half-dome structure decorated with colorful tiles that looked like the front altar of a church. We were fascinated--I was SUPER-convinced we'd just found the ruins of some old church no one else had ever discovered. It had latin writing on the sides, and very worn mosaics depicting the globe, a lamp/lighthouse, and a star with radiating beams of light. AWESOME, right?
However, my friend and I realized that our parents were probably really worried about us, as we hadn't told anyone we were leaving to explore the woods (it was 2006 and we were 12, so we didn't have cell phones). We made our way back to the pavilion as quickly as we could, following our little markers, and emerged from the forest to find my mom on the phone with someone and her mom standing by. They were obviously very relieved to see us, and also very upset that we'd just wandered off without telling anyone. Later that evening, when she had cooled down, I told my mom about the "ruins" we had found. I don't know if she believed me, but she thought it was interesting!
Fast-forward about 5 years. I'm in high school, and my friends and I are enjoying our summer by grabbing iced coffees and exploring our town's downtown area. (My hometown is a touristy little town on a river). One of my good friends suggested we go to the "shrine." I had no idea what he was talking about, so he said, "It's this little run-down Catholic shrine out in the woods behind the old government building!" Instantly, I thought of the "ruins" and was a little spooked--but I HAD to go see it!
My friends and I hopped a fence and hiked out into the woods behind the government building for about 10 minutes, and sure enough, there were the "ruins." They looked EXACTLY how I had remembered them, and were right next to a stream like the one my friend and I had followed to get to it years prior!
I told my friends the story, and they were perplexed. They told me that there was no way we could have travelled through straight-up woods to get to the "shrine," because it was in a tiny patch of forest that was bordered on one side by the government building, on another by a neighborhood, and the other by the river. They even took me to the edge of the path that was behind said neighborhood to show me.
I didn't believe them, so when I got home, I pulled up Google Maps to do some research.
First off, the town that the tkd picnic forest preserve was in DOES neighbor my hometown, but it is on the side of that town that doesn't border mine. Second of all, my friends were right. the patch of woods containing the "shrine" in my hometown were completely closed off by the river, the government building, and the neighborhood. There is no way we could have exited the pavilion into the forest preserve and ended up in the spot where the "shrine" was actually located by simply walking through the woods for an hour or two.
I still go and visit the shrine on occasion when I'm home. It's a cool place, and is still beautiful! I haven't reached out to my tkd friend about my discovery, as we grew apart about a year after the fact. Maybe I should!

TL;DR a shrine in the woods appears and then reappears in an impossible place years later.

Idunno how crazy this is compared to others, but this happened last night while I was on the phone with my girlfriend. I was telling her about my day and ended my sentence, "it shouldn't be like that" I then herd static and my voice echoing, repeating back just the sentence " it shouldn't be that way". The phone call went back to normal and my gf couldn't remember which one she herd. Did I glitch out to another parallel universe where I chose to end my sentence with the other words?

Idk if this counts as a "glitch" but still has always weirded me out. When I was 13 I was in the outfield during one of my baseball games when I suddenly got this overwhelming feeling of doom. After the game I called a bunch of my friends and family members to see if they were okay because I knew something was wrong somewhere. Everyone was okay but I still felt really off.

The next day my sisters friend, whom I am pretty close with as well, comes over and is crying a ton. He told us that the day before (around the time of my game) his best friend back home in Alaska got too drunk at a party, wandered off into the woods, and never came back. The next day they had found his body half eaten by a bear. After he told me this the feeling of dread I had for the past day immediately left and I felt incredibly relieved. Still one of the strangest things that's happened to me

Last spring when my son was three years old, we drove by a big white church. This church is one that we pass often driving around town. It is also the place of his current preschool, but at that time, he attended a different preschool and had NEVER stepped foot in or talked about the big white church. So we drove by one day and he said, 'Oh there’s the church that I ate cereal in.' My husband and I looked at each other and I said, 'What do you mean? We’ve never been there before.' We asked some additional questions but he didn’t really answer. However, he was very adamant about being there and eating cereal."
This happened during a very difficult time in our lives. My father in law was on hospice and dying of cancer. For weeks, we were up and back to my in laws house — this church being along the route. He said it a few more times and then never mentioned it again.

Fast forward to today — he currently attends preschool at said church. He has been going since September and we love it. It is Christian though we aren’t very religious. Anyway, I got the monthly newsletter and it mentioned that next month is pajama day where the kids wear pajamas and...eat cereal.
I told my son and asked him if he remembered eating cereal there before. He said no and had no recollection of saying that he did.

Is there an explanation to this? It gives me chills when I think about it.