Most of us have a few stories to tell of things that we’re sure happened to us, but don’t have any rational explanation. It can be fascinating to speculate about what really happened, but more fascinating still, whether we believe in the supernatural or not, to just accept that there’s no way to find out. Someone on r/AskReddit posted this call for people’s best stories of times they experienced a “glitch in the matrix,” or a moment when reality just didn’t check out, and reading the thread is a journey down a rabbit hole.
Here are stories from people who either made contact with some things beyond the world of the living, got a premonition of a serious real-life crime or accident, or had all of their senses deceive them.
#1
So this has always bothered me. I was 13 years old at the time and my dad was a coal miner. He worked 3rd shift (known as the 'hoot owl shift) which was midnight to noon. As such he got home around 2 pm and slept till around 9, got up had dinner with us and left for work.
My dad was always pretty gruff and constantly yelled at us if my younger brother or I made too much noise and woke him up after getting home from somewhere(which as an adult now I completely understand).
So one day I did something to wake him up, I forget what. Anyways he calls me back to the bedroom and I'm expecting to get a dressing down but he just looked at me and said.
"it's ok. Come over here and give me a hug". What 13 year old boy wants to hug their dad? I kinda squirmed a bit and he followed up with
"What if something happened to me?" and just layed there all grizzled and tired..... I didn't hug him.
That night there was an accident in the mine. He saved everyone on his crew, including the one person he went back in for.
His was the only death, and I'm convinced he knew it was gonna happen. I'll never forget his eyes that day
If someone asked you for a hug give it to them. I love you dad
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258points
#2
My friend Sarah was in a nightclub, drunk off her face, when she got an overwhelming urge to tell a total stranger that her leg hurts (edit: it didn’t). All a bit strange, she ignores it but it doesn’t stop so she walks up to this guy and says, ‘I know this is crazy but I’ve got a huge urge to tell you my leg hurts. I know that’s crazy, again! Sorry!’
But he bursts into tears. Turns out his dad had just died and they made a pact before that if there was an afterlife he would get a message to him saying a totally random phrase, so there could be no mistakes, which they decided was ‘I’ve hurt my leg.’
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242points
#3
I have a good one.
I was about 12 years old, and woke up in the middle of the night needing to take a leak.
I walked across the hall to the little bathroom, hit the lights, and was about to reach for the toilet when I glanced up and saw a face in the mirror.
It was not my face.
It was as if someone was on the other side, standing to the right, with their face right next to the glass, staring at me. I only saw it for the briefest moment, but it is seared into my brain.
I screamed, and ran out of there to find my Dad. Of course, my dad investigated, then calmed me down, or tried to. Eventually we had a prayer session, because I was so freaked out. Eventually I must have gone back to sleep...
Fast forward to my 30s. I’d forgotten all about the event. One night while visiting, my dad quietly brings it up. “Remember that one time you saw a face in the mirror...”. It suddenly came back to me in a rush of memory, sending a chill down my spine. “Yea, I remember”
“Well...” he said, “I sometimes think about that night.” He looked down at the floor, with a serious expression. “I saw it too.”
He went on to describe exactly what I’d seen. We have no idea what that was. Apparently when he investigated, he saw it and had a freak out of his own. Apparently the prayer session was as much for his own nerves as mine.
I respect him for keeping that tidbit from me till my thirties, but I kinda wish he’d never told me.
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178points
Many close encounters can be explained by false memories—that is, when information that you learn after something happens influences you to recontextualize or even imagine more details to what happened before or during the event, recreating it so clearly that it blends into your memories.
For example, the pall that a death or accident casts over your memory of the day that it happened could influence you to believe that you had a foreboding feeling that something was wrong, or that a coincidence that happened earlier that day was warning you of what was to come.
#4
This just happened today.
My daughter (4) was playing in her room on the second story. I was two rooms away, playing my guitar. Very loudly, I heard my daughter screaming "daddy come to the guest bedroom, I want to show you something!" This immediately seemed off. We have an extra bedroom, but I had never heard her call it that before. While she also has pretty good speech, this was amazingly clear.
When I walked around the corner, into the bedroom to see what she wanted, I saw two little legs sliding out the window. I jumped across the room, and grabbed my daughter by her ankle before she could fall out.
After a not great moment where I yelled at her, then hugged her, then yelled again, then apologized for yelling and hugged her, I finally calmed down. We had a talk about why we don't play in windows. While I was putting the window back together (she had pushed and popped out the storm and screen window from the bottom) I asked her what she wanted to show me.
"What?"
"What do you want to show me? You asked me to come see something"
"No I didn't daddy."
"Are you sure? You told me to come to the guest bedroom."
(A little whiny now, and annoyed) "No I didn't daddy!"
"You didn't ask me to come to the 'guest bedroom' to see something?"
"No."
"Okay..."
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150points
#5
I once clocked out of work at 6pm (like I always did at the time) and began my hour long train ride home.
After I had found a seat, I went to sleep and woke up just before my station. From the station, it is a short bus journey (10-15 minutes) to reach home.
During the entire journey, I didn't use my phone and I don't wear a watch so I didn't really notice the time anywhere.
When I reached home, my family surprised me with "You're home early, everything alright?". I look at the wall-clock and it is about to be 6pm. I was too shocked to understand what happened. Checked other watches, cellphones etc and the time is absolutely right.
A few days later, the admin emailed us the timesheets for the month (times clocking in and out), and every single days for me was around the same 6pm. So it certainly wasn't me having left work earlier.
To this date, I haven't figured out how I gained between 60-90 minutes that day.
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135points
#6
One day when I was about 8 I didn't go to school because I was sick. My friend was suppoused to bring me homework etc. but he never came. My granddad came home from work and he told me that that friend was dead, I was devastated. That night I had a dream. I was with my friend at a playground next to our school and we were talking, then he told me that he is safe and it didn't hurt when that car hit him. The next day my mother wanted to talk to me about that situation and she asked me if I wanted to know what happened. I told her that I know everything because my friend told me. She thought that my granddad told me but he did not. He said that he did not wanted to tell me without her knowing it. That night I had a dream again and I was talking to him again. We were playing and having fun and he told me that he really had to go and we wont see each other ever again. The next day was his funeral and I really havent had a dream about him ever since.
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129points
The effect can be even stronger when there’s more than one person there to back it up. This happens so often in relation to history and pop culture that it has come to be called “the Mandela effect” (named after the belief that Nelson Mandela died and his funeral was broadcast on TV in the 80s, decades before he actually died in 2013) when people who misremember a public event the same way compare their memories and are certain that with so many witnesses, it must have happened.
It’s not surprising that a smaller version of this could happen if you and a friend go through something harrowing together and then try to get your story straight.
#7
1985. My ex wife and I were sleeping. There was a small sliver of light coming in through the window from a streetlight, so the room and bed were dimly visible. Our black Pomeranian was at the end of the bed asleep.
I dreamt that I woke up, reached down to pet him, and he turned into a glossy black bivalve/oyster thing which opened up to reveal rows of gleaming glass teeth. I woke up to my ex backpedalling up the bed over the pillows towards the wall.
I asked "what's wrong??" She said, "what is that shiny black clam thing with the teeth at the end of the bed?? Where's the dog?"
We had had the same nightmare at the same time. This still gives me a chill.
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128points
#8
I died. I saw it, I lived it. Either it was another world with a version of me that died I saw or I'm going crazy but I DIED.
We had a pep rally in school and after it was finished we had to go back to class. Well, my friend and I were not into that so we wanted to to across the street to Sonic. Across the school there is not heavy traffic, but if you don't pay attention you could get hit.
Well I remember walking with him and he dropped something so I went across the street first. I just saw a red Tahoe heading right for me and I got hit.
I remember everything. I remember gasping for air, I remember waking up and sleeping again. Then nothing. All of a sudden I was back in the stadium again and the EXACT SAME WORDS came out of the principal's mouth. My friend wanted to go get sonic but i was freaking out. Was asking him everything.
I thought it had to be a dream, so I went with him just to see what would happen. He dropped his stuff again and I waited. To my horror, that same red Tahoe showed up. I told him that I'm going back to school, I ain't dying again.
I can still see the other version of me on that street just messed up. Not even moving.
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118points
#9
I remember being pretty young like 9 or 10 and I was the car park of a pub in England (Southend). I remember seeing someone in their teens in the window of a house looking over the car park. They waved at me and I felt like I knew them somehow. My parents asked who I was waving at and I said just some lady in the window over there. Didn’t think much of it. Fast forward 10 years. I was at my nans new house. I remember walking into her room (which I never was allowed to do) going to the window. I then realised I was in the house looking over that same parking lot and remembering that interaction years before. Then a girl around 9 or 10 who was in said car park waved at me and I waved back. I felt like I knew her.
Could not explain it and have never told anyone about it. It freaked me out.
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106points
If you’ve ever had a bizarre experience with no apparent explanation, though, it may not be worth speculating about what psychological phenomenon could have really caused it. In most cases, it’s not like there’s a way to test it or find out, for better or for worse… so we’ll never run out of weird stories to tell in the dark.
#10
Might get buried but oh well. When I played baseball as a kid, they were handing out the trophies at the end of the season. They called out the names of the kids while we received our trophies. They're happened to be a kid with the same name as me. We met after the ceremony because it was weird since our last name isn't a very common one. We had the same birthday and everything. We looked alike, both our Dad's were named Derek and both of our sisters were named Lilly. As a kid, I found it cool. As an adult, I find it cool and also disturbing
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104points
#11
My late uncle used to say he never believed in God, and he believed in Thunder instead (it's a god from my country's old mythology, a Baltic God called Perkūnas). He died in summer and his funeral was held on a beautiful sunny day, no clouds in sight.
As they were closing the casket suddenly the only window in the room burst open (it was definitely closed shut) and we heard a super loud thunder roar. Everyone freaked out instantly. I was around 16-years-old and I remember it clearly.
This was the only thunder that day, no rain followed and no clouds in sight.
103points
#12
In college, I took a hard news/soft news journalism class where one of the assignments was to write an obituary for one of my grandparents. The professor told us to write it on a deceased grandparent, but if all of your grandparents were still alive we had to choose one. In my case, all of my grandparents were alive. I procrastinated actually doing the assignment until the night before it was due because it seemed like a morbid assignment (especially once all of my grandparents were still alive).
Scramming for an easy grandparent to write about, I gave my mom a call and asked her for some basic biographical information about my maternal grandfather. As we were talking about my grandpa's career, my mom couldn't recall the name of one of the companies he worked at. She lectured me about waiting until the last minute to write the assignment because it was late -- 10:30pm my grandpa's time. However, she said she would give him a call to see if he was still awake and be able to answer that question once my assignment was due the following morning.
When my mom called my grandpa, my grandma answered the phone in a panic. My grandma frantically explained that the paramedics had just arrived and were performing CPR on my grandpa because he had stopped breathing and lost consciousness. My mom was able to stay on the phone with my grandma until they took my grandpa to the hospital, where he was declared dead.
In the time my mom and I had been talking on the phone about my grandpa's "obituary," he was dying. (His death was entirely unexpected at that. Although he was in his eighties, he was the healthiest of my grandparents at the time. We ended up using the obituary I wrote for that writing assignment as his actual obituary. Still freaks me out when I think about the timing.
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98points
#13
I was on vacation on Florida visiting a friend, we were walking on the beach on a perfectly sunny day when everything went black for a second. I think it was weird but explained it away thinking that my eyes were playing tricks on me until he looked at me and said "did everything go black for a second?"
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98points
#14
I had a very important document that I only ever kept in one place. I kept it in the top drawer of a small filing cabinet. I never moved it and would always see it in that drawer whenever I opened it for whatever reason. The day came that I needed it now and I didn’t sweat it because I knew exactly where it was. Well, I be damned if it wasn’t there. Cue panic attack.
I tore that filing cabinet up. I removed everything and spread it out, flipped papers over, dug through envelopes, shook everything out, shined a flashlight all through the emptied cabinet in case it was somehow stuck to the sides... I mean, it was not there!
I can assure you no one took it or was messing with me. I was so frustrated. I even looked through other parts of my house... but I knew it wouldn’t be in any of those places and it wasn’t. I was intermittently going back to that dumb filing cabinet. No luck.
Super irritated, I searched the rest of the house again and, on my way back downstairs where my filing cabinet was, I called out in frustration, “Okay! Bring it back!!!”. I don’t know who I thought I was talking to because I was alone, but you guessed it... I found it in the top drawer of my filing cabinet where it should have been in the first place.
I was relieved and totally freaked out.
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86points
#15
This summer I bought my girlfriend a last-minute birthday trip to go kayaking around the San Juan Islands off the Washington state coast. After a long drive and ferry trip, we found the tour group of about 20 people and were then shuffled into a shuttle van for a ride to the beach.
Now, my girlfriend has a unique name similar to the name of a famous painter. Let's say it's Rebecca Warhol just for fun (it's not). She's a little ray of sunshine, and started chatting with the middle aged woman sitting next to her on the shuttle as we waited to leave. The woman noted that she had always loved the name Rebecca, as it was her mother's name. They made pleasant small talk in the van until the tour guide passed around the sign-in sheet for all of us to fill out. That's when things got strange.
My girlfriend wrote her full name on the sheet and passed it on to the woman, who immediately shouted "Oh my God," and started crying. After a few minutes of total confusion, she told us "Rebecca Warhol was my mother's full name, and these islands were her favorite place in the world. She passed away this summer from cancer and we've traveled hundreds of miles to spread her ashes here." We were STUNNED. I literally picked a random date, time, and tour company, and THEN we were split into the same group as this woman AND my girlfriend was sitting right next to her on the shuttle. What the hell? She continued by saying, "My daughter told us that Nana Rebecca would be with us on this trip, and I didn't believe it until now." It was the most unbelievable coincidence we had ever experienced, and has totally convinced me that there's more to this world than we think. As my brother later said, the Universe winked at us that day.
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81points
#16
I remember driving my car to this intersection in this rural area and I'm checking both sides because of terrible blind spots. In the corner of my eye my mother is sitting there and says something like "it's all clear my way"
I look back and she isn't there. My mother had been dead for a few years at this point. This was also in the middle of the day and I've never had it happen since.
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78points
#17
Taking the trash out at night, super remote area so I know for a fact we're the only ones around here, getting close to the road and I hear very clearly "help me" from a female voice. Even knowing there's such a slim chance of there being another living person around, I still feel like I should look around and check it out in case I wasn't just hearing things and someone actually needs help. Take about two steps in the direction I thought I heard it, hear a giggle in the same exact voice, turn around and walk promptly back up the driveway because f**k that s**t. Anyone who actually needed help wouldn't be laughing, I don't think.
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74points
#18
I usually break this out when someone asks for a "ghost story," but I don't believe in ghosts, so we'll say it fits this category.
I have always loved exploring abandoned buildings in the American west. Mostly ghost towns, abandoned mines and such, but old ranch houses and other building can be interesting, too.
In 2005, I was in central Nevada, heading for a week long exploring trip. I passed an old house on a large (former) ranch property that I know had been inhabited just a few years earlier, but now appeared to be abandoned. No cars on the property, about half of the windows boarded up, etc.
The front door was open, so after shouting out for any inhabitants with no response, I walked into the house. It had seen other visitors before me. A few windows were broken from the inside, and many of the few belongings left behind had been rummaged through and strewn about. I walked upstairs, and began walking from bedroom to bedroom. Pack rats had begun their takeover, and their droppings littered the floor. I walked into what was once decorated as a little girls room. There was a cheap brass bed frame, and the mattress had been slid partially off the frame and onto the floor. Some clothes and toys sitting around would lead me to believe the girl was quite young. I peeked into the small closet, which was bare with the exception of a few wire hangers left on the rod. When I turned to leave the closet, there was a girl, around 5-6 years old sitting on the bed, which had somehow had the mattress returned to its normal position.
She said "Hi, Mister. What are you doing in my room?" I panicked, and immediately realized that the house wasn't abandoned, it was just that the family living there was living in extreme poverty. I began apologizing, and explained that I had yelled hello, and nobody answered, so I thought the house was abandoned.
"It's okay, Mister. Mommy isn't home. I haven't seen here in a long time. Maybe you could help me find her?"
She stood up, walked toward the the open window and sat on the ledge, looking out on a vast empty field of sagebrush.
I asked her to come downstairs with me and we would go find her mother.
She started to stand up from the window, but turned around suddenly and said "Oh no, he's coming! I have to go, Mister. He's coming! You should probably go too." She then kicked her legs over the windowsill and jumped. I raced to the window, and looked to the ground, expecting to see an injured little girl, but there was nothing there. I raced back downstairs and out of the house. I looked around as I walked back to my car, but saw nobody.
She wasn't what I think of when I think of a ghost. There was no transparency, no foggy haze around her or anything like you would expect from a movie "ghost." I still don't know what the hell I saw. I pulled into Austin, NV later that evening and met up with the group I was planning on exploring with. We went for drinks that night at a local bar, and after a few drinks they convinced me to tell my story to the bartender. He listened, and then asked me to confirm the location of the property. When I described the location and condition of the house, he explained "Oh yeah. That's the old _______ ranch. Sounds like you had a visit from Nellie. She likes to chat with people that stop by. She's harmless." He then explained that the original owner disappeared in the late 1960's after leaving a note saying the family was moving to Alaska, so he could try his luck at gold mining in the Yukon. He was later located in Oregon, and largely suspected of killing his wife and daughter, however no bodies were ever found. His version of the story was that the wife and daughter did not want to leave Nevada, and left him somewhere along the way.
I absolutely loathe telling this story, because I don't believe in ghosts or the paranormal, and I feel like I'm trying to tell a spooky story to a group of children. I went back to that house 2 more times before it was burned down a few years back. I never saw or heard anything unusual since my first visit.
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74points
#19
A minor one but why not.
My wife and I are space nerds, so we follow pretty much all news regarding space travel. Of course, we're all hyped AF (if skeptical) about the whole Starship thing. And the glitch is exactly about that thing.
About 3 years ago, SpaceX YT channel posted this vid, showcasing the first iteration of their Mars craft. I watched it on like day 2, with my wife sitting behind me, eyes wide and in absolute awe. We finished watching, I turn back - and see that incredilous look on her face.
"But we already watched this... Some three weeks ago"
I look at the posting date - nope, nada, it was definitely 2 day ago. I do a quick search in YT and Chrome history, going all the way to the beginning of the year - obviously, no trace. I even check the internet and ITS (as Starship was called back then) was not even revealed 3 weeks prior, at least not in any video published by SpaceX or any other official site.
Then she starts going through things I apparently said back then, during that previous watching, up to quoting my exact words - some of which sound pretty similar to what I thought while watching the vid (but definitely didn't speak aloud, as I was too stunned and awe-struck).
At this point I recall that at 2:40 timemark, she had said something along the lines of "Look, now it's going to deploy panels, it looks so funny" - and the scene happens then, a few seconds after her remark. So either she actually saw the vid before me, or guessed the moment, based on what was being shown in the vid.
We chalked that up to either her watching it a day prior, just after it got uploaded, and forgetting about it, or an actual harmless glitch (I actually believe in glitches, kinda in a Pratchettesque manner of 'things just happen - what the hell').
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71points
#20
Weird but happy. About 5 years ago in November we lost our family dog to cancer. She was the dog my children grew up with, loved by all. At the next Christmas, at the end of the day of gifts, food and family, as I was picking up, I found a tiny pewter dog figurine sitting on the mantel. I asked everyone who had been at the house that day if they left it. No one had. Okay, weird, but took it as a good omen. When my eldest went back to college at the end of that Christmas break, he asked if he could take the little figurine, to remember his dog. Of course, I said yes. A week or two later, picking up around the house, there was the figurine again! I called my son, and said, “You forgot the dog figurine!” He said, “No I didn’t, it’s right in front of me on my desk!” I had now found a second figurine!! Again, no one claimed any knowledge of it. No idea how....but I still have the two of them tucked away on a shelf to this day.
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71points