Ask Lemmy

I feel like I have a lot of every day weird things happen to me, but nothing paranormal or otherwise. Bystander effect is probably the weirdest thing there really is.

But I think the weirdest thing that happened to me was having a seizure. I'd fainted plenty plenty plenty of times in the past, and from my perspective initially, this one was no different. I was exhausted and way overheated after the last leg of a hike, but I was pushing myself because my then-partner had left me on account of being frustrated by my slow speed. He'd gone ahead to finish the remainder of the hike on his own.

So I got to the top and was huffin and puffin and just struggling to breathe. Leaned over a railing to take some effort off of standing and zoop everything went white and then it was all gone.

I woke up on the ground, surrounded by a few different people I didn't know and sweaty as fuck. I remember talking about how hot I was and apologizing to the others for being so sweaty, but I don't imagine the words actually came out of my mouth like I thought they might. I was kinda in and out for a little bit, but finally came all the way to and was so sore and so confused.

Turns out it was a full tonic clonic seizure caused by a blood clot getting into my spinal cord because the meat between the ventricals in my heart had burst and ripped open, allowing blood flow to go the wrong way.

Turns out I had a hell of a lot more going on than just being "out of breath" and I'll always hold a little bit of resentment for my partner just taking off on me. That seizure was the wake up call to bite the financial bullet (yay america) and see a real doctor about the problems I was having. And then lo and behold, I was in the ICU for two months after finally seeing a doctor.

I have a really uncommon first name (The only thing I'm in the 1% with).

I was visiting Ireland with my parents. They had met a couple of other Dutch people at the bar, who happened to be staying in the same hostel.

At breakfast they joined our table. My parents introduced me: 'This is our son Aka'. The guy says: That's funny, I once met a boy with that name before, this was in Yugoslavia, I believe in '84.

Turns out this guy was the savior that once retrieved my swimming shoe from the bottom of a bay in the Adriatic sea once, ten years before.

If I had a more common name, we would never had known.

Random people assaulting me in coffee shops while I was minding my business over what I was wearing or a book I was reading. I basically stopped reading in coffee shops because of this, and it only started happening in like '22.

One time this guy went off on me and started lecturing me about how gay my boots were and how he'd be a rich pretty boy too if his mom hadn't stolen his inheritance and been such a whore. Guy was unhinged. He came in, zeroed in on me, stood about 5 feet away and started going off on me, then just turn around and left when I didn't acknowledge him. Nobody else said around me said or did anything, I think we were all just in shock.

The boots in question are olive suede, and I really do like them.

A guy died at work. I was his manager, so when he went missing for a few days, the police called me and asked me to check his office in the basement.

After I found his body, I was scheduled to be off a couple days. When I got back the office he had been in was emptied, stripped bare, new floor, new ceiling, new paint.

A few weeks after that, I saw him walking down a hall. I rushed to the corner he had turned down, but he wasn't there.

He also had a distinctive odor. Poor hygiene combined with strong cologne. There were a bunch of times when I'd suddenly smell him standing nearby.

I'm not a big believer in ghosts. I figure it was just my mind working through it.

I can't think of anything supernatural. I'm usually quick to dismiss a lot of such things. I mean, I get scared, but I like to explore the instants and find reasonable explanations.

However, I do get paranoid when I'm overly tired and things can get interesting at night - interesting indeed, as I'm a night sky enthusiast. One that stands out is when I was stargazing in some December. I had a good view of Orion and Taurus. I was bouncing around clusters and nebulas with my binoculars. At some point, the paranoia started setting in, unbeknownst to me in my caffeinated state. I looked back towards Taurus, with its face, the 5-star V, was squared to the horizon and staring at me. It was so oddly inescapable. No clouds, no roof, no concept of scale. Just this massive, unwavering bull face that felt infinitely large and distant, yet somehow tangibly terrestrial, like the sky was painted overhead. I looked to Orion to see if I could shake it, but that face was still locked onto me in my peripheral. Even when I looked at the other end of the sky, I couldn't shake the feeling I was being watched. It didn't help that I was on a beach, so the waves drown the sound of anyone approaching in the sand, adding to the paranoia. I opted to pack it in and take the queue that I'm sleep deprived. It was an excellent night of stargazing, though. The water was choppy, but the sky was so clear that the stars looked to come right down to the horizon's edge. It was as close as I've ever been to experiencing something resembling the scene in that Pirates of the Caribbean movie where they sail off the edge.

15 years ago we were in a ski resort with a few friends, all of us were like 17 - 19yo. it was arond midnight, we were bored. there was a small-ish game room that was open late, so we went to play pool with my buddy. it was dead silent, nobody else there, ac/ventilation was off. we played a few rounds, but were interrupted by a sudden very strong wind. it even picked some posters off the wall. we just stared each other for a while, looked arond, i asked him if he felt that. he says "you mean the wind that blew my hat off? wanna get back to the room?" then we just left and didn't talk about it until days later. neither of us believe in anything paranormal but we still can't come up with any explanation to it. there was no ac pipe above us, doors were closed. what else could even explain it?

edit: just remembered that i recently read that the place was used for sacrifices at some point in distant history. buddy suggested we go back there next weekend to check the room again, if we could finally find an explanation or start believing in ghosts 😂 sounds like we have a road trip to do

I was driving home from work around 6AM dark winter morning when I noticed one of the lamp posts that tower over the highway just after a bridge had fallen across the highway fully blocking the paved bit.

Then someone in a early 2000"s Toyota Corolla flew by me speeding just as I noticed this so I didn't even have time to flick my hazards on. It's an 80 zone briefly then 100 once the merge lanes end.

That person smoked the metal lamp post going ~120 km/hr and ramped off it going airborne all tires in the air, sliding the lamp post back off the road clearing the way. The car hit the ground throwing a sheet of sparks as the underbody was grinding on the asphalt briefly.

The person in the car didn't seem react at all besides speeding up even more, disappearing into the distance. Their car must've made it home because I didn't see them broken down before entering the city or any oil slicks.

Edit: I'll add a couple more stories as I remember them.

When I was a kid and a methed out semi truck driver laughing manically with a long white beard was trying to run my family off the road in the middle of nowhere Saskatchewan. My uncle got in front of the trucker and forced him to slow down so we could escape. Trucker was unwilling to damage vehicles.

Or when a homeless guy threatened to shoot me when I was a teen at 10AM in a Panago Pizza joint when he brought in an unmarked brown pizza box and declared he had found hair in his pizza and I didn't believe him. We didn't use unmarked boxes and nobody had even ordered pizza yet, we hadn't start taking orders yet we were doing morning prep and dough still. My Lebanese boss overheard the death threat and chased the guy down the street. The building is next door to a police headquarters. Cops came out because my boss was screaming at the guy while chasing him around. To this day I wonder where he even got a totally unbranded blank pizza box, the grocery store deli boxes are all marked too! A total mystery.

If the guy had just said he was hungry instead of trying to scam, for sure my devoutly Islamic boss would've made him a pizza for free, it was a small town with barely any homeless people living there at the time so not a regular occurence.

Does being in a 44-year age-gap relationship count? I was born in 1997, he in 1953. We’re also international (he’s American, I’m Thai). It started as a sugar relationship but turned into something real, and we got married last year after Thailand legalized same-sex marriage.

This is like 30 years ago, before electric cars were really a thing. Some friends and I were hanging out in the Pine Barrens one night. It was an area we knew pretty well, and we'd walked down this long sandy road with no turnoffs to get to where we happened to be hanging out.

Suddenly, all of nature around us went silent - and I mean all of it. Sound carries at night, especially with the lakes to echo off of. We looked up the road we were walking back along, and there was a pair of headlights coming our way. We could tell they were headlights because they were lower than a person would carry a flashlight, they were moving in that peculiar synchronization that headlights have, and they'd do several quick bounces when they hit a rut in the road.

So anyway, we're in this road in the ass-end of the Barrens, everything's turned absolutely deadly silent, and there's this car coming down the road toward us. And the three of us suddenly realize that it's absolutely silent. Not only is nature silent, but the car isn't making any noise either.

We watch the headlights of this car headed down the road toward us - it's a couple hundred yards away now, the Pine Barrens are still dead silent, and the car isn't making any noise either.

My nerve broke first. I bolted off the road and partially vaulted over a couple shrubs, my friends close behind me. We turned around, and the car was still coming toward us - and then suddenly the headlights went out. We waited, but nothing happened - no car headlights, no interior lights, no car doors opening, no voices - nothing. We waited, and still nothing.

We dithered and talked over what to do and we eventually grabbed a couple branches and headed back up the road. We reached the area where the headlights turned off - and there was no car. We turned our flashlight on the (very) sandy road, and we could see our tracks heading down, but there weren't any recent car tracks. We checked the road and the verge all the way back to our car, and - nothing. The forest went dead silent, there were headlights, the car didn't make a sound, and then it just ... disappeared. We went back the next day, and there still was no sign of anyone on that road that night except us.

.

There's also a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading into New Jersey. Like two miles before the rest stop, there's a sign saying something like "New Jersey - 25 miles". We pull into the rest stop, get some gas, relieve ourselves, grab a snack, get back on the road. Go maybe two or three more miles, and there's another sign saying "New Jersey - 5 miles". Like, wtf? If there a space warp at that rest stop or something?

A plane I was on crashed on its next trip. Air France 447. I flew from Paris to Brazil the day before, and I flew that route in one direction every five weeks for two years.

It was an eery feeling learning that "our" plane had gone missing (before the wreckage was found). But hey, I am now statistically immune to plane crashes.

When we walked in the city and a car came a little off and it missed me by a few centimeters. It hit the person who walked right next to me (severely injured, but survived).

For two weeks my brain went in circles all day long with the question why etc. I had no clue why it was that disturbing when I was not even injured at all. Later I learned that there is a name for it, and it is a medical condition too.

I came out of my room and went outside.

Never again.

I met The All Thing in a near death experience

I understand your question from a sensory standpoint, to me it was the removal of my wisdom teeth. The anesthesia. Gradually losing agency over my mind and body, and an inescapable physical force pressing down on my forehead. It felt like dying, for a few seconds. I knew the context, yet my instincts kicked in and told me, "you're dying". I remember fighting,... trying to get up straight but being held down by this merciless force. I've never felt this vulnerable. Mortal.

So, I'm not a believer in ghosts, so this is just some random unexplainable event in my mind. After the funeral of one of my grandpas, we got a call on the cordless landline in the kitchen. Caller ID was his name, no number. My mom answered and nothing on the other end.

This post also made me think about something I should have absolutely been way too young to remember. Probably the oldest memory I somehow have, which is specifically the imagery of one of the bathrooms in the house my grandparents lived in. Just the imagery of a dark room, but only a set of stairs that lead to an attic you couldn't use because you'd fall through. Opposite wall from the toilet and sink. Not really an occurance, but the fact I can remember that despite the fact I was absolutely most likely still in diapers is kinda chilling.

@ageedizzle first thing I thought about when I read that question: the time when I time-travelled into the 50s.

I did not actually time travel, but I visited a small town in Germany, in my home area actually, that somehow had managed to pass through the 50 years before, seemingly without being affected. I was looking down main street and there was nothing there that betrayed we were in the 2000s. 1/2

Nice try doxxer! What's next? do you want my uncle's sister's maiden name? /j

One time I had someone following behind me (didn't look back, but I could hear them) while I was at college and I was confused why I was being followed (or if I was just imagining it). When I finally got to where I was going (probably about 1km away), the teacher finally told me they were following me because I walk fast and they basically took it as a personal challenge.

A zombie came to the hospital where I was working in Haiti.

Not me, but Seth MacFarlane was supposed to be on one of the 11/9 planes. He missed it, i believe because he slept in.