Cambridge Coincidences Collection

As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.

understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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Well I Never!

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University wants to know about your coincidences!

Death on bus 25 years earlier

About 15 years ago I was casually talking to a middle aged woman in Devon where she had moved some years earlier. Whilst chatting I told her I had originally come from Nazeing in Essex to which she replied that her parents had lived there. I said that my mother had since moved from Nazeing to Broxbourne in Hertfordshire. In response to this she advised that her father had died on a bus travelling between Nazeing and Broxbourne some 25 years before. I was on that bus! I was about 15 years old and on the bus with my older sister when a man ran to catch the bus as it pulled away. He got on the bus and sat behind us. It was soon evident that his breathing was distressed and my sister got the driver to stop the bus. Whilst my sister attended to the man the driver flagged down a passing ambulance. Unfortunately the man died. What are the odds of meeting the daughter of the man some 25 years later and 200 miles away (and talking sufficiently to discover the coincidence !) What are the odds of being on that particular bus, at that time, on that day 25 years earlier? The family had never known the details of his final minutes as his wife had not want to know.

Death on bus 25 years earlier

About 15 years ago I was casually talking to a middle aged woman in Devon where she had moved some years earlier. Whilst chatting I told her I had originally come from Nazeing in Essex to which she replied that her parents had lived there. I said that my mother had since moved from Nazeing to Broxbourne in Hertfordshire. In response to this she advised that her father had died on a bus travelling between Nazeing and Broxbourne some 25 years before. I was on that bus! I was about 15 years old and on the bus with my older sister when a man ran to catch the bus as it pulled away. He got on the bus and sat behind us. It was soon evident that his breathing was distressed and my sister got the driver to stop the bus. Whilst my sister attended to the man the driver flagged down a passing ambulance. Unfortunately the man died. What are the odds of meeting the daughter of the man some 25 years later and 200 miles away (and talking sufficiently to discover the coincidence !) What are the odds of being on that particular bus, at that time, on that day 25 years earlier? The family had never known the details of his final minutes as his wife had not want to know.

Sunday birthdate

My name is Mo and I am the eldest of five siblings. I was born in Zanzibar on in February 1966 on a Sunday. I have three brothers & one sister born in the UK and they were all born on a Sunday. My sister is the youngest and was due on my birthday in February 1979 but was born two days early. My mother was so afraid while she was in labour that the baby was going to be another boy because it was a Sunday but as luck would have it she got her princess in the end. I'm not sure how freaky this is and I'm interested in knowing what the probability is with one out of seven days times five children.

Consecutive Cars

In September 1999 I bought a new Renault Clio car. It was registered as T295MKK. Two months later I had occasion to leave home very early on a Sunday morning, around 4am in fact. Consequently the roads were very quiet; I did not see any cars at all for the first five miles or so, until I reached the junction with a local trading estate. As I approached the junction the traffic lights turned to red and I stopped. The vehicle which had caused the lights to turn red against me and which emerged from the estate was another Renault Clio. The number plate? T296MKK. This was the only other car I had seen up to that point in the journey. Now, what are the chances of that?!

25yrs later i still can't believe it happened......

Back in the mid 80's i left School & got an Apprenticeship at a local company, on my first day i sat there with the the fellow new starters & we were all allotted a Works Number, to my surprise it was 2669, as my date of birth was 2nd of June 1969 (2-6-69).......i thought maybe they'd done this on purpose to help you remember it etc, until i noticed that all the other new starters had the numbers surrounding mine 2667,2668,2670 etc etc and that it was the actual number of employee's they'd ever employed, Spooky i thought ! Anyway, as i'd just left school and was now in the big wide world of money, i had to open a bank account so that my wages could be paid into it, this was just about the time when cashcards were coming into popular use (you know what's coming don't you ?), so........a week or so later a nice shiny new CashCard dropped through my letterbox, only to be followed by another letter containing my new (randomly generated) PIN Number.............Yes you guessed it ! it was 2669 !!!!

Author and Death

In 1998, I was teaching in Argentina. The phone rang one evening. It was my mother. She told me my dad had died. At that time, I was studying for an M Ed by distance learning. There was a reading list open on my dining room table. My eye fell on a title that I had never heard of by one T Harris - "I'm Ok, you're OK". My dad's name was Tony Harris. I always felt it was a message.

Lottery

I bought a lottery ticket on the way to work and picked my own numbers, on arriving at work my friend was carrying a lottery ticket . I asked him what numbers he picked while holding my ticket , as he called out his numbers I said yep, yep , yep, yep, yep except for the last number which was 7 and I had eleven!! This was also when the 7 or eleven lottery advert was being screened . What are the chances of that ?

Birth Dates

My coincidence is - I was born on 12th October 1979, my brother 12th October 1981 and my sister 13th October 1983. Friends often comment on how bizarre this is when we celebrate our Birthday's together. I often have coincidences and have read about these before in the Celestine Prophecies by James Redfield.

my dads 1971 mercury

my dad recently bought a 1971 mercury cougar xr7 we didnt know much about it because we had never heard about until we bought it we looked around on the web to learn about it bought some manuals when we realised that the mileage showed 62,864 miles and then we realised that only 62,864 of the model that we bought were made coincidence? Stewart Rickard

Random meetings 2 weeks apart

In the early 1980's we had just moved to Australia from the UK and decided to go to the first day of an England v Australia test match at the Sydney Cricket Ground. We were quite late taking our seats and the ground was pretty full (it holds about 35000 people). Just after sitting down I heard my name called from just behind and there two rows back were a couple that we had shared a flat with, briefly, in Bristol 5 years earlier but had not kept up with since. So far so co-incidental! We had a brief catch up and exchanged addresses and said we'd keep in touch. Two weeks later we were in Canberra attending a wedding on the Saturday and, with time to spare on the Sunday morning decided to visit the National Gallery. We joined the queue at the ticket desk and who should be standing just in front of us but the couple we had seen two weeks previously at the SCG. They had decided last minute to spend the weekend visiting Canberra. So even if we hadn't bumped into them at the SCG we would still have seen them in Canberra two weeks later (or would we? Would our lives have taken EXACTLY the same path had we not met in Sydney?)

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