Cambridge Coincidences Collection

Well I Never!

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

My life and likeness are now a smash hit video game...

Please hang in there with me...It's a very long story, but to start out I will introduce myself. My full legal name is Jesse H X, but whenever I can get away with it, I go by Jesse H only, because X is my step-fathers last name, whom I am permanently estranged from. I have blue eyes, colored bright red hair, and have had many extremely strange almost unbelievable coincidences in my life, but this one by far is, well, mind blowing. My therapist agrees with me. </p> <p>I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Unspecified with Psychotic Features about 10 years ago.

On Broadway

As a teen, I often drove the length of Broadway, a main drag in my small (40,000) city. On many occasions, a car drove by in the opposite direction, with what I thought was a friend driving. I would wave but was embarrassed to discover that it was a stranger. Then, many blocks later, another car would drive by with, you guessed it, my friend at the wheel. This happened many times over the course of a couple of years, then ceased.

Cobblers!

During WW2, my father served with the RAF in Egypt and Libya. His younger brother also served in the RAF, but due to security restrictions, neither knew of the other's whereabouts. One day, some 18 months into his posting, my father needed to get his shoes mended. He was standing in the queue in Alexandria, when, on looking round, found his brother behind him in the queue.

Music from the past

When I was young, I played with a cassette tape recorder and typically recorded my brother, sister and me talking, singing, etc. and sometimes I'd record America's Top 40 music show. It was the only way that I got most of my music back in the 70's as a kid. My family wasn't into buying current records. I recently retired in January 2020 and because of the Covid-19 quarantine, I thought it would be a good time to listen to the tapes to figure out which to throw away finally.

Ice Cream Coincidence

I sent a random Good Morning text to my siblings with a photo of an ice cream parlor we’d frequent as kids. It was a chain called Wil Wright’s that’s been out of business for decades. Four hours later, I’m reading the comments section on an article about weird restaurant incidents when I come across a commentor’s tale about an incident that happened years ago at Wil Wright’s.

The One Family

When I was a kid in 1995 I went to school with a boy he was the only other Indian kid in my class. In around 1997 he moved to another suburb/school. That year when we were at a close family friends apartment and I ran into the boy and his sister. They had moved into the apartment below my family friends apartment. Forward to 2001 on an overseas trip to India, we saw a school photo of the boys dad at my mums cousins house. Turned out the boys dad had gone to school and was friends with with my mums cousin.

2 separate deaths, 2 same names, connected by 1 house, wut??

Two years after my boyfriend/band mate and I moved out of my parents house, our best friend/also band mate and his brother were killed in a head on collision on the 405 freeway in LA. 2 months later, after their death, my parents sold that house me and my boyfriend had left. We didn’t realize until later but it turned out my boyfriend’s mom’s friend was the buyer. 6 months after moving her family in (8 months after our friends were killed) she was also killed in a head on collision.

And then, 35 years later. . .

When I was a rebellious teen living in northern Virginia during the early '70s, I ran away from home one summer. My dad, a veteran of three wars, went looking for me at a nearby hippie commune; emerging from the woods behind the commune dressed in full camo gear, armed with a military rifle, but I wasn't there. Many years later, while living in Florida, I went to lunch with a business associate, who told me a funny story she had heard from a old friend the week before.

Trivia game connections

I play a trivia game and the number of times I answer a question, often about something totally obscure, and then look up and see it on the tv, or hear a news item about it. I once asked a friend of mine in Phoenix whilst holidaying with them (I’m from Australia) while I was playing my game, “do you know the name of a particular US politician Mario somebody?” He answered immediately and then said “that’s him” and pointed to the TV within a second of answering

Because my grandma lived in Arkansas! Yeah, right /s

I'm a Californian. Arkansas, a place so foreign to most of us Californians, had never entered my mind until a free e-book about a young woman in Southern Arkansas landed in my iBooks library a few years back. I read lots of books so I decided what the heck, it's free, I'll read this one too. Although I didn't love the book, somehow I felt compelled to buy the other books in the series and read on. After several books, I became enraptured like no other book series in my life. I couldn't figure out why.

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