Reddit user u/yankeevandal posed the question: "What statistically improbable thing happened to you?" The thread promptly filled with hundreds of chilling, shocking, and fascinating stories of brushes with death, eerie coincidences, and unfortunate mishaps. BuzzFeed Community users also shared their own wild coincidences and one-in-a-million stories. Here are some of the most interesting anecdotes:
1. "My grandparents were traveling home (from Florida to Virginia) in their RV and stopped to help a hiker on the side of the road. It ended up being my cousin, their grandson, who was hiking the Appalachian Trail. He had been hiking for months and came down into town to get supplies. This was during mid-2000s, and they didn’t even know they would both be in the same area at the same time. My grandparents just stopped to be good people and discovered it was him."
2. "My boss and her husband have a pretty cool story. They both went to the same college for all four years in New England and shared a ton of mutual friends, but they never crossed paths, aside from one day when he saw her walking across campus and told his friend, 'I’m going to marry her.' Almost 10 years later in 2020, when they were both living in completely different states on opposite sides of the country, they both joined a Zoom call for a mutual friend’s birthday party. He saw her and was like, 'Oh my god, that’s the girl.' He asked for her info right away and they dated long-distance for about a year, until one weekend, she flew up to see him and proposed to him on the spot. They’ve now been married for two years, have three kids, and just bought a new house."
3. "I’ve been kidnapped once and taken hostage once. Totally different places in life and at different ages. I was even in different states for each occurrence. I was kidnapped in Louisiana when I was four, and I was held hostage at gun point in North Carolina when I was 13."
4. "When I was 18, I lived in Vancouver with two roommates. The two of them worked together at some door-to-door vacuum sales job (seriously). While we lived together, we got a cat named Pablo who was orange and white, and part Persian. I freaking loved Pablo. After a year of living together, I was moving back home with my parents, and I offered to take the cat, but the two of them had started dating and wanted to keep Pablo together, so I got vetoed (devastating). I left on pretty bad terms with them. I ran into them a year later when I lived in Victoria and asked them about Pablo. They told me that a month after I had left, they had decided to move to Victoria, but couldn’t find a place that allowed cats, so on their last day of their vacuum sales job, they gave him to some weird chick who had just started there. They didn’t even know her name. I was devastated."
"Six years later, I was in Toronto meeting up with a friend who was visiting from NYC. I had only known her about a year. We had met at a work conference, so she was pretty random and not even from Canada. We spent the afternoon shopping, then decided to go to a fancy place for drinks. She asked if we could stop by her cousin’s apartment, where she was staying, so she could change first. We went to the apartment and I met her cousin, who was kind of weird, but nice. Then, in walked the most beautiful orange and white Persian cat, who was instantly all over me. I almost cried because he reminded me so much of Pablo, so I told my friend's cousin, 'Oh my gosh, he looks just like my old cat Pablo!' She was like 'That’s weird. His name is Pablo!' Sure enough, he was my Pablo, and she had been the weird girl at the vacuum sales place."
5. "I worked at a seafood store in high school (over 30 years ago). I once waited on three consecutive customers who bought different things that all rang out to the same exact amount: $8.84. I was so amazed, I told the last customer to go two shops down to the store that sold lottery tickets and play that number. I actually meant to do that myself, but it was a busy night and I forgot all about it. A couple weeks later, I was waiting on a customer who bought something small under $10. After giving her her change, she handed me $5 and said, 'This is for you.' I looked at her blankly, confused and silent. We occasionally got tips, but not for such a small bill."
"She said, 'You might not remember, but last time you waited on me, you told me to play a lottery number. I did, and it hit.' I was happy for her, but distraught I forgot to play myself. She said her husband was there when she watched the drawing and told him she won. He said, 'What? You never play the lottery.' Her reply: 'You're not gonna believe it when I tell you.'"
6. "When I was around 5 or 6 years old, I took my mom’s wedding ring into the backyard to play with it. Somehow, I ended up losing the diamond from it in our sandbox, but not the ring itself. Fast forward about 10 years later. We were working on landscaping our backyard, and my grandpa was using a small tractor to move around dirt and whatnot. I was raking the new sand in the sandbox at night and saw something shiny in the light. I picked it up, and it was the missing diamond from my mother's ring. Wild stuff."
7. "I was on the bus reading a magazine article about a specific woman, and the article mentioned she lived in the same city as me. I looked up from reading the article to check how far the bus was from my stop, and I saw the woman the article was about. She was crossing the street. I quickly compared the photo in the article, and sure enough, it was the same woman."
8. "I was driving from the west side of Manhattan to the east side on 86th street. My young daughter was in the car, and I had been explaining the concept of six degrees of separation. As we approached 86th and Central Park West, I told her about the Hollywood variation called 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.' We stopped at the traffic light, and who crosses the street in front of our car? Yup. Kevin Bacon. He does live in the neighborhood, but still."
9. "Not me, but a friend. He was a merchant mariner and lived here in Virginia Beach. He was always calling, texting, and posting pics from around the world. One time, he'd been out for a while. We knew he was heading to Dubai, but we didn't know where he'd be after that. Four months go by, and nobody's heard from him. His neighbor, who I was friends with, got married and went to Thailand for his honeymoon. He texted me one day and said, 'You aren't gonna believe this.' He said he asked a local where to find a good spot to eat where tourists wouldn't be. The guy took him 30 minutes from the beach to some dive bar/restaurant with no sign and no clearly marked entrance. He said it looked so shady, he was afraid he was about to be robbed and killed. He went in, and it was a legitimate restaurant."
"He ate, drank some beers, and went to the bathroom. Then, out walks my friend! He took a pic and sent it to me to confirm he was okay. Imagine taking a flight several thousand miles away, getting away from the touristy areas, going into a local dive bar, and running into your next-door neighbor, who you haven't seen in months. Wild."
10. "When I was 19, the spa I was working at booked a 'flower reading' for us as a reward for hitting a record sales goal. Basically, it was a psychic who gave you a reading off of a flower you brought in, but he wouldn't see who brought which flower. He grabbed my big sunflower first. I don't remember everything he said, but one thing was that I have someone watching out for me named Evelyn or Esther, or maybe Evelyn-Esther, and she has long, straight black hair and plays the piano. I had no idea who that could be. I have a grandma named Esther, so after the reading, I asked him if it could be her, but he said, 'Nope, this person's definitely dead.'"
"So, I asked my grandma if there was anyone in our family by either name, and she's said 'Well, your grandpa's sister was Evelyn-Esther.' I asked what she was like, and she said she had super long, straight black hair and was an extremely talented pianist. She died about 30 years before I was born, and I'd never even heard of her."
11. "I went to a podiatrist to fix my ingrowing toenail. In our conversation, she mentioned the town where she grew up, which was about 15 miles away (in the UK). 'Whereabouts?' I asked. I knew the road. 'Which house?' I asked. I knew the house. I described the house and the garden. 'How do you know all this?' she asked. My earliest childhood memory is from when I was around 5 years old when my family moved out of that house. I remember the new family arriving to move in. They had a baby in a pram. She was the baby in the pram. Her parents still lived there."
12. "I adopted a cat, and one day, he snuck out and was gone for about two days. When he got back the next day, his twin showed up. Turns out the 'twin' was actually my original cat. Three days later, another identical cat showed up. I took them all to the vet, and it appeared that they were all brothers from the same mother and they found each other. Now I have three identical cats. I think people adopted the other cats and they just got free and all found each other. The other two cats were not microchipped when they showed up. They're all the same in looks and behavior, so I just call them all 'Buddy.' They're all black cats with yellow eyes, so there are no discernible stripes or colors. I like that they're all reunited again, but damn, they eat like horses and zoom around my apartment all the time. I became quite the cat dad involuntarily."
13. "My husband and I met on my first day of work. My new boss was out of town, so it fell to my future husband to give me the office tour. He'd never given on before, and he hasn't given one since. After we started talking, we realized that we were supposed to meet several times before my first day. He was supposed to do my interview TWICE. The first time he was on vacation, and the second, he was on his way to it when he got pulled into an emergency meeting and sent someone else instead. Our relationship would've been a conflict of interest if he had. Eight years later, we discovered that we had, in fact, met each other before my first day four months earlier on New Year's Eve at a bar in Phoenix. We chatted at the bar about our same drink orders and his incredibly tall mohawk. Totally wild to meet again in a city so large and full of people."
14. "I was working as a security officer in a 350-bed hospital in a mid-sized city when I got dispatched to take a report from a patient whose purse had gone missing. As I was taking her personal information, I asked for her home phone number (this was long before cell phones), and she gave me the number my parents and I had up to about a year prior, before we moved to another part of town. I looked appropriately shocked when she said it, and I told her it was my old number. She said, 'Oh! What’s your name?' and I said Dave. Then she said, 'Yeah, we get calls for you all the time.'"
15. "One day, during rush hour, I was driving home to the East Bay from San Francisco. Anyone who knows the city during rush hour knows what it’s like heading down Bryant St. to get on the Bay Bridge. It’s a madhouse. SFPD usually directs traffic during this time in the area, so the traffic lights are arbitrarily flashing and the intersections are gridlocked. This driver pulled up to the side of me and was honking his horn frantically and pointing in front of me. He also wanted in the lane headed for the Bay Bridge. I was tired and wasn’t in the mood, so I’m like, 'You want in front of me? Fine, it’s all yours!' and I let him in."
"A few minutes later, traffic was stopped and we ended up in the middle of an intersection waiting to be waived on. The car in front of me is where I would’ve been stopped. Lo and behold, a white cargo van came barreling down 6th St. and T-boned the car in front of me so hard, both vehicles ended up on the sidewalk on the other side. I continued on and crossed the bridge without incident."
16. "I was snorkeling off the coast of Belize. My boat consisted of a church group and couples. As we starting swimming away from the boat, I noticed my mom's beautiful gold ring was no longer on my finger. I started to panic. I just couldn't stop crying through my mask. When we got back near the boat, the eldest member of the church group yelled out from the water that she saw a ring. I was skeptical because it was about 20 feet deep and my ring wasn't necessarily a standard round ring. I was thinking she saw a shiny shell. Nope! Another man saw it too and dove down for me, and he retrieved my ring. The lady then said to me, 'I could tell you were upset, and I prayed to St. Anthony for you and your mother.'"
"Now, I am not religious, but I do know St. Anthony is who you pray to if you need something found. So, after we got back to land, I went into my bag to get my phone charger. Something flew out with it and hit me in the face. It was a St. Anthony medal my mom had snuck in there two weeks prior."
17. "I had a dream one night about an airplane with obvious engine trouble; it sounded like it was missing and sputtering. The aircraft crashed, and as I hurried towards the location site, I was met by a herd of cattle running away! I approached the aircraft, which was resting on a barbed wire fence in a cleared area. As I reached to open the door, that’s when I awoke crying. I woke my husband up and told him about my dream. The next morning, as we drove to Bryan, Texas for an appointment, we both heard on the radio that a small airplane had experienced engine trouble and had crash-landed on a fence line in Madison County, and the pilot survived with minor injuries! There was also no property damage other than to the fence."
18. "When I was in high school, I worked as a closer for the Dairy Queen in the next town over from mine. As I was driving home from work one night on a road with little trees or vegetation, a tree frog came flying out of nowhere and landed on my windshield! It stayed on my windshield until I got home, and then hopped off into our yard. Then, when I was in college, I also found a different tree frog in my childhood bedroom under the baseboard. My room was on the second floor facing the backyard, and both of my windows had screens on them. To this day, I still have no idea how that frog ended up there."
19. "My dad and I hadn’t talked to/seen each other since I was 5, although we lived a few towns apart (in different states). At 20, I moved 1,300 miles away for college and returned home that Christmas season. I never read the newspaper, but one night, I picked up the local paper and randomly went to the obituaries. The first one I read sounded like my dad — I was even listed as his daughter. I called my mom at work and said, 'I think my dad died.' I read her the obituary, and she said, 'Yep, that’s him.' We have zero contact with any of his family, so I have no idea if/when we would have found out had I not randomly opened the newspaper that exact day. So freaking bizarre!"
20. "Not me, but my dad. His father was a big coin collector and was obsessed with finding coins minted in family members' birth years. My dad worked as a retail pharmacist and had to count out cash register drawers at the end of the night, so if he ever found a coin he knew my grandpa was looking for, my dad would swap it out with one from his pocket. On the one-year anniversary of my grandpa's death, my dad was counting out a drawer and stumbled on a rare 1925 dime. My grandpa was born in 1924, but they didn't mint dimes that year, so he always collected the 1925 ones. My dad swapped out for the dime and kept it."
21. "I've got a weird one that I just experienced earlier this year. My husband and I were having a dinner party with less than 10 people, and one of them mentioned a mutual friend, who I didn't realize my husband and I both had friendships with years prior. That was kinda weird as-is, but then someone mentioned to my husband how he dressed as Louise Belcher from Bob's Burgers for that old friend's Halloween party one year, and it struck me because I remember seeing someone with those bunny ears and a green dress on at a party at least once. Then, ANOTHER person pulled out their phone and showed everyone a picture of me and her at a Halloween party years prior, and who do I see in the background? My husband, beardless and baby-faced, dressed as Louise Belcher and talking to someone, but looking at my friend and me. We were all so freaked out. It was really cool. We partied together roughly five years before we officially met."
22. "I once had friends over when I was young. One of them realized one diamond earring was missing and was sure that she had lost it at my house. We turned the place upside down, but we didn't find it. My mom was upset because the implication was that it would eventually be found at my home, and then it would be on my mom to return it. Anyway, a week later, the same friend's mom was out on a walk somewhere else entirely in town. She saw something glimmering in the street. It was her daughter's earring."
23. "I was a bank teller for a short time, and a guy came in to cash a check with a stolen ID. How did I know it was stolen? The ID belonged to my roommate's brother's husband. Someone had broken into his car while he was at an appointment and stole his gym bag, which had his wallet in it."
24. "One night, as I was leaving a club, I had $5 I planned on spending at the hot dog cart. Then, I was approached by an older gentleman who looked to be living outside. So, I gave him my $5. I walked about half a block away, looked down, and there was $20 at my feet!"
25. "I (M) was working for a language non-profit doing training for English teachers in a remote town in northern Saudi Arabia. I walked into the classroom to do the training and met eyes with another participant who seemed very familiar. He also had the same look too. Turns out, he had worked at the same non-profit a few years earlier on an Arabic language project. We didn't work directly together, but we'd usually meet in the elevator each morning coming into the office. I ended up having a great time with him and his friends during our stay, as well as a wild trip to find the airport at night in the middle of the desert."
26. "I once had an owl accidentally dive into my car, through an open window, and onto my lap, while driving through a very busy downtown. I then had to find an animal hospital VERY quickly. It was absolutely bizarre. Such a sweet and cute owl. Unfortunately, all the vet could do was make the little one comfortable. And, when I tried to pay them, they wouldn't accept it. Bless them."
"I was driving in the evening with my husband. We had the windows cracked, but not even halfway down, cruising along, and all of a sudden, something fell INTO my lap and onto the floor between my feet at the pedals. I couldn't see what it was because there was no light, and had to find somewhere to pull over, since it was a dark windy road. It was an owl."
27. "At the end of 2022, I lost my job, so my wife and I started the process of getting me on her company’s health insurance. The HR woman at her company kept dragging her feet though, and by the last week of February, I still didn’t have health insurance. One day, I said to my wife, 'We really need to get this sorted out. What if I got in a car accident tomorrow? What would we do?' The very next day, I got into a very, very bad car accident. I was on the highway after work, following the speed of traffic, when all of a sudden, the pickup truck in front of me swerved out of our lane, revealing a car in front of it that was at a dead-stop in the middle of the highway. I slammed into a stopped car head-on at over 70 mph."
"I was on the phone with my mom when it happened, and she told me afterward that one second I was speaking, and the next second she could hear the unbelievably loud sound of crunching metal. She was sure I was dead. I blacked out for a second on impact, but as soon as I came to, I started shouting, 'MOM, I’M OKAY! I’M OKAY, MOM!' while looking for my phone. I couldn't see my phone, but I could hear her screaming my name.
A woman came running over to the car and helped get me out and waited with me until the ambulance came. I went to the emergency room and got a full-body CT scan. I walked away without even a bruise, just a very sore chest from how hard I hit the seatbelt. The car was absolutely totaled, of course. Every single airbag went off, and the entire front half of the car was smashed to pieces. The wildest part of all is that there had been an open recall on my make and model for years due to airbag failures, and we never went to get it checked out. Thank god they all went off, and thank god I always wear my seatbelt."
28. "I was at a friend's house a few weeks ago (I rarely go there, we always hang out at my house) and we took her son for a walk. A family was outside — three kids, parents, and a man who I presumed to be the grandfather. This man looked just like the father of a childhood friend I hadn't seen in over a decade, but I told myself it couldn't be him because he and his wife had moved to Florida. Well, long story short, it was the friend's father who just happened to be up visiting on one of the maybe six times a year I visited my friend's house, and it just so happened to be on a day when her son was in the mood for lots of walks. Not quite one in a million, but it was odd!"
29. "I went fishing and fell into quicksand. It ironically has been one of my top fears from childhood, thanks to cartoons. I was walking ahead of my S.O. and he said, 'Hey, that looks a lot like—' and by that point, I realized it wasn’t mud. I was freaking out so badly. I was waist-deep and hyperventilating before I heard him yell, 'STOP MOVING!' It pretty much took my entire concentration to turn around and throw my gear. He had to lay flat and pull me out. I’m not entirely irrational for being paranoid on any sort of loose ground now."
30. "I almost accidentally ate a natural pearl that was in a seafood dish at a restaurant. This happened in 2019 while I was at my favorite Jersey Shore seafood restaurant. As I was eating the final mussel, I heard a really loud crunch, like I accidentally bit on a small part of broken shell. Thankfully, I didn't chip a tooth or anything. When I spit the half-chewed mussel out into a napkin and tried to isolate the assumed piece of shell so I could finish the mussel, damned if there wasn't a little pearl in there. The pearl isn't really big or anything. Honestly, it's just about the same size as the head of a pin, but my gosh, that's one of my favorite stories to tell to people. I keep the pearl in a little bottle on the end of a chain, and I wear it on very special occasions."
31. "I was in a mall once with friends at 14 or 15, and we met some guys. We ended up hanging out with them a few times, and I eventually hooked up with one of the guys in particular. Things fizzled. Then, fast forward to my first year in college in Philly — an entirely new state and city from where I grew up. I was waiting for a bus when a man in a Mustang pulled up to hit on me. He was cute, so we exchanged numbers. After meeting up, we realized we had met in Jersey at that mall all those years earlier. We didn’t get married or anything, but it was quite the coincidence."
32. "We were flying as a family one summer, and they stopped my grandpa at TSA and pulled him into a back room. Turns out a guy fitting his description with the same exact name was wanted for murder, and they thought it was him trying to flee. It's the only time our family was thankful he made us go to the airport three and a half hours before our flight."
33. "I was in a car accident with my kids on a rural highway, and a woman pulled over to help me. She was my kids' friend's mom and a friendly acquaintance. She waited with me until the ambulances got there. Eight months later, my ex-husband was in a car accident with our kids on a different rural highway about 20 miles away. The same woman was behind them and stopped to help. She called me from the side of the road to keep me updated on my kids. The odds of her being right there for both of those accidents has to be astronomical. I was questioning reality."
34. "On the day my grandma was having heart surgery, the school bus I was riding was hit by a car right where I was sitting. I was the only kid sent to the hospital, and it was the same hospital where my grandma was having surgery. My whole family was already at the hospital. I had been bummed my mom wouldn’t let me wait with the rest of the family. I ended up getting to anyway!"
35. And: "When I was 10 years old, I had a brother who passed away at birth. This was back in '98 and the movie City of Angels was popular, and the band The Goo Goo Dolls had a song in the movie called 'Iris.' That song was really relatable to how I felt at that time and was one the first songs I learned how to sing and would later in life sing and often play on guitar. One evening, I was with a friend. It was after the bars had closed and we were in her car parked sharing stories about life. I was telling her about my brother and how he passed away as a child. I reached for the radio to turn on some music, and the song 'Iris' was playing on the radio in that exact moment."
I have goosebumps! What's the most "statistically improbable" thing to ever happen to you? 👀
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.