Category: Stories


Are We On The Same Page?

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May 13, 2012

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Spencer Marks)

In 1973, the year I turned 12, a book came out called “Blue Money,” about pornographers and that industry. My father was a prominent attorney, and an entire chapter of the book was devoted to him. The author of the book, Carolyn See, had spent several weeks, all day, every day with him to research the book, and on one page, Page 222, there is a mention of me, not by name, but simply as “we talked about his son” (I am the only male child of my father, so this reference is me, for sure).

Twenty-four years later, I am mentioned in another book (to my knowledge, these are the only two books at this point); this time, it was the book “Evidence Dismissed” by Detectives Lange and Vannatter, the lead Detectives in the O.J. Simpson homicide investigation. This time, my full name is mentioned … also on page 222!!!

[EDITOR: Now that this story’s been published, it will naturally throw into doubt any future such coincidences as we’ll never be able to prove the authors didn’t place his name on that page purposefully, just to screw with him. – Jarrett]

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The Mysterious Malfunction

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May 10, 2012

(Submitted by reader Trevor N)

This is the story of the haunted elevators in my DC condo. I’m a CFI member and a proud skeptic but my dispassion has been tested.

My condo front door is near the elevator lobby on the fourth floor. Shortly after moving in, I soon noticed that as I left my home for work and walked toward the elevators, every few days an elevator door would open for me before I pressed any buttons. It’s always empty and it takes me to the floor I press without any problems.

Same thing began happening every few days when I get home – elevator door in the lobby will open as I walk toward it.

This has been going on for years and I had no idea how an elevator would know I was approaching. Others reported the same phenomenon but no one knew why or how. The property manager was stumped. The popular conclusion was that the elevators are haunted.

Eventually, it was time for major elevator work. They had begun acting erratically and we called in an elevator consultant. I told him the story of the haunted elevators and he investigated.

What he found was illuminating. Elevator banks have home stations – floors to which the elevators return and wait when there’s no demand for them. Our home stations are the lobby and the fourth floor – my floor.

One of the control problems the consultant found is that the doors are malfunctioning and will sometimes open upon return to home station. So, every few days, an elevator will return to its fourth floor home station, cooincidentally,  just as I’m leaving my condo. Sometimes the malfunctioning doors will then open as I walk toward them.

Same thing in the lobby in the evening when I come home – another period of high elevator use.

So, the haunting was explained by statistics – the odds that an elevator would return at exactly the right time and the doors would then malfunction to open for me as if by magic.

The good news is that the mystery is solved. The bad news is the size of owners’ special assessment for elevator repairs.

[EDITOR: The other bad news is the owner can’t get away with trying to collect tourist money for the building being haunted. Unless, of course, the owner just makes something up like most haunted house owners resort to.

This story personally reminds me of a situation I ran into in my last house. The master bedroom’s ceiling fan was also the main light source, and there was a nice control panel by the door that let me adjust the state and intensity of each. But shortly after moving in we began to notice the light would randomly turn itself on or off at unexpected times. Some were innocuous, such as during the day, but occasionally I was awakened in the middle of the night, cast into darkness while working, or a couple of times at some truly hilarious moments (best left to speculation). I assumed a fault in the wiring, but it was quite a few months in before I realized how many people would instead jump to assume a supernatural cause. The details were all there, and it was only my knowledge of confirmation bias and basic understanding of electrical wiring that made one answer more obvious than the others.

Eventually upon moving out of the house I spoke to my landlord (who lived in his own addition off the side of the house, strangely enough), and learned that he had the same system installed in his place and that apparently the two control panels were on the same channel and would occasionally miscommunicate and control the neighbor’s device. He had simply never gotten around to fixing it. So apparently there WAS an intelligence behind the actions, but it was merely my landlord.]

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The House on the Corner

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May 7, 2012

(Submitted by reader Joseph Gagné)

Life can be crazy… Back during my undergrad, I was showing pictures of my hometown to my two new friends, Adèle and Marcel. (As if the following story isn’t odd enough, these two are both from Windsor in Ontario but accidentally met and became friends while separately travelling in France…). As we’re looking at pictures of my parent’s house, Marcel turns pale and says, slightly trembling: “Uh, is that the house on the street corner… with the ugly blue fence… the ugly butterflies on the wall… and with half the siding missing?” As I nod to each detail, his head turns away and he clams up.

We’re obviously curious and push him to reveal what was on his mind. Embarrassed, he says: “For the past five years, my family and I have been spending Christmas at my uncle’s who, incidentally, lives in your hometown… Well, every year I go snowmobiling with him and whenever we pass through your neighbourhood, I tell him to stop on the street corner so I can stand up to point and laugh at your house”.

And FYI, yes, we’re still friends.

[EDITOR: This story’s funny enough on its own. I’ll keep my mouth shut this time. Except for taking the time to point that fact out. – Jarrett]

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The Census Taker and the Doppelganger

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May 3, 2012

(Submitted by reader Michael Doyle)

In the summer of 1960 I was visiting my older sister in Rivertons, Wyoming, when a census-taker knocked on her door.  Upon opening the door, the census-taker took one look at my sister and turned pale.  It was obvious he was in shock.

He asked my sister, whose name was “Doris,” if her name was “Velma.”  My sister told him no, but that we had an aunt Velma. He said looking at my sister was as if he had gone back 40 years and that he was looking at the face of Velma.

After discussing the coincidence, the census-taker told us that he was at one time engaged to Velma who turned our to be our aunt.  But, he knew her in Vancouver, Washington, not in Wyoming.  Kin always told Doris she looked like Velma.  I guess this stranger proved it to be so.

[EDITOR: This reminds me of a favorite short story of mine, written by Mike Resnick, available on Escape Pod, titled Distant Replay. I won’t spoil the story more than what our story above might suggest about it. I strongly encourage you to give it a listen. Outside of that I can’t say much more about this one. It’s a startling moment in this strange world we inhabit. I can’t imagine just how shaking it must have been for the census-taker. – Jarrett]

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Prehistoric Dreams

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April 28, 2012

(Submitted by reader Jeff Wagg)

Last summer, I surprised my girlfriend with a mystery trip to St. Louis. She agreed to get in the car without knowing our destination, and as I drove the five hours south, she watched the signs and tried to guess where we were going. By the time we hit Dwight, IL, she had it figured out.

My primary destination was an amazing place called simply “City Museum.” This rather mundane and non-descriptive title belies the wonders waiting inside.

Housed in a large old shoe factory, City Museum features airplanes suspended in mid-air, connected by human-sized habitrails. A school bus leans over the side of the building, and you’re invited to sit in the driver’s seat and open the door at the 150 foot drop. Inside is the world’s largest pencil, a ten story spiral slide, a circus, a carnival sideshow, an architectural museum, and a complex network of caves and tree houses all connected by tunnels, bridges and secret passages.

The things listed above account for about 5% of what this unique place offers.

Jen (my girlfriend) was very interested in the tunnels, but as I had badly twisted my ankle in a cave earlier in the day, I was taking it easy in a room filled with waterways and dinosaurs. As I’m wont to do, I checked Twitter to see what was going on in the world, and I saw a tweet that amazed me.  It was from Magician and magic designer Andrew Mayne, and though I don’t have a copy of the actual tweet, it went something like this:

“I just had a dream about a white pterodactyl. It was so real.”

This doesn’t seem like unusual dreamtime fare for a magician, but the amazing part was that directly above me, at the exact moment he tweeted  that short message was this:

@Andrewmayne umm, are you following me?

Andrew and I are friends, but we’re not super close friends and I doubt he even knew I was in St. Louis. I know of no webcams at City Museum, and even if he did know I was there, the place is large enough that his assumption that I’d be in the same room with, nevermind standing underneath, a life-sized pterodactyl of the unusual color “white” would be amazing in itself.

My best explanation is that this truly was a coincidence, and while I could point out the fact that Andrew has hundreds and hundreds of Twitter followers, and that the chances of any one of them finding some connection to one of his tweets is quite likely, the specificity of this particular coincidence is such that I felt it worthy of inclusion here.

By the way, if you’d like a great opportunity to see the City Museum, some of us are putting on a first-year conference there, called the College of Curiosity. It’s on May 26th, and will last ALL DAY. I promise you’ll leave having experienced things you’ve never imagined.

That is, unless you’re a sleeping magician.

[EDITOR: First off, this place sounds FANTASTIC. If I had any chance of being in town for that event, I’d definitely be there. Sounds like something you could visit over and over again and never run out of new things to see. As for the actual story, well… this one’s really hard to put clear thoughts behind. We can try to start listing out the number of people Jeff follows on Twitter, the average numbers of tweets across those people, and all sorts of other factors, but it falls apart when you start dealing with what people DREAM about. A pterodactyl? I can’t imagine people don’t regularly dream about the critters, but it’s still likely a pretty small number of people each night. And a white one at that? Far more specific. The timing of it being the night before Jeff went is pretty interesting, but then you realize if the dream ever occurs it will ALWAYS be the night before probably hundreds or thousands of people visit this museum. So then we have to come around to the fact that someone who specifically follows Andrew was at the museum the next day. Slimmer margin, although he does have nearly 4,000 followers. And finally the fact that Jeff happened to look at Twitter at that moment. Would it have counted if he had looked at it five minutes later, though? Probably. Saw the pterodactyl five minutes later? Just as likely. Then we can start adjusting to any of the other odd attractions in the place and things people dreamed about. With tweaks and modifications you can find that a lot of variations would have garnered the exact same reaction, raising the odds that SOMETHING would have gotten this amazing coincidence from SOMEONE. That someone happened to be our friend Jeff. And to him it was crazy. And it is to us, too. – Jarrett

And we don’t mind at all promoting The College of Curiosity – in fact, curiosity is our favorite educational resource! – Wendy]

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You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio…

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April 25, 2012

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Spencer Marks)

Just the other day, I stopped into a tool store to buy some things, and as I was checking out, I noticed the cashier was named “Brandy.” My mind immediately went to the song, “Brandi, you’re a fine girl” by Looking Glass, and was tempted to verbally say to this girl, “Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be…”

I chose not to, because I figured she had heard this 1,000 times in her life, so I just paid and left. I walked straight to my car, turned it on, and guess what was playing on the radio?!? If you guessed, “Brandi, you’re a fine girl,” YOU’D BE RIGHT!

[EDITOR: I guessed “Magical Mystery Tour,” but then again, I’ve never been very good at guessing games. – Jarrett]

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Dancing With Dragons

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April 22, 2012

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Brian Hart)

I was at Atlanta’s annual Dragon*Con in 2011, waiting in a very long line with about two thousand fans to see a viewing of the latest Doctor Who episode, which had not yet been shown in the U.S.  Dragon*Con has an estimated 40-50 thousand people who attend for the Labor Day weekend.  For about an hour we waited as fans came walking past, dressed in various Science Fiction and Fantasy-based costumes.  Some of these costumes are very elaborate, and always in good fun.

I befriended the people I was standing next to; there were a few Amy Ponds, a Princess Leia, various incarnations of The Doctor, and a pretty woman in a belly dancer outfit.  The belly dancer turned out the be a real belly dance teacher, named Lisa, with a very interesting and memorable story of how she started dancing and teaching. The line finally went in and we all went our separate ways inside the theater.

Poster of Lisa, the Belly Dancer

Two days later, we were visiting Asheville, NC, and walking through the charming downtown area.  In the window of a store, I saw a poster for belly dance lessons.  The teacher?  The same woman I had met in line in Atlanta, 160 miles away, in a crowd of thousands.

[EDITOR: Pssh, wearing your work uniform as a costume is SO cheating. Reminds me of the time I auditioned for the role of a Blockbuster (remember those?) employee for an episode of Entourage. When I arrived it turned out to be what we call a cattle call (TONS of actors for one role), and several of them arrived in their ACTUAL Blockbuster uniforms. But the joke was on them in the end. – Jarrett]

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Silver Anniversary Achievement

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April 19, 2012

(Submitted by anonymous reader)

On November 2, 1963 I married my first husband. He turned out to be an abusive man and I finally divorced him in 1968. Having never been hit by my parents I never understood the abuse or how I fell into that type of relationship or why.

In 1988 I heard an ad on the local radio station seeking  volunteers to counsel abused women. They offered free training and I decided to give it a try.

As it turned out I taught more than I was taught,  having all the experience I had. After my training was completed they gave me my certificate of completion at one of our meetings. The date on the certificate was November 2, 1988, exactly 25 years from the day I had married this man.

I felt as if God was telling me, “Now you know why.” I spent years volunteering and helping other abused women to escape and to heal.

[EDITOR: If you haven’t yet read George Hrab’s thoughts on the subject of our site, I suggest you go do so. I think he perfectly sums up exactly this type of scenario. The vast majority of the coincidences we have on this site are just plain goofy. They don’t teach a lesson, they don’t send a message, they don’t impart knowledge; they’re people running into college buddies or squirrels falling on heads. And if so many meaningless coincidences happen to people every day, then occasionally one’s going to line up just right to make you feel like there’s more to it. I personally had this experience in Favorite Worlds Collide, leading me to feel like this amazing confluence of events meant something more. But at the end of the day the source of a life-changing event isn’t necessarily what’s important about it. It’s what you do with it. It’s hard to blame people for searching for and applying meaning to events, especially when they use that to foster a positive change in their life. We should all be so lucky as to pick out clues in the jungle of life around us and make something positive out of them. – Jarrett]

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Three Wiki Sixes

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April 16, 2012

(Submitted by friend of the blog, Susan Gerbic of  Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia)

I was preparing for an upcoming Wikipedia workshop.  I chose November 2011 at random to retrieve stats for pages.

The Amityville Horror Wikipedia page had 66,633 views that month.

No way could someone have messed with the numbers because you can’t see how many hits a page receives until 36 hours after the fact.

[EDITOR: Numbers and how we perceive them always make for an interesting subject because they’re a perfect example of of searching with uncertain goals in mind. In the case above, the number was significant because it contained “666,” which some consider the number of the beast reference in a well-known holy text. Combining this with the Amityville Horror, which is a story of a supposedly real haunted house, is what makes the number’s appearance spooky. But it’s not as though this combination is uncommon.

In the example given, the number has 5 digits in total. 666 could have appeared in three possible places (66,6xx, x6,66x, or xx,666) and still caught someone’s eye. Presumably an especially observant person might have caught it spread out, as well (6x,6×6). And that’s sticking ONLY with 666. There are other numbers with classic occult meaning behind them, including 3 (although that does add to the spook factor of the above number ending with 33), 7, 9 (999 being the flip of 666), 11, and of course 13 (reference link).

So presumably any of those sets of numbers showing up in the hits could also grab the attention of someone predisposed to think of them. Some even pay attention to multiples or divisions of those numbers (although that does cover the 33 and 999 already discussed).

And that speaks only to occult numbers. People find significance in all sorts of other numbers, whether they be birthdays, anniversaries, favorite/lucky numbers, or all sorts of unusual examples. Had the number above been any different SOMEONE who looked at it was virtually guaranteed to find a number string that was, to them, meaningful. And small strings of combinations of only 10 digits are ripe for common reuse throughout everything we see. So unlike many of the stories we run on this site, numerical coincidences are probably the easiest to find on a regular basis. And yet… having said that, sometimes they still manage to surprise the heck out of you. And if you happen to be superstitious, I imagine some can be downright scary. But they’re still just coincidences. – Jarrett]

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The Ring Comes Home

Filed Under: Stories by Jarrett Kaufman — 1 Comment
April 13, 2012

I’m shockingly realizing right now that an entire decade ago the film The Ring came out in theaters. For anyone who was around at the time and had movie-going friends, this was a phenomenon. It was impossible to avoid hyperbole about what a brilliant, shocking, terrifying horror film it was, and it simply, truly, positively could NOT be missed. I’m not a horror fan, but my then-wife was and I did my job and took her to the theater to see it.

Personally, I wasn’t impressed. I felt like most of the “terror” was cheap startles of either something jumping out or a quick cut to something gruesome. Maybe I missed something, or maybe I really did expect more from what had been sold as one of the greatest horror films ever, but it left me cold.

Now I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying the main concept in the film is that a person views this video that contains a series of weird, creepy, and oddly sickening images. After the video is done, the phone rings. When the person answers the phone they hear a girl’s voice tell them that they have seven days left to live. If they don’t get someone else to watch the video before then (transferring the curse to them), they’re dead. Predictably (to me, anyway), the film ends with that very video being shown full-screen to the theater audience, in theory to terrify them by transferring the curse to them. I’m sure that was exceptionally scary for anyone who enjoyed the film better. It did nothing for me. At least not at the theater…

When we arrived home afterwards I walked into the house to hear the sound of a ringing phone. Except the house phone wasn’t ringing. The ringing was coming from my computer in the bedroom. It was the ring it makes when the main line rings so I can hit a pop-up to allow it to receive a fax, except again, the main line wasn’t ringing. I checked the screen and there were no programs running in the taskbar that could have triggered it and the fax pop-up wasn’t visible. The phone continued to ring. I checked the notification area and found no fax application or anything else that appeared related to the sound. The computer kept ringing. I opened up the task manager and started closing process after process, working my way down to core applications. THE COMPUTER KEPT RINGING. Finally I initiated a system restart at which point the ringing stopped during shutdown and didn’t return after I started the system back up.

So while the film itself didn’t do much for me directly, one of the strangest bugs I’d ever experienced on my computer happened to occur perfectly timed against the plot of the film, and managed to do exactly what the movie failed to do: scare the crap out of me. And to this day I have no idea what happened.

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