Article created by: Indrė Lukošiūtė
Whether or not you believe in fate, you can’t deny that luck is certainly a factor in our lives. There are moments when the universe seems to line up perfectly, to serve up some extremely rare coincidences that you’ll likely be talking about even years later. These coincidences can be both good, bad, or (most likely) a mix of both. But it's how we react to these events that truly matters.
The online community on Quora had a lot of fun recounting their “one-in-a-million” coincidences that completely shocked them at the time. We’ve collected some of their most interesting stories to share with you, Pandas. Scroll down to check them out.
Bored Panda wanted to find out how people can come to terms with how many things are outside of their control and based on luck, so we reached out to Max Alberhasky, Ph.D. He is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at California State University Long Beach and the host of the ‘Psychology, Money, and Happiness’ blog on Psychology Today. Alberhasky was kind enough to answer our questions. You'll find our interview with him as you read on.
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I joined the Army at 19, my first assignment was Frankfurt/Main, Germany. First time there. About a month after being barracks bound. I decided to go down town. A beautiful sunny day. This was 1965. The young woman in summer dresses. I saw this beautiful brunette and I winked at her and she winked back. Long story short we dated and married, We were married for 54 years. About 10 years ago I took an interest in Ancestry DNA. I researched my family. My mother’s mother was German and her name was Reese. I only had the tip of the iceberg on their information. At one point I decided to look into my wife’s ancestry. Her grandfather’s family name was Weingarth and he was from Kusel, a small village in Germany with a population less than 1,000. Later I obtained additional information on great grandmother Reese. In the middle of the 1700’s, information showed that the family came from the village of Kusel also, in fact the name Weingarth was part of the family. So, in a country of 80 million, what is the chance I would meet and marry someone from my family tree.
Image credits: Eric Anderson
This is a picture of an almost 2 year old me and an almost 5 year old little boy who grabbed my hand in line waiting to see Santa, because I was scared (as my mom explained).
I was flipping through photo albums about 20 years later, and thought: gee he looks familar. I was in a relationship with a young man named Chris who looked like he could be that boy, we grew up in the same town. I showed the pic to him and his mom, and sure enough, it was him! 17 more years, and 2 kids later, still going strong!
Not me, my mother. She is Cuban and when she was on her first year of teaching, she was teaching first grade and had a kid that was held back. The teachers called him a bad kid. He found it hard to sit down and pay attention, so he still could not read. My mother made him her “helper” and whenever there was free time she would sit alone with him to go over lessons. He passed first grade and actually did great!
Later on, after the Castro regime took control, my mother left Cuba. She met my father, had children, and moved on with her life.
Years later we were traveling in Florida and a man and his wife came up to her. It was the student! He said he recognized her right away because he never forgot her. He introduced her to his wife as the teacher that did not give up on him.
She is my inspiration!
My husband and his first wife went from Chicago to New York for a long weekend. As they waited to cross a busy street, they heard two businessmen behind them discuss how they were going to get the better of someone they were doing a deal with—in St. Louis. Their ears pricked up because his first wife was from St. Louis originally. As they walked along the next street, they were able to hear and identify enough details to realize that these two men were going to trick her uncle by not disclosing certain information. When they got to the hotel, his wife called her uncle—who verified that indeed he was in the middle of doing a deal with these two guys in New York! So no deal happened then! What are the chances?
When my wife to be and I started going out together many many years ago, there was a popular song that became our song, and over the years we would close dance to it whenever we heard it. and we always played it on our special occasions.
She recently became seriously ill and was on that path of no return. When she did pass away in hospital in the small hours of the morning, our song played on the radio which we had playing softly in the corner of her room. Incredibly moving.
Incredible coincidence?
My wife and I were living in our first house in Oklahoma City. One day while we were both at work, the city sewer department tore down all the fences in the rear of the houses on our block to replace the sewer main. When we got home from work we were heartbroken because we had had our young dog in the backyard and now he was nowhere to be found. We searched the area for days and put up notices but to no avail.
We were starting to believe that we would never see our dog again. My wife was so upset she decided to call the city to “give them a piece of her mind” about the lack of notification on the sewer work causing us to lose our dog.
So she gets a person on the phone from the city's Ombudsman Department. My wife explains the situation and tells the person that we loved that dog and had paid good money for him because he was a registered Irish setter. The person asks where we live and my wife gives our address. The person says “Well that's amazing. I live about a half mile from you and there's been an Irish setter hanging around lately.” My wife tells me the address and when I got to the person's house, there's our dog.
Oklahoma City is a big metropolitan area. Of all the people in the metro area my wife might have got on the phone, our dog happened to be at that person's house.
My wife, then 7 year old son and myself were on vacation in Hilton Head, and decided to go out to dinner one night. The dinner table was covered in white paper and the waitress brought out a set of crayons for my son, telling him he could use the whole table as “his canvas”. My son had brought some toy cars and proceeded to draw out an elaborate set of roads and played happily around the table. An elderly gentleman approached our table and asked if it was OK to give our son a little car. He pulled a Hot Wheels from his inside pocket. We said it was OK and he offered our son the car, which he happily accepted and added to the table/race-track. I asked him why he randomly had toy cars in his pocket and he told me he was retired but now worked with a Hilton Head classic car organization as a hobby, and in that function always carried a few cars with him. The gentleman then asked if we were Dutch, to which I replied that I am. He had overheard me speak Dutch with our son, and he said he recognized the language as he had worked for KLM Cargo in their US division for many years. I told him that was a huge coincidence as my grandfather for years was President of KLM’s cargo division. He asked for my family name, and then with great surprise told me that my grandfather had been his boss throughout his career at KLM! He was now retired (and my grandfather had died many decades ago) but he remembered my grandfather, and his trips to the Dutch KLM headquarters fondly. The chances for this encounter to happen… infinitely small. But it did happen and I think of it often when we visit Hilton Head, SC.
Not me but a fellow I knew was born in Vietnam just as the war was ending.
I don’t know what happened to his family but he ended up in an orphanage as a baby and was brought to the United States as the war came to an end. He was adopted by a family in California and spent most childhood near LA.
He was in his early 20s, shopping at Ralph’s when he noticed a young Vietnamese guy staring at him. He also noticed the guy looked just like him, like spitting image. Turns out it was his brother, his twin brother, that he never knew existed. They had come over together but adopted by different families. The organization that arranged the adoptions hadn’t put any effort into telling the families about the brothers, so they never knew of each other until that fateful day at Ralph’s.
In a seaside French town, mid-August, height of the tourist season, I lost the key to a bike lock. It was my father-in-law’s bike, and I had borrowed his bike to shop at the other side of town from our vacation cottage. I must have left it in the lock and it fell out on the way home. Uh-oh! He was a RATHER difficult old man, and would be distraught at the loss.
So I said nothing, and the next morning, went in search of it.
Walking along the path I had taken, I entered a busy street close to the beach, where hundreds of people strolled or hurried here and there. Suddenly, I spotted a bill on the sidewalk, a ten-euro note. Wow, cool! I leaned down to grab it and it fluttered away, so I went after it, and again it fluttered away. Hmmn, very odd. Then I heard giggling. I looked up, and lo and behold, two boys on a balcony with a fishing pole, and the lure was the ten-euro bill. I wagged my finger at them, and as an afterthought, asked if they’d found a key by any chance.
“Yeah, we found a key last night right on the sidewalk.” HUH? I took the stairs to their apartment, and voilà, it was the very key to Papa-in-law’s bike lock!
In a big town with fifty thousand tourists, I happened on the two who had found my key. If that ain’t a coincidence, Idk what is!
At the age of 12 I met a new girl at school who had the same birthday as me. No big deal. Then…
Born in the same state,
same city,
same hospital,
same floor,
two doors down and
15 minutes apart from me.
We were born in Hawaii
And we met in a tiny unincorporated town in Louisiana.
My daughter moved into a flat which needed a lot of work. On the first day there her best friend and her sister came over and together we ripped up the carpets. Underneath the carpets and underlay the floor had been lined with old newspapers and in the hallway was an old local newspaper and facing us was a photo of the two sisters in a dance competition when they were children!
This was probably 15 years ago - A newly married young couple had just moved in across the street from me. Shortly after that he was deployed overseas. Not long after he was deployed an older couple moved into the house behind them, and his wife got to know them quite well. After her husband returned the four of them got together and after some talking, they came to realize that he was their son! They had given him up for adoption when he was born in California and had just decided to move to Utah, some 25 years later. One in a million coincidence, moved to be neighbors with their son!
When my kids were little in Vancouver Canada, one of my oldest boy’s best friends was a kid called Sepand. They did a lot together in daycare and then kindergarten. When he was seven, we took a family trip to Montreal on summer where one of the big events is the Jazz Festival. Hundreds of shows and a few dozen free shows every night with literally tens of thousands on the streets for those shows. In the middle of that crowd, my boy pipes up with “Hey Sepand!” and sure enough there is Sepand and his family, very randomly in exactly the same spot three thousand miles from home. Big laugh, hugs and handshakes and we go on our way.
Two years later, another summer vacation, this time in California. We visit old friends in the Bay Area and decide to drive down to the Monterey peninsula for the day. Of course we have to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the great aquariums of the world. We go to the stingray tank where kids can actually reach in and play with the stingrays and we hear “Hey Sepand!” Once again, a thousand miles from home, Sepand and his family are in exactly the same place at the same time.
Back in 1998 I got my mother-in-law a copy of Pete Hamill’s “Snow in August” for a Mother’s Day gift. I wrote a little note to her on the fly leaf. Years later her daughter, my wife died and my MIL had to leave her home out of state to go into a long term care facility. She herself died almost ten years after my wife.
in 2016 I was making dump run to my little towns transfer station. I stopped into the Put and Take shed to see what treasures my neighbors had decided to part with. There’s a separate shed just for books and that’s where I headed. After a few minutes I spotted a copy of “Snow in August”. It was a bit beat up but I grabbed it and found my little note to my MIL on the fly leaf.
I wonder how many hands it went through to find it’s way back to me.
This is more than 40 years ago now but I still tell it: So there i was at university with my girlfriend. She shared a room with a girl called Siobhan. Got chatting. Where are you from, where are your parents from?
Manchester. Oh, so are mine.
Where in Manchester. Prestwich. Gosh my father was from Prestwich too.
Where exactly? Canterbury drive. Wow, Your father must have known mine. He lived on Canterbury drive too.
So I ring my mum. (my father died when I was very young). Did you know xxxx? Oh yes he was our best man!
And you know what? Siobhan was our chief bridesmaid. And she and my wife are still in touch 40 years on.
Jimi Hendrix moment. Take the time to read this, it’s pretty cool.
It was the late 60’s and I was at a Hollywood party at the home of Micky Dolanz . In case you don’t remember him or know who he is, he was one of the Monkee’s. A popular recording and television artist. While I was there I was feeling pretty uncomfortable…..feeling like I was out of my element so I went down to the basement area of the house which was just as nice as the rest of the house. Micky had a pair of kaleidoscope glasses lying around down there that I was messing around with which was kind of fun. Now, at the same time there was a black man down there with me so we talked to one another for about 15 minutes. It was just the two of us. He was pretty solemn and asked me a few questions about life and the way people think. I remember that clearly.
Now fast forward to around the mid 80’s…I was out to dinner with my ex-husband who, by the way, took me to that party. He was a part of the stage crew for the television show the Monkey’s were doing. For some reason I mentioned having this odd memory about the kaleidoscope glasses and a brief conversation with the black man that was down there with me noting that he was wearing a turban. My ex said “do you really not know who that was?” I said, “no I don’t” and he said “that was Jimi Hendrix the only black man at the party”. I was floored, stunned and practically speechless and now, at 76, its one of the most treasured memories of my life. When I look back on it now, if I had known who he was the conversation wouldn’t have happened. So glad I didn’t know it was him.
So kaleidoscope glasses and a turban became a recipe for an unforgettable and memorable 15 minute coincidence.
About 25 years ago, I decided to buy some art for my house. I ended up finding a gallery in Toronto which did a fair business in resale contemporary art, which can often be picked up at a bargain.
One of the pieces I found was a spectacular large painting of a cup, about 60 inches x 60 inches (1.5 m x 1.5 m), done by an artist named Christopher Kier. He did a series of large-format paintings of cup-like figures. What’s cool is that it’s done with encaustic, which is basically painting with liquid wax. My picture looks a lot like this one here, and it’s very interesting to touch, the surface has a very tactile feel.
Anyhow, this painting hangs on the wall of my breakfast nook, and since the pandemic, that’s where my wife sits when she works from home. The painting is in the background when she is on a video call.
About a year ago, she had a call with someone she does not normally talk to, a senior VP in the organization. They had the call, and at the end he asked her to stay on after the other people left. He said that he noticed the painting in the background. He asked her if was a Christopher Kier. She was pretty surprised, but said yes, it was.
Then he said that he was good friends with the artist, and then said “Look at this”.
He pivoted the camera, and there, hanging on his wall… was a Christopher Kier encaustic cup!
Pretty amazing.
Many years ago, I was riding my motorcycle in the right lane of a 4-lane highway divided by a guardrail. The car in front of me braked suddenly—no problem, I stopped easily and saw that a family of ducks had entered the highway from the right side of the road.
Seeing the ducks and the traffic in the left-hand lane approaching quickly, I turned and waved at the left-lane traffic which did come to an abrupt halt as the mother and four baby ducks continued walking. They ducked under the guardrail and proceeded, crossing in front of two oncoming lanes of fast-moving traffic. The cars in the oncoming lanes came to a literal screeching halt as the mother and four chicks, undaunted, disappeared into the weeds on the opposite side of the highway.
Whew! I was relieved that the ducks were ok, and I began to pull out from the right shoulder back onto the highway. As I was about to pull out, I had to wait for a car that had stopped behind me and was already moving down the road. As that car passed me, I looked at the license plate which read “5 DUCKS”!
My parents told me this story. When I was 8 years old living in the UK, my dad took a job opportunity in the USA and we emigrated. My parents decided to rent out our home in the UK so before we left we were showing the house to perspective tenants. One was an American guy. Turns out he was from the same city in the US that we were about to move to in a few weeks time. They laughed over the coincidence and the American guy said that his adult daughter is still in the US and we should look her up when we get there. He gave us her name and that she works in a particular restaurant in the city.
Fast forward a few weeks and fly to the US. we arrive at the airport, tired after flying halfway across the world! We are met at the airport by a representative of my dad’s new company and he drives us to a hotel. On the way we stop for some food. It’s late and there’s not a lot of places still open. The rep says he knows a place that’s open late. Yep, the same place the American tenant’s daughter works at. We end up getting served by her! So we rent out our UK home to a random American guy and move to America and end up meeting the guy’s daughter working half an hour of leaving the airport!
Some years ago, I spent a summer working for a law firm. My job involved calling and interviewing plaintiffs in a class action suit that they were working on. I had a list of names and telephone numbers, and a list of questions to ask. I would call, as for “Joe Anderson” or whomever, then spend half an hour or so interviewing Mr. Anderson about his claim.
One of the phone numbers on the list was for a woman in Georgia (I am not from Georgia). I called the number. But I accidentally transposed two digits when I dialed - instead of dialing 555–1234 I dialed 555 -1324 or something like that.
A voice answered the phone.
I said “May I please speak to Sylvia Podunk?” (or whatever the name was)
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
The person on the other end said “would you please repeat that?”
I said “Of course - may I please speak to Sylvia Podunk?”
The voice said “ Is this Mark McCain?”
I had accidentally dialed a girl that I had dated in high school about 10 years before. I had lost touch with her after graduation. She was now living in Georgia. When I accidentally dialed her number, she recognized my voice over the phone and realized it was me!
I was in NY 1979 with my brother. There was a guy about same age as me with a BMW motorcycle same limited edition 1000cc model that I had in London UK.I spoke to him about bike and told him about my one. Got impression did not fully believe me about owning one same model.
A few months later whilst riding my one in London UK, I saw him on holiday with friends about to cross the street. Said Hi remember me NY we talked about your bike same as this one. Nice to see you again. He looked double shocked one about bike, and two seeing me again riding it 6000 miles away! Had a few words then off I rode, never saw him again as no reason to exchange numbers. Odds against that must have been on par with winning lottery!
My brother had this happen. He and his family were on a road trip and their car broke down. They were close enough to a gas station to push it there. There was a man there asking for gas money. My brother gave it to him and the man turned out to be a mechanic and fixed my brother’s car at no charge.
We'd got a new rescue dog. Got her as a pup. Approximately 6 months later, we'd gone on a day trip to the coast. Stopped at lunchtime at a little village pub that had outside tables. I got us a couple of drinks, snacks etc and we sat at one of the tables. Got talking to a couple at the next table with a young dog who seemed about the same age as ours. It only turned out that they had got their dog from the same rescue centre and both dogs were actually brother and sister from the same litter. Not only that, they actually lived close to us.
