Strange Days Indeed!

[𝘗rincess 𝘵uvstarr]

Here we post bizarre and interesting stories from our very odd world.
What weird wonders do you know about?
Share the strangeness!

Here is the first:

Ghost Apples!



www.today.com/food/photos-ghost-apples-are-going-viral-what-are-they-t148759

[ripper]

I enjoy accounts of odd coincidences. One of my favourites is given below. I can't quite remember where I read or heard it, but it may have been shown during that Fortean Night the BBC did back in the 90s.

A man went away on holiday. He was strolling one day in the town where he was staying when he noticed that a phone was ringing in a public call box. On impulse he answered it. He had a shock when the caller was someone from his company trying to contact him. It turned out that the caller had mixed up the man's phone number with his (I think) employee number, and that employee number happened to be the same as the phone number of that particular call box, and the man just happened to be walking by it when the person from his company called.

[Swampirella]

Sept 18, 2021 21:03:12 GMT ripper said:

I enjoy accounts of odd coincidences. One of my favourites is given below. I can't quite remember where I read or heard it, but it may have been shown during that Fortean Night the BBC did back in the 90s.

A man went away on holiday. He was strolling one day in the town where he was staying when he noticed that a phone was ringing in a public call box. On impulse he answered it. He had a shock when the caller was someone from his company trying to contact him. It turned out that the caller had mixed up the man's phone number with his (I think) employee number, and that employee number happened to be the same as the phone number of that particular call box, and the man just happened to be walking by it when the person from his company called.

That's a great story, this may or may not be the one you're thinking of, from Fortean Times "It Happened to Me" Vol. 4:

OF ALL THE PHONEBOXES

In the Eighties, a friend of mine decided to go hitchhikingaround Europe, and on the way call in on some friends from Italy. After a row at work, he quit his job early and started travelling two weeks earlier than he had originally planned. One night, during a heavy downpour in Germany, he took shelter in a phone kiosk. The telephone rang and, having nothing better to do, he answered it, expecting to hear someone speaking German.

To his surprise, it was out mutual friend in Italy calling to check some arrangement on meeting up. it transpired our Italian friend, not knowing about his early departure, had simply dialled his home phone number and somehow been connected to that particular public phone.

Our Italian friend phoned me straight afterwards to check that this wasn't a hoax and that our friend was ineed abroad, as I confirmed. To this day, none of us knows how it happened. Misdial a number and the odds of picking a particular phone in another country must be infinitesimal.

Darry Ryden, by email, 2009

Pg. 218, FT It Happened To Me.

[Dr Strange]

Sept 18, 2021 21:03:12 GMT ripper said:

I enjoy accounts of odd coincidences. One of my favourites is given below. I can't quite remember where I read or heard it, but it may have been shown during that Fortean Night the BBC did back in the 90s.

A man went away on holiday. He was strolling one day in the town where he was staying when he noticed that a phone was ringing in a public call box. On impulse he answered it. He had a shock when the caller was someone from his company trying to contact him. It turned out that the caller had mixed up the man's phone number with his (I think) employee number, and that employee number happened to be the same as the phone number of that particular call box, and the man just happened to be walking by it when the person from his company called.

Sept 19, 2021 0:13:16 GMT Swampirella said:

That's a great story, this may or may not be the one you're thinking of, from Fortean Times "It Happened to Me" Vol. 4:

OF ALL THE PHONEBOXES

In the Eighties, a friend of mine decided to go hitchhikingaround Europe, and on the way call in on some friends from Italy. After a row at work, he quit his job early and started travelling two weeks earlier than he had originally planned. One night, during a heavy downpour in Germany, he took shelter in a phone kiosk. The telephone rang and, having nothing better to do, he answered it, expecting to hear someone speaking German.

To his surprise, it was out mutual friend in Italy calling to check some arrangement on meeting up. it transpired our Italian friend, not knowing about his early departure, had simply dialled his home phone number and somehow been connected to that particular public phone.

Our Italian friend phoned me straight afterwards to check that this wasn't a hoax and that our friend was ineed abroad, as I confirmed. To this day, none of us knows how it happened. Misdial a number and the odds of picking a particular phone in another country must be infinitesimal.

Darry Ryden, by email, 2009

Pg. 218, FT It Happened To Me.

Google turns up various different versions of this story. These are 3 submissions to a question about coincidences in The Guardian's Notes & Queries -

"A show on BBC2 a few years ago told the story about the AA guy who was walking past a phonebox in the middle of nowhere, when the phone began to ring. On a whim, he answered, and was amazed to find he was talking to his dispatcher. She had meant to ring his mobile, but had rung his staff number instead - which happened to be the phone number of the phone he was walking past." - Caimin McGovern, Dublin Ireland

"While I suspect that the payroll/mobile mix-up is an urban legend, a very similar thing once happened to me. My brother Ben and I both worked at the same pub and the landlord was trying to get hold of me by ringing a number marked "Ben-Home" on the staff contact list. This was in fact another Ben's number which he then misdialled by accidentally reversing the last two digits. The number he actually rang was the pub across town where I was having a drink. The barman handed me the phone and my boss refused point-blank to believe that I wasn't at home, since that was the number he thought he'd called!" - Jon, Cambridge

"The AA guy story I can confirm is TRUE as I was working for the company at the time, the odds must have been staggering." - Mark G, Wakefield UK


There are various others online, including ones that claim "it happened to me", such as -

"When I was 15 and shopping in town with a friend when I should have been working on a school project with the same friend, I walked past a public phone box just as it started ringing. I 'dared' my friend to answer the phone. She 'double-dared' me. I opened the door, answered the phone 'Hello?' and my mum said 'Hello Charlotte. Are you coming home for dinner?'. I was so surprised I confessed all. It turned out that the phone box had the same number as my friend's home number bar one digit. My mum had misdialled and inadvertently called the phone box that I just happened to be walking by."

And -

"In the mid 80s I lived in south Birmingham and after the pub my friends and I would walk home past a row of shops and then peel off to our various houses. One day when walking home the public phone box on the row of shops was ringing (this was about 11.30 at night). One of our group decided to answer it for a laugh and when he answered it the call was for him! His friend had mis-dialled his home number and got the call box just as he walked past. When we looked into it the timing was partly because his friend had called at a time when he thought he would be getting in from the pub and the two phone numbers were very similar."

[ripper]

Thinking about it, I am more convinced now that I saw it on TV, most likely on 'Fortean Night'. It's a heck of a story. It could have been an AA guy and it might not have been the guy's employee number, but it's hard to be sure after so much time. It definitely wasn't in Fortean Times that I saw it.

[Dr Strange]

Sept 19, 2021 10:58:53 GMT ripper said:

Thinking about it, I am more convinced now that I saw it on TV, most likely on 'Fortean Night'. It's a heck of a story. It could have been an AA guy and it might not have been the guy's employee number, but it's hard to be sure after so much time. It definitely wasn't in Fortean Times that I saw it.

Here it is, starting at 6:34, originally broadcast Dec 1994 -

[ripper]

Thanks very much, Dr Strange, that's where I saw it. I see I got the bit where I said he was on holiday wrong. It is an incredible coincidence. The one about the phone call from Italy is also a good example of oddness.

It was 'Weird Night' not 'Fortean Night' as I thought.

[ripper]

Here's one I can vouch for personally, as it happened to me. It's not as weird as the AA guy or others in the 'Weird Night' clip, but here it is.

It was October 1981 and the location was the Hotel Oasis Park, Lloret De Mar, Costa Brava, Spain. We had arrived at the hotel late the previous night. In the morning we were going to the dining room for breakfast. We had to go up a flight of stairs, and as we were going up, who should have been coming down but a work colleague I hadn't seen for a year since we had been made redundant after the company closed. We chatted for a few minutes, each surprised to have met so far away from home. We were there for a week but I never saw her again. A delay of maybe 30 seconds in our ascending those stairs and we would have missed her, which goes to show how fine the line is between a coincidence and a non-event.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Sept 19, 2021 12:50:13 GMT ripper said:

Here's one I can vouch for personally, as it happened to me. It's not as weird as the AA guy or others in the 'Weird Night' clip, but here it is.

It was October 1981 and the location was the Hotel Oasis Park, Lloret De Mar, Costa Brava, Spain. We had arrived at the hotel late the previous night. In the morning we were going to the dining room for breakfast. We had to go up a flight of stairs, and as we were going up, who should have been coming down but a work colleague I hadn't seen for a year since we had been made redundant after the company closed. We chatted for a few minutes, each surprised to have met so far away from home. We were there for a week but I never saw her again. A delay of maybe 30 seconds in our ascending those stairs and we would have missed her, which goes to show how fine the line is between a coincidence and a non-event.

You met another British person at a tourist resort particularly favored by British people. No, not quite as weird. I mean this in a caring way.

[ripper]

The point is, as I said, that the line between something appearing as an odd coincidence and a non-event is very fine. For example, in the case of the AA man in the 'Weird Night' clip, if he hadn't answered that phone, if he had been a minute earlier or later passing the call box, if his colleague had called a minute earlier or later, if his colleague had dialed the correct number, what appears as very odd coincidence would not have happened. My story was a diluted version with possibly fewer variables, merely recounted to illustrate the point I was making, and I did say it wasn't as weird, but it was still a coincidence with a very low probability of happening. I make no claim that my story or any of those in the clip are anything more than chance coincidence. There must be thousands of 'close calls' happening daily, only one or more variables needed to make a 'hit' fail. We remember the 'hit's but no nothing of the many more 'close calls.' It is similar in that respect to dreams where precognition is alleged.

[Dr Strange]

Exactly. The human brain has evolved to look for meaning in everything, and will often impose meaning on the meaningless. If you consider that there's more than 7 billion people on the planet, each having about 4 dreams every night, then it would be very odd if there weren't lots of apparently "precognitive" dreams being reported - in fact, it would imply some mysterious mechanism that was preventing this from happening. I myself have had at least one dream about seeing a plane crash, but nothing happened in the next few days that could be related to it. It doesn't surprise me at all when I hear about someone having a dream like this the night before something apparently related to the dream is reported in the news. The phone coincidences are certainly more difficult to rationalise in this way - but I have to admit to being a bit cynical about some of them (e.g. the Italian one - wouldn't that have required the caller in Italy to have used the international dialling code in order to get connected to a telephone in London? Could she really have called that number "by accident" by just getting the number for her local dry-cleaner slightly wrong?).

[ripper]

Sept 19, 2021 16:26:54 GMT Dr Strange said:

Exactly. The human brain has evolved to look for meaning in everything, and will often impose meaning on the meaningless. If you consider that there's more than 7 billion people on the planet, each having about 4 dreams every night, then it would be very odd if there weren't lots of apparently "precognitive" dreams being reported - in fact, it would imply some mysterious mechanism that was preventing this from happening. I myself have had at least one dream about seeing a plane crash, but nothing happened in the next few days that could be related to it. It doesn't surprise me at all when I hear about someone having a dream like this the night before something apparently related to the dream is reported in the news. The phone coincidences are certainly more difficult to rationalise in this way - but I have to admit to being a bit cynical about some of them (e.g. the Italian one - wouldn't that have required the caller in Italy to have used the international dialling code in order to get connected to a telephone in London? Could she really have called that number "by accident" by just getting the number for her local dry-cleaner slightly wrong?).

The italian account is probably the one that most stretches credibility. Assuming it is true, I suppose if one or more exchanges were those old-fashioned mechanical type then one or more of the digits might not have been properly selected even though the caller dialed correctly. I can remember that very occasionally I would be sure I had dialed the correct number only to be put through to a total stranger when mechanical exchanges were in operation. However, I agree that it is a stretch. Note that the caller and speaker both read meaning into the event, that it was 'meant to be' for them to re-establish their friendship, only that did not happen.

[Jojo Lapin X]

Sept 19, 2021 15:41:14 GMT ripper said:

it was still a coincidence with a very low probability of happening

My point was that something like that (meeting somebody you know in a location where people like the both of you congregate) must have had a very high probability of happening.

[ripper]

Both meeting due to being at the same place at the same time, yes, a decent probability, but I think it is a low probability taking into account the various choices we both had to make to get to the same location. I had never been there before and haven't been back since, not even to Spain. Neither had she. We chose that particular hotel out of dozens of hotels and apartments/villas in that resort, not to mention the hundreds of hotels/apartments/villas in the same brochure for other resorts in Spain, the islands, Greek islands, Malta, Cyprus, Tunisia, Morocco, Bulgaria and a few others I can't recall. Then that was one brochure out of about a dozen we got, each with hundreds of hotels/apartments/villas, some overlapping with the brochure we selected, but many more that were not. At a conservative estimate, there must have been eight hundred choices of hotel/apartment/villa where we could have stayed in perhaps a dozen countries. So, I and my colleague just happened to pick the same hotel. Then we happened to both choose to stay at the hotel at the same time, out of any time between may and the end of October. We had actually planned on going in Early September but had to alter the time for some reason I don't recall, and very nearly chose a resort in Bulgaria. Then we just happened to bump into each other on those stairs once and didn't see each other again. The chance of meeting a fellow Briton was, of course, very high, but the chance of meeting my colleague in that particular hotel at that time was, I believe, low. I agree that once we were both in the hotel there was a decent probability that we would meet, but taking into account that we could have chosen any of 800+ places to stay over a time period of 6 months and we both chose the same hotel at the same time, then that is a low probability. I even asked her how she chose that hotel and she said it was more or less at random. She, too, had been looking through lots of brochures for resorts all over the Med area of Europe, and had chosen that particular week because it was her birthday or wedding anniversary, I don't remember which.

[Jojo Lapin X]

If you know enough people it is not unlikely that you would run into one of them even if you go to Ulan Bator.