This is so interesting, I had a very similar experience a few years ago. We live In Ireland. We went for a walk as a family to a local forest area. It has a duck pond in the centre and so you can walk around the duck pond in a loop . We were walking anticlockwise. My husband was ahead with baby in buggy , son about 3 and I was approx 10/15 feet behind with daughter approx 5 at the time . A couple came along the path clockwise, they were older , maybe 60s or 70s. They had a little jack Russell dog and the man had a walking stick. They smiled said hello and carried on. About 5 minutes passed and the same couple came from the same direction. My husband is a massive sceptic and always finds a logical explanation to everything but we were both speechless. I watched them go by , same polite smile . I was looking ahead at my husband to watch his reaction, when he turned back to look at me 🤷♀️ to this day we talk of it often . Unless they were Olympic runners there is no possible way they did the loop in that time.
The same family passed me twice on a path with no exits!
This happened last October, and I still haven’t found an explanation that makes any sense.
I was walking my dog along a canal towpath in the West Midlands (UK). It’s a route I use regularly with canal on one side, a tall railway fence on the other, and no exits between two road bridges roughly a mile and a half apart.
At about 8:25am, a family approached from the opposite direction. They were unusually easy to remember. The woman wore a red wool hat, the man was pushing a bright yellow three-wheeled buggy, and they had a tan dachshund in a green harness.
As we passed, the woman stopped and asked, “Do you know if the little café by the locks is open yet?”
I checked my watch and said, “Not until nine, I don’t think.”
She thanked me, and we continued in opposite directions.
About eight minutes later, I saw another family walking towards me.
It took a few seconds for my brain to register why they looked familiar. It was the same woman in the red hat, the same man, the same yellow buggy and the same dachshund. They were also approaching from the same direction as before.
When they reached me, the woman smiled and asked, word for word, “Do you know if the little café by the locks is open yet?”
I just stared at her.
Eventually I said, “You’ve literally just asked me that.”
Her smile disappeared. She looked at the man, then back at me and said, “Sorry?”
I explained that I had passed them less than ten minutes earlier and had already answered the exact same question. The man laughed awkwardly and said, “Must have been our doubles.”
They both seemed genuinely confused, so I checked my watch again and told them it was now 8:34. The woman thanked me, although she looked uncomfortable, and they carried on walking.
I immediately turned around. They were still there, walking normally in the direction I had come from. They didn’t disappear, run off or behave strangely.
The problem is that there was no possible way for them to have got ahead of me.
There are no side paths on that section. They couldn’t have crossed the canal, and the railway fence is far too high to climb. Even if they had turned around after our first conversation and sprinted to the previous bridge, they would then have needed to travel more than two miles by road, reach the next bridge and walk back towards me all in about eight minutes, while pushing a buggy and walking a dachshund.
They also would have had to do it without passing me.
When I reached the next bridge, I checked the walking app on my phone because I wondered if I had somehow become confused and doubled back without realising. The map showed one continuous line along the towpath. No loop, no missing section and no pause.
I was completely sober, well rested and not wearing headphones. It was broad daylight, and both encounters lasted long enough for me to remember what everyone looked like.
The obvious explanation is that I saw two extremely similar families. But identical clothes, identical buggy, identical dog and the exact same question in the exact same wording feels like a ridiculous number of coincidences.
Nothing like it has happened to me since. I still use the same path, but every time I reach that section, I find myself looking ahead for the yellow buggy.
45 years ago, Mum took off her earrings whilst eating dinner. Small studs pearls in a radiant sun burst of gold.
As per usual out the kitchen window the tablecloth was shook to remove any crumbs. Haha she realised that her earrings were in the cloth so she sent both my brother & I downstairs with a torch to see if we could find them. Hoping the torch would highlight the gold & help us spy them... No.
So over the years of mowing, weeding & whipper snippering that area she'd given up hope of ever finding them.
I bought her a new pot plant & asked her where she wanted it... Under the kitchen window, ok. Placing the huge pot plant there I spied a twinkle of gold.. yep wouldn't have read about it.. two perfectly clean & healthy little earrings sitting on top of the grass??
Physics state that that should not happen. Across the years of rain, watering, weeding, whipper snippering & mowing there is no way they'd be sitting on top.
I ran upstairs & said to Mum "Hold out your hands!" and I gently placed the earrings in her palms. "OMG", she gasps, "I was asking St Anthony to find those earrings" and he has delivered?!
Weird as I'd originally searched both that night & the next day & every time I mowed or worked there I kept an eye out, but it took 45 years for them to jump back into this dimension.