Unexplainable Experiences

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“Have you ever experienced something that you couldn’t explain?” has become a question I really love hearing people’s answers to. The Glitch in the Matrix subreddit is about people’s answers to this question, and the stories posted there are some of the most interesting I’ve ever read.

The following are some of my favorite posts. There are a few others that are just as interesting as these, if not more so, but only these ones have the tone and ambiance that I’m looking for.

I don’t mean to imply that these are evidence for the paranormal or supernatural. At worst, they’re fascinating stories. But I get the feeling that these are all experiences people really did have, regardless of whether those experiences reflect reality. And there’s always some small part of you that can’t help but wonder…

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The Castle

“My two cousins and I were outside on the front porch playing. At the time, we were all around 4 or 5 years old. Two teenagers approached us and asked if we wanted to see a castle. I knew this was bad news, but one of my cousins really wanted to go see it, so we all agreed to follow. We went into the woods and walked along a trail for what felt like an eternity (probably 20 minutes or so realistically).

We arrived to find a beautiful, gleaming, majestic castle in the distance. I’m talking something you’d see in the movies. This place was made of heaven. It literally shined as if we’d entered a city of wealth. We looked at each other with intense excitement and sprinted home to tell our parents. The teenagers stayed behind and never chased or followed.

Our run back was almost instantaneous, as if it only took a few seconds. We went and told my mom. Obviously, she was freaked out and told us no more playing outside for the day.

The thing is, my mom was so incredibly strict that she never would’ve let me out of her sight for longer than a minute. And the door to the front porch was open, so there’s no way two random teenagers could’ve actually taken us into the woods (or anywhere) without one of our parents noticing.

I’ve spoken to my mom about this multiple times. I’ve even looked as an adult. No luck. There’s no church or anything like that nearby that we could’ve mistaken for a castle. All three of us remember it, though. I’m 25 now, and we’ve spoken about this at the ages of 6, 8, 12, 15, etc. ― essentially every time we’d see each other. We all remember. I know a lot of people will chalk this up to kids’ imaginations, but I swear this was real.” ^[1]

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A Third Person

“My boyfriend and I don’t really have any mutual friends, so we mostly spend time alone together. Either going for walks, drives, watching films, etc. When we’re actually doing those things, I never feel like there’s someone else with us. However, when I think back on those moments, I get this distinct feeling that there was a third person there.

For example, one night we were walking home in the dark. We got into a disagreement and I stormed ahead. When we got back to his place, he got mad at me for leaving him alone (and for walking off on my own in the dark). In response, I literally almost said out loud, ‘You weren’t on your own,’ before stopping myself.

So this is only in hindsight, and it’s not every memory, but most ― especially when it’s dark and we’re very isolated. I don’t know if this is some weird psychological trick my mind plays on me in memory formation or something, but it only ever happens with him and it happens a lot. And the ‘person’ who’s there isn’t really a person ― it’s more like a throwaway third character, just out of frame.” ^[2]

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Although it’s not exactly the same thing, even when all six members of my immediate family (plus our dogs) are all together, it often feels like there’s someone missing. And my other family members sometimes say the same thing. I think it’s a feeling that’s pretty commonly experienced. Here are some other mentions of it.

“I know I have four kids, but recently I just feel like there should be another one. When we go out, I do a headcount and get flustered because I can’t find the extra one. I have to consciously remind myself there are only four ― but my heart just doesn’t believe it.”^i[3]

“I had this feeling for most of my childhood. I have one sister, but I always felt like there was another sibling missing.” ^[4]

“When my kids were small ― when getting us all out the door to go somewhere or checking on them playing in another room ― quite often, there’d be a few seconds where I was like, ‘Where is… Oh hang on, there is no one else.’ It was a sad feeling realizing no one was missing, even though it made no sense.” ^[5]

Ultimately, I do think it’s just a psychological phenomenon, but an eerie one.

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Dark Magician

“I was in a master’s program with plans on becoming an elementary school counselor and needed to do volunteering in the field. I’m about a week in, and the school is having an assembly magic show. So naturally I go, like the rest of the teachers. Right off of the bat, I’m creeped out by the magician because he didn’t talk throughout his whole appearance at the school (pre or post show), and he had an extremely emotionless and almost supernatural aura about him. During the show, he had the most piercing stare. Considering that it’s an elementary school and you’re dealing with 6 to 11-year-olds, you’d expect him to be extra jubilant and comforting ― but these notions were brushed aside. He did this magic trick that absolutely had to be impossible ― he was reading a big book, and then he stuck his head into it, and his head reappeared out of a top hat placed on a treasure chest (that at most could fit two soccer balls in it), which was on a table with legs that you could see right under. I was impressed, but still, that’s how a magic show is supposed to work.

After the assembly was over and it was the end of the school day, I saw him walking toward me in the hallway. I was anticipating us meeting and wanted to tell him how good the show was. But before we met, he turned into the bathroom, and I ended up talking to a couple of teachers who happened to be in the hallway at the time. As I talked to them, I kept my eye on the bathroom door so I could catch him coming out. But he never did. I walked into the bathroom and… nothing. I was a little freaked out.

But that wasn’t it. The next day, everyone’s talking about the magic show. I decided I was going to hire the guy for my niece’s birthday, because I was honestly intrigued and wanted to see him perform again. So I went to the office to get his contact info, but I learned that there was a scheduling mix-up. They’d never even booked the guy that showed up or had any idea who he was. The actual performer had called to ask if he could reschedule, because the school had ‘called in and canceled’. Everyone in the office was confused. He was supposed to come pick up his check but never did.” ^[6]

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Floating

“When I was about 7, I clearly remember jumping up and down, just playing. But one time when I jumped, I went a little higher than normal and stalled about halfway down to the ground. It was almost like… gravity loosened a bit? I’d chalked it up to a very active imagination until I asked my mom about it a few days ago. When I brought it up, her face went pale. She said she remembers it vividly and explained how confused and panicked she was when it happened. When I asked my dad, he said that mom was just tired and I was an imaginative child. But I clearly remember the feeling of my stomach flipping and being suspended in midair, if only for a few seconds.”^i[7]

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I’ve had an unexplainable experience or two in my life, one of which might be worth sharing. Experiences like these are always extremely interesting to the person they happened to, but not all of them translate into stories that are interesting for others to hear. At the risk of mine being like that, I’ll link it here. It has to do with the video game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, so it probably won’t be too meaningful if you haven’t played the game.

Anyway, I encourage you to reflect on if you’ve ever had any unexplainable experiences, and to ask your friends and family if they ever have. You might be pleasantly surprised by their stories.

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Cookie Day

“When I was a child, it always felt like my REM sleep was constantly being disturbed throughout the night, and this caused me to have really vivid and gradually more lucid dreams. At the time, I chalked this up to our house being haunted. When I was in kindergarten, my mom sold that house, and we immediately moved into our new house. I had school the next day, so I unpacked just one school outfit and one pair of pajamas, a Princess Jasmine nightshirt.

I fell asleep that night peacefully for the first time in years, and I started to dream. Even now, I remember this dream exactly as it happened. It took place in the old house, and I was playing with my mom’s friend’s daughter in my bedroom, early in the morning for some reason. We were pretending to race these horse figurines (that I didn’t own in real life), and the girl kept cheating. When I accused her of cheating, she yelled at me that she wasn’t, and then she sat on my floor and peed her pants (lol). So I ran to get our moms. The girl’s mom picked her daughter up by one wrist, slapped her, and took her out of our house, slamming the door. It was around this point I became aware that I was dreaming. My mom told me that everything was pretty much packed, and that after school I’d come home to our new house. And she told me that I had to go to school that day, because it was ‘cookie day’, and I’d be making cookies all day in class. I was confused that I hadn’t heard about this special cookie day before.

My mom drove me to school, and when I got to my classroom, there were cookie-making materials and baking pans on every table and a giant oven near the teacher’s desk. Sure enough, all we did was make cookies. I made sugar cookies and chocolate chip. After school, my mom picked me up and asked me if I was excited to see our new house. After we got there, I realized that the door to my room had a window in it that it normally didn’t ― an indication that I was still dreaming. Besides, I was aware that in real life we’d already moved into the new house the night before, not while I was at school.

I started to color in a coloring book, which I also didn’t own in real life, that was just sitting on top of my boxes. I kept glancing at my door and to see whether or not it had a window in it, and it started switching back and forth, which really scared me. My mom made dinner, and after we ate, she told me to get ready for bed. I was getting worried that I’d managed to continue dreaming to the point of going to sleep for the night, so I asked my mom if she could unpack a different pair of my pajamas for me to wear. That way, I could check to see if I was still dreaming. If I woke up in the Princess Jasmine pajamas, the dream was over. And if I woke up in the green shirt and pants my mom had just unpacked, I was still dreaming.

The thing is, I never woke up in my Jasmine pajamas on like I should have. The next day, I woke up in the green shirt and pants. I asked my mom about the coloring book, which I didn’t think I’d owned. She told me that she saw it in my room before I came home from school, and that I must’ve always had it. There were ziploc bags of cookies in my fridge from cookie day. Making cookies at school, my mom’s friend’s daughter peeing her pants in my room ― all of that continued seamlessly with the reality I live in now. I’m pretty sure I currently live in the ‘real world’. However, there’s no way I moved into the new house twice.

I didn’t quite understand what’d happened, and I didn’t even think about it at all for quite some time. But luckily, in second grade, I did end up asking a friend from my kindergarten class if there’d been a day where we baked cookies at school. She swore to me up and down that it never happened. And her mom told me (probably rightly so) that there’s no way that there’d ever have been a full-size oven in our kindergarten classroom. I remember my mom and I eating those cookies, though. But whenever I ask her about moving into the new house, she tells me that she remembers us moving the night before, not while I was at school the next day. She also denied that cookie day ever happened.

After having woken up in the wrong pajamas and checking on the cookies, I don’t remember what happened at all. It just became forgettable, everyday stuff, and life went on normally until now. So I somehow managed to have a dream that seamlessly dissolved into my real life without ever having ‘woken up’. And I think this might’ve been the last lucid dream I ever had.” ^[8]

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The Alternate Room

“In the house I lived in from was when I was 4 until I was 14, my bedroom was at the very end of the hallway. But it wasn’t always the last room. There was another room past my bedroom that my twin brother and I would occasionally go into to play. It was filled with random stuff, and I don’t remember anything specific that was inside. Nobody ever explicitly told us not to go in that room, but whenever we went inside, it always felt like we were sneaking around somewhere we weren’t supposed to be. We’d forget about the room for long periods of time and then randomly remember it and decide to go inside. This happened a lot for the first few years we lived there. We even took our best friend inside a few times. One day, when it’d been a few months since we’d last gone inside, I remembered it and suggested we go in and play. We walked to the end of the hall, but the room was gone. It never appeared again. And neither of our parents have any memory of the room.” ^[9]

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Secret Passage

“There are many wooden playgrounds in the area where I grew up ― the kind with lots of tunnels, bridges, and towers. What some might be considered the king of such places ― a 40-foot-tall, 8-story play palace called ‘Kid’s Castle’ ― was about 45 minutes away from my house. On the rare occasion I got to go there, I spent hours crawling around and exploring the endless tunnels. There must have been 200 or more separate passages, all interconnected by slides of varying length. It was paradise for a kid like me. A lot of other kids I met there would tell me there were secret passages in the castle, so I spent the majority of my time trying to discover them. Once, when I was about 10, I think I did find one of these secret passages. It’s strange though ― the circumstances of the discovery, the place I found, the people I met there, and what happened afterward just don’t make sense.

I made the discovery one sunny day on the first floor of the castle. I’d been walking around through the tunnels (the first floor had the highest ceiling) making turn after turn, when I walked into a clearing in the structure. The area was enclosed within the castle but the sun was shining down onto the ground of a pit of sorts. The pit had stairs down to its woodchip floor and benches on either side. On the benches were two girls, both staring at me in disbelief. They both looked older than me, maybe 13 or 14. ‘How did you find this place?’ the closer girl asked. I told her I’d just been wandering around and found it randomly. She explained that I wasn’t supposed to be able to find the pit, and that her dad ‘built this place’ and had made the area special for her. She made me pinky swear (a novel idea to me at the time) never to tell anyone about it and asked me to leave. I complied, figuring that I could easily find my way back.

I ran out of the castle to my mom and told her what happened (pinky swear be damned). We went back and tried to find it, blanketing the whole first floor, but there was nothing, no trace. The pit had just disappeared. I’ve asked friends of mine who used to frequent the place about it, and they said they’ve never seen an area like I described. I’ve been back there quite a few times to look for it since, and not once have I been able to find it. It’s by far my most perplexing memory from childhood. Some people, myself included, have theorized this might’ve been a dream I’m mistakenly remembering as a real event. But I confirmed the story with my mom. She recalls me running up to her and describing what happened.” ^[10]

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Citations

1. ~john30859
2. (author unknown, original source deleted)
3. ~for-the-weirdstuff
4. ~tinbasher97
5. ~thewoodwitch
6. ~alwaysmanic
7. (author unknown, original source deleted)
8. ~anisefish
9. ~simonoel
10. ~artfullydodged