A brilliantly written plot twist can make an entire film. You know the kind, those that trigger an audible gasp in audience members and leave everyone recommending the movie to their friends upon leaving the theatre. But we all know that truth is stranger than fiction, and life is sometimes the most brilliant screenwriter of all.
Redditors have recently been sharing the most surprising plot twists that they’ve experienced in real life, so we’ve gathered some of their best stories below. From coincidences that prove just how small the world is to sharp turns in people’s career trajectories, enjoy reading through these movie-worthy moments!
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When me and a buddy went to see a movie, we stopped for gas on the way. It started to rain fairly heavy, and some goofy hippy girl that worked at the gas station, ran out and started dancing in the rain. It was a hot day and the rain was welcomed, but this goofy broad is laughing and dancing around when she is supposed to be working. Many years later, my girlfriend who I had lived with for 4 to 5 years, told me how she loves the rain so much, that she used to dance in the rain, even at work at a gas station. Yep, I was living with goofy hippy chick for years and never knew. Still together.
We were at a big bonfire, and there was this guy named Kylee who got absolutely hammered. Eventually the night's winding down, people are going home, and some of his friends started asking him if he had a ride home, and he kept slurring " 'll take mfsssfelf home," which obviously his friends were just like "F**k no," asked me if I had extra room in my car to take him home, and I said "sure." Kylee kept protesting that he wanted to take himself home, but we eventually got him in my passenger seat and he fell asleep almost immediately.
We get in the car, his friends give us directions to Kylee's house, and good news, it was literally two streets over from where I was headed anyways! The drive was going to be around 1.5 hours, so not having to go way out of my way to drop him off was fantastic!
The car ride was pretty quite as it was around 2am, we were all tired, sober, and ready to just go the f**k to sleep. I pull up to Kylee's house, wake him up and go "Hey man, we're here!" to which he takes one look out the window and goes ".... this aint my house." One of his friends immediately went "The f**k do you mean, I was literally here last week, this is your house!" and Kylee just responds "Naw... I moved two days ago."
"Where the f**k did you move to!?!?!?!"
"Two houses down from the bonfire. I walked there."
I was in Japan and ran into a guy from Alaska. Told him I worked in Alaska years ago for a while. We became friends and I was showing him some of my Alaska pics and he got the weirdest look. I asked what? He said, "That's me in the background of your picture!" I took a random picture of a memorial while he was walking in the background and we both discovered the fact while in Japan. Still makes me feel weird.
I was first on scene to a bad motorcycle accident. A car missed a stop sign and T-boned the motorcyclist.
I stopped immediately, so did the car behind me, and a car in the opposite lane. This was a rural road in the middle of nowhere.
The woman in the car behind me jumped down into the ditch with me and the victim, took off her head scarf, and tied a tourniquet on his nearly amputated leg.
The other guy came over with a large med kit bag, and while he was putting on gloves, said to the woman:
“Hey, I know you, don’t I?”
“Yep, we’ve met a couple times!”
The woman said to me: “I’m an off duty officer. He’s EMS.”
What are the chances?! A country road, middle of nowhere, and police and EMS both on scene immediately. If it was a TV show, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Biker may not ride again, but he survived.
Friend of mine, let's call her Jordan, met a guy at work. He's got the same first name as her - boy Jordan. Find out they were born in a small rural area 3 months apart and both families moved away when they were young. Girl Jordan tells her mother. Her mother tells her she heard of Boy Jordan when he was born and really liked the name, and that's why she called her Jordan. Jordan and Jordan are now married.
Did they then move to live in Jordan, and name all their kids Jordan? ... Sounds a bit like Marklar!
I used to get coffee from a Dunkin' Donuts every day on my way to the office, and I would always chat to the lady who worked there. Some days, I would get a weird feeling off her, like she looked slightly different or she didn’t mention her kid like usual. One day, I’m chatting to her as usual, when from the back appears… Her. There was two of them. I had been talking to TWINS for TEN MONTHS.
My canadian great-uncle went on a round the world tour with a friend in the early 1950s. While travelling in India, they saw a sign that a local guy was giving a slideshow about his recent travels in Canada at their hotel and decided to go for the heck of it because they were homesick. About halfway through, the guy giving the slideshow brings up photos of my uncle's hometown... then his street... then his house... then him being served tea by my uncle's mother. That would be pretty wild nowadays, in the fifties it must have been an absolute mindf**k.
Okay this would be really insane but really cool at the same time.
I was studying abroad in Japan and volunteered to go to a middle school to help students practice conversational English. The coordinator for the program was giving us a tour of the school and she mentioned that she lived in the US as a child. We asked where and she said that she lived outside of the city I grew up in.
I asked where and it turns out that it was the town I grew up in. I'm half Japanese so we went back and forth naming the Japanese people we knew from that town to see if there was any overlap. We were about 15 years apart in age, so not much overlap, but eventually discovered we had that same piano teacher and probably were at the same recital one year.
Then she stops and kind of looks at me funny. And she says, 'your Dad is white, you have an older sister, and you had a huge dog named Star'. All accurate.
Turns out she babysat me and my sister once.
To add to the hilarious situation: in our family we liked to joke about a famously bad babysitter who didn't even know how to boil water for pasta. When I told my Mom the story about this run in, she told me that this was that babysitter!
I one day found a wallet in the parking lot of a Walmart not terribly far from where I lived, so I decided to return it to the address on the ID inside. 30 minutes out, no big deal the woman was glad and I went about my life.
2~3 years later I start seeing this girl from a college course i was taking and when going over her house for the first time it turns out it was the daughter of the woman whose wallet I returned years prior, what an exciting twist that was.
I'm currently living it.
My mom and her best friend both got pregnant with their first pregnancies at 33, and gave birth to me and my friend a month apart, I've known him since I was 3 days old. We grew up together like cousins, he was a bridesmaid at my wedding.
I just told my friend I am pregnant for the first time, at 34. He then tells me his wife is also pregnant with their first, and she's 2 weeks away from my due date.
So my mom and her best friend became moms together and are now becoming grandmas together.
I can't tell you how excited I am.
When I applied to University, I was accepted into a sciences/arts hybrid degree, but they accidentally enrolled me in a bachelors of education program and said it would take them a couple weeks to switch it. I’ve been a teacher for 9 years now and I love it. When people ask how I became a teacher I just say by accident.
So my parents and I were on holiday on the other side of the world from where we live. And we were in one of those places that’s very isolated and only has a few people staying there at the time.
It was dinner time, and we were mingling with the other guests. I was sitting by the fire, making small talk with a random woman. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned where I went to school, and she got the shock of her life, as her son was in my year. I asked his name, and it turned out to be a classmate I knew quite well!
If that was the end of the story, it would be weird enough as it was, but when I called my mother over and told her the weird coincidence, she started chatting to the woman as well, and over the course of the conversation, they made a second big discovery - they had been classmates at school as well!
The thing is, they didn’t go to school in the same country as us. They had gone to school in Southern Africa, classmate and I had gone to school in Europe, and we were in South East Asia when we met.
One of my dad's good friends was adopted as a baby to loving parents as their only child. Grew up knowing nothing of his birth parents, though he looked for them. He got married, bought a house and had children. His children grew and became best friends with the children similar ages across the green (houses in a circle neighborhood, surrounding a large park). The parents become close friends, and the children spend countless hours together, including sleepovers at each other's homes.
It is discovered, years later, that my dad's friend is full blooded brothers with his across the green neighbour. The children were actually best friends with their cousins. After putting him up for adoption being young parents, they stayed together and had another son. They had spent his whole life looking for him and he was across the street.
Oh that's so lovely. I hope he was able to reconnect with his parents too.
I had a crazy idea of trying to sell T-shirts online. I sold like... 6. 4 of them were sales from my parents and their friends trying to encourage me. But one of them was from someone who would end up becoming my wife. We are still married today.
Met a guy on tinder and we hit it off. Went on a few dates and started swapping stories about past relationships and it turned out that our most recent exes (who cheated on us) are now dating each other. We come from different cities and have no mutual friends, so just found it quite funny.
A likes B. C likes E. B cheats A with C. Algorithm picks up and matches A with E. Makes sence
A friend's best friend was badly bullied in high school for being gay. The football quarterback was the worst offender.
Guess who ran into one another in a gay bar ten years after high school?
My great uncle was a Jesuit priest. He sort of always kept to himself. He was very serious, bit of a curmudgeon. My dad gets a phone call in the middle of the night in 2005. Great uncle says he needs my dad to pick him up immediately from Port Washington, Wisconsin.
My dad drives from Indianapolis to Wisconsin to get my great uncle. My great uncle is living in a mansion on the water. My dad is trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Long story short, when my great uncle was teaching at a well known Jesuit University, he fell in love with a young woman and she with him. They secretly led a life together and when he was 97 and she 80, she passed away. He had no idea what to do. They had always planned for him to die first. But to make this wilder, he still went about as a priest. He took the vow of poverty, hung out with priests, etc. Martha, his girlfriend, went big with IBM and became a millionaire! She took my great uncle all over the world, they did fancy things. He even had a different name when he was with her.
After she died, my great uncle lived with my mom and dad, when my mom took him to the doctor they couldn't find any of his records. After a few minutes, he said "Oh...check under the name Peter Rockford", and they found him. My great uncle was a total bad*ss. I'm not sure he could get away with this today. Maybe he could. He lived to be 103.
I used to enjoy telling people my father was a priest - the taken aback looks given - and I would say he had four children - even more astounded looks - and then I'd say the vital point, that he was an Anglican (Episcopalian) priest. It would be good if Catholic priests could have relationships and marry. Just as well my father could!
Once there was a round of layoffs going on at the steel mill. Union was buzzing about it for weeks and weeks and everyone was worried. As a multinational, usually corporate would handle this but this time, local HR let EVERYONE know they were large and in charge.
The local HR Manager spent weeks toying with people and essentially letting them know he was THE MAN.
So, layoff day comes along and the whole plant (600+) gather in the parking lot. HR Manager begins reading the list slowly - a 120 had to go - and it was torture. Bastard had a smile as he read names of people he didn't like. Until name 120 - HR Manager's face went pale and the d**k started to cry. His assistant read the last name - it was his.
HR went bot-based after that.
My grandfather was a wheeler-n-dealer kind a guy, charismatic and knew everyone in Berlin before fleeing to Shanghai in the late 1930’s. When the Japanese wanted to have a midnight ”conversation” about the status of the Jewish refugees in Japanese occupied Shanghai - the head of community decided to bring him to help with negotiations. My grandfather and the young Japanese interpreter got along so well, both had high EQ and had side conversations that helped nudge the the “official negotiations” allowing the Jewish community to remain and survive the war.
In 2015, I was waitressing at a Japanese restaurant in suburban DC - one of my regulars was a guy my age and we became friends. he told me he was going to Shanghai to do some research on his Japanese grandfather - a young doctor who spoke German from his medical school days and was woken up one night to act as an interpreter in a clandestine meeting between the Japanese military and the Jewish community, and that his involvement and subtle influence had helped saved the Jews of Shanghai.
I was a graduate student in clinical psychology. Broke, eating Ramen noodles, and having a hard time seeing a successful future.
We had an assignment to analyze one of our favorite historical figures. I picked a comedian I admired, as I previously had a background in comedy. The teacher really liked it and told me I should take it somewhere. I basically just did the same assignment for a couple of more comedians and self-published a book with a s****y cover using Amazon's lame self-publishing software at the time.
Three weeks later I got a call from a TV producer. A couple of weeks after that, I was heavily featured on a major TV show featuring some of the world's biggest comics and TV critics.
Everything changed. My financial fortunes. My confidence. My hope about the future.
I've done another 15 or so TV shows since then.
I never saw any of it coming. Everything changed in a month.
When I was in college, I was walking one morning with my then-boyfriend and saw a pitch black burnt pizza in a tree. We took a picture, laughed about it and went on our way.
A year later, I'm hanging out with some friends of friends. I'm on their balcony and realize it looks over the tree where the pizza was. I tell them the story and they confirm that yeah, it was their old roommate who got drunk, burned a frozen pizza and flung it out the window. I never thought I would end up learning the story behind that burnt pizza.
When I started high school, a guy in my class had the same, quite unusual, name as my childhood dog. To give you an idea of how rare the name is, only about 3 people in 100 000 have this name (my dad chose it as a tribute to his favorite football club). So, let's say the name was Burnley. I of course told my parents about the coincidence, and they thought I should tell my new classmate. I argued it would be weird to blurt out: "I once had a dog with your name", so I decided not to.
A year passed and Burnley was now in my circle of friends. We had all gone to a party together and I was in earshot of my friends talking about how long it'd been since they'd seen me and how they missed me. Weird. I've never known anyone with my name (let's call me Adia) and, as far as I knew, they didn't know anyone else with my name either as only about 40 people in 100 000 share it. They then said that they really wanted to pet me. The weirdness of it all got to me and I jokingly asked them what they wanted to do to me, to which they replied: "Oh, not you - Burnley has a cat called Adia".
And that's the story of how I found out about the other Adia and Burnley of the other Burnley.
My roommate and I discovered after living together for several years our great-grandparents were next-door-neighbours for decades in the early twentieth century and remembered each other. We met at university with zero prior connections.
Something similar happened to my parents - they met at university and when the families were introduced it turned out the fathers had met before on a random business trip years prior and were even in a picture together (one was an architect the other a mining engineer, so there was overlap to their professions)
Was studying in my uni library one day minding my own business when the guy in the seat next to me popped his head round the partition and silently offered me Cheetos. I'd never met this person before in my life and wasn't a huge fan of Cheetos so I politely turned him down.
Fast forward several months I'm on a bus coming back from a whole different State. The bus is relatively empty and there was no assigned seating. An hour in the guy sitting in front of me gets onto his knees on the chair and turns around. It's the same dude from the library that one time. And what does he do? Stick his hand out and offer me Cheetos.
Okay this oddly strange and oddly cool. And just a little creepy but kinda sweet.
20 years ago I was a regular on an online law forum. Admin was a lawyer from a town 500 km away. He occasionally shared anecdotes about his goofy secretary.
At the same time I met a woman I became close friends with. She told me anecdotes about her goofy best friend who was a secretary for a law firm.
Turns out the goofy best friend and the goofy secretary
are the same person. (And it was interesting to hear the other side, apparently the lawyer was an alcoholic.)
On a vacation several hundred miles from home. I’m wearing an athletic shirt with my unusual last name on it. A tourist behind me says hello, do you happen to know XYZ Mylastname? I said yes, that’s my uncle! Turns out he was the same age as my dad, grew up in my hometown and moved to my dad’s hometown after college. He and my dad had a ton of overlapping friends, to the point where he had stayed overnight in my current room 20 years before during a sleepover.
I'm wondering why random tourist named the uncle if he knew OP's dad well enough to go to his house for a sleepover.
Divorced my husband 36 years ago. Best thing I ever did. The day I put his stuff in the front yard and changed the locks someone set him up on a blind date. He ended up moving in with her immediately and they've been together ever since. Years later one of our daughters got into ancestry.com and started mapping all of our families. Come to find out the woman he married is actually a cousin of mine. Turns out all three of us were originally from a little town in Florida. She and I share a great grandfather. I am descended from his illegitimate family and she is descended from the legitimate family. Then we find out my ex-husband is related to both of us. We're all distant cousins.
My dad's family hated my mom's family. The land my father and his parents are buried on once belonged to my mother's family. I absolutely love it.
Deployed during deep water horizon. Away from my partner. I start getting a burning sensation when I pee. They drop me off the ship and I start driving back to the hospital. Get cell signal and call my partner to ask if there’s something I should know. She responds with “S**t, f**k, goddamnit” and then hangs up the phone.
Turns out it was a UTI from the oil.
Never would have suspected infidelity otherwise.
I think the op means they had a uti from exposure to toxins at work, but before they knew that they suspected std so asked their partner who coincidentally was cheating and swore because they were found out, even though that's not how the op actually got the uti
Finding out that I happened to have bedded another set of cousins after saying I would never do it again - even though both times I had no idea these people were related.
Note: this post originally had 66 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
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Went on holiday with my family (from Manchester, England) to a small town in southern France, Castillonnés, when I was 7. Met a 7 year old French boy when we were there, Arneux, I spoke little French, he spoke little English. We played tennis, football, swam in the pool, climbed trees, hid in the woods, spent two weeks not caring that we didn’t share a common language apart from being children who enjoyed playing. It was a wonderful time. Roll on nearly 30 years, I’m driving an HGV around Europe delivering components and tech for mobile phone sites and meeting engineers of all nationalities, my French was considerably better by 36! Happened to be back in Castillonnés to deliver kit, thought to myself ‘I wonder if Arneux still lives here?’, met an engineer on site, had a stilted conversation in a mixture of French and English. Guess who the engineer was……not Arneux, just a French engineer. No idea where Arneux is now.
Someone I know went on a day trip to the rocky falls with her elderly parents. She was stupidly climbing across a rock ledge. When she got to the other side her dad stood up to help her down. But she slipped and fell 80ft into a whirlpool on the top of the falls which pushed her over the edge. Her mum was terrified and thought her daughter was dead. She heard a shout and looked over to her husband who had just had a heart attack as a result if the shock I'd assume and nearly gone over himself until someone grabbed him and lay him on the floor. The woman was crying because she assumed that both her husband and daughter were dead. When she looked up again a woman was standing next to her husband. The woman said she was a doctor who specialised in heart attacks and her friend specialised in drowning incidents and was trying to recover the daughter. The third friend in the group was a long distance runner and had gone for help. I find it amazing and wouldn't believe it if I didn't know her
I forgot to add that both the daughter and father lived though the father did die a couple years later and the daughter had life changing injuries.
Load More Replies...
When I was 10, my family lived in an Arab country. I had a friend there, she was a princess of some kind. We had lunch together, at my house with PB& J's, at her house with a full nine course meal, goat and lamb and all the stuff. She helped mom and I clean up our kitchen that day, she had servants clearing the table at her place. YEARS later I'm working on a golf course and one chilly morning the couple who live by one of the greens I was mowing, brought me a cup of hot chocolate and told me they had just been to a wedding in London. So I asked the usual questions, who and all that and they described a young Arab princess who told them about an American friend she had as a child. That she had had peanut butter sandwiches and helped the mom clean up, some thing she had never done before or since. I guessed the name of the princess and we could not believe the coincidence.
Went on holiday with my family (from Manchester, England) to a small town in southern France, Castillonnés, when I was 7. Met a 7 year old French boy when we were there, Arneux, I spoke little French, he spoke little English. We played tennis, football, swam in the pool, climbed trees, hid in the woods, spent two weeks not caring that we didn’t share a common language apart from being children who enjoyed playing. It was a wonderful time. Roll on nearly 30 years, I’m driving an HGV around Europe delivering components and tech for mobile phone sites and meeting engineers of all nationalities, my French was considerably better by 36! Happened to be back in Castillonnés to deliver kit, thought to myself ‘I wonder if Arneux still lives here?’, met an engineer on site, had a stilted conversation in a mixture of French and English. Guess who the engineer was……not Arneux, just a French engineer. No idea where Arneux is now.
Someone I know went on a day trip to the rocky falls with her elderly parents. She was stupidly climbing across a rock ledge. When she got to the other side her dad stood up to help her down. But she slipped and fell 80ft into a whirlpool on the top of the falls which pushed her over the edge. Her mum was terrified and thought her daughter was dead. She heard a shout and looked over to her husband who had just had a heart attack as a result if the shock I'd assume and nearly gone over himself until someone grabbed him and lay him on the floor. The woman was crying because she assumed that both her husband and daughter were dead. When she looked up again a woman was standing next to her husband. The woman said she was a doctor who specialised in heart attacks and her friend specialised in drowning incidents and was trying to recover the daughter. The third friend in the group was a long distance runner and had gone for help. I find it amazing and wouldn't believe it if I didn't know her
I forgot to add that both the daughter and father lived though the father did die a couple years later and the daughter had life changing injuries.
Load More Replies... When I was 10, my family lived in an Arab country. I had a friend there, she was a princess of some kind. We had lunch together, at my house with PB& J's, at her house with a full nine course meal, goat and lamb and all the stuff. She helped mom and I clean up our kitchen that day, she had servants clearing the table at her place. YEARS later I'm working on a golf course and one chilly morning the couple who live by one of the greens I was mowing, brought me a cup of hot chocolate and told me they had just been to a wedding in London. So I asked the usual questions, who and all that and they described a young Arab princess who told them about an American friend she had as a child. That she had had peanut butter sandwiches and helped the mom clean up, some thing she had never done before or since. I guessed the name of the princess and we could not believe the coincidence.
