“That’s How My Family Ended Up In Ohio”: 35 Stranger Than Fiction Stories That Actually Happened, According To This Viral Twitter Thread
My grandma often used to repeat the saying, "Man plans, God laughs." Whether or not you're religious, I think we can agree that life can be stranger than fiction. Just when we think we have it all figured out, the universe plays a trick, reminding us that nothing is guaranteed.
Interested in these strange occurrences, Twitter user Naomi (@AMythicWitch) asked other people on the platform to share their personal stories that sound too wild to be true. The request immediately went viral, and everyone started describing the weirdest experiences they've had.
We collected the most memorable ones and even managed to get in touch with Naomi, so continue scrolling to read about those crazy moments, and don't miss out on the talk we had with the author of the thread — you can find it between the pictures.
This post may include affiliate links.
"I made the tweet because I just launched a new hotline for people to tell their strange and unexplainable stories," Naomi told Bored Panda.
"I did not expect famous people like Monica Lewinsky to answer! I think once it got picked up by a few high-profile people, it just snowballed."
"I actually asked this exact same question a year ago with not even half the amount of engagement. I'm nosy. I love stories! This is how I operate in real life, too. I ask nosy questions and will listen to almost anybody who wants to share their weird life stories," Naomi explained.
"High strangeness" is something Naomi is especially interested in. In fact, this week, they will be scheduling a Twitter space to explore more stories that made it into their inbox via the Sleepy House Hotline.
"A lot of the wildest ones are not statements people want to have attached to their name and public profiles. This is where the juiciest, scariest, most interesting narratives have come through," Naomi explained. "I'm excited to explore some of the anonymous messages with my followers via Twitter spaces! We already have over 200 anonymous texts and voicemails to work with on top of the massive response to the tweet."
"The number is 678-321-7962 and the Twitter spaces event will be hosted on my page @amythicwitch," Naomi added.
imagine having had John Wayne f*****g Gacy as your birthday party clown. that's just as horrifying as this
Wow!! Having read a lot of books on serial killers (way too many) I have often wondered how many people have had encounters like this. Like a cruising shark swimming past you
Ann Rule worked next to Ted Bundy at a suicide hotline. Her read watch into her friend led to the book "The Stranger Beside Me" and thus started her long career as a true-crime writer.
Load More Replies...
Shortly before I was married I had a few friends over for a dinner. It ran quite late into the wee hours of the morning. I let them out of the house, coming back in to straighten up a bit and then head off to bed. When I entered my room I felt freezing cold. I looked straight ahead and saw a man crouched down fiddling with my window. Gasping in terror I immediately bolted into the hallway to call 911. Well, the Police came literally in a few minutes, the next morning, the next afternoon. It was Paul Bernardo, the serial rapist and killer.
My dad's room mate in college invited him to come stay with him and a guy in Chicago. It was John Wayne Gacy as well. Suffice it to say my dad did not go
Bro I was just reading the bp article about serial killers wtf
He didn't give voice lessons. He'd offer young men he hired to work in his construction company or offer homeless men jobs working for him. I'm not saying this isn't true, it's just not how he did things. H'ed grab guys off the street and chloroform them. I live close to where his house was and when I was younger he'd put signs up in the drug store near me looking to hire guys. A friend of mine was a car machanic and worked on Gacy's car a few times. Everyone knew him. He was an Upstanding Citizen. He was only a clown at charity events or things that included civic publicity. Story is a bit "off" due to the usual facts
i just searched this dude up... my whole class is starin at me
During unexpected hardships, clear and concise thoughts rarely enter our awareness and front-of-mind thinking. Proper and effective planning, however, mandates taking into consideration the what-ifs that happen when we don't see them coming.
"Like so many other human traits, resilience can be woven into the fabric of one's being (nature) and/or it can be learned (nurture)," career and business coach Marjie Terry said. "One's natural disposition may lead them to always look on the bright side or to look for the silver lining. For others, with an accumulation of life experience, they develop a resilience perspective and realize that, as the old saying goes, what doesn’t break you makes you stronger. They develop an ability to recognize that it’s important to keep going even when life hands you challenge after challenge—they develop perspective."
Case was dropped? After being abducted by a cop? Did I read this right? 😳
According to Terry, resilience is characterized by positivity and productivity. "A resilient person will maintain a positive outlook on life and continue to believe that. Even when life hands you lemons, there is lemonade to be made. They will continue to present to the world with a positive attitude," she said.
"You are much more likely to be accepted and welcomed by every community with which you interact when you present in this way. When people view you favorably, they are more likely to like you and present you with opportunities. Opportunity leads to more positive experiences, which further reinforces one’s belief in resilience and their commitment to it."
Charlie as in Charles Manson? That quite the bullet she dodged there!
At 18 months old, how were you so articulate and how did you get up the ladder to the top of the slide?
For those of us who are not naturally resilient, there are three tactics Terry suggests that can help us build this trait.
To begin with, there's something she calls a leap of faith or faking it till you make it. "Studies have shown that smiling can make you happier. Being happier will help you feel more positive about your life. This increased positivity is the beginning of resilience."
How did you manage to take his place in detention? I don't get this one. Surely someone noticed that his mom was there and not him.
He was probably praying, "O Lord, give us our daily bread (pizza, wink wink)".
The second tactic we can apply is to approach a trying situation from a different perspective. "If you try to view a difficult experience from a different perspective (e.g. spend a few minutes deeply visualizing your favorite childhood experience and then approach your current crisis with the energy and creativity that characterized you in that earlier time in life), you will approach your current predicament with an altered, stronger sense of hope and energy," Terry said.
I live in Ireland now... I married an irish man I met on an online dating site, and the rest, as they say, is history.
My maternal grandparents' fathers grew up on the same street in Manhattan and their kids met decades later in Brooklyn. My parents were baptized in the same church in Brooklyn, Mom's father knew Dad's mother but my parents didn't meet until they were in the same school in Maine in their 20s. My dad and my ex-wife were born in the same hospital in Brooklyn, and my mother knew my ex's aunt's cousins in Brooklyn, but my ex grew up in Florida and we met in Minnesota.
Finally, there's using our own power. "Try approaching a challenging situation as if you are the only person in the world who can make it better," Terry said.
To do so, ask yourself: if anything is possible right now (divine intervention and magic aside), what three things can I do to improve my circumstances? "You may not be able to take every step at this very moment, but you can start to create a plan that you can execute over time until you have started to create positive change in your life circumstances."
As you can see from the tweets, we can't control what happens to us. But we can decide how to respond to it.
Wow I've watched a documentary about Andrew Cunanan, he was a very sick individual
I can only imagine how much that must’ve hurt! I accidentally cast a line into a friend‘s hair once when I was rather young and her getting it out of her hair was hard and painful enough!
I got stuck in Denmark due to the same Icelandic volcano. I had a nice weekend in Copenhagen, put in two more days paid work and caught a bus home, as my airline decided to become temporarily a bus company. 19 hours on a coach got me as far a London, which as luck would have, is where I was supposed to be working that week. I arrived just as the first planes started to land, after they changed the rules on how much ash air traffic could fly through. The annoying bit is that my colleague made me do a day's work before taking me to my hotel - I was dishevelled, unshaved and hadn't slept. Still, I can laugh about it now!
I was in very slow moving traffic on the motorway due to rush hour and there’s a woman in the car next to me driving along while looking down and doing something on her phone and saying quite loudly ‘it’s so boring here that I’m reading on the motorway!’ (It was summer, windows down). 5 seconds later she smashes into the back of a police car. The police do have a wonderful ‘did that just actually happen?’ look on their faces but get witness statements, clear the cars onto the hard shoulder and arrest the woman for dangerous driving. People don’t believe I saw that, but it really gets weird when I’m at work the next day and we find that our new health and safety officer won’t be starting because she got arrested for dangerous driving. It was the same woman.
Years ago, I was returning from dropping my daughter off at college north of Boston. Part of my route was on I-95, a 4-lane nightmare where the speed limit is nonexistent (but technically is 105kph). A car was in the passing lane traveling at 80kph. As I passed her on the right (out of necessity), I glanced over. She was applying mascara.
Load More Replies...
When I was 10, I was the goody two-shoes nerdy teacher's pet in my newly built private school. This school open only last year and it have only 3 classrooms and less than 100 students. So gaining new students was the main goal of the administration. One day a new student from a rich family came into class. His family was considering transferring him to the school and wanted him to spend a day in class to get a feel of the class environment. Naturally the the teacher assigned me the responsibility of convincing him that this is a good school and that he should transfer here. Well, They sat him next to me and as soon as I introduced myself and started talking about what a great school this was, the ceiling light and part of the ceiling broke and fell on top of my head. He decided not to transfer.
My first born had an atrial septal defect, a hole in his heart and needed open heart surgery at 3 months. My husband is a doctor and at the time had just opened his practice, basically he couldn't take time off or he risked losing his business. So I take my very young baby 150 miles from home to the Children's hospital all alone while still in the grip of wonky hormones. My baby goes into surgery, I'm told it will take around two hours. Six hours later no one can give me an update and I'm panicking. The nurse suggest I take a pager and go to the garden, they'll let me know. I get in the elevator and just break down. After a minute or so of ugly sobbing I hear "Do you need a hug?" I nod, I don't even care. This guy squeezes me super tight and holds me until I get control. I finally stop crying and step back to thank...John Cena. He was there for Make-A-Wish and just happened to be in the elevator when I had a breakdown. (Insert joke about how I didn't even see him)
If you live long enough, at least a couple of odd things are going to happen. In the mid 1990’s, my wife and I took off the week between Christmas and New Year for a vacation road trip. We wound up at the Gettysburg Battle ground memorial the last couple of days. The last day was New Year’s Day and we were going to head home because we worked the next day. It was a but if drizzling rain/sleet mixed as we took one last look around. As we walked up towards the monument where President Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address we saw two other people already there and heading back as we approached. As we passed each other, we looked and recognized them from our hometown and they were even people my wife went to school with. The only four people in that area in the park that morning were from the same small town in Michigan. All unplanned. We hadn’t seen them in years. Haven’t seen them sense.
They had died under mysterious circumstances three days prior...
Load More Replies...
When I was 13, a group of kids stole a friend's younger brothers bicycle. We managed to catch the kid at the back of the pack, took him to one of our houses, and made him call his parents. We told them where to pick him up, they showed up with police, and a 3 hour "hostage stand-off" ensued until the police retrieved our friend's bicycle. The oldest of us (16 m) got 30 hours of community service, the rest of us were let off with a warning. We all (including our "hostage") sat around eating junk food and playing Nintendo while we waited for them to find the bike.
In 1980 I was in NYC wearing the jacket shown in this picture. I was on the subway coming home from the Mudd Club at 3-4 in the morning when I saw a guy drawing graffiti on the black paper they put up after they remove ads in the subway. I'd seen and enjoyed his work before so I jumped off and had him draw a picture on the back of my jacket. It was chalk and only lasted about 1.5 days but if I'd gone to a hardware store and bought a can of spray urethane I probably could have sold it later for about $1 million. His name was Keith Haring. So I don't have a priceless jacket but I legitimately say that I had the very first piece of Keith Haring clothing.\ and I'm cool with that. 1978-Stan-...848e69.jpg 
One night when I was walking home from the pud I had a car roll up alongside me. I often hitched rides when it was dark and cold, but something about the guy made me turn down the offer. He started nagging me about it, and that made me certain he was no good. I had a couple of minutes in half panic before he drove off. Early the next morning I had all my relatives on the phone. A woman my age, with similar looks, was missing. Later that day they found her clothes and purse in the apartment building next to mine. The media talked about a man in a black Ford. The creepy guy I met drove a white Opel, so I never contacted the police. 15 years later the cops finally find the remains of the missing woman. Evidence on the scene leads them to a man who eventually confesses. Turns out he got away because the media put all focus on a black Ford while he drove... Yeah, a while Opel.
My college boyfriend and I were playing frisbee when he threw it badly and it bounced off a cop car and hit a police man in the back of the head, knocking his hat off.
When my son was in college at UT I got a letter in the mail offering him a full scholarship to Cornell University. He was a Junior. I thought it was some kind of scam or joke so I called them up. No joke. One of his professors had recommended him. Was a pre law degree in Industrial Labor Relations. Full ride scholarship. He jumped on it. Manna from Heaven!
When DMX was on probation in Scottsdale Arizona, he lived in a tiny apartment off of frank lloyd Wright and the 101 near my house. He was neighbors with my friend and I met him a few times because of that. Anyways. One day he had to do community service so he showed up at the McDowell mountain skate park in an ice cream truck and yelled at us "you kids want some ice cream!" ....I said "this feels like a trap, but yes"
My first car was a 1971 Plymouth Duster. I bought it in 1976. My wifes first car was a 1971 Plymouth Duster. Her father handed it down to her in 1978. We met in 2001.
I was in very slow moving traffic on the motorway due to rush hour and there’s a woman in the car next to me driving along while looking down and doing something on her phone and saying quite loudly ‘it’s so boring here that I’m reading on the motorway!’ (It was summer, windows down). 5 seconds later she smashes into the back of a police car. The police do have a wonderful ‘did that just actually happen?’ look on their faces but get witness statements, clear the cars onto the hard shoulder and arrest the woman for dangerous driving. People don’t believe I saw that, but it really gets weird when I’m at work the next day and we find that our new health and safety officer won’t be starting because she got arrested for dangerous driving. It was the same woman.
Years ago, I was returning from dropping my daughter off at college north of Boston. Part of my route was on I-95, a 4-lane nightmare where the speed limit is nonexistent (but technically is 105kph). A car was in the passing lane traveling at 80kph. As I passed her on the right (out of necessity), I glanced over. She was applying mascara.
Load More Replies... When I was 10, I was the goody two-shoes nerdy teacher's pet in my newly built private school. This school open only last year and it have only 3 classrooms and less than 100 students. So gaining new students was the main goal of the administration. One day a new student from a rich family came into class. His family was considering transferring him to the school and wanted him to spend a day in class to get a feel of the class environment. Naturally the the teacher assigned me the responsibility of convincing him that this is a good school and that he should transfer here. Well, They sat him next to me and as soon as I introduced myself and started talking about what a great school this was, the ceiling light and part of the ceiling broke and fell on top of my head. He decided not to transfer.
My first born had an atrial septal defect, a hole in his heart and needed open heart surgery at 3 months. My husband is a doctor and at the time had just opened his practice, basically he couldn't take time off or he risked losing his business. So I take my very young baby 150 miles from home to the Children's hospital all alone while still in the grip of wonky hormones. My baby goes into surgery, I'm told it will take around two hours. Six hours later no one can give me an update and I'm panicking. The nurse suggest I take a pager and go to the garden, they'll let me know. I get in the elevator and just break down. After a minute or so of ugly sobbing I hear "Do you need a hug?" I nod, I don't even care. This guy squeezes me super tight and holds me until I get control. I finally stop crying and step back to thank...John Cena. He was there for Make-A-Wish and just happened to be in the elevator when I had a breakdown. (Insert joke about how I didn't even see him)
If you live long enough, at least a couple of odd things are going to happen. In the mid 1990’s, my wife and I took off the week between Christmas and New Year for a vacation road trip. We wound up at the Gettysburg Battle ground memorial the last couple of days. The last day was New Year’s Day and we were going to head home because we worked the next day. It was a but if drizzling rain/sleet mixed as we took one last look around. As we walked up towards the monument where President Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address we saw two other people already there and heading back as we approached. As we passed each other, we looked and recognized them from our hometown and they were even people my wife went to school with. The only four people in that area in the park that morning were from the same small town in Michigan. All unplanned. We hadn’t seen them in years. Haven’t seen them sense.
They had died under mysterious circumstances three days prior...
Load More Replies... When I was 13, a group of kids stole a friend's younger brothers bicycle. We managed to catch the kid at the back of the pack, took him to one of our houses, and made him call his parents. We told them where to pick him up, they showed up with police, and a 3 hour "hostage stand-off" ensued until the police retrieved our friend's bicycle. The oldest of us (16 m) got 30 hours of community service, the rest of us were let off with a warning. We all (including our "hostage") sat around eating junk food and playing Nintendo while we waited for them to find the bike.
In 1980 I was in NYC wearing the jacket shown in this picture. I was on the subway coming home from the Mudd Club at 3-4 in the morning when I saw a guy drawing graffiti on the black paper they put up after they remove ads in the subway. I'd seen and enjoyed his work before so I jumped off and had him draw a picture on the back of my jacket. It was chalk and only lasted about 1.5 days but if I'd gone to a hardware store and bought a can of spray urethane I probably could have sold it later for about $1 million. His name was Keith Haring. So I don't have a priceless jacket but I legitimately say that I had the very first piece of Keith Haring clothing.\ and I'm cool with that. 1978-Stan-...848e69.jpg
One night when I was walking home from the pud I had a car roll up alongside me. I often hitched rides when it was dark and cold, but something about the guy made me turn down the offer. He started nagging me about it, and that made me certain he was no good. I had a couple of minutes in half panic before he drove off. Early the next morning I had all my relatives on the phone. A woman my age, with similar looks, was missing. Later that day they found her clothes and purse in the apartment building next to mine. The media talked about a man in a black Ford. The creepy guy I met drove a white Opel, so I never contacted the police. 15 years later the cops finally find the remains of the missing woman. Evidence on the scene leads them to a man who eventually confesses. Turns out he got away because the media put all focus on a black Ford while he drove... Yeah, a while Opel.
My college boyfriend and I were playing frisbee when he threw it badly and it bounced off a cop car and hit a police man in the back of the head, knocking his hat off.
When my son was in college at UT I got a letter in the mail offering him a full scholarship to Cornell University. He was a Junior. I thought it was some kind of scam or joke so I called them up. No joke. One of his professors had recommended him. Was a pre law degree in Industrial Labor Relations. Full ride scholarship. He jumped on it. Manna from Heaven!
When DMX was on probation in Scottsdale Arizona, he lived in a tiny apartment off of frank lloyd Wright and the 101 near my house. He was neighbors with my friend and I met him a few times because of that. Anyways. One day he had to do community service so he showed up at the McDowell mountain skate park in an ice cream truck and yelled at us "you kids want some ice cream!" ....I said "this feels like a trap, but yes"
My first car was a 1971 Plymouth Duster. I bought it in 1976. My wifes first car was a 1971 Plymouth Duster. Her father handed it down to her in 1978. We met in 2001.
