Man Says He's Seen The Same Stranger Over & Over Again In Random Places For 20 Years & Wonders What It All Means
Is it just a coincidence? Or does it have a deeper meaning? Depends on who you ask.
carballo | Shutterstock | Canva Pro Most of us have had an odd coincidence occur in our lives a time or two, but what about the same coincidence over and over again, all over the world, for more than two decades? That's the experience of one man on Reddit, and many online feel it must have some kind of spiritual significance.
The man says he's seen the same stranger over and over again in random places for more than 20 years.
Once when I was around 10, I flew by myself from Detroit to Phoenix to visit my much older brother and sat next to a woman in her 30s with whom I instantly connected. We chatted all about our lives the entire way — which was pretty extraordinary given I was a kid and she was a full adult. What did we even have in common?
Six years later I was flying back to Phoenix for Spring Break and passed her in the airport terminal. We immediately locked eyes and stopped in our tracks, and found we remembered each other and our conversation with such detail it felt like yesterday.
It felt too serendipitous to be random and left us both kind of bewildered, especially since she no longer even lived in Detroit by then and was just passing through on a layover. But of course, the likelihood of this is probably a very simple mathematical calculation.
Not so for this Redditor — or so it feels, anyway. Take my experience, and multiply it by a factor of 10, and you'll have something close. "I've been seeing the same man since I was in my late teens," the 38-year-old man wrote in his post. No matter where he goes, the man seems to follow — even to other countries.
The two have run into each other so many times it's obvious the other man is weirded out too.
"I started seeing him in random places around the age of 17," the man wrote. "I've seen him in parking lots, I've seen him in stores, I've seen him at events. But the craziest one was when I saw him at a destination wedding in Saint Martin about 10 years ago."
Unable to let that one go, he finally approached the guy at the wedding and asked him about it. "As you can imagine, the conversation immediately became one of the awkwardest ones I've ever been a part of," he wrote, going on to say that the man laughed it off, "but I could tell he knew he was seeing me all over the place also."
There have been periods of years at a time when they never saw each other, but then out of nowhere, "it seems like it comes in waves." One of those waves happened recently after he and his wife had a baby — he saw the man at a baby supplies store, then at another store 30 miles away.
"Every time this happens he pretends like he doesn't see me but I can tell he's as sketched out as I am," he wrote. "I'm telling you if I see this guy again I am going to get to the bottom of it, I don't even care what it takes."
This could simply be an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
There are, of course, several potential explanations for this, one of them being mere coincidence — though it's hard not to feel like that's the least likely one.
Another is that it's not even happening at all and this guy is just off his rocker, a possibility he himself acknowledged, saying the experience has made him "question my sanity" over the years. But the fact that he's seen and spoken to the man face to face is of course pretty compelling evidence that this is not the case.
So what is it? Well, it could be the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, a form of cognitive bias in which people see a particular thing constantly after first noticing it. It's that old joke about how the moment you buy a new car, you suddenly see that car everywhere. The car has always existed, you just never noticed it before.
It's also known as "frequency bias," and, fun fact — it's why advertising often works on subtle repetition. You begin to subconsciously think that you must "need" this product since "for some strange reason" you keep seeing and hearing about it.
Spiritual circles and some branches of psychology call it synchronicity and say it holds some deeper meaning.
Whether or not the simplest explanations hold water to you likely depends on your biases, but the details of the man's story — the high number of encounters, the acknowledgment from the other man himself, seeing him at an international destination wedding — make it hard to think it can be so easy (assuming the story is real, anyway).
Spiritualists, intuitive, and others who lean into the more esoteric side of things would likely call it an example of synchronicity, seemingly coincidental occurrences that aren't really coincidental at all, but rather things meant to get our attention to teach us something, especially if they're repetitive.
Some spiritual types would even say the two men may be "twin flames," two people who are somehow spiritually linked and would urge this man to follow his instinct to get to the bottom of this situation because the other man likely has some kind of "message" to impart, whether he knows it or not.
Interestingly, even some psychologists would agree. Carl Jung, one of the pioneers of psychology, actually coined the term "synchronicity," which he defined as seemingly coincidental events that lack an obvious causal connection and hence seem connected. Jung believed this to be evidence that there is more to our world than the merely empirical — that, as sociologist Dr. Martha Beck put it, "something more than chance is at work in the universe."
Who knows if that's what's afoot here, but with so many strange overlaps over so many years, it quickly starts to feel like the most likely explanation. Perhaps I should keep my eyes peeled for that lady from the plane to Phoenix the next time I fly — we just might have something to teach each other.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.