Man, I dunno who sent it to me (apologies, Twitter, last week was a demon from beyond the Hell Dimension, and my brain is notoriously like a sieve), but I caught wind of this thread at Reddit:
“Tell me your GLITCH IN THE MATRIX stories.”
(Core idea: remember that Deja Vu cat-replication scene in The Matrix? Meaning, something weird and inexplicable becomes a sign that the program is glitching on you.)
Go there, revel in the creepy weirdness.
And then, since I’m fascinated with this stuff, feel free to share (here, ideally) your own weird-ass incomprehensible Fortean “Matrix-Glitch” moments from your own life. Had any totally bizarre-o shit happen? Why not share? Disseminate your own weird-ass Creepypasta for all to see!
Albert Berg says:
I was probably 14 when I first read The Amittyville Horror, and since I was a good deal more gullible in those days it didn’t even occur to me to think the events described in the book might not be true. I was entranced by the story and stayed up late into the night to finish.
By the time I was done everyone else in the house had long since been asleep I was really freaked out by the story, but it was late and I knew I needed to try to get some sleep. I stood up out of bed and pulled the chain to turn off the overhead light, and then got into bed and turned off my bedside lamp.
For a while I just lay there in bed, still totally freaked out thinking about ghosts and demons and whatnot. I won’t say I felt a presence in the room, but my sense of fear was almost tangible and the feeling started to grow in my gut, that I need light, I need light, I need light, I NEED LIGHT RIGHT NOW!
I went to switch on my bedside lamp, only when I did, I saw a flash of light and heard the worst possible sound imaginable, the “ping” of a filament giving out and I was plunged back into darkness. By then I was REALLY scared, stomach churning, heart pounding, and I literally jumped out of bed, grasping for the chain that would turn on the light. The fan chain and light chain got twisted up together, and I’m yanking on them both, over and over, and my heart is about to explode in my chest, because I NEED light. Finally some tiny sliver of rational thought in my brain realized that the light WASN’T going to come on this way, so I ran out into the kitchen and turned that light on without incident.
I sat there for a while, forcing myself to take deep breaths, bringing myself back down to earth. Finally I worked up enough courage to go back into my room and see what was wrong with the lights. I took a flashlight with me, but as I walk into the room, I reflexively flipped the switch by the door and the lights came on just fine. I’m reassured, but just for a second, because I realize that I hadn’t turned the light SWITCH off; I KNOW I pulled the CHAIN to kill the lights. And everyone else in the house had been asleep for at least an hour, so there was no way anyone could have flipped that switch.
Needless to say, I slept with the lights on for the rest of the night.
January 23, 2012 — 9:11 AM
Lugh says:
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had prophetic dreams. I experience future events while I’m asleep.
Unfortunately, they are generally terribly mundane future events. No lottery numbers for me.
I also rarely really take note of these dreams, because they are very boring. Most of the time, I will simply be going through my life, and suddenly be hit with deja vu. I will recognize the scene as having dreamed it before.
There was one dream, though, that was different. It was still largely boring, but it was also bizarre. I woke up one morning when I was about 10. I remembered a weird dream involving a place I didn’t recognize that looked like some weird kind of bedroom. I was talking to people that I clearly knew in the dream, but had no idea who they were at the time. The complete alienness of the situation was startling, and the dream stuck with me.
My junior year in college, ten years later, I was getting ready to leave my dorm room. I had just met a handful of freshmen, who had come over to our room. Suddenly, the scene clicked, and I realized I was in that dream. I actually knew what was going to happen next. And it did, perfectly.
To this day, it kind of freaks me out.
January 23, 2012 — 9:20 AM
David Flor says:
How coincidential (or not…?) that you posted this.
Just last night, at around 2am, our living room ceiling fan turned itself on all by itself. What’s odd about it is that the fan is controlled by a wall on/off switch as well as a remote control, and in order to turn the fan on not only does the switch need to be in the “on” position but the remote needs to be clicked on. But if the switch is flipped to the “on” position, the light turns on as well… Late last night the switch was in the “on” position and the fan turned on, but the light itself was not lit.
My wife spent the next hour trying to get a rational explanation for the event out of me, stating that either the wall switch or the fan must be “broken”. I couldn’t give her an explanation that I felt comfortable with.
January 23, 2012 — 9:30 AM
Amelia says:
When my kid was about a year old, he had a stuffed frog toy. It croaked, but the sound thing broke.
Once he lost it in a parking lot. We got inside, realized it was gone, and started hunting. I spied another kiddo about the same age holding the toy. So I go to the parents and ask if they’d just found the toy, my kid lost it just now, blah blah. The dad, clearly pissed at the world for some reason, grabbed the toy out of his kid’s hand and gave it to me. Then they stormed off with the poor kid wailing for the toy.
I walk back to my family and give my kid the frog. A second later, it starts croaking. The thing had been broken for ages, and now it suddenly worked.
So… glitch in the Matrix, or did I steal a toy from a baby? I’ve never been certain.
January 23, 2012 — 10:01 AM
ghtvg says:
If the thing croaked, I’d say you definitely took another kids toy.
May 11, 2019 — 11:02 PM
Darlene Underdahl says:
Wow, black coffee and goose bumps for breakfast!
I had a contact lens evaporate one time (never to be found again), but that’s minor compared to those stories.
I’ve had Guardian Angel incidents.
I’ve done calculations at work that resulted in a six digit number. Later, working on different data, I got the same number. I wrote it off to chance.
But my dad *did* see ghosts.
January 23, 2012 — 10:08 AM
Jamie says:
This is more of a poltergeist, but let’s call it a glitch in the matrix. One day as I was getting ready for school, I was standing in front of my dresser. I looked down at my backpack because I heard a zipping noise. I watched my backpack slowly unzip about 10 inches. But the backpack was already partly open so I blew this off as our cat probably jumped in there while I wasn’t looking.
Once it stopped unzipping, I picked it up and opened the bag only to find that there was nothing in there. DUN DUN DUN!!!!!
It freaked me out, but it was minor. So at least it was a somewhat boring poltergeist.
January 23, 2012 — 10:33 AM
sandeesandlz98 says:
bored ghost-seems harmless
October 31, 2016 — 8:39 PM
Matt says:
The first x-mas after my father died, my family convened at my mother’s house for festivities. During a lull in the holiday cheer, i thought to myself that ‘this really sucks without dad here’. No sooner do i have that thought my mother’s terrier starts growling at an empty chair. No one else made a sound. It was just the dog, two seconds away from going batshit.
January 23, 2012 — 10:43 AM
Elizabeth Poole says:
Like Lugh, I also get deja vu very frequently. I usually don’t remember the dream until the event is actually happening, but I can usually remember how long ago (roughly) I had the dream. Sort of like remembering last week versus last year. Just recently, I had a deja vu incident (very boring, just lots of people talking) that I’d dreamt at least ten years ago.
Scientists say deja vu is our memory fucking with us. That we’re remembering something as it happens, but our memory stores is as something we’ve already experienced. And you know, I can buy that some of the times. It’s just the times that I can predict what people are going to say before they’ve actually said it I have no explanation for.
I’ve also seen ghosts, and…something else. I have no idea what it was, and try not to speculate. Those things are subjective though. Lots of people don’t believe in ghosts, or they could just say I made it up.
The creepiest thing that’s ever happened me that can’t be waved away as my imagination was when I worked at a gas station. It was late at night and someone asked to use the ladies room. There’s no key for it, the door just locks from the inside with a push button. We wait for the person inside to come out to no avail. I knock on the door, no one is in there.
At that, my writer’s brain is racing because you literally can’t open the door without unlocking it. You push the handle down, it unlocks. You also can’t lock the door while standing outside, because when you pull it shut, it automatically springs open. It HAS to be locked from the inside, while the door is closed.
My first thought of course, was there was a dead body inside the bathroom. My next thought was ghosts. I did finally get the door jimmied open, and there was no one inside. And I still have no idea how someone could have possibly locked the door.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve always thought bathrooms were super creepy places. That incident just confirmed things for me.
January 23, 2012 — 10:59 AM
Bob Buengener says:
I have 2 well behaved children.
Knowing what I did as a kid, that fact alone explains that this is NOT the desert of the real.
January 23, 2012 — 11:05 AM
Jamie Wyman says:
1) I dreamed of my college boyfriend twice 6 months before I met him.
2) Every death I’ve ever experienced…14 days later I will have a sort of experience of the person who died. With my grandpa it was a dream he called me, I woke up holding the phone. Stuff like that.
3) Got really drunk one night on rum and became telepathic with one friend. We’ve never been able to duplicate this phenomenon no matter how much rum one consumes.
4) Facebook suggested I friend someone. No big deal right? Well the person it suggested? My grandfather’s biological half-brother. My grandpa was adopted out of one family, took the name of another and yet Facebook still suggested i friend my great uncle. That creeped me out.
January 23, 2012 — 11:15 AM
Adam Short says:
I’ve got a couple of weird incidents. One is very “glitchy”, and the other is just a bit weird.
The glitch was a simple incident that freaked me out for years afterward. I was a kid, about 10 or 11 years old, and I was walking from my bedroom, downstairs to the kitchen. As I got about halfway down the stairs, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and I turned my head to see myself standing on the landing above me, looking down. I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, hoping that when I got to the living room, someone would be missing and it would turn out to be a simple case of mistaken identity. Maybe I’d actually seen my brother, or even my dad up there, but everyone was accounted for downstairs. It was exactly like a matrix glitch, like something – just for a second – fucked up and I was in two places at once.
The other thing happened earlier in my life and can probably be put down to an overactive imagination, a particularly bad night’s sleep or some other cause, but there’s still that niggling doubt in the back of my mind. When I was probably about 7 or 8, I vividly remember going to sleep, and starting to dream (I have always had dreams that I was to some extent aware of while I was in them, not necessarily to the point of being able to control what was going on, but certainly to the point of being able to enjoy them as a spectacle), what I don’t remember, however, is waking up. The dream was one of those “previews” you sometimes get when you’re expecting something bad and your brain wants to rehearse, so the events in it were pretty normal. I just don’t have a memory of a cut-off point between the dream and reality. Part of me is still half-expecting to wake up, in 1985, and have to live the last 26 years all over again.
January 23, 2012 — 11:26 AM
Amy Severson says:
When I was around 15, I dropped a small, silver scarab earring down the drain of my bathroom sink. I didn’t tell my mom or my step-dad cause I was afraid that they would be mad at me. Hell, I was already mad at myself cause I loved those damn earrings. I put the remaining earring in my jewelery box, cursing my carelessness. About a month later, I opened the jewelery box and both silver scarabs were laying there, side by side. My heart raced, more out of excitement than fear. I put the earrings on and said, “thank you” to whatever force was working in my favor at that moment. I’ve always wondered what I did to earn that little reward and if I would have to pay it back one day.
January 23, 2012 — 11:29 AM
Tim says:
It was the summer of 1990, and I was with two friends, D. and S., walking through London, from Camden Town back down along Camden High Street towards the centre of the city. We stopped to wait at a pedestrian crossing for the lights to change — the standard British ‘pelican crossing’, a plain red silhouette of a man standing still.
As usual when waiting for the lights to change, we all watched them impatiently. Eventually they changed, to the normal British green man mid-stride, and we started crossing. As we walked, we kept an eye on the lights to make sure we had time to make it across comfortably.
About half way across the road, there was — quite literally — a ripple in reality, a brief flash of disturbance, and suddenly the lights had changed again… but not back to red.
The plain green guy was now wearing wide-bottomed flares and glasses, had long, flowing hair cascading out behind him, and had a line of stars from in front of his forehead that trailed over his head and down his back, each one slightly bigger than the previous, like some kind of cloak. We all stopped dead and exchanged stunned looks. One of us (I forget which) said “Did you…?”; the other two both replied “Yes” before he could finish the sentence.
Then we remembered the traffic and hurried across the road, and waited nervously for the lights to go red again. Sure enough, on both sides of the road, the red guy had changed too. He was now carrying a briefcase, smoking a pipe (with wisps of smoke rising), wearing a little homburg hat, and he had big brogues on his feet.
We watched at the lights cycle for ten minutes or so, but eventually continued on, feeling really freaked.
A couple of days later, I was talking about it with a group of friends. To my amazement, one of the girls said “Oh yeah, I heard about that.” I muttered something incredulous, and she told me that she’d seen an article in the press talking about how the council had recently changed the lights on that pedestrian crossing.
Apparently it was some sort of tribute about the death of a singer who had been famous in the sixties, and who had lived in that street. She was certain that the three of us there had just not noticed the difference in the lights until we were half-way across the road.
I was far from convinced — the council changing the plates over the lights made sense, but not in less than the blink of an eye. Anyway, L. promised to bring me the article to have a look at our next gathering a couple of weeks later.
A few days later, I went back to Camden to look at the changed lights more closely. The construction was standard — they were just black-painted glass, the top section red glass and the bottom section green, with the shapes of the men etched out of the paint, and white bulbs behind.
The figures were based on the original templates of the walk/go men, but with extra details etched out of the black paint to provide the outfits. The glass was bolted in, and took up the entire casing in front of the light bulbs. There was no possible mechanism by which they could have slid down in front of the other plates, or anything of that sort.
Just in case, I hung around at a cafe across the road for about an hour, watching the lights, but they stayed changed. A week after that, I went back again for another look, to get a sketch of the altered designs. I was disappointed to find that the lights were back to being perfectly normal.
It was our regular gathering a couple of days later, and I was quite keen to see the article that L. had mentioned. When I asked her if she had brought it in however, she looked at me blankly. She clearly didn’t have the slightest idea what I was talking about.
She didn’t remember me mentioning traffic lights, Camden, or anything else, and neither did any of the others there. She had never heard anything about the council changing some pedestrian crossing lights, or even of a sixties singer dying recently. In fact, none of them remembered me saying anything much at our previous gathering. When I re-told the story, everyone seemed quite spooked by it all.
I called D. and S. immediately afterwards, and yes, they still remembered it clearly. D. seemed amused by it all; S. was just terrified.
The only explanation I have that can even begin to stand up to Occam is that we briefly swapped into a closely-aligned parallel dimension. If the other two hadn’t been there, I doubt I’d trust my own memory of the event, it was so surreal. But as it happens, I have since had a couple of other experiences that also look a little like some minor dimensional swapping, although they’re less dramatic *wry grin*.
January 23, 2012 — 11:32 AM
Casz Brewster says:
I swear I see actual like television-set like glitches — you know like you used to get when you physically turned the dial on an analog tv? It happens whenever the light outside is just right. Not quite sunny, but with high overcast skies. And it will be really odd things like the car next to me on the road, or a jogger going by. No pattern other than the glitch is of something moving. Other than the weather, there’s no way to predict it. I just always wear sunglasses on those days to avoid having folks know I’m staring at them or having a momentary complete freak out. If I’m caught in such an experience without the sunglasses, I get a headache. The logical side of my brain says it’s just the fact that I have more rods than cones in my eyes…or some such scientific explanation.
There, I’ve just outted myself as a complete freak. Oh well, I’m a writer after all.
January 23, 2012 — 11:46 AM
Adam Drew says:
Streetlights turn on or off in my presence with alarming frequency. I’m sure virtually everyone has been standing under a streetlight when it’s come on, or overheated and shut down, but it happens to me ALL THE TIME. Basically every day. Not always the same lights, but there was one near my friend Jason’s house back in high school that was every single time. I mentioned it to him then, and he used to howl with laughter whenever we’d walk past it and its inevitable state-change would give me chills.
January 23, 2012 — 11:47 AM
Lisa says:
Such experiences, for me, are mostly of the writerly kind. Like, I’ll be reading a book and find all kinds of ideas, images, odd words that have been showing up in my own work in the week *before* I read the book. Or I’ll be noticing something – say, references to bees – in books, in the culture at large, bee encounters in my daily life, that kind of thing. Then someone will comment on the bee imagery in one of my poems – a poem in which there was no conscious bee imagery I could see. But, um, now I see that it’s there.
When this stuff happens, I first get really excited. Then I calm down, say thank you to my subconscious, and go about my business. Nothin’ to see here, move along. I suspect I believe I’ll jinx this highly fruitful state if I look into it too closely.
Oh, and I sometimes see a small furry animal out of the corner of my eye. I think it’s a long-departed pet of mine, so that’s OK too, if a bit disconcerting.
January 23, 2012 — 1:18 PM
Oliver Gray says:
A friend of mine was visiting me in Chincoteague, VA, during my senior year of college. We were drinking beer and being silly when a large, rainless thunderstorm moved in. We decided watch the storm in the open area of an adjacent graveyard to get a good look at some of the more impressive lightning. It was nearly midnight, so each bolt briefly lit up the whole area, washing the ageing tombstones in eerie blue light. My friend kept saying that it was probably dangerous to be stood in the open during a lightning storm, but I just told him to shut up and enjoy the show.
As we were turning to leave, I noticed a single, bright light on the far side of the graveyard. The rest of the area was completely black; it backed onto a wooded area with no homes or streetlights. I looked at my friend, who had also seen the light by now, and he was obviously creeped out. I convinced him that we should go check it out, despite his objections.
As we got closer, we started feeling more and more apprehensive. I could see that the light was coming from a little LED in front of a large, newly placed headstone. As we got close enough to read the name, another bolt of lightning flashed, and the grave was perfectly illuminated for ~3 seconds. In huge serif letters, the last name on the stone was burned into my memory: “Gray.”
I freaked out like I’ve never freaked out before, and bolted back to my apartment. I locked us in and refused to let him turn on any lights. It was hours and hours before I could sleep. The next day I took pictures of the grave and did some research. The man who had been buried there had died only weeks earlier, but had no direct relation to me. An uncanny coincidence, given the tiny population of the town and my timing in stumbling upon his plot.
My parents built a house on that same land, and now the graveyard is their permanent neighbor. I still feel uneasy any time I need to walk close to it. Somehow, it feels like the graveyard wants me to come back.
January 23, 2012 — 1:21 PM
Khorsheed says:
@Adam Drew That actually happens a lot to a friend of mine, too. Last time it was this october in Lisbon. I am sorry to say I laughed at her dismayed expression too. But in a friendly way =)
January 23, 2012 — 1:22 PM
Darlene Underdahl says:
I should probably share this story; I just remembered it:
My mother had died some months before. Mom was a religious fanatic, if a hypocritical one, but she *was* terrified on the devil.
I arrived at the farm from Minneapolis to find my sister-in-law playing with an Ouija board at the kitchen table. She was alone, but she said she thought she had my mother answering her via the Ouija board. I suppressed a chuckle so as not to hurt her feelings, I mean, my religious mother on an Ouija board?
To humor her, I put my fingers on the pointer as well, but there was nothing definitive, and I thought she was subconsciously pushing it. I asked a question I knew my sister-in-law didn’t know.
“If you’re really my mother, point to the first letter of your middle name.”
I expected the pointer to wander aimlessly, because she wouldn’t know where to push it. Instead, the pointer flew off the board and onto the table was if someone had hit it. My sister-in-law was shocked. She said, “What happened?”
I said, “Mom had no middle name. She was always bitter about that.” Scared my poor sister-in-law so bad she put the board away.
It’s in my book, Threadbare.
January 23, 2012 — 1:31 PM
Morgan Collins says:
A few months after I got laid off from my first major job at ICG, I moved from Colorado back to Florida to crash in my dad’s guest room and figure out what was going on with my life (and earn a little cash working for him). I was stopping in Texas to pick up my sister who was going to drive the rest of the way with me, but it’s a hell of a drive. I was stopping a couple of hundred miles out from where she was, but had to make it to civilization.
Around one in the morning I found a gas station in the middle of god damn nowhere, and needed to fill up. The store was clearly closed, but the gas pumps were left on, and I had a credit card. Score. I started filling up, and remember being pissed about how dusty the car was (middle of nowhere Texas, they’ve got lots of dust.) I started pumping and leaned back against the car, glancing around. There was a truck with its hood popped by the side of the station and a lamp hanging from the hood, but no one was around. I thought that was a little odd, and even kept an eye out for murderous hobos or bored kids or something similar.
Eventually the gas nozzle clicked, and I turned around to put the nozzle away.
There were hand prints all over my car. Some even right next to where I was leaning, where I would have had to have seen someone.
The weirdest part that I remember in that moment is that they were different hand sizes. Some huge, some maybe a toddler’s. Dotted all over the car.
There have been very few times in my life that I have been that freaked the hell out. I think I sped the rest of the evening.
January 23, 2012 — 2:30 PM
Sabrina Chase says:
Bear in mind the following incident happened right around the time the first Matrix movie came out, for maximum freakiness–
I was at work (a certain Large Software Corporation) when I got a FedEx envelope. It contained a pager, and nothing else. Accused my manager of trying to give me a pager (something I have dodged for years) but she denied it. Tossed it back in the mail bin assuming it was a wrong address.
Few days later, got another one. This time it had a message on the screen. “Stopping by your office in ten minutes.” This is when the freakout ramped up 😉 (Especially since my office had no windows and there was no handy construction crane to escape with).
Turns out the person who used to have my office was the regional pager repair contact, and some secretary remembered the office number but not the name of the person…
January 23, 2012 — 2:32 PM
sandeesandlz98 says:
whoa O_O
October 31, 2016 — 8:52 PM
David Earle says:
I’ll second the mundane prophetic dreams Lugh @2 mentioned. But since a repeat would be boring…
I walk around most of the week in a state of severe sleep deprivation. I average anywhere between four and six hours a night, work 9.5 hour days, and generally feel awful a lot of the time.
One day I was washing my hands in the men’s room at my office when the Matrix glitched. The sink started PULSING up and down at me. I just gripped the stall while it happened and thought “Oh God, it’s finally happened, I’m going to pass out…”
It lasted a few seconds before it stopped. In the pause, I heard alarms going off. I shouted “What the hell was that?”, and the guy in the stall down the line said “Felt like an earthquake”… which is was, as it turned out. I’d never felt any shaking, just the weird visual distortion.
Nobody was injured, and there was only minor damage to the building. The thought of that sink coming at me still freaks me out, though.
January 23, 2012 — 3:12 PM
Belial says:
There’s an engineer at my company named Earl. I deal with him relatively often as he’s the head of one of our technology groups, so I need his signature for various things. He recently became a different person.
Up until late november 2011, I remember his appearance being somewhat Rick Perry-esque. Close cropped dark hair. Tannish skin. Short, sturdy frame. Sleazy-and-dumb-but-animal-shrewd features. Dark eyes.
One day in november I went into his office to get a signature on a change order and there was a tall, thin, bald man with placid features and watery blue eyes sitting in Earl’s chair. I thought maybe someone was just visiting and borrowing his office, but he seemed to already know why I was there. Took the change order from me (it was one Earl and I had discussed before) and signed Earl’s name in Earl’s handwriting. He’s still here. Everyone refers to him by Earl’s name.
While the best explanation is that my memory hiccuped somehow, I’m occasionally struck by the fact that I have no idea who this guy is and it freaks me out sometimes.
January 23, 2012 — 3:37 PM
Belial says:
Ohhhh, the comments are being eaten by moderation. Just pick whichever retyping of that story you like better, then.
January 23, 2012 — 3:39 PM
AlohaKarina Chapman says:
Who says cats can’t communicate?
We once had three cats: George, Gracie, and Gunther. Sadly, one night, years ago when I was pregnant with our first daughter, Gracie disappeared. We lost a lot of cats in the neighborhood that night. Coyotes. Sadly, my daughter never knew Gracie. She was such a pretty cat.
A couple years later, when my daughter was tiny and finally starting to speak, we saw her wander over and just start staring at the other two cats. They all stood there for a full minute. It was weird. George, Gunther, and Maddy–standing there, having a staredown.
Pretty soon, Maddy turned around and said, “They miss Gracie.”
They missed Gracie? How did she even know who Gracie was?
While my husband and I stood there with our mouths flopped open in shock, she added, “Oh. And they want better food.”
We went to WalMart that night and bought them the fanciest canned cat food we could find.
January 23, 2012 — 7:24 PM
AlohaKarina Chapman says:
I just remembered two other things I can’t explain:
1) When I was in Hawaii with my best friend in 1982, we were packing up a picnic while waiting for my brother to come back from the video store. When I turned around, I was startled to see him standing in the corner of the room! I blinked–and he was gone. I thought, “Weird”, went back to the kitchen, and when I turned around again–there he was! Standing there, same spot, just looking at me! Then–he was gone.
It got weirder: when my friend Pam turned around, SHE SAW HIM TOO. Same place. Same clothes. Just standing there.
We seriously freaked. I was afraid he had died and his ghost had come back to talk to us, but pretty soon he came in (in different clothes) as if nothing had happened.
I still can’t explain that.
2) We used to mess around with Ouija boards in college, like everyone else. This Ouija board called itse’f “DOG”, and it used to have a thing about pennies. It liked to send us off in search of them, and would give us very specific details about where to find them, what they would look like, the year, and even whether they were heads-up or tails up.
The two weirdest places we found pennies: one was buried in the yard and we had to retrieve it with a friend’s metal detector…yep, right year, right description. The other was in the middle of the street, literally ten miles away in front of a particular building. It was “messed up” and “scratched”, tails up, and the correct year yet again.
It also named my friend Pam’s cat. We were arguing about what the name should be, and when we put our hands on the board, it zipped around and spelled out, “Just name the thing KITTY”.
She did.
January 23, 2012 — 7:39 PM
oldestgenxer says:
Deja vu seems to be something that only happened when I was young. As a teenager, I had it all the time. It got to the point that I felt like I was sliding back and forth through time.
I had it so much and the sensation became familiar, that I would recognize that an episode was about to happen, and I would know what was going to happen–
On several occasions, I would see something coming up and try to change it. I knew *this* was going to happen, so I did *that* instead.
And I would then have the full deja vu memory revealed to me, and realize that what happened was what my deja vu really was. I tried to trick it, but I couldn’t. My mind would remember the wrong thing, so that when I changed it, it was the right thing. I gave up trying to change it.
I haven’t thought about any of this in years, until my 15 year old daughter was telling me about her experiences with it. It was like deja vu all over again.
Yes. Yes I did just do that.
January 23, 2012 — 7:50 PM
Jennifer-Crystal Johnson says:
I’ve had a lot of deja vu before… as a kid, mostly. That was never all that weird to me. What was weird to me was when I knew some crazy shit happened and wasn’t even in the same state where it happened. In fact, at the time, I wasn’t even in the same COUNTRY.
My dad got stationed in Korea for a year, so my mom took my brother and me to stay with my Oma and Opa in Germany in a little town called Bechtsrieth. I did not want to go. I was going into 7th grade and had to study the entire summer we got there in order to catch up to those German school students. Then I got to go to an all girls school. Sure, the educational aspect was great because it was one of the best schools… but it sucked. Really.
I missed my best friend in Colorado. That was what really got to me.
I got to call her once a week because it was darned expensive, so that was my lot… sigh… Sunday chatter with the bestie from thousands of miles away, halfway across the globe.
One night, I had this insane dream. Now, don’t get me wrong – I always have crazy dreams, but they usually don’t mean anything except that I ate before bed or had one too many glasses of Chablis. This dream was just too weird, though. There were actual people I knew in it, not a bunch of alien apocalypse attacks or 4-legged giant silver spider creatures that drain the life out of people.
That being said, I dreamed that there was something going on with guns; I accidentally hit the target wrong while I was shooting and the bullet bounced back and me and flew through my wrist. I was freaking out a little, but asked my mom what would happen. She told me everything would be fine, they’d just have to chop off my hand.
Excuse me?!
Meanwhile, coming back from La-La Land…. The next time I spoke with my best friend, I found out that he brother had pissed some people off and their house was caught in a drive-by. One of the bullets bounced off the ceiling fan and went through the floor. I’m assuming my losing my hand was the amount of damage that was done to their house.
That’s my Matrix glitch. The major one, anyway. I know it isn’t quite deja vu or the exact same thing repeating itself, but it was still weird.
January 23, 2012 — 9:06 PM
Danielle says:
Do ghost sightings count? I mean, it might be a ghost, might be a glitch in the Matrix, might be a figment of my imagination… whatever.
I was somewhere around 10-13, and I was walking home from school. I didn’t cut through the fence from the neighbouring townhouse complex, so I was coming up the driveway instead of going through the park. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a kid come up behind me on a red bike. Or it might have been a red helmet, but I think it was the bike; I very distinctly remember something bright red. I turned to look to see who it was and no one was there. Freaked me the hell out.
Doubly scary I think a kid that used to live in the house I was living in died. I don’t know for sure, I forget where I heard it and I never really looked into it, so I might be full of shit, but I do recall being told that. I wonder if he was hit by a car while riding his bike, or something similar.
January 23, 2012 — 9:29 PM
Deanna Ogle says:
Whoa, these stories are amazing.
I get deja vu frequently. The ones that really freak me out and make me stop dead in my tracks are the ones where I *know* I have been to that place before even though it’s not possible that I had ever been there before. That type hasn’t happened in several years.
My glitch was when I was around fourteen or fifteen. I had a dream that something very serious happened to my grandfather. In the dream it wasn’t fatal, but it was bad. I didn’t think anything about it. Two weeks later my grandfather got Bells Palsy. When I mentioned it to my mom she was a little freaked out by it.
January 23, 2012 — 9:43 PM
Erin Sneath says:
Sometimes when I pass by a sign or anything with text and I only look at it for a microsecond or so, I read it as a similar looking but wrong word (usually something silly) and I end up doing a double-take before reading it correctly. This is probably normal. The brain fills information gaps with what it already knows. When the misreading of the words takes on darker themes, however, it could easily be interpreted as a message… of DOOM!
January 23, 2012 — 10:14 PM
Paige S. says:
Disclaimer: This falls more under the “creepy-ghosty-experiences… or were they?” category rather than “Keanu Woah” moments, but after reading all the creepiness of reddit, this is what surfaced in my brain.
Surely there are logical explanations, including that of a young girl with an over-active imagination who shouldn’t watch haunting shows ever–especially not when she’s by herself.
I was home sick from middle school. I’d been watching TV on a windy, overcast day and everyone was gone with work and school. Of course, a show comes on with people’s stories about their experiences with the paranormal. My mind tells me to change the channel, but I can’t look away.
I’m laying on the couch, particularly freaked out, wind gusting outside, when the door from the kitchen to the garage opens on its own. In a second, I jump up, close the door and run back to the couch. I reason “the wind pressure in the garage must have done it… heh…heh… must be it.” A few seconds after the door opened, I hear what sounds like a stack of papers falling in my mom’s office in the basement. I ran to my bedroom with the cordless phone and my blanket, turning on all the lights along my way, and blared music on my radio until I finally calmed down. I’m still reasonably sure that the air pressure change in the garage coupled w/ a door not shut properly was probably the cause of the door—I have no idea about the papers in the basement. And the timing scared the bejezus out of me.
Same house, I’m by myself at night. My family’s at some church thing and I can’t remember why I wasn’t. I’m in the living room again and I hear noises like someone’s walking around in the house. I grabbed a kitchen knife and locked myself in my parents’ bedroom. I listen closely and hear creaking coming from the hallway. It sounds like someone’s pacing in the hallway. I try and peek under the door, but the carpet’s too high and I think I would have preferred not to know for sure. I call the church where my parents are and get one of the associates. I tell her it sounds like someone’s in the house and ask if she can get my parents. She tells me they already left but stays on the phone with me a little longer. I keep hearing the creaking in the hallway while we’re on the phone.
It stops for a bit and my parents finally got home. It could have been a mix of the house settling and the new AC running; but I don’t think I’ve been that freaked out in any of the places I’ve lived before.
January 23, 2012 — 10:46 PM
Chris Mackey says:
I love reading these stories!
About six months ago, my wife was home alone. She opened the bedroom door to find that our bed was about 3 feet closer to the door. It was so close that she had to move the bed with the door to get in the room.
Last week, she was in the bedroom closet. It’s a small closet with a shelf at the top. She was on the floor going through a bag or something when a small crate of pictures fell from the shelf onto her head. She said she’s positive that the crate wasn’t even a bit over the lip of the shelf.
January 23, 2012 — 11:22 PM
Kain says:
These stories creep me out.
When I was in high school, I used to see a man sitting in front of me when I went to sleep. Sometimes I still see him. He would always be there, just staring at me. Now, I’m a bit crazy, so that could explain a lot.
Something the doctors couldn’t explain was why I kept choking…on air.
I was babysitting my sister and I was out in the living room, ready to doze off. It was daytime television, so that’s explainable. My head started to slump, then something grabbed me. It pulled me back over the couch and started choking the life out of me. The problem was that I saw nothing there.
My sister said that I must have fell over and had a seizure or something because when she got there, I was unconscious. She called the ambulance and I got to the hospital in time.
When I woke up, I swore I heard the man cackling in my ears.
And that’s why you never babysit children!
January 23, 2012 — 11:34 PM
terribleminds says:
@Kain —
Actually, not to bust the mystery bubble, but all that stuff is entirely explainable — well, if you buy the medical explanation. Hypnagogic hallucinations come with night terrors and sleep paralysis (which often leads to sleep choking). Some reactions can be pretty physical, some are not. (Though for my mileage, most hypnagogic hallucinations are weird anyway.)
— c.
January 24, 2012 — 6:44 AM
Athena says:
Capgras too
September 8, 2016 — 7:42 AM
Anninyn says:
Once or twice a day the world flickers off.
No, really.
I don’t know if it’s a neurological problem or something, and it used to be accompanied by horrible dizzyness and buzzing in my brain, but I’ll be looking out of the window, and for a millisecond everything’s is black. My eyes are open, so it’s not me blinking, it’s just that everything flickers off for a bit.
I’ve either got a brain tumour, or all this is fictional.
January 24, 2012 — 6:32 AM
Saoki says:
Once, when I was 15, I was walking down the street, heading downtown since I had absolutely nothing to do that afternoon, when I saw a guy that looked like he could be my brother, same eye color, same hair, slightly darker skin, similar to my dad’s. He was wearing a flanel shirt that was exactly the same pattern as one I stole from my dad. We made eye contact, he smirked and bumped his shoulder into me. I turned to cuss him, but he was gone. My heart started pounding as I scanned the street for him, but he was nowhere to be found.
So, yeah, I once bumped in me from an alternate universe in which I was born a boy.
January 24, 2012 — 7:33 PM
mattw says:
These stories are great!
My Matrix Glitch(es) would have been in late 2006. I used to see quick glimpses of people all over the place. I’d be out running errands, or going from the office to the train, and I’d catch a glimpse of someone and they’d be gone. I have a pretty clear memory of seeing a very fat man on the escalator maybe 20 feet ahead of me at Union Station in Chicago and when I looked a second time there wasn’t anyone there. This was happening to me a lot then, but that’s the one I really remember.
I was working my first “real” job out of college, commuting 2 hours a day, working a second job, my wife was pregnant with our first, and money was really tight. I’m pretty sure this is all my mind’s reaction to being under so much stress. Although, now when I get stressed out I don’t experience that any more.
January 24, 2012 — 8:17 PM
oldestgenxer says:
@Anninyn-
That sounds like something my fiance has–ocular migraines. It’s just a headache…in your eye. So, not necessarily a tumor.
They could be caused by the aliens that did experiments on you. Do you remember any of that? (I’m trying to help.)
January 25, 2012 — 12:07 AM
Angela Mc says:
I think this could be a cross between a ghost story and a matrix glitch:
Many years ago Billyboy, my family’s black and white cat, died of a heart attack and my father buried him in our backyard. He was a funny, sweet cat I loved very much and I still miss him. It puzzles me why the dream I had of him freaks me out and still gives me the shivers.
In my dream, it’s b&w, he jumps up on the porch railing of our back porch and sits there. He just sits there and stares at me, his tail twitching. That’s it. I woke up terrified and had to turn a night light on.
It had been raining for several days before this dream and two days later my dad comes in and said that Billyboy’s grave had fallen in and that he had to refill it. I suppose that explains the dream but why the nightmarish quality of the dream? Shivering here.
January 25, 2012 — 5:15 AM
Brett says:
@Adam Drew: my friend’s father had a bunch of mates he would go drinking with in his twenties while they were living in Sunderland. One of them claimed that street lights would explode as he passed beneath them. Of course, his mates demanded he prove it, and on the walk home, they watched as lights would break or explode or blow out as he walked beneath them. Later it became a joke, so every time they went for drinks, they’d walk home, with the one on the opposite side of the road, bursting street lamps randomly all the way home.
January 25, 2012 — 9:40 AM
Athena Grayson says:
I’ve had glitches and ghostings.
When I was in 8th grade, there was a snapshot in the local paper–one of the back, human-interest pages–of a woman who was a grad student in mathematics at one of the big universities. She had my name AND MY FACE. As the years have gone by, it’s not so freaky now–I’m wearing my grandmother’s face when she was younger, and I have a big family so it wouldn’t be unheard-of to have a distant relative with similar genetics. Freaked the hell out of me then, though.
When I was in high school, my grandfather had his 6th and last heart attack. We’d gone to see him that morning (my mother warned us that it was to say our goodbyes), but the hospital and my grandmother sent us home. My mother made me go to my softball game, but on the drive home, I drove over a bridge with a creek below (running water) and the car just…died. Lost power, lost lights, engine stalled, no brakes. The minute the car hit pavement again, the engine coughed to life, I had brakes again, and the lights flickered. I knew he’d gone then, and wasn’t surprised when I got home to the news. That wasn’t scary to me, though–I’d always assumed Pop would have something to say to me on the way out.
There’s another poster on here who developed telepathy under rum–I had a similar experience with Bacardi 151 in a freshman dorm. I started speaking Russian, according to the friends I was with (one of whom I’d just met and I had no idea was a Russian Lit major). I don’t know Russian. I’m not even from Russian stock. But apparently, I checked out and something else that did…checked in, and wanted the entire floor to know it was motherfucking cold in Russian.
Another time, after some ceremonial wine in a Wiccan circle hosted in a house dating from the pre-Civil War era, I managed to check out long enough for one of the house’s former occupants to check in and let us all know the well in the kitchen needed to have salt thrown down it to purify it. None of us knew what the fuck I was talking about until the house owner’s husband popped up the floorboards in the kitchen and said, “The realtor mentioned it but I never said anything because I didn’t want the kids falling down in it.”
Apparently, if I’m drunk enough, leftover rogue programs can take over my space-time existence in the Matrix for short periods.
January 25, 2012 — 1:45 PM
Ruth Baker says:
Are the Dead still around?
I know now they are but I didn’t before my Mother, Dad and son passed. I had to re-evaluate my belief system when it became apparent to me that the dead may have lost their fleshly body their mind and thinking ability was still with us. Lots of people poo-pooed my experiences with the supernatural . But from my own experience I know the dead are still around sometimes and they do find ways of communicating with us if we aware enough to catch it when they do. I’ve gone from thinking when we died we just cease to exist to seeing we clearly are alive after death just not living in this realm anymore with us.
I’ve gone from unbeliever to believer, and I know everyone here has experienced enough to agree there is certainly something we clearly don’t understand.
January 25, 2012 — 3:32 PM
Abby says:
I got a teddy bear from my high school boyfriend. That bear shared my bed until I broke up with the guy. I named the bear Sam for some reason. Not Samuel, not Sammy. Just Sam. I met a guy my first day of college. His name was Sameh because he’s Egyptian, but all his friends just called him Sam. And he’s chubby like a teddy bear. I married him. Weird coincidence or freaky prophetic gift?
January 25, 2012 — 4:07 PM
None says:
In my college dorm room one night many years ago, I was shooting the breeze with a couple of friends. The door was propped open with my toolbox; another friend happened by and stopped in the doorway to join the conversation. When she accidentally kicked my toolbox, I hoped her toe was OK — she said she was fine: she was wearing her steel-toed boots. Which she then showed off, so we all looked at them.
About five minutes later, she started to make another reference to the boots, looked down, and froze mid-sentence.
We looked down to see why she had stopped: she was wearing her hiking boots.
Please note that she was standing still, in full view, in my doorway the entire time. With her feet in plain sight.
We all stared, blinking, for several seconds at the boots. She asked if we remembered, five minutes ago — when she had pointed out that she was wearing her other boots. Yes, we all remembered. Yes, we had all seen the steel-toed boots then. Yes, we were all seeing the hiking boots now. She was spooked.
I’ve had other “glitches in the matrix”, but that’s the only one with under full light with three other witnesses.
(And no, there were no drugs or alcohol involved.)
January 30, 2012 — 10:01 PM
Sylvannia says:
I Have Many Expierences, here are a few. Me and this guy I use to be friends with got into an small arguement which blew out of hand. I told him to leave my house and he became enraged. I left my apartment and locked the door. I walked down stairs and got in my car. He got out his car hit my window so I tried to start my car he grab a screw driver and busted my back passenger tire. At that time I I didnt notice I was looking at him bust my tire at the same time I was cranking my car. (Tears are rolling down my cheek now as I tell the story). He got so scared because he said I lounged at him and I said what are you doing but he looked over and I was still in the car. I do not know which one was the real me but I clearly remeber being in both states of mind or places at once. Many weird thing have happened since then and they are growing with integrity. I have to go in for a CAT scan soon because I have a lot of outter body experiences, a lot of what they call sleep paralysis, and other things. My question is are they gonna give my ex friend a CAT also, because he saw what I felt and also with the sleep disorder , how can you be sleep when you still see and hear everything around you. I see flashes of light and also spirits in beings in the form of different color hazes. Im not scared and I love it. They say people like me have schizophrenia but My question to that is how can everybody be the same kind of crazy. I would like to add, I’m not a violent person, I believe in the greater good and I’m not possessed. I actually feel like Im getting a taste of what they call the 5th dimension, Oh yeah had a near death experience during a seizure a year ago. i usually have tension headaches I got one starting 1-27-12 ansd it became severe 2-1-12 I’ll never forget that day .It felt like a fire heated metal rod was being jabbed into the top of my skull. My friend said I just dropped into his arms. I remember my body falling and my mind or essence still standing there looking down on my body and kids looking at me. A little nomb looking man caught my eye and i followed him to a fairy land,. the fairies looked shock to see me. Then I appeared in hell some how but when satan asked me wheres my God I automatically knew to say He’s in me I’m in Him and I shot to heaven and lay in a thick honey like river of souls recovering from what ever had happened to me on earth. By the time I got to the hospital I was fine. They couldnt explain it, checked me for drugs and everything. I”m usually tired and achey all the time but since that day pain is nothing to me and I have a lot of energy for a single mom with 4 kids and who will be 33 soon. There”s much more to the story. I plan on documenting My experience and telling it. .
March 11, 2013 — 1:51 AM
randerson05 says:
A couple years ago, I was eating lunch with my family, a perfectly normal day. I was sitting facing the window, absently staring out while we waited for our food to arrive. I saw a young girl, early twenties, wearing a knit hat talking on her cell phone. I saw her turn and look at me as I was watching her and then she walked away, I saw her walk down the block and around the corner. I then looked away for maybe 5 seconds looked back and she was back, exactly where she had been standing, talking on the phone in the exact same manner and then she looked at me the EXACT same way she had looked at me previously, turned and walked away. I was so shocked, I jumped out of my chair. I firmly believe this was a glitch in time or a glitch in the matrix.
November 3, 2013 — 4:02 PM
thesouljacker says:
The last person to comment on this thread has the same forst initial and last name as me. Slightly spooky, given the subject matter. I’ve got two legit ones though.
My group of friends used to go out on a Sunday. We’d start during the day at the pub at the bottom of the high street and work our way up to the last pub, where the karaoke started at nine. We got there about 8.55. Just inside the front door of the pub there are two doors, one to the left and one to the right, left for karaoke in the lounge and right for the bar. We went there every Sunday. Anyway, got there a little before nine, tried the door for the lounge, it was locked and no lights were on in that room. Puzzled, we went into the bar and I asked ‘is there karaoke in the lounge tonight?’ EVERYBODY sitting at the bar went silent and looked at us, there was a long pause, and the barman said ‘we haven’t had karaoke on a Sunday for over a year.’ We had been there every week for at least six Sundays previously. We all just looked at each other and got out of there! I now wish we’d gone back the next Sunday to see.
The other one was when I was about five I woke up in the middle of the night and my bed had moved. I had a long narrow bedroom with a single bed down each wall. When I woke up, they were across the room. Mine was under the window, and the other was across the room, blocking it. I thought I was half asleep and seeing a sort of illusion, so I sat up to get a proper look. And they were definitely the wrong way round. Everything else was where it should be. I just went back to sleep.
July 19, 2015 — 11:13 AM
christina says:
My sister and my little neice and nephews came over to visit. I had been feeling depressed lately so I hung out in my room. Occasionally I would go outside and smoke a cig and go back to my room. Well, I walked through the livingroom and noticed everyone was frozen in place! No sound from the t.v., my neice and nephews are 1, 4, and 3, so they are active. No sound from anyone. The t.v. was just flicking and bright, but no sound came from it. I glanced at my sister, and she wasn’t blinking. So I just walked outside feeling disoriented. When I finished my cig, I walked back in and everything was noisy and back to normal. My sister looked at me and asked surprisingly, when did I go outside?! I shrugged it off not knowing how to explain it, and just answered her saying that everyone was just really involved in the tv show! And we left it at that. Since then other glitches has happened. I want to know what is going on with our reality,
and if it is. Thanks for reading.
June 4, 2016 — 12:18 AM