40 Stories People Swear Actually Happened, Even Though They Sound Completely Made Up
I don’t like being lied to, but if I’m entertained, I’ll go with it. Some stories sound so made up that “Why would I make this up?” is the best defense you’ve got when someone doesn’t believe you.
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt when their story sounds ridiculous. I’ve had my own moments in life that no one would believe if I told them anyway. The folks in this AskReddit thread have more confidence than I do.
These people shared stories they swear actually happened, despite having every ingredient of something a friend would make up at a bar.
1.
“I told a mugger with a knife “no thanks I’m in a hurry” and got on my next train without even noticing the knife till I sat down.
Guy looked perplexed.”
2.
“Okay here I go. I met that woman named Lucy(named are changed for their privacy) that was from Poland. A couple of weeks after I saw Lucy in the same grocery store and said “Hii, Lucy!”. The woman looked at me with surprise. I repeated myself, “Hi Lucy, we met two weeks ago in this store, do you remember me?” The woman looked at me with a weird expression on her face and said “I’m not Lucy. I am Mary.” I apologized and we had a “small talk”. She was from Romania. A week later, I met Mary again and greeted her. It was not Mary this time, it was Lucy. I asked Lucy if she had any sisters because Mary looked like her twin. Lucy said no, but then surprised me with another answer. She said, “I had a sister, a twin sister. But we were separated during adoption and I have never seen her since.” I told her everything that happened with Mary and she decided to look for her. We exchanged numbers to keep each other updated. When Lucy met Mary they realized that they finally found each other after years of searching. The most unbelievable part of this story is that it happened in neither Romania nor Poland. It was another country. As for an adoption concerns that siblings cannot be separated I guess it wasn’t like that before or something could’ve went wrong, I’m not sure about the details. I am happy I played a part of a family reunion. I am surprised because such a coincidence is almost impossible. Nevertheless, it happened.”
3.
“Someone left their baby at my house and never came back for them. I eventually adopted them. They are closing in on thirty now and they’re amazing. A whole lot of WTHs but no regrets.”
4.
“I stepped drunk into an Uber once. Driver and I got talking about crypto and he told me how he lost his life savings, $50,000 USDT, two years earlier by sending it to another exchange on the wrong network. I work in tech and I happen to understand blockchain technology quite well, so I immediately suspected that maybe it could be retrieved. I gave him my phone number as he dropped me off 5 mins after getting in.
He texted me a week later and I did some research. Knew a guy at the other exchange. Had my theory confirmed. 2 months and tons of back and forths later the funds landed back on his Binance account. He could barely believe it.
The odds of me helping someone out so randomly yet significantly still makes me smile to this day.”
5.
“I met my second husband online playing video games in 2009. I was in Mobile, Alabama and he was in the Bronx. He proposed with a text message, shipped me a ring via FedEx, I drove to New York and we got married 5 days after we met in person. He realized he was gay in 2020. I drove him to his first date and they’re still together 5+ years later. We’re divorced now but still best friends.”
6.
“I was once asked this question by a college kid doing an assignment. He approached me in the produce section at Walmart. I told him that I flew to Mars by helicopter and a guy named Marvin checked me in. He left it at that and said thank you. No follow up questions. Mars is the name of a Shell platform in the Gulf of Mexico that I flew to by helicopter for a job I was working. The guy named Marvin was the head of safety for the platform. Part of his job was to account for everyone on the rig.”
7.
“My wife and I have tried to go tent camping eleven times. The first ten times we were driven out by torrential rains that got us soaked. The eleventh time we were driven out by a forest fire. I don’t think there will be a twelfth.”
8.
“My birth was a surprise- I was a cryptic pregnancy. The wildest part? I have a twin.”
9.
“I had a fish fall from the sky and land on my car. I was driving next to a reservoir, and a hawk dropped it mid flight. I watched it dive into the water and come up with the fish and the fish was able to squirm out of the hawk’s grasp, and landed on the hood of my car.”
10.
“When I was a kid, a “cop” stopped me for riding my bike without a bell and gave me a handwritten ticket.
I went home terrified. My dad looked at it and started laughing, it was just some random guy.
The “ticket” literally said: “BUY A BELL.”
I bought one anyway.”
11.
“I taught the Rockwell rocket scientists how to use their first computerized spreadsheets-Apple VisiCalc. Truth of the matter is that l was just learning the program myself so l just stayed a chapter ahead.”
12.
“I rode in the Goodyear blimp and my grandmother got hit in the leg by a golf ball struck by the sitting President of the United States.
Both in the same week.”
13.
“5 of my family members slept with my ex-husband.
vice_queen:
I don’t know why I need to know this and I apologise but – which family members?Lucky_Ad_1318:
1 aunt and 4 cousins.”
14.
“I stayed one college long night awake reading a book that completely trapped me and thrilled me about a post-apocalyptic world where the yellowstone volcano had exploded and completely covered the earth with ash, no sunlight, winter coming thing.
It’s 9AM, I have not slept because I literally spent all night reading that, it’s a saturday, I go to a shop nearby to buy some stuff, I look at the sky…. completely grey and ashy for some reason. Breathing is weird.
I get to the shop,which has a tv, on the news: apparently a volcano had exploded that day in the south of argentina and the ashes just reached this morning our city.
I am completely stumped.
I had never, in my life, experienced that and when I do ….. I had just finished reading THAT?
I have no clue what to think about this coincidence, seriously. The world is the matrix, I don’t know.
Edit: I went looking for the title, it’s “life as we knew it” by susan pfeffer, it’s been 15 years since I read it. It was actually something (to not spoil anyone) that caused the global chaos and made all the volcanoes explode. Yellowstone I assume I remember because the protagonist is a US girl.”
15.
“Slipped on a banana peel and concussed myself on my now fiancés shin. Hard explaining that to the Doctor.”
16.
“I have a rare medical condition called Kallmann syndrome, that affects puberty. I also have no sense of smell.
I was called a “late bloomer” by every doctor I saw until I was 23 years old.
At 23, I started work in a London hospital, I am a biomedical scientist. One lunchtime I went to find one of the endocrinolgists who worked at the hospital in his office. After a quick description of being a “late bloomer” he asked if I had a sense of smell. No doctor had ever asked me that before.
He just happened to a specialist in the condition, one of very few in the country. He had even done his MD thesis at Cambridge on Kallmann syndrome.
This led to an almost instant diagnosis, hormone replacement treatment and a totally different life knowing I was not the only person who had not gone through puberty correctly.”
17.
“I was attacked by an actual monkey in a movie theater.”
18.
“I stole 67 cents from Willie Nelson.”
19.
“I inhaled a bug into my lungs while I was howling at the moon, then developed a mysterious anaphylactic allergy from it and now have to carry an epi pen around.”
20.
“I was washing dishes at my grandmas house during a thunderstorm. They have a giant window about 8 feet to the right of the sink.
While I was washing the dishes lightning came through the window (didn’t break the window) and hit the sink right as I took my hands out of it.
I flipped and got my grandma. She calmed me down and said to finish the dishes cus lightning never strikes twice. As she said that lighting came right through the window again and hit the same sink. (Maybe 10 min after the first strike).
We both left the room immediately and got grandpa to shut the sink off.”
21.
“At age 12 I helped intubate my father with a piece of gasoline syphon hose during anaphylaxis caused by an ant sting. I sawed about a foot off the hose on my parent’s bed with a kitchen knife, and he rawdogged it down his throat to keep his airway open. It was out of our farm truck for use with Jerry cans, stank of gas.
One of our neighbors was a local physician, turned up drunk 30 minutes later with no instruments in his bag except a stethoscope, he was rummaging through our kitchen drawers looking for another knife to do a tracheostomy just as the paramedics arrived (we lived in a rural area).
Paramedics left the syphon hose in place because it was working.”
22.
“I had a bf in college. We broke up and he went to NY for med school. Then I met someone else (Scott) who had recently moved to my town from NY and we started dating.
At around the same time, my ex met a girl in NY (Emily) and they started dating.
Turns out my current boyfriend (Scott) and Emily were bf/gf for 2-3 years and had broken up when Scott relocated to CA.
Scott and I are married. My ex and Emily last I heard broke up.
I thought it was pretty wild.”
23.
“I am adopted in the USA. My bio family on my birth mom’s side immigrated to America 4/5 generations ago from the Netherlands, have kept contact with family who are still in the Netherlands and maintained a pretty good family history. Some of them even still speak Dutch. I grew up knowing absolutely none of this with no active connection to them until much later in life. I married a Dutch citizen from the same town my biological family has roots in. My biological distant family still lives there and his family also still lives in the area. We didn’t realize this until he and I were already in a long term relationship. We traced our family histories as much as possible and are pretty positive we’re not related but we honestly had a bit of a scare at first!”
24.
“LA nightclub for a media launch party. Me, naturalized American chatting to a younger colleague from UK office and discover we are from same small UK town. Joined a few minutes later by Australian colleague, tell him what we just realized and turns out he’s from the same small town too but family emigrated to Australia. An American, a Brit and an Aussie born in the same tiny English town discover this while sitting at a bar in LA. Wild, huh?”
25.
“I raised a baby squirrel I found on a run to maturity until he found a girlfriend and left.”
26.
“While slowing driving down a dirt mountain road at night, my husband and I both clearly saw a skunk and a black cat casually strolling across the road side-by-side as if they were straight out of a Pepe Le Pew cartoon.”
27.
“I sprained my entire spine taking off a sweater.”
28.
“My blood type changed after my stem cell transplant.”
29.
“When I was a depressed teen I was walking around at Walmart late one night. In the checkout I was making small talk with the woman in front of me. She noticed my semicolon tattoo and showed me her own. She told me she also struggled with mental health and that it gets better. I thanked her and asked her her name, turned out it was the same as mine. I saw it as a sign that I should stick around.”
30.
“I had a warrant out for my arrest, but it was really for someone with the same first name as me but the last name (pronounced the same) was spelled differently. Cops came to my job to arrest me, but I was in class. I had to find an attorney and they told the judge they had the wrong person. It was…a lot.”
31.
“I was walking my parents driveway when I saw an owlet on the ground. Before I could move away from it I felt a sharp pain on the back of my head. Mama owl had dove at me and nipped me or clocked me with a talon. Thankfully didn’t break skin but had a bump. No one ever believes me.”
32.
“Lost 410 lbs in 4 yrs at 60 yrs old.”
33.
“When I turned 8 my dad said I was old enough for my own, full adult sized, tacklebox. He took me to Gander Mountain and told me I could get $100 worth of stuff (including tax) to put in the tacklebox. He didn’t expect me to be exact, so he just said to put items in my cart while he looked at fishing rods in that same area.
I spent the time adding things to my cart, and eventually reaching a point with my mental math where I knew I had to put some stuff back and start weighing what things I wanted more than others. He came and found me and looked at my cart and said he thought we’d end up having to put quite a few things back.
When we got to the checkout he told the guy that once we hit $100 to stop, and we’d put anything left in the cart back on the shelves, and he told me to put what I wanted most up onto the checkout, first.The guy rang up the last item and it came out to $100.01.”
34.
“Both of my grandfathers [passed away] naturally on the same day. That was a rough week.”
35.
“I was sitting in my room when I was about 18 and I got this overwhelming feeling of dread. I went and told my mom that I had a feeling something was wrong. She seemed skeptical but listened.
20 minutes later she received a call that my younger sister had been drinking and driving. She rolled my dad’s truck three times. She was injured but surprisingly not too bad. Never had another feeling like it since and me and my sister weren’t particularly close. So weird.”
36.
“I got strep throat so many times that it gave me OCD. It’s called PANDAs. Look it up- it sounds fake but it happened to me.”
37.
“In a manic episode, I took a swan dive off my 3rd floor balcony onto a grassy area with a lot of rocks. I got up moments later before being taken to the hospital.
I got a small gash below my left elbow. That was my only injury.”
38.
“Took a bush plane to a remote island in Alaska with one of the highest concentration of brown bears, 1800, 1 per square mile. Saw 11 in 4 hours. It was an amazing experience.”
39.
“In the 5 sections of my graduate school entrance exam, I got a 95, a 97, and three 99s.
I’m not that smart, didn’t excel much in school, but I have a knack for multiple-choice questions and test-taking strategy.”
40.
“I was at the edge of the Green Swamp in Florida and was about to try hiking in it. I was sitting on my car’s bumper putting on my tall, thick, leather, “snake boots”. And old guy in a rattletrap pickup rolled up and through his half-toothless mouth he asked me what I was doing. I told him my plans. He pointed to my boots and said that I didn’t want to wear those, but to wear sneakers instead. I argued about protection from snakes.
He said, “A snake will hit ya’ right above that boot.”
“I’m wearing long pants.”
“Don’t matter. They know where the top of the boot is. You’re better off getting hit lower ‘cause you can slow the poison with a tourniquet. Look here.”
He opened the door on his truck and above his worn out Ked low-tops were snakebite scars. “I’ve lived our here my whole live. I know what I’m talking about.”
I ignored him. Laughed him off as a dumb old codger.
Not long after, Scientific American published an article about how many species of snake are heat-seeking. They will hit the warmest spot they can reach. I got lucky. I saw alligators, wild boars, and some snakes in trees, but never up close as far as I know.”