Do you have your own Twilight Zone story?

Parent Cafe
1

<p>I was explaining to my 12 yo what “Twilight Zone” was all about, and remembered my own true Twilight Zone moment and wondered if others have had similar unexplained experiences.</p>

<p>Year was 1987. My first day of Internship (medical) in upstate NY. Had just moved from out of state couple of days before, gotten a random phone number I had not learned yet and had given out to <em>no one</em>, including the hospital paging service. Living alone in a studio apt, and knew no one in town. Was assigned a random new beeper that morning by the hospital paging service.</p>

<p>Eating a quick bite in the cafeteria at dinner time, get digital paged to a vaguely familiar number. Call the number and my answering machine comes on! I had been paged to my home number somehow. As there was no person or entity who knew by home number, and only the hospital service knew my beeper number, there was no rational way that this could have happened. </p>

<p>To this day, I still don’t know how it came about…</p>

2

<p>Twilight Zone…
The greater part of my adult life, living as the only girl in a house with four boys. People who explain it as Mars/Venus have no clue. We’re not even from the same universe.</p>

3

<p>ihs76, that’s just creepy. <em>queue Twilight Zone music</em></p>

4

<p>I have 2 examples:

  1. About 20 years ago I had a big credit card bill of $1000 and change come in. We had put some large car repair bills on the card. I liked to pay the credit card bill in full each month, but I wasn’t sure whether or not I could afford to that month. I knew that I would have the money a couple of days after the payment was due. I decided it would be best to send a partial payment of $600.00 and pay the remaining $400.00 after my H’s next paycheck came in. A few days after I’d mailed in the payment I got an overdraft notice from the bank. Several checks had bounced! I was horrified and was sure that I must have stupidly sent the credit card company a payment for the entire amount instead of only $600.00 as I had intended. I called my bank and asked them to see how much money the credit card company had been paid. Sure enough, it was $1000 and change. I just couldn’t believe I had been so dumb - I wanted proof! I asked the bank to send me a photocopy of the check. It turned out that I had not made a mistake. The bank debited my account for $400.00 more than the amount I had written on the check. I have very legible handwriting. I had clearly written both $600 and six hundred on the check. It’s just so weird that the bank looked at my $600 check and sent the credit card company an extra $400, the exact amount I’d debated over sending them. I could understand it if the credit card company had made the mistake, but it was my bank that decided to award them the extra money.</p>

<p>2) Twenty four years ago I agreed to be the childbirth coach for a friend’s three children. She was having a planned home birth with baby number 4 and she asked me to take charge of her other kids. I happily agreed. My friend’s 1st 3 children all arrived well past their due dates. One night, about a week before my friend was due, I had trouble sleeping. I woke up repeatedly thinking about her and the impending birth. Normally, I slept quite well. For some reason, I simply could not stop thinking about my girlfriend. Even nursing my 6 month old D did not calm me as it usually would. At 6:00 A.M., my friend’s H called me to tell me that she’d gone into labor at around midnight and that they needed me. Seems like I had been on my friend’s “wavelength” all night. I’d never believed things like that before, but I have wondered all these years if somehow her mind did call out to mine that night!</p>

5

<p>Nevermind - read the post wrong.</p>

6

<p>dancersmom: interesting that my ‘event’ was 23 years ago and yours were 20-24 years ago. Coincidence? Sunspots? :)</p>

7

<p>Hubby and my first date was at a Chinese restaurant downtown. We had gone there several times while we were dating and first married, but then life intervened, we moved farther away from the center of the city, etc. On our 18th wedding anniversary, I planned one of my annual surprise trips (usually I take him away for a night or two to some undisclosed location). That year, our daughter was performing in a local Nutcracker in the city, so I decided an overnight downtown could be fun. So I booked a room and called the Chinese restaurant. Got their answering machine, where the recording stated to leave my name, number in party, date/time, contact info for a reservation. I did so, blathering on to the answering machine about how this had been the place of our first date 20+ years ago, and I was really looking forward to coming back there now.</p>

<p>On the appointed night, we arrived at the restaurant. It’s not in the best part of a mid-size city, so a fairly vacant sidewalk (it was also December, and freezing!) was not atypical. We entered the restaurant, and were greeted by the owner, who remembered us. This was also not unusual, as he has an amazing memory for faces – he always recognized us when we had gone in the past, if not by name, by the fact that we were returning customers. He congratulated us on our anniversary, so I knew he had gotten the message.</p>

<p>He then led us past the entryway into the dining room. We were the only patrons on a Saturday night. The room was exactly as I had remembered – the old upright piano in the corner, the year-round Christmas lights on the plastic palm tree in the corner. It was as delightfully tacky and dusty as I remembered. with old photos of the owner as a young chef on the wall, ancient newspaper reviews. The restaurant was freezing. The owner brought us water, menus, and propped a little space heater up next to us. We ordered off the full menu, and enjoyed a delicous dinner, as good as I remembered. Still no other customers came in, but we had a fine meal, with an excellent host.</p>

<p>As we stepped outside the restaurant after dinner, a panhandler coming down the street did a double-take, as if surpised to see us there, then asked if we’d buy him a dinner at that restaurant. Hubby gave him a few bucks, in the spirit of the holidays, and we headed on our way. </p>

<p>The next day, we picked up our daughter to bring her home with us. She asked about our dinner, and we told her about the evening, the lovely food, the “private”, cold restaurant. We were driving up the street where it was, and I turned to point it out to her.</p>

<p>By light, the shabbiness of the building was more apparent…but so was the fact that the front windows were now boarded up (they had not been covered the night before), and there was a definite air of emptiness to the building…</p>

<p>True story. Theory #1: The restaurant was in the process of going out of business, but got my call for the special dinner, and decided to serve one last meal (after the furnace had been shut off, etc). The owner lived above this 1800’s building, and had all the ingredients to cook our fine dinner in his home kitchen (as he seemed to disappear and it was quite quiet in the restaurant, besides our conversation).</p>

<p>Theory #2 – Cue the Twilight Zone music, for a restaurant that was long out of business, the owner long gone, the power of love restoring it for one night…</p>

<p>It’s definitely an evening we will never forget!</p>

8

<p>On our home phone several months ago, the phone rang. I went to answer it. Nobody there.</p>

<p>I hung up.</p>

<p>The next day, after work, I checked my phone - it has the log of caller identification numbers called. I notice that there was a call from “Anna Jones” - which is my long deceased grandmother’s name around the time, the day before that I got the hang up call. </p>

<p>It’s not a common name. </p>

<p>It was my TZ moment. I took a photograph of it! Freaked out my family. </p>

<p>I also clicked on a facebook page, and there was a comic cariacature of a mutual friend’s relative as their FB page…it looked EXACTLY like my long deceased grandfather, and the last name was the same as my grandpa. Either we have a common family ancestor or it was simply another TZ moment!</p>

9

<p>Mommafrog, that story really could be a TV show!</p>

10

<p>I’ve got goosebumps.</p>

<p>I’ll throw in a fun one for bedtime:</p>

<p>20 years ago, before the days of computers and eHarmony, I moved to a new town. In an effort to meet someone outside medicine, I decided to answer a personal ad in the paper for the first time in my life. It used a telephone message based system. As soon as I heard the voice on the message come on saying “Hi, this is so and so,” I heard very distinctly and firmly in my head: ‘This is the guy I am going to marry.’ Mind you, I was a fairly jaded, been around the block a few times, 30+ year old professional not given to starry eyes thoughts. In fact, Newsweek had just come out with an article stating that an unmarried 30+ yr old professional female was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married (yea, they really said that.)</p>

<p>After that, I never doubted that I would marry him. We just dropped DS off at college 2 weeks ago.</p>