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"What's your creepiest coincidence?"
r/AskReddit (paraphrased)
Recurring megathreads asking for the creepiest coincidence people have experienced, drawing thousands of stories — a crowd-sourced library of the uncanny.
Library › Tags › story
Quantum Pings Library
story
12 curated entries tagged “story” — books, studies, stories, and posts about synchronicity, each with the meaning and the skeptic’s take.
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"My scarab moment" — a Jungian coincidence story
r/Jung (paraphrased)
Posts where someone, often mid-crisis or mid-decision, describes an outer event that matched their inner state so precisely it felt like Jung's scarab at the window.
Concept
The Pauli Effect
Anecdote
The joking observation that laboratory equipment would mysteriously fail in Wolfgang Pauli's presence. Physicists treated it as a curse, not a theory.
Book
The Coincidence Authority
J. W. Ironmonger
A novel about a man who studies coincidence for a living and the woman whose life seems to be one long, impossible coincidence. Fiction, but it gets the ideas right.
Book
There Are No Accidents
Robert H. Hopcke
A Jungian therapist's field guide to coincidence, full of ordinary examples of synchronicity and what people make of them.
Story
The lost copy of The Girl from Petrovka
Anthony Hopkins (retelling)
While searching London for a copy of the novel he was about to film, Anthony Hopkins found an abandoned copy on a station bench — and later learned it was the author's own annotated copy, which had been stolen.
Story
The Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences
Urban legend (debunked)
Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both elected in years ending in 60, succeeded by men named Johnson, and so on. The list feels uncanny — until you check each claim and find most are stretched, cherry-picked, or simply wrong.
Book
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
C. G. Jung (with Aniela Jaffé)
Jung's memoir, which contains the golden-scarab story and his account of how the experience of meaningful coincidence entered his thinking.
Story
The golden scarab at the window
C. G. Jung (retelling)
Jung's patient was describing a dream of a golden scarab when a real beetle — a rose chafer, the closest thing to a scarab in Europe — tapped at the window. Jung handed it to her, and the moment broke her resistance.
Story
The bookcase crack that Jung predicted
C. G. Jung (retelling)
During an argument with Freud about parapsychology, Jung felt a hot sensation in his diaphragm. A loud crack came from the bookcase. Jung told Freud "there, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon" and predicted a second crack — which, he said, came moments later.
Story
The three Hugh Williamses
Folk anecdote
Three times, in different centuries, a ship is said to have sunk in the same stretch of sea — and each time the sole survivor was named Hugh Williams.
Story
The plum pudding coincidence
Émile Deschamps (retelling)
The poet Deschamps was once served plum pudding by a stranger, M. de Fontgibu. Years later he ordered it from a menu, only to learn the last pudding had just been taken — by de Fontgibu. Decades on, at a dinner party, the same man walked in uninvited as the pudding was served.