I have a really uncommon first name (The only thing I’m in the 1% with).

I was visiting Ireland with my parents. They had met a couple of other Dutch people at the bar, who happened to be staying in the same hostel.

At breakfast they joined our table. My parents introduced me: ‘This is our son Aka’. The guy says: That’s funny, I once met a boy with that name before, this was in Yugoslavia, I believe in '84.

Turns out this guy was the savior that once retrieved my swimming shoe from the bottom of a bay in the Adriatic sea once, ten years before.

If I had a more common name, we would never had known.

A guy died at work. I was his manager, so when he went missing for a few days, the police called me and asked me to check his office in the basement.

After I found his body, I was scheduled to be off a couple days. When I got back the office he had been in was emptied, stripped bare, new floor, new ceiling, new paint.

A few weeks after that, I saw him walking down a hall. I rushed to the corner he had turned down, but he wasn’t there.

He also had a distinctive odor. Poor hygiene combined with strong cologne. There were a bunch of times when I’d suddenly smell him standing nearby.

I’m not a big believer in ghosts. I figure it was just my mind working through it.

Random people assaulting me in coffee shops while I was minding my business over what I was wearing or a book I was reading. I basically stopped reading in coffee shops because of this, and it only started happening in like '22.

One time this guy went off on me and started lecturing me about how gay my boots were and how he’d be a rich pretty boy too if his mom hadn’t stolen his inheritance and been such a whore. Guy was unhinged. He came in, zeroed in on me, stood about 5 feet away and started going off on me, then just turn around and left when I didn’t acknowledge him. Nobody else said around me said or did anything, I think we were all just in shock.

The boots in question are olive suede, and I really do like them.

When we walked in the city and a car came a little off and it missed me by a few centimeters. It hit the person who walked right next to me (severely injured, but survived).

For two weeks my brain went in circles all day long with the question why etc. I had no clue why it was that disturbing when I was not even injured at all. Later I learned that there is a name for it, and it is a medical condition too.