This American Life - 489: No Coincidence, No Story!

Episode Date: October 19, 2026

We asked listeners to send us their best coincidence stories, and we got more than 1,300 submissions! There were so many good ones that we decided to make a whole show about them. From a chance encounter at a bus station to a romantic dollar bill to a baffling apparition in a college shower stall.  Start a Life Partners free trial to watch our new video, A Night of Stories and Improv.(00:00:00) Prologue: Hannah Jacoby tells the story of when she and her best friend Lindsey bonded over those toy soldiers with the parachutes, called (really) Poopatroopers — and how the little jumpers perfectly bookended their high-school years. And guest host Sarah Koenig explains the very interesting trends we discovered in our listeners' coincidences. (9 minutes)(00:09:23) Act One: A surprising number of coincidences involve grandmothers. One grandma has so many coincidences happen to her that it drives her granddaughter, 16-year-old Juliana Bontrager, to try to beat her at her own coincidence game. We also hear from Blake Oliver about a very strange appearance his grandma once made. (9 minutes)(00:19:31) Act Two: When it comes to love, coincidences tend to loom extra-large. Stephen Lee tells about the time his parents first met his fiance’s parents, and his future mother-in-law dropped a coincidence bomb. And we hear how a dollar bill ended up clinching a marriage, after floating around Chicago for years. (10 minutes)(00:28:22) Act Three: Ryan Rozar told us about a confounding coincidence that was visited on him in college. We didn’t think it was a coincidence at all, so we set out to prove him wrong. (8 minutes)(00:37:39) Act Four: More stories of dazzling coincidences: an old boyfriend is conjured in Morocco, a jazz singer seems to rise from the dead, and three boys believe they’ve seen a corpse. Plus stories of errant fathers, lost and found. (13 minutes)(00:49:57) Act Five: Kerry Weeks tells about the time he lost a pocketknife and turned to the galaxy for help. (7 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org / This American Life privacy policy. / Learn more about sponsor message choices.

This is Hannah. Oh, hi, Hannah. This is Sarah from This American Life. Hi, how are you? I'm good, thank you. How are you? Good. Before we go any further, from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.

I'm Sarah Koenig sitting in for Ira Glass. And you're about to hear this story the same way I did, blind. All I know is that it's going to have a coincidence in it. I have no idea what you're about to tell me. Oh, okay. So, yeah, lay it on me. So the story is I was a freshman in high school at Bozeman High School. Oh, in Montana? Yes. And I was in the orchestra. And it was early in my freshman

year, and I had made friends in high school, but didn't really have orchestra friends yet. And we were taking an orchestra trip. So that was a little nerve-wracking. When you're a freshman, this qualifies as a demi-crisis. A long bus ride to Seattle, sharing a hotel room with someone you don't know. But there's this one girl, Lindsay. She and Hannah have friends in common. So they decide to pair up, to room together, ride the bus together, to be orchestra friends. So we go to Seattle and we're like, it's awkward, you know, because we're like new friends trying to get to know each other. And on one of our free days, they send us to the space needle. And I don't know if you've ever been to the space needle. I have. There's that like carnival

area all around it. And we are playing the little games all around there and we won Poopootooopers. Do you know what those are? No. Okay. They're like the little plastic soldiers that have a plastic parachute. You're supposed to drop them from somewhere and the plastic parachute sort of expands. Oh, what did you call them? Poopo troopers.

Really? I didn't quite believe Hannah about this, but she looked it up. It's true. Poopo troopers. I just did a Google image search for poohetruppers, and I'm seeing images of the little guys. But wait, is it a generic name or is it's a brand name? I think it's a brand name. I think from what I'm seeing here, Imperial Poopo Troopers.

His Highness, four-star general Poopootruper? Yes. Exactly. Back to the plot here. Hannah and her new friend Lindsay go to the top of the Seattle Space Needle to try out their prizes. So we got in the little elevator and ran to the top and ran to the edge and threw the poohetruper's over the edge because there's nothing to stop. really. And we were just like in peals of laughter and it was, we thought it was so hilarious. And it sort of broke the ice in our friendship.

Lindsay and Hannah become best friends all through high school. Cut to senior year, four years later, another orchestra trip. This time to Reno Nevada. Hannah and Lindsay are in their hotel room, studying. And so Lindsay and are both sitting at the desk in this hotel room in Reno, Nevada, and a pooh-a-trooper comes flying out of the sky and lands on the window sill of our hotel room where we were, and we both, like, we couldn't, we couldn't believe it. We opened the window and we grabbed the pooh-truper, and we ran into the hall to try to, like, find other people in our orchestra, like we thought someone had been playing a trick on us, but no one knew what we were talking about. No one even remembered the thing in Seattle,

And so I still, to this day, don't know why that happened. Every once in a while we get pitches like this at the radio show. Coincidence stories. Since they don't really fit into our usual every week we bring you a theme format, we've been setting them aside, wondering what to do with them. They mean so much to people. I don't know. It felt like it was about our friendship.

You know, it was just, it felt, you know, I'm not someone that believes. believes in God, really, but it felt a little bit like an act of God or something, like, just sort of cosmic and larger than us. Finally, it hit us. If we got enough of them, we could put them on the radio as their own thing. So we put out a call to listeners, send us your coincidence stories. And you did. Hundreds and hundreds of you did.

We've read at least 1,300 coincidence stories, interviewed dozens of people. Here are just a few things we've learned. You're most prone to coincidences when you're young, teens or 20s. Lots of coincidences involve your grandmother. You're likely to experience a coincidence if you're in or near the Netherlands. Coincidences also happen to you in or near airplanes or on Craigslist. For many of you, coincidences were the answer to your prayers or helped you find your missing bike. Also, there are coincidences hidden in your name, your keys, your clothes, your address.

Like when Flora and Regasiano Peña first started dating. When we met, he said that he was born in Salmanale, and I said, well, I was two. And then when we were going to get married and we needed our birth certificates, we compared them and it was the same building. We heard stories about a lost role of film discovered, coincidentally, in the stomach of a decomposing hyena, about the man who got his favorite T-shirt back from a stranger's knapsack in Slovakia. about the woman who was dating not one but two Mark Stephen Anderson's at the same time. About the student whose car broke down in rush hour on a busy highway and the one person who just happens to stop who comes to a rescue,

it's her dad who lives four hours away. And one of my favorites from a woman named Jill Peterson who felt nauseated on the subway in New York City. As they pull into the second avenue stop, there's a garbage can perfectly positioned to help her out. So the train doors open. and I'm belining it for this can. And as I get there, out of the core of my eye,

I kind of see, like, another person heading my direction, kind of like going for the can too. And, you know, it's all coming up. And I'm throwing up, and as I'm throwing up in this can, this person that is coming towards me starts throwing up in the can too, and we're both, like, simultaneously barfing into this can, into this separation. And we kind of look at each other like, whoa.

I don't know. How are you feeling? And she's like, oh, I'm feeling a little bit better now. I'm like, me too. What's the only way to survive throwing up in front of a subway car full of strangers? Have a nice girl your age, do it with you. And numbers, so many coincidences with numbers. One woman told us how she was at Thanksgiving with her extended family. And I suddenly realized that six of them had the exact same number of letters in their names.

23 letters. Michael Arthur Van de Puddy. Mary Elizabeth Van de Puddy. William Arthur Van de Puddy. There was a guy at the mall doing surveys who had to ask people their phone number. It's obvious the guy he's surveying starts to make up a number.

He says, 933-456. When he read out that last number, he said, eight? And I kind of step back for a second, but I was cool. And I said, no, sir, I'm sorry. That's not your phone number. And he said, why isn't that my phone number?

And I said, because that's my phone number. That's my phone number. The phone number that you just made up is actually my phone number. These stories reminded me of an old Chinese saying I once heard. Actually, I learned it a couple weeks ago, and I have no idea how old it is. But it goes like this. That's my friend, UN UND. And what does it mean?

If there's no coincidence, there won't be stories. No coincidence, no story. to imply that, of course, lives are all, I don't know, developed in the ways that we can't predict. So is it like if you heard a story with a coincidence, afterwards you might be like, no coincidence, no story, like that? That's right. Yes, just expression.

You use it to quote. Is it like a corny thing to say? Mostly, I think, no, it won't be a corny thing to say. Do you ever use it? When I'm corny, yes. At the risk of being corny, I'm going to say it. Today's show, no coincidence, no story. While the big man's away, we're going to sneak these coincidence stories onto the air.

All the stories you'll hear today first aired on our show in 2013. And they're all verified true stories that my colleagues hid from me until the actual interviews. So it wouldn't spoil the surprise, which is also why there is so much unprofessional giggling this hour. And full disclosure, I came from. into this topic a coincidence skeptic, believing that a coincidence is just a coincidence. Nothing more. I judged. I confronted weakness. I countered wide-eyed faith with statistical probability. And by the end, well, stay with us. It's This American Life. I'm Sarah Kainig sitting in for Ira Glass. Act 1, Grandma's. Blake Oliver is living in Nicaragua right now. We talked on Skype.

About four months ago, he was on the phone to his friend Camille, who goes by Camie. He mentioned to her that the screensaver on his iPhone had been the same picture for a long time, that he wanted to change it. So I asked her to just send me a picture of something. Uh-huh. And it was really funny. She ended up sending me this picture of her as a little kid as a joke. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's kind of funny. It's not what I was expecting, but that's funny.

And then I glanced back at the picture, and I saw my grandma walking through behind her. What? Yeah. How crazy is that, right? Very crazy. The picture was taken about 18 years ago. But you recognized her right away. Oh, absolutely.

There was no question that was Grandma Joyce. It was without question, Grandma Joyce. Coincidences like this one usually have a dense nest of details to bolster the craziness. Here goes. Blake is from Michigan. That's where he met Camille. But Camille's family isn't from Michigan at all. They're originally from Utah.

Salt Lake City, Utah. That's where she grew up. Yeah, that's where she grew up. Was this photo from Utah? No, and that's the funny thing is my grandma lives in Melbourne, Florida. And I'm thinking, oh, she must have been in Utah and walked past it. Cammy's like, no, no, that picture was taken in Parksville, Vancouver Island in Canada. What?

Yeah, right? Blake figured out that at the same time that Cammy and her family were on vacation, in Vancouver. Grandma Joyce had gone there to visit some of her husband's relatives. Like, what are the chances to think that not only did I meet Cammy, but she sends me this picture of her in the background, of my grandma. I don't know what the chances are. Minuscule. Right? Yes. And not only, like, I don't know if you've seen the picture, but not only just in the

picture, but like perfectly behind her. At that moment, a fellow producer emailed me the photo. And there it was, cute four-year-old Cammy in the foreground facing the camera and not far behind her a blonde woman walking past wearing blue shorts and a matching top. Yeah, and she has no idea if she's in the picture even. Yeah, right. It's not like, yeah, she doesn't seem aware. But I have to say, it's a little, you know, it's not a very crisp photo. Like, I'm sort of surprised you would recognize her right away.

Well, yeah, there's not a lot of, it's my grandma. I don't know. I was like, I was like, For my first reporting job decades ago, I interviewed a woman who just turned 100 years old. I asked her, admittedly, a rookie question. What's the most amazing thing that's happened in your life? She thought for a while, and then she said, The most interesting thing that happened to me was that on my first day at Patchhog School,

the principal said to me, what's your name? I said, Esther Tuttle. And he said, I have a friend in Shelter Island by that name. I was 12, she said. and that, to me, was remarkable. This woman had seen the advent of cars and movies and computers and space travel, and this was her answer. At the time, I thought it was lame, that maybe Esther was losing it a little. But since I started hearing all these coincidence stories the last couple of weeks, I've reconsidered.

Coincidences feel so rare, and that sticks with you, even when the coincidence is barely a coincidence at all. An academic study of people's reactions to coincidence stories, from the early 1980s, found that we have an egocentric bias toward our own coincidences, that people find stories that happen to them, far more surprising than the same stories happening to other people. Case in point. My name is Juliana Bon Trager, and I'm 16 years old. Juliana, she's got a problem with her grandmother. My grandma has been obsessed with coincidences, and she finds them in her life all the time,

and she always wants to tell everyone about them. And we get kind of annoyed with her sometimes because she just, she thinks they're so incredible and how they happen to her all the time. And it's just, you know, it's every time we see her, oh, my gosh, you would not believe what happened to me. And they're always, you know, I was at the hospital with, you know, she lives with her cousin. So she takes her cousin to the doctor's office quite a bit for appointment to stuff. And she'll be sitting in the waiting room and then, you know, they'll drive. to go get lunch after that and they'll see the people they were waiting in the waiting room with

at the restaurant. And I've always, you know, I always thought that was funny because it's like, yeah, that's a coincidence, but, you know, maybe they're just going to get lunch too. Like, it's not necessary to the deal. Yeah. So then a while ago, I was doing a project in the English class. We were reading the Scarlet Letter book. Uh-huh.

And I was, once we finished the book, our, like, end project was we had to come up with what our sin was or what sin we struggled with the most. And I chose envy. So we had to create our own letter out of paper, and then we had to like safety pin it to our shirt and wear it around school the entire day. So as I was coloring in my letter and cutting it out, my mom was listening to the show Monk in the background. As we were watching it, I was literally like cutting out my last, you know, line on the letter E for Envy, and it said on the show, I've studied the seven sins and the most prominent one is envy. I was cutting out my letter.

And so I immediately called my grandma and was telling her about it. And she was like, oh, uh-huh, that's a good one. Yeah. And then I didn't really hear back from her after that. And I thought, like, well, maybe she should just envy us of my great coincidence. And I happened to run into a person. twice in one day. I do that all the time, you know? What are the odds that as I'm cutting out this letter E? They would talk about that on a show, and I was so confused about it.

Okay, so Julianna's coincidence is a common one. We've all had those moments when you're reading a certain word and then someone says it on the radio or on TV. But remember, Julianna's 16, so maybe this is the first time it's happening to her. Still, I'm on her side here. I think it is more remarkable than her grandmother's example of the people in the waiting room being at the restaurant. Do you have a phone where you can dial up your grandma right now? I can try. Try it. Okay, one second. So Juliana conferenced her grandmother in so we could settle this. I'm here. Elaine Olson. Elaine Olson. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, dear. I laid out my argument for Elaine about the purity and therefore superiority of Julianna's example.

But Elaine argued right back. There were several hours between the two sightings, Plus, the restaurant was about four miles from the hospital. And in that four miles radius, you might say, I could have gone to any number of restaurants. The fact that I ran into her at that restaurant, I think, is a coincidence. I think it's... She could have gone any place, too. That's true. I mean, that's true.

I'm not saying it's not a coincidence. I'm just saying it's not maybe as pure as... Like, you can break down the sort of probabilities of a certain kind of person in a certain kind of neighborhood going. You don't think so. I don't think so. Wow. Do you think you're somehow prone to coincidences? Like coincidences find you more than they find other people?

I don't know. That's why, you know, in my own family, I've asked them, does this happen to you? And don't get, you know, much of a response. But you also are impossible to argue it. So when you ask, when you ask for coincidences, we have nothing to give to you because you are so set in your way. And 81, okay, yeah, okay. So what would Juliana, like, what would Juliana have to experience in terms of a coincidence that would impress you, do you think? Like, what would it need to be?

Well, you know, it's hard to tell. Just a couple of weeks ago, I had my cousin up at another doctor's not sitting in the receptionary gentleman across from me. This time it was about an Asian man in the waiting room, whom she later saw buying a melon at Trader Joe's. Which Elaine admitted wasn't as good as the other one. Act two, in God we trust. It's probably no surprise that we got a huge number of coincidence pitches about love, romantic love. A few years ago, after Stephen Lee proposed to his girlfriend, Helen, they brought their families together for the first time to celebrate the engagement.

My mom and my stepdad came to New York to meet with Helen's parents. and basically over the course of dinner and coffee afterwards, we discovered that basically my father had dated my wife's mother back in Korea back in the 1960s. And he had proposed to her. I'm going to slow this down a sec just to let it sink in. Helen's mother had almost married Stephen's father, his late father, actually. He died when Stephen was 17.

And how this all came out was that after they had dinner, they went back to Stephen's apartment. They were looking at Stevens' family photographs. So, you know, my future mother-in-law is flipping through the album, and she sees my dad. And so she asks, you know, oh, oh, what was his name? And my mom tells the name, and, you know, my future mother-in-law kind of just nods and kind of just moves on, keeps up flipping through the book. Doesn't even say anything. Imagine what she must have been feeling, seeing that photo suddenly, just like flooded.

Yeah. Crazy. She has a, she has, she must, I think she'd be really good at poker. Right. So Helen's mother says nothing, goes home. But later that night, she tells her daughter, this was the one, this was the man who might have been. She explained that the reason they hadn't married was because her father, Helen's grandfather, had chosen a different husband for her, the man who became Helen's father. All of them ended up living in the U.S., but they quickly lost touch.

Stephen didn't find out about any of this until a couple of days later. That's when Helen, you know, calls me and says, I have something to tell you. And she tells me, and I was floored by it. And, you know, together we call my mom. And, you know, she put a good face on it. But she was, you know, she was pretty shocked. Did she know that there had been this other woman that your father had been in love with? And that's the thing.

My dad told her years and years ago, you know, there was. was this other woman that I was in love with at one point, you know, long before I met you. But mom was like, look, you have a past, I have a past, we all have passed, who cares? Of course, you know, never thinking that she was going to share grandchildren with that woman. I mean, she later admitted to me that if she had known this from the very beginning, she would have not supported Helen to me. She would have, you know, it would just been like, look, being with the daughter of the other woman your dad loved, I mean, it would, can't. Can't you find someone else? How did you take this coincidence?

Did it come to mean anything to you or to Helen? Yeah. There's something about it, the fact that, you know, I didn't have the time with my dad that I wished I had had. Yeah. And then suddenly to kind of have him be kind of an active part of my life again, to think that I can talk to my mother-in-law and hear what he was like in his 20s, something that my mom doesn't even know.

And, you know, actually, Helens' father is a strong believer in the idea that somehow my dad somehow is behind all this, that somehow, you know, peace kind of helped make all this happen. At the time this next love story takes place, a guy named Paul Grachin was working in a Chicago suburb called Arlington Heights. He'd just started dating a woman named Esther. They'd been out maybe eight times. And I thought maybe it was time to get exclusive or become boyfriend, girlfriend, or whatever it was. And I was about to go out to lunch, and I was thinking about asking her on a Friday date that I had set up. And I went out to lunch. I stopped at the store prior to hitting the deli that I normally hit.

And I got some change, went to the deli, ordered my sandwich. It was six bucks or something like that. I pulled out a five from my wallet. And I pulled out the couple bucks change that I had gotten from, the store, handed the clerk one of the ones, and then I looked at it, and I pulled it back. Written on the dollar in pencil was Esther. And I thought, oh, that's weird. You know, I'm thinking about asking her go steady, and I get this dollar that says, Esther,

and it's bizarre. So I stuck in my pocket, you know, chuckled. I went to the store. I got one of those floating frames and a little piece of gold lame, and I stuck a dollar in the frame. So it was floating in the middle on this piece of gold, as if, you know, you're going to go in a church in Italy and they had a fragment from the robe of some saints or something like that. And I called it the Immaculate Dollar of Arlington Heights.

So on the Friday, I asked her out and she was, you know, all excited and we were all giddy. And then I said, hey, I have one more thing for you. And I gave her this frame with this dollar in it. I start unwrapping it and he's like, it's a dollar with your name on it. And he's all like beside himself. And I just look at him like, I'm freak. doubt. She kind of furrowed her brow a little bit and looked concerned and I said, you know, is there some sort of problem? I was speechless for the first time ever, but I said, you know,

remind me to tell you something later. So, okay, you know, I let it go and we, you know, had a relationship, got engaged, we got married, a couple years later, we were, unpacking at a new apartment that we had, and I found the frame with the dollar in it, and I stuck it up on the dresser, and she came in the room. I said, hey, you never told me about this dollar. What's the deal with that? She said, well, when I was 19, you know, I was a cashier working in a copy shop in downtown Chicago, and I was dating someone, and I just wasn't happy with him, and I just thought, you know, how do people know who the right person that they're meant to be with? how do they know who that is?

I said, you know what? I'm not going to worry about that. I'm just going to put my name on this dollar bill, and the guy that gets this dollar bill is going to be the guy that asks me to marry him. And I'm like, well, you can't just write your name I want. Actually, I think it was more like maybe 10 or 12. And so this dollar bill that you gave me,

I believe, is the same dollar bill that I wrote my name on, and I knew that we were going to be married the day that you gave me this dollar bill, bill. It was pretty crazy. And then he made me tell him the story again. He asked me like five or six times. And I said the details don't change. It's the same story. Like he couldn't, I think he was a little bit beside himself that that actually happened and that I didn't tell him. You know, I don't know how I found the will to not say anything to him, but I just remember like, do I, don't I, do I, do it? You know, what do I do? I don't want to freak this guy out. I, I don't. I

and be like, what? This girl's already talking about marriage? Wait, what? Forget it. You know, I don't read too much into almost anything. So I just kind of move forward. And then after she told me, I think I went through all the normal stages of whatever. And I just thought, what does this mean for us? Are we going to invent a time machine or our kid's going to bring world peace? Or like, well, what's the, like, is there some sort of bigger thing that we're not seeing here? now it just sits in that very same frame up on our dresser and I look at it every day that I wake up. Sometimes I remind her that we have it when she's upset at me or angry. It's never been a question in my mind like, you know what, I'm going to kick this guy to the curb.

But I do believe it's because of this dollar that I feel tied to him. I mean, obviously I love him, but I think that if it ever did cross my mind, I'd be like, but wait, this is my soul. I can't just walk out on him. You know, we don't even wear wedding bands. I'm like, why? Just, I know I'm stuck with you. You got this dollar bill. I guess he could also, you know, put it back out into the register

and then be like, look, I'm cashing this in. I think it's got to go to somebody else. He could do that. Paul and Esther Grachin. I got a dollar that says I. be your man If you forget the fear Let me take your hand

There's understand But it's a place I'm supposed to be Act 3 Brother, can you spare a dime? This story comes from Ryan Rosar in Los Angeles It happened when I was in college

I was actually pledging a fraternity and I ran into some of the seniors on campus and they were laughing about something. And so one of them tells me the story that had happened to him that day, supposedly, where he gets in the shower and about five, ten minutes into his shower, he hears a ting, and he looks down and sitting on the floor of the shower between his feet is a nickel and has no idea where this nickel came from or why it's there. You know, obviously, like, we, like, everyone was making jokes that, you know, he had change falling out of his butt. You know, people were like, were you eating dollar bills or, you know.

But anyway, we have our laughs, and I go home and I don't think much about it. The next day, I get in the shower and, like, five, ten minutes into my shower, I hear it. And I look down and right between my feet is a quarter. So my first thought was, you know, how did they do it? Like my thought was, I totally assumed that this must not have really happened to him. That was a setup and somehow they set this up to happen to me, but I could not figure out how. I was just like, you know, it had to be a prank, basically.

Oh, that's so, like, that's so smart of you to, like, figure out the whole con. That's, I mean, that's what I assume. Right. Then I go and I talk to him and I tell him what happened to me and I'm kind of watching his face for that, you know, the laugh or the glint in his eye of mischief or whatever. Right. And he just looks kind of sincerely mystified by the fact that this happened to me right after it happened to him.

Then like a week later, I get in the shower and like five, ten minutes in, I hear, ting, ting, ting. And I look down and there's about 35 cents between my feet. Right? So each time it's things happening, there's that moment of, like, no way. Before I look down and there's more change. So at this point, like, obviously my mind's going to some, like, weird places. Because I, you don't want to be the butt change fairy guy, you know, like, there's somehow, I don't know. There's just, there's nothing, no way this story gets good for me.

And then no explanation comes, but it doesn't happen for a while for like, I want to say probably a month. Until one day I'm about to get in the shower and I reach behind me to scratch my back and I feel something cold and metal on my back. And I turn around to show my, you know, to like turn my back to the mirror. Right. and there is like a whole pocketful of chain stuck to my back. What do you mean? Stuck to it? In what way?

Stuck to it. Well, this is what I figured out. So, like, it wasn't, there was no adhesive or anything. It was just, like, impressed into my back. So I figured out what was going on is that I had a bad habit of falling asleep with my pants on because, you know, it was college. I'd nap a lot. And so I'd also sleep with my shirt off. because my apartment was really hot.

So what was happening was change was falling out of my pockets onto my bed, and I was laying on it, and all that sweat and pressure was just sticking the coins to my back. Like, they're just literally, like, impressed into my back. And it was taking about five minutes of water running on it to dislodge them, at which point they're dropping at my feet. Clearly, I love this story, but I did not see the coincidence in it. Ryan said there was absolutely a coincidence.

It happened to that one kid, the senior, and then it happened to him the very next day. I disagree. I think this is probably a common quirk of college boy life. Lounging around, shirtless and groggy on unclean sofas and beds, probably half the boys at his college had changed stuck to them. I told Ryan so. I don't think there's any coincidence involved at all. I do

And because I'll tell you I know I've known lots of lots of guys who've lived in pretty squalor conditions and other than me and that other guy

I've never heard someone you know having the change falling from them it's just because they're not admitting it it's just because they're not admitting it I swear to God start asking start asking

hello hi okay can I come in for a second I knew Ryan wouldn't actually start asking, so I started asking. Because while Ryan's life is sure to contain many special and unique experiences, I am positive that this is not one of them. So off I went to prove him wrong, because finding others would be so easy. I happen to live in a college town, state college Pennsylvania, home of Penn State.

So I dropped by a frat house. Has this ever happened to you? No. Never in my life. Never? Never in my life, no. Never? Never.

Never. Wait, so have you never heard of that happening to anybody? Not even close. Never heard of it. What about you? Never, ever. Never? I mean, I think it'd be a nice icebreaker with women.

Why? Because, like, in a conversation, you could be like, oh, this weird thing happened to me. Yeah, I always got change stuck to my back or my butt for weeks. Anyway, lots and lots of nose. I asked whole classes. Has this happened to anyone? No. And then we thought, Pennsylvania.

It's too cold. Ryan went to college in Southern California. We got to go south. So we start reporters to the University of Virginia. Have you heard of this happening? No. I've never heard that before. No, none of us have heard how this happened.

No. No. Nope. That's the first. To Frats at University of North Carolina. Never heard of that problem, no. All the way to Miami, we asked at two different universities there. You never had it fall off in the shower.

No. No, I can't say that it has. No. No, it's never happened. That's never happened to me. Never. I've never heard of that happens to anybody until now, I guess. Maybe it's a California thing? So we went to UCLA to match the climatological conditions at Ryan's school. Has it ever happened to you?

No, that doesn't happen. It doesn't happen? It's not a thing. That is not a thing. So does that mean Ryan was right? It really was a coincidence? Maybe. I asked it one more class in Pennsylvania.

Has this ever happened to any of you? Oh, it has. Oh, my God. Ladies and gentlemen, Penn State Senior, Casey Phillips. It's actually like an ongoing joke in our apartment because there's just change in our shower all the time. It's just from you or others in your apartment too? Just me. Actually, there's change in my shower right now.

There's like a roommate texting me today. Why is there change in the shower? because I forgot to take it out. Because that happens to me all the time. Like he said, I take naps all the time. Like, I pretty much just sleep in naps, like, in, like, two hours spurs. And I just sleep in my jeans, and I have change in my jeans, and it comes out and it gets in my bed.

I figured it out the same way he did. That story was eerily similar. I am so pleased to meet you. You too. Coming up, don't. Don't lift the manhole cover. That's 23 letters, by the way. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio,

when our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Sarah Kainig sitting in for Ira Glass. We've borrowed today's theme from a Chinese saying, no coincidence, no story. We first aired the show in 2013, after asking you to send us your coincidence stories. And you've flooded us with more than 1,300 pitches.

We found trends. We found gems. We found stories impossible to class. My name's Jeff Dunn. Jeff done, okay. Jeff grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. When he was 16, he was hanging out with two of his friends at someone's house. The parents weren't home.

They're goofing around, smoking pot. They were in the living room that had a huge window on one wall. And so we're sitting there and we're kind of sitting along this glass wall and there's a dirt road outside of his house. And up this dirt road barrels this van. And the thing that happens next is what you think is going to happen when you see a, a white van like that at night. These two guys get out. They're all kind of bundled up,

and they pretty quickly just run to the back of the van, open it up, and pull out this big black bag. So they get out, they take the bag out, and they quickly run up this kind of small hill that's behind his house. And it's all wooded. There's no houses back there. So they run up this hill with this bag,

and less than like two minutes later, they come running back down. And they get in the van, and they take off. So Jeff and his friends do precisely what you don't want them to do. If this were an after-school special, this is the point where you're yelling at the TV saying, don't do it. Stay inside. But they decide they have to find out what the strange men in the van have deposited at the top of the hill.

So they run up there. We get to the top, and we kind of look around, and then we see that kind of on one side of it, there's this manhole cover, like a circus. manhole cover like you'd see anywhere. And coming from one of the edges of the manhole cover, it's in place, is long brown hair, human hair. Long brown human hair. They are teenagers, they are stoned, they are freaked out.

They have to tell an adult about what they've seen. A police car happens to drive by. They flag it down, and the officer tells them to get in the back. It became clear that she was really concerned because she then. said, yeah, there's been a girl missing on the west side of town for the last couple days. Oh, my God. So again, like, our hearts just sort of drop. And you hadn't known that hadn't been on the news or something like that?

We had no idea. You had no idea. Okay. So we just kind of got scared at that point. Can I stop you for a second? Is this story going to get funny or is this a horrifying story? Wait, actually, don't tell me. Don't tell me.

I can't tell you. So she calls another officer. And the other officer comes. there's a couple cars, and they both get out, and they tell us to get out, and they say, okay, wait at the bottom of the hill. So we're waiting. They go walking up to the top.

And it's dark, so we can't really see them that well, but we can see them well enough, and we don't really want to watch what's going on, because we see them bend over, pull the cover off. And I'm trying not to look, but of course I'm looking, and she pulled. up a human figure out of the hole. Oh, my God.

And then she says, it's a mannequin. I don't know what my friends are thinking, but I was sitting there thinking, that's the only, like, how does this story end up okay? And it doesn't in any universe, you know, like, unless you say it's a mannequin. Jeff goes to school on Monday,

tells his story in physics class, and the kid next to him says, that was us. We did it. We went around stealing holiday decorations, and we had to get rid of them, so we stuffed them under the manhole cover. The mannequin, by the way, had been the Virgin Mary in someone's nativity scene. I think the real coincidence is that it's like our close friends that caused us to happen to us. Oh, they were good friends of yours? Yeah. Right. All right. No, Jeff. Turns out that is not the real coincidence of the story.

My producer Brian Reed was listening to all these interviews as they were having to. happening, and he interrupted us to tell us we both missed the point. Brian has just pointed out that I'm missing. You and I are both missing the main coincidence. I don't even know the coincidence of my own story. Yeah, I submitted it to the coincidences thing. So the main coincidence is there's a girl missing at the same time. Yeah.

I have five words for you, Jeff. No coincidence, no story. Here's a definition of coincidence that seems right to me. A coincidence is a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related. with no apparent causal connection. It's that middle part, meaningfully related, that people seem to get stuck on. Because when events line up just so, you can't help it.

You can't help but wonder if there's a message in that. In that way, coincidences are kind of like shortcuts to very big questions about fate, about God, even to people who don't believe in either one. The notion that somewhere out there, someone or something, is paying attention to your life, that there might be a plan conjured through coincidence That notion seems to be most appealing when you're young.

We got one story about a young couple visiting Marrakesh in Morocco. They're at a restaurant talking like you do about old flames. And the boyfriend wanted to know about one guy in particular. I asked Kate, what did this guy look like? And Kate just stopped dead in her tracks and lifted one hand to her mouth. And with the other hand, pointed across the restaurant. And she said, oh, my God, he looked like that. And she crossed the restaurant.

and tapped him on the back of the shoulder. And it was him. The daughter of a jazz guitarist named Andy Riley wrote to us about the time when she was 19. She was listening to an Ella Fitzgerald album. I was listening to the song, That Old Black Magic. And at the end of the song, Ella throws in a line, that old black magic that Billy Daniels got me in.

And I've heard her, you know, sing that line on that album dozens of times before and wondered, who's Billy Daniels? But on this particular day, for some reason, I felt inspired to go out to the living room and ask my dad who Billy Daniels was. And he explained that in the 40s, Billy Daniels had sung Old Black Magic in a way that made it his song. And he was referred to as Mr. Black Magic, I guess, back in the 40s. And it was a big deal at the time.

And I'd asked my dad, had you met him? Did you ever know Billy Daniels? And he said that Billy Daniels was probably dead now. And just literally at that moment, the phone rang. So I answered the phone. And this playful, gravelly voice asked for Andy Riley. And I said, who's calling? And he said, Billy Daniels.

Hello, black magic hatch me in it's a pet. Hello, black magic tattooing. So last September, I was living in Roswell, New Mexico. And I had woken up in jail for like the last time. This is Edda Thorterson. When this happened, she was 20 years old on drugs, hanging out with street kids. Her mom offered to buy her a bus ticket to Washington State to go to rehab. Edda said yes.

She took her dog and got on the bus. In Los Angeles, there was a stopover at the depot, and this guy comes up to her while she's waiting in line to get food. She's got $2, just enough for some French fries. The guy starts asking her questions about her dog. And he starts asking the other venom questions, like, what are you doing, where you going? And then he asked me, are you from Alaska? And I was like, yeah, I am actually. And then he asked me, is your mom named Meg?

And I was like, yeah, she is. And he's like, oh, well, I'm Chris. I'm your father. I met you 10 years ago. And I was like, oh, holy shit. Edda had only seen her father that one time briefly, and she was 11. And then he pulls out a big lot of money. and like he pays for my food.

And then he hands me 40 bucks. And it's like, don't say I never gave you nothing and walked away. That, what, I, I'm like shocked by this story. And he didn't, that was it, you didn't see him again? He didn't. No. You could tell he felt bad. Did you expect something more to happen?

Like, did you think, oh, the hears how this is going to go. Yeah, I really thought we were going to go, like, sit down and eat. together and I was going to, you know, lay out my whole life story for him and he was going to explain his life and where he's been. I was kind of looking forward to that, but that didn't happen. Mostly I just, I want to, like, study his face for longer just because that's, I mean, I've seen him twice and I still can't really remember what he looks like. Do you regret not pursuing him in some way? Yeah, absolutely. In the moment, I was just, you know, I was so sick. I just really couldn't comprehend. It wasn't until I got on the bus that I was kind of just, like, why didn't I run after

him? I just spent my whole life wondering about this man and, you know, the chance to talk to him was put right in front of my face, and I didn't really understand that at the time, and I let it go. Emiliano Garcia Sarnoff also hadn't seen his father in many years since he was seven or eight years old. He lived in California, but he was visiting a national park in Mexico with his mother when he was 18. And they hiked to the top of a pyramid there. The whole place was sort of off the beaten track.

We were walking along. There were some people passed in front of us. And my mom said, oh, my God. Crowled. and then she turned to me and said, that's, that's your father. That's your dad. And it was. Also, coincidentally, it was Father's Day.

So I ended up sort of embarrassingly breaking down and crying on that pyramid. It was a really emotional moment for me. My father definitely, you know, his absence meant a lot to me. And we said, yeah, we're going to, you know, stay in contact. And after they said, bye, they left. And he came running back up the hill about 20 minutes later. and you can hear him panting. And he said,

Emiliano, I just want to say I'm sorry that I didn't stay in touch and that I love you. And he turned and went back down down the hill. Emiliano's story goes the way Edda wishes hers had gone. After a rocky few years, he and his father

did get to know each other and each other's families. Emiliano had a son, who now had a grandfather. Emiliano's father had left him when he was a baby. but when his father died some years ago, Emiliano was there at the hospital.

They'd had a real relationship. And that never would have happened, Emiliano said, if he hadn't seen him that day at the pyramid. Walking down that pyramid, I was talking out loud to myself, and I was saying, this is one strong memory I have, as I was saying, don't forget, don't forget, you know. I was just sort of getting angry with my future self,

which I knew would rationalize this event, you know, because I had a very distinct sense that I had felt that this was definitely a miracle. Something had intervened and brought us together. You know, you don't just run into your father on top of a pyramid. So I think I was a believer for about a week. And then... And then that very pause, that brings us to Act 5.

What are the chances? In order to let a good coincidence live a long and healthy life to get told and retold and take its rightful place in the narrative of your life, Sometimes you have to stop yourself from thinking it all the way through, why it happened really. Because the fact is any statistician will probably rain on your parade. We'll tell you these things happen a lot more often than you think. But a good coincidence is like a good magic trick. When you see one a struggle ensues instantaneously, between the thrill of the apparent miracle and the urge to debunk it.

This final story is by Carrie Weeks. He's a prop guy for the movies, but he told this at a storytelling competition. So here's my story. Nine years old, first time going to summer camp. And my grandfather gives me, before I go, he gives me his old pocket knife. It's practically an antique. And so the first thing all of us boys do when we get to camp is we pull at our knives and we start throwing them at things, trying to get them to stick the way Daniel Boone did.

And because it's in 1970s, there's nothing unusual about a bunch of young children throwing sharp knives around. And I got mine to stick in the floorboard. It was like, wong. And it's great, but when I pulled it out, the tip broke off. But anyway, camp goes on, and a few days later, I noticed my knife is missing. And I'll look everywhere for it. I look high. I look low.

It's gone. But then one day I'm walking through camp, and I see this group of boys throwing knives at a tree, and something tells me I should check this out. And sure enough, there's this boy there throwing my. knife. Now there's no mistaking this knife because the handle was red and green but the colors met in the middle and it's rolled together in a trippy psychedelic way and I've never seen a knife like that before since. So I walk up to this boy, he's a little older but I walk up to him and say hey that's my knife and he says no it's mine. And I say no that's my

knife, my grandfather gave it to me and he says no he didn't. He says, my grandfather gave it to me. And I'm confused all of a sudden. Maybe I should have thought this through a bit more. I thought he would just hand it over. And the other boys, they're like, move in close. And I'm thinking, could it be possible that his grandfather gave him the exact same knife that my grandfather gave me?

I mean, is this a thing? And I just didn't know it. But I look at the knife, and he's holding in his hand, and I look at the blade. and I see that the tip of the blade is squared off as though it were broken. And I say, that's my knife because I broke the tip off when I stuck it in the floor. And he says, what? That? No.

It came that way. So you can use it like a screwdriver. And I'll look at the other boys, and I'm not getting any help from them. And so I wander off, just thinking to myself, screwdriver, driver. I never thought of that. Well, as you can imagine, this really bugged me. And I don't mean just while I was at camp, but like for the rest of my life. And, you know, I kept thinking, why did I fold so easily? Why didn't I go to the counselors? And the only thing I can think of is this. I'm the son of a physicist. And I used to ask my dad these questions all the time. Like, dad, how far away is the sun? Dad, how fast is the speed of life?

light. Dad, what's the closest star? And he would give me these answers and these numbers that were just so huge. I couldn't get my mind around them. So my point is this. I better than most other children had an idea of just how vast the universe is. And therefore, how infinite the possibilities are. So the thing is, at the time, I thought, well, maybe the kids telling the truth. So the only reason why I bring this up is because this is what I was thinking of when some 32 years later I become the landlord of a small apartment building. And one of the first things I did as a landlord was I threw this guy out because he was a small-time drug dealer. So on the day he's moving out, I get a call from his neighbor across the hall, a guy I call

Budweiser Bob. And Budweiser Bob says, hey, this. that druggie is stealing your refrigerator. And so I hop down there, and sure enough, in the driveway is a pickup truck, and in the back of the pickup truck is a refrigerator. So I charge up the stairs, and I demand to know just what the hell is going on. And Nick, the druggie, calmly tells me and says, dude, when I moved in here, that refrigerator was so gross. I bought my own refrigerator and swapped it out.

And I put that one in storage, and now I'm just putting it back. And I look in the kitchen and sure not, there's another refrigerator. It's a little old, a little dirty, but it's working. And I'm trying to think this through. I mean, would someone really go to all that trouble of just swapping out a refrigerator and then putting in storage and bringing it back? Or would a guy go to the trouble of stealing a used refrigerator just to screw his landlord and replacing it with an even more used refrigerator?

Well, the answer to both these questions is, Yes. But I look up and there's Nick and he's expecting me to say something and there's his buddies who are helping him move and they're expecting me to say something. So I walk up to Nick and I'll look him in the eye and I say to him, say, you sweep up real good before you leave because there's just too many possibilities in this universe. Thank you. Carrie Weeks. His story was recorded live at a Moth StorySlam in New York City.

You can download the Moth podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. At the beginning of the show, I said I was a skeptic. But after talking to so many people about coincidences, including a Stanford mathematician who spent decades studying them, I end up here agreeing with this one woman I interviewed about her coincidence. She knew her story could probably be explained away with statistics and probability, but she said, there's just a poetry. to things like this when they happen.

There's some kind of beauty in it. There's meaning in the noticing of it at all. Today's episode was produced by Brian Reed and me with Alex Bloomberg, Ben Calhoun, Meek, Jonathan Menhivar, Lisa Pollack, Robin Simian, Alyssa Schip, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Our technical director is Matt Tierney,

music help from Damien Grafe and Rob Geddes, production help on today's rerun from Stone Nelson, Adrian Lilly, and Ruby Schwartz. As I mentioned at the top of the top of the time, the show. This episode is a rerun. I no longer work at This American Life. I peeled off years ago to make the serial podcast. And now I am hosting a new show. It's called Metro with Sarah Kainig, and it comes out this week. It's stories all about New York City and its most fascinating raw material, New Yorkers. If you're a fan of this American life, I think you're going to love it.

Search your podcast app for Metro with Sarah Kainig. And a huge thanks to the hundreds and hundreds of you who sent us your stories and took the time to let us intervie. interview you, including Layla Wright, Catherine Vandaputty, Bob Yonka, Eric Johnson, and Hannah Jacoby. Thanks also to Peter Aguero, John Bewin, Eric Menel, Jane Marie, Marva Hinton, Dave Hunter, Percy Diaconas at Stanford University, Julie Beer, Jen Fallon, Paul Rue West, Catherine Burns, and Jennifer Hickson, Michelle Harris, Erin Hanken, Bianca Tonus, Tony Barbieri, and Ben Shrier. Our original music about The Immaculate Dollar was written and performed by Bri Webb and Rich Burnett, produced by Bri and Jeff McMurridge.

His website, bribeweb.com. Our website, Thisamericanlife.org, where you can subscribe to our free weekly podcast or listen to the archive of over 850 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks also to Tori Malatia,

who's on vacation with Ira this week. They were so excited for their cruise. But it seems like by day three, fun's starting to fade. You also are impossible to argue it. So when you ask, you're so set in your way. I'm Sarah Kainig. I'm Sarah Kainig.

Ira Glass will be back next week with more stories of this American life.