Ever experienced the supernatural phenomena known as 'deja vu?' The feeling that things seem eerily familiar? Almost as if someone was playing a trick on your brain or something? If ya' have, believe it or not, it's quite common among humans.
In the hit movie The Matrix, 'Deja Vu' is said to be a glitch in the matrix. A simple Google search defines glitches in the matrix as firsthand accounts of some small but puzzling occurrence that has no logical explanation. For those who have experienced a glitch in the matrix, it can be puzzling, and even frightening depending on the circumstances. We've collected some of the most shocking stories of glitches in the matrix told by those who personally experienced it. These stories come from Reddit, and have been edited for clarity.
“Still Freaks Me Out To This Day”
“I did magic mushrooms with 4 of my friends awhile back. While we were tripping, I saw 3 of my friends’ hair turn grey, and they visibly looked much older than what they actually were. They looked like they were at least 50.
For some reason I didn’t see the 4th guy. We were all sitting around a table on chairs, and we were only 2-3 feet apart from each other. After about a minute I snapped out of it, and I saw everyone again, young and normal. We were 21 at the time. This stayed with me for a while.
About 8 months later, the 4th friend, whom I didn’t see in my ‘vision,’ died in an accident. It’s been 7 years since he died, and this still freaks me out to this day.”
Power Of Imagination?
“A few winters ago, my hands were severely chapped, cracked, and bleeding. I was sitting in a very long stop light and sort of zoned out. It felt like time slowed way down. I started rubbing my hands imagining that I had an excellent hand lotion. I started imagining that I was putting it on my hands, and that this lotion was so good that it healed them and softened them.
The light turned green and I drove on and didn’t think of it again until later when I noticed that my hands where 100 percent healed. Not dry or cracked or bleeding. Perfectly smooth.”
“What Just Happened?”
“I was in the kitchen with a friend. I was reaching up to the highest shelf to try and get a serving tray down. As I tilted it towards myself to pull it down, a huge kitchen knife (the Halloween kind) came sliding off, point first, toward me (This was in a place I was renting, no clue who put the knife up there). Time seemed to slow down as I watched the knife fall toward my body. I heard it scrape against the tray as it slid off, and watched the point aimed right for my solar plexus.
I had time to think, oh snap, this is it, this knife is about to plunge hilt deep into my belly at a downward angle and I’m going to die in a strangely calm and detached way. As the point of the knife touched my T-shirt, the whole knife just winked out of existence as if it had never existed.
It was just there and then not. I was ready to write the whole thing off as a weird hallucination or something, and question my sanity, when I looked over at my friend who is standing next to me.
His eyes are huge and his jaw is open, and he says, ‘What just happened to that knife?’
I started freaking out and shaking all over, ‘Oh my god you saw it too!?’
He saw the exact same thing I did. We looked everywhere for a knife like that in the kitchen and opened every drawer because maybe it fell somewhere and we somehow didn’t see or hear it? We looked and looked but there was no knife or anything like it was anywhere in the house. This was back in 2007, a week after Thanksgiving. Craziest thing that has ever happened to me. I wonder about it all the time and wish I had an answer.”
The House Where Things Go Missing
“I lived in a house where little things would go missing often. For example, one time I was trying to change the batteries on the remote and dropped the backing. Both my mom and I saw where it landed, but we never found it again. We searched everywhere.
In November, I changed the time back on a small clock we had on a bookshelf in the hallway. I thought I put it right back, but a while later, my mom asked me where the clock was. We looked all over for it and never found it.
Fast forward to February, it’s about 3:30 am and I’m watching TV (I worked swing shifts, so I was often up late after work). I start to get chilly because it’s February in Denver, so I go to grab the blanket off my bed. I don’t even have to go into my bedroom because my bed was right by the door. The house is tiny, so I’m no more than 15 feet away from the chair I was just sitting in.
I go back to sit down 20 seconds later, and in the middle of the chair is the clock and a dinner knife.
We were always losing the remote in that chair and digging in it, so it’s unlikely the clock was in the cushions, but I still spent a long time trying to set up the clock and the knife so they would pop out onto the cushion. I couldn’t do it. The bookcase was too far away for them to fall without force, which created a problem as well.
I sat down and watched television a while longer because I didn’t want to admit it was creepy.”
“Good Thing We Got It Out Of There”
“My family had moved into this new house a few months ago. Since I’d been moving in all day, I hadn’t had a chance to close the door to my new room until it was time to go to sleep. So I close my door and go to crawl in bed and notice this full, floor length mirror attached to the back of the door. I’m sitting there for a moment debating if I should just sleep thinking like, okay that’s super creepy. Eventually, I decided that there is no way that I’m sleeping in the same room as that thing, so I awkwardly walk to my mom’s room and ask if she’ll help me unscrew that thing. I told her it was just too creepy for me, and she completely understood where I was coming from and agreed to help remove it. She then goes off to get the screwdriver from the garage so we can unscrew it.
Now here’s where it gets really creepy.
So we get two or so bolts out when, all of a sudden, all the rest of the bolts just stop. Like full dead stop, will not move anymore. She’s confused and mentions this to me because it was turning just fine until then.
Then, out of nowhere, the mirror starts to fog up. Like, completely fog up, from top to bottom. We watched it turn from clear as crystal to bathroom hot shower opaque and the two of us are standing there watching it do this. We were just standing there, staring in complete horror when it suddenly stopped. Then the fog vanished, and then the bolts started turning again as if we didn’t just step into the opening of a horror movie. We look at each other and immediately continue to unscrew the mirror so we can get it the heck out of there as quickly as humanly possible.
We were both pretty freaked out for obvious reasons and there were some, ‘good thing we got it out of there,’ jokes to try and make the moment less abjectly horrifying. Regardless of what it was, I’m pretty convinced that there was either a glitch in the matrix or that mirror was a portal to another world.”
Am I Seeing Doubles?
“This happened to people I know, not to me directly. A woman who works with my mum was out doing her grocery shopping one night and ran into ‘me’ at the supermarket. She told my mum about the encounter the next day and asked why I didn’t recognize her as we saw each other once every few weeks when I’d go and help with any heavy lifting at their store. My mum confirmed that it couldn’t have been me, as I was at home. The woman also mentioned feeling oddly nauseous during the interaction. I was about 16 or 17 at the time.
Another woman I know said she didn’t know I walked through the park near her home after work. Dumbfounded by her observation, I listened as she explained that she’d seen me every so often after work, walking briskly through a large park (which I do know of but have only driven past) as if I was exercising. She said I walked close by her the previous evening and she was going to speed up to catch up with me and say hello but as she started to, she began to feel ill so she slowed down and then sat on a bench for a few minutes. By then, she’d lost sight of me. This happened about three years ago and both occurrences were miles apart.
The next occurrence happened when I was 20. I was living on campus on the ground floor of a three-story building. There were only 36 people in the building so I knew everyone by sight at least when this happened. A new guy moved into the third floor. We’d exchanged pleasantries and I knew his name and what floor he lived on but not much else. I was coming out the front door one morning and he was coming down the stairs. He said, ‘Oh I just saw your sister going up the stairs!’ I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘Your sister, she’s here all the time. She wears her hair the same as you.’ I used to change my hair a lot. At the time it was midway down my back and fire truck red. There was nobody on campus with hair like mine. I noped out and went back inside.
I think about it a lot, to be honest. I have been to the park a few times since my friend (and co-worker) told me the story. I’ve also drilled them for more information. The way she described seeing ‘me’ was creepy as heck. I’d love to see this other ‘me’ but on the other hand, I’d also hate it.”
The Matching Set Of Keys Mystery
“I was housesitting my parents’ place for a few weeks while they went up the coast about 1,200 miles away. In the middle of house sitting, I lost my keys. On the key chain I’d lost was a unique little key fob, my car keys, the card to the car park gates at my flat, and the keys to my flat.
I only have one card to the car park gates which was on that key chain, and the spare keys to my flat were with a friend. I got a replacement card to the gates from building management, my spare flat keys from my friend, and from there got my spare car keys from the filing cabinet in my flat.
I told my mother about the lost keys on my next call, and she said she had an extra set with her she thought were mine. She described them, and they were my keys, right to the unique key fob.
Somehow the keys I’d been using for my car for more than a week to drive back and forth to my flat daily, with the card I used on my car park gate, and the keys to the flat, were suddenly in her bag 1,200 km away. When she arrived back home, sure enough they were my keys.
I’d never had more than the one car park gate card, yet I’d used it for more than a week before it disappeared, and it was my original card when it came back with her. I’d also only had the two sets of car keys, and there was no way for those keys to be both in my flat and used to drive my car to my parents’ place to find that I’d lost keys. The unique key fob was a little handmade leather thing that fit nicely in my hand.
The only logical explanation is that my parents sneaked back for a bit and accidentally picked them up and then drove back, but looking at times on photos as they were taken, mum and dad were in the photos taken all through their holiday including the time between when I last drove and when I realized my keys were lost (about a 5 hour period).
Not to mention, I also checked where they were regularly when I’d call, using Find My Friends. That, or over time I’d accidentally built two very unique looking but identical sets of keys and forgotten it, including the two little leather fobs.”
How Did That Get There?
“I was having a vivid dream of getting into a fight with my brother over something pointless and becoming so infuriated that I punched a hole in my kitchen wall (through old drywall/plaster obviously) which cut up my knuckles pretty bad.
I woke up the next morning and found my hand just fine.
I walked into the kitchen to make some breakfast, and to my surprise, there was a hole in my kitchen wall exactly the same as in my dream.”
“No One Can Tell Me Any Different”
“I was driving thought West Texas, and on the left of the road, there was a small, abandoned mud brick house with an old broken wagon wheel leaning on its front left corner. About a mile down the road, there was an abandoned mechanics shop with a rounded, rusty, corrugated tin garage behind it.
We keep driving and I feel like I’m losing it because it’s so flat and boring out there. A few minutes past, and all of a sudden, I see a small building in the left of the road… It’s the mud brick house, broken wagon wheel and all. About a mile down the road… The same exact abandoned mechanics shop, with the same, exact rusty garage out back.
We didn’t get turned around, and I hadn’t fallen asleep and gotten confused. I pointed out the repeat house and shop to my husband, and he had no idea what I was talking about. He said that was the first time he’s seen them, and he really liked them because they were so classic looking.
To this day, I swear to God we accidentally drove through a kind of Bermuda Triangle thing in West Texas, and no one can tell me any different.”
“I Don’t Remember Any Of It”
“I worked as the instructor for the pit of my old school’s band during band camp. We always go to a university for a week and sleep in the dorms. When I was a student, I had a room-mate help wake me up in the mornings, but since I had already graduated and was considered an ‘adult/teacher’ I had a room to myself.
On our last day of camp, I woke up at about 8:30 am to one of the assistant directors banging on my door yelling for me to get up. I had set several alarms to wake me up at 5 am, then some at 6 am in case I overslept those, and so on. My girlfriend even agreed to call me to make sure I wake up because I can be such a deep sleeper sometimes.
Well, I jump out of bed and throw some clothes on and run down to the field, having no time for a shower or breakfast since we started an hour ago.
Before I left my room, I grabbed my phone which should have been charging on the stand next to me. Instead, it was on the other side of the room, with my bag that was already packed to go, which I don’t remember packing the night before. My phone didn’t light up when I hit the home button, but I was in too much of a hurry to worry about it at the time.
When I got to the stadium, my girlfriend told me she called and I answered and told her I was already going to the cafeteria building. I even replied to her text message when she asked if I was awake.
I have never sleepwalked in my life, but that is the only explanation I have because I don’t remember any of it. But sure enough, when I plugged my phone in, it was dead. I checked my messages and found we had a full conversation that I am completely unaware of.
Again, all I can think of is sleep walking. My room was locked and no one else had a way in.”
The Definition Of Evil
“I was driving home from work one morning and was waiting to turn right at a stop sign on a somewhat rural road. A number of cars were turning left onto the road I was on. As the last one passed, a blue minivan, I locked eyes with the driver. I am 100% convinced that I either saw a demon or some physical manifestation of pure evil. The minute I noticed him, the hair on my neck stood up and I felt physically sick.
From what I remember, he had no deformities or anything explainable but something still felt so…off and terrifying about him. It was like looking at something ALMOST human. I did make eye contact, only for maybe a second, but that was all I needed to feel the way I did. This was probably two years ago now and I’ve never forgotten that otherwise boring ride home.”
A Glitch In The Matrix Or Fate
“There is a teeny secondhand bookstore in the town I live. I’ve been driving by it every single day for almost 3 years, and pretty much every single day I say to myself, “That little bookstore is so cute, I need to go check it out”. But I never go.
I’m a personal assistant, and this week my boss had me take a day off because he was sick and didn’t want me to get sick too. Random cancellations like this only happen probably 4 times a year.
I was sitting at home and decided that I wanted to read a new book. I have two or three books that I bought months ago and haven’t read yet, but none of them sounded good at the moment. So, I decided to finally go to the teeny tiny secondhand bookstore in town to see what it was all about.
When I got there, there wasn’t a single person in the store except the man working at the register. I wandered upstairs where they keep the fiction books and browsed around for probably 30 minutes or so. The store was, indeed, super cute and charming and it was fun to roam around for a bit, but I figured that I had seen it all and decided to head home.
I went back downstairs and walked toward the door, but I noticed a row of books that I had missed when I walked around downstairs earlier, so I went to peek down the isle. As soon as I turned the corner, a little old woman that I hadn’t heard come in the store startled and dropped a book off of the top of the pile she was looking through. I picked it up for her, AND IT JUST SO HAPPENED TO BE ONE OF THE VERY FEW COPIES OF A BOOK THAT MY OWN DAD WROTE AND PUBLISHED OVER 15 YEARS AGO??!?!
He probably only sold 25 copies and they were all sold in a completely different state, thousands of miles away from where I am now. Yet I somehow still happened to be in the exact place at the exact right time to be near a woman that just so happened to drop a copy of a book authored by my own father right as I walked by so that I, his daughter, could bend down and pick it up for her??”
“What The Heck Did She Hit?”
“My girlfriend was in an accident this past April, car absolutely mulched, windows smashed, steering wheel and dash was facing what was once the passenger side. It looked like she had driven right into a brick wall, reinforced with steel or something.
Got a call at 11:30 pm from her, crying and screaming. I got out to her just as the police showed up to take her in and ask her questions. I was shocked that she was upright, walking and talking, and when I saw the car later on, I was shocked she was alive at all.
Now here comes the glitch, neither me, my girlfriend, or the police could see/find what she crashed into. No other cars were smashed, no lampposts were hit, other than our car, there was no sign of a crash on that road.
What the heck did she hit? Or! What hit her?”
The Black Hole Experience
“I was in Orlando competing in the cheerleading national championship, and we were packing up our hotel room to leave. I discovered that the new ring that my aunt gave me was missing. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it, so I gave up and headed to the airport with my team.
We were at our gate in the airport waiting for the airplane and then I feel a thud in my lap. It was my ring! I didn’t see it land in my lap or see it thrown. Just felt a very slight thud. I asked everyone around and nobody knew what I was talking about. I am sure nobody was Just messing with me.
On the flip-side, last week I had an earring in my hand and then I accidentally dropped it down my shirt sleeve as I was about to put it on. Literally saw it go down my sleeve. But it seriously just disappeared. Like, I didn’t even feel it next to my skin like I should have. Even swept the entire room and it’s just gone.
It’s like I’m experiencing black holes or something.”
“I Swear I Bought Them”
“When I first moved to Nevada there was a 7-Eleven by my apartment that sold scratch tickets. One day I was bored and went and bought about $30 worth of them and lost money. Never do that, ever, just wanted to for some reason. I lost, threw them away, and didn’t ever buy anymore.
Then within that next month somebody is talking about how scratch tickets aren’t allowed in Nevada and I was like, ‘No, they absolutely are, I bought some at the 7-Eleven near my house.’
And they assure me if that is the case then either the place is doing it illegally(which could be, but it wouldn’t make sense because if a cop saw it or just about anyone who knew that law, they would get busted pretty easy), or I’m remembering wrong(which Im certain I’m not).
So I go check, either the same day or the next after that conversation, and they were gone. My roommate and boyfriend who also frequented that 7-Eleven, and the 7-Eleven workers themselves swear up and down that they were never there to begin with.
My friend and husband even make fun of me for it to this day and call me crazy. But I swear I bought them, went home, scratched them, lost and then threw them in the garbage, I have a vivid memory of doing all that, from making the choice to buy them to tossing them in my pantry garbage.”
“We’re Still Not Sure What Happened That Night”
“My boyfriend and I got home around 2:30 am, after going to a concert. I was sober, he was relatively sober (3 drinks). We were both hungry, so we decided to boil water for pasta and sauté some spinach, a relatively quick to make meal.
We had a gas range stove top in our previous apartment. I put on a pot of water for the pasta, and turned the gas on that jet. The water starts to boil after a bit. I then grab another large pot for the spinach, and put quite a bit of oil in the pot to prepare to sauté it. I remember looking at the oil in the pan and wondering if I would need more for the spinach.
I turn away, as my boyfriend did something silly (I don’t remember what), and as I turn back to the jet to turn it on he just goes, ‘WAIT, NO STOP.’
I look at him confused, and he points to the jet. All of the oil seeped through the bottom of the pan, onto the stovetop, which I was about to ignite. It would have turned into a horrendous grease fire, and I probably would have been badly burned. We were really weirded out by this and put the pan aside, and cleaned the jet. We figured there must have been a hairline crack in the pan that caused it to leak out.
So the next morning, I grab the pan and put water in it. Surely, if oil seeped through it due to a hairline crack, water would pour out of the bottom of the pan. Nothing happened, water stayed in the pan. We even put oil in it again to check, same thing, nothing leaked out of the bottom.
We’re still not sure what happened that night.”
