Man wonders if he’s losing his mind after 20 years of bizarre déjà vu with the same stranger

Have you ever experienced the odd coincidence of running into the same stranger repeatedly? While many might find such encounters unsettling, experts have theories to explain this phenomenon. Some suggest it could be related to unfinished business, as reported by Oprah. The same occurred to a man on Reddit who shared his experience of bumping into the same man multiple times over the past 20 years, sparking his curiosity. He turned to the Reddit community for insights and vowed to "get to the bottom" of this bizarre pattern if it ever happened again.

“I've been seeing the same guy at random for over 20 years all over creation,” the man captioned his post from 2021. These frequent encounters with the stranger had led him to question his own sanity. “This is a topic that has questioned my sanity and haunted me for years and years,” he shared, explaining that he first started noticing the same person at the age of 17. Now 42, he had spotted the man in various locations, from parking lots to stores and even at events. “I live in a heavily populated area and I have lived all over the tri-state area. I've seen him in parking lots. I've seen him in stores, I've seen him at events, but the craziest one was when I saw him at a destination wedding in St. Martin about 10 years ago,” the man explained.

At that time, he decided to approach the stranger at the wedding, trying to keep the conversation light and avoid making things awkward. “I approached him at the wedding,” he recalled, but the interaction quickly became one of the "awkwardest" moments of his life. “He (the stranger) kind of laughed and shrugged it off, but I could tell he knew he was seeing me all over the place, also,” he said. Interestingly, the man experienced long stretches where he wouldn’t see the stranger for a year or two, but when they did cross paths, it always felt like the encounters came in waves.

This time, however, things felt different as the man’s life had changed after becoming a parent. His most recent sightings of the stranger took place at a store called "Buy Buy Baby." “I was buying things for my newborn. Within the same month, I saw him in a Home Depot about 30 miles away. Every time this happens, he pretends like he doesn't see me, but I can tell he's as sketched out as I am,” he explained. The man considered these encounters the “final straw,” marking a tipping point that led him to decide he would finally get to the bottom of it if he ever had another déjà vu moment with the stranger.

“If I see this guy again, I am going to get to the bottom of it. I don't even care what it takes. The guy that I've been seeing is a lot older than me, but it seems like he hasn't aged a bit, as crazy as that sounds,” he concluded. His post invited countless reactions. Relating to it, u/eil32003 shared, “As a child, there was a lady who walked past our house almost every evening. I never knew her name. She would smile and nod and so would I. Never thought about it all. Fast forward twenty years and I’m a grown woman with children, moved to a suburb about 30 minutes away and... I start to see the same woman, taking evening walks through the neighborhood. I remembered her from my childhood and it was kind of weird. She even looked very much the same. I came to meet her daughter who was around my age. Turns out, the lady had simply moved to the same neighborhood as me. And she kept up the habit of walking her whole life, which probably kept her young-looking!” “The next time you see him, why don't you ask him what his name is? It won't really answer your question, but it won't seem as strange,” u/Irorak suggested.