The Most Haunting “Glitch In The Matrix” Moments
There's nothing more chilling than a "glitch in the matrix" moment. From eerily accurate premonitions to unexplainable time jumps, these Redditors have stories that will have you questioning everything. Some things in life just don't have any possible explanation, and sometimes, we have to put aside rational thought and accept that maybe—just maybe—our reality isn't set in stone.
1. Deja Vu
When I was in high school, my mom, my little sister, and I would eat dinner together every evening and tell each other about our days. At the time, my sister was young and still in elementary school.
On one Monday during summer break, we were all having dinner and my sister told us about how she and our next-door neighbors were playing with their new cat when it got loose outside.
They had to spend the whole day looking for it. Fast forward two days later, and my sister told me the exact same story she had told two days prior...My mom and I looked at each other funny because we both clearly remembered the cat story. When we asked her if she had mistaken the day, she just gave us this blank look and said had no memory of it. But it got even creepier.
When we called our neighbors to ask them about the cat incident, they told us all of it happened that same day, Wednesday, and they weren't even in town on Monday. So my sister told us a story two days before it happened and had no memory of it.
How is that possible? Where was my sister on Monday? We still don’t know what happened.
2. Two-Faced
One day 16 years ago, when I worked at a gas station, I was watching a teenage couple get slushies at the back of the store. I was taken aback when the young man looked toward the till, because I noticed that he had a very severe facial deformity. But then, when I kept watching, I noticed something bizarre. When he looked to the girl, he looked perfectly normal in profile. Confused, I assumed I imagined it the first time.
Well, they eventually came to the front of the store. Then his face was distorted again, like a terrifying gargoyle. I kept looking at the girl to see if she could see what I was seeing but she didn’t seem to.
And every time he turned to her, his face was normal. Trust me—this was like a Halloween mask. It was not an expression anyone could possibly make.
It was SO DIFFERENT and terrible. Anyway. As he looked at me and finished paying, I felt like a massive black cloud of hate inside me, like an actual thing. It was like I had drunk a glass of liquid hate. Then they left.
I’ve never been able to explain it.
3. Mystery Man
My mother did all her OB-GYN appointments with a doctor in downtown Austin. He was on the fifth floor of this hospital building and had a long-time receptionist named Alison.
I remember going to her with her appointments when I was little, and my mother would always make a game out of finding the office and being in the waiting room, which was colorfully decorated with a forest scene.
Alison was a super sweet woman who was basically a babysitter for us kids, too. She would read books to us, provide coloring books, and occasionally even listen to our dreadful knock-knock jokes. We all referred to her as Alison Wonderland.
Anyway, years down the road, I got married and pregnant and started searching for an OB-GYN since I had moved back to Austin recently.
My mother suggested I see if that doctor, who was super young when I was born, was still in business. Well, I could not find his name in the hospital directory, so I figured I would just swing by the office and check.
My mother happened to be in town (she had moved years ago) and came with me. We both joked about it being so familiar but in reversed situations now.
As we reached the stairs, we ran into an eerie problem. There was no fifth floor of this hospital office building. Odd. We both must have misremembered it. We knew it was on one of the top floors, so it must have been the fourth. Nope, not there. We thought maybe we were in the wrong building...except we parked in the same parking garage from 20 years ago and walked the same route.
That doctor does not exist. Never did, apparently. My mother and I are the only ones who remember him and Allison Wonderland. We have asked around, including among the hospital staff.
We even looked up our birth certificates, which are new copies, and it just lists "attending physician." One of my childhood memories is fake.
4. A Bad Trip
Back in early July, my family was going on a road trip to Montana to visit our grandparents. Prior to the trip, I had a horrible, horrible feeling about going.
I kept having flashes of car accidents in my head, and I was sure that we were going to get in one if we left. It was so strange, because I have a pretty severe anxiety disorder, but this didn’t feel like my anxiety at all.
I actually never have anxiety about road trips. I love them! Anyway, we left Saturday of that week. I had told my parents I had a bad feeling about driving up there, but they dismissed me as being anxious.
I had honestly never felt so certain about something in my life. Getting into that car felt like signing my death sentence.
So, we get about six hours in, and at this point, I start to think I was being ridiculous, and a wave of calmness just washes over me. This is where stuff gets strange. My dad passes an underpass and everything just shifts. I feel like I saw everything in slow motion for a whole four or five minutes. My parents were joking beforehand, but their faces moved so slowly, and then the light in the car started to shift.
This was the scary part, because I thought I must have been going insane. For a few seconds, there was a huge illumination of light into our car, and I looked at my family, and could not tell who they were or what they meant to me.
And then, it’s like everything just came back. The light shifted back, and I knew who everyone was.
Still, it felt like something imperceptible had completely changed. I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of the past few minutes. When I reached back to remember, I saw blood, our car, and another minivan in total shambles on the side of the highway right beyond the underpass, and mangled bodies—and that wasn’t all.
I remembered sensations I should not have known: what spattered brain matter looks like, the smell of something burning, the way I couldn’t breathe.
None of it had ever happened, yet I remember that the car in front of us had switched lanes even though there was a truck in front of us, realized it at the last second, and hit us with a lateral impact.
I have no history of psychosis, and I have never been in any sort of car accident. This wasn’t PTSD, and I have never had anxiety over being in the car in any sort of way prior to this.
And maybe I could have just brushed it off, but I still think about it when I’m driving in my own car. It’s made me a more cautious driver. I don’t know what happened, it was just a weird situation.
I remember having the distinct feeling in that moment that I had passed on in some sense. I am not a spiritually sensitive person by any means, I am a scientist at heart, but this truly was something I cannot explain.
