Same Names

Confusion reigned in Bulawayo Magistrates’ Court. Smart Ngwenya, waiting to give evidence in a different case, was brought into the court room. The mistake was realized after the charge had been read and denied. Embarrassed court officials hustled him out and led in another Smart Ngwenya (ngwenya means crocodile) who also turned out to be the wrong man. The ‘correct’ Smart Ngwenya was brought in at the third attempt.

Patricia Kern of Colorado was sent a tax demand for $3000 from a job she had held in Oregon, a state in which she had never set foot. Inquiries showed that Patricia DiBiasi of Oregon owed the taxes. Both were born Patricia Ann Campbell, on 13 March 1941, and shared a social security number. Both had fathers called Robert, both married military men within 11 days of each other, both worked as bookkeepers and had children of 21 and 19.

In January 1985 Peter bacon of Eyam, Derbyshire, crashed in to a car driven by Peter Bacon of North Anston, Sheffield. A couple of months later, John Stott, whose car crash was witnessed by Bernard Stott (no relation), and investigated by a police officer called Tina Stott, was taken back to a police station where the three people were met by desk sergeant Walter Stott.

(from ‘The Best Fortean Times)

Love Will Find a Way

In New York on business in 1980, writer Ian Livingston was invited by a friend to spend a week in Cape Cod.

On the second night there, they went to a local bar, where they met two girls, and Ian ended up talking to Jane. ‘The four of us spent a lot of the remainder of the week together. Although Jane was English, she was spending an indefinite time in the USA, and we did not bother to exchange addresses.

‘The next holiday I had was in Corfu in late August. There I met an Irish girl, Elizabeth. At the end of the holiday we did exchange addresses, as she was living in Manchester; my parents live in Manchester.

‘At the end of October I phoned Elizabeth, told her I was coming to visit them, and suggested we go out for a drink. She agreed. So it was that on a wet, early November night I rang the bell of a flat in Manchester. The door opened and there, looking as aghast as I was, stood Jane. Elizabeth and Jane shared a flat.’

(from ‘Coincidence’ by Brian Inglis)

No Escape From Love

‘Over 50 years ago – when I was a very young man – I had an intense affair with a beautiful woman somewhat older than myself.’ Michael Relph nostalgically recalls.

The woman told her husband she was leaving; drunk and emotional, he stormed off threatening to take his life. Back at Relph’s flat, she seemed unmoved, ‘but I found the responsibility too great. I told her that at all costs she must find him and stop him committing suicide.’ She left the flat to look for her husband.

Such was Relph’s distress over losing her that he decided he must go somewhere with no associations which could remind him of the ignominious end of his first love affair; and this prompted him to visit a distant relative, a bank manager in a small Sussex town.

‘He invited me to luncheon. As he took me across the deserted market square to his local pub for a pre-lunch drink, my gloom lifted a little in the knowledge that there was nothing here to remind me of my lost love and no possibility of chance encounter.

‘A hotel stood centrally in the square and at its entrance a car drew up. The two people who got out as we approached were my lover and her husband. We were the only people in the little square.’

Many years later, when the romance was briefly rekindled, she told Relph how much she, too, had dreaded such an encounter. ‘She and her husband had only decided to eat at the hotel because they had taken the wrong road. Neither of us had ever been in the town before, and had she or I been one minute earlier or later, we would have missed one another.’