1. In 1773, Bailey Jackson from Knuckle, Oregon, was mocked by his neighbours after climbing a tree and refusing to come down. He had been there three days when everyone in Knuckle was killed by bears.
The bears were too full to climb the tree after Bailey, having already eaten well.
2. Tax collector Kim Nguyen narrowly avoided death after dropping her iPhone while crossing a busy road in the resort town of Nha Trang.
Before she could stop to pick it up, a voice in her head reminded her it was already two years old.
She left it there to go buy a new one, avoiding the truck which would have flattened her if she had stopped to pick it up.
3. Irish farmer Ted Driscoll liked to pretend it was his cows talking when he heard voices in his head.
When one day the cows stopped making sense, he called in a vet who to confirm his suspicions.
It was an outbreak of Mad Cow Disease, and the early warning meant they were in time to confine the spread of the disease to the Driscoll farm.
4. The voice in her head told Meg Rodriguez not to open the bottle she found on the beach.
There was a note inside, and the voice told her it would contain bad news.
So she didn’t, and is still alive and happy today.
What would have happened if she had opened it?
Nobody knows, but you can’t argue with alive and happy.
5. When a voice in her head warned Texas mother Kari Olbrecht that her child was in danger at school, she dropped everything and raced to Don Townsend Elementary.
The voice had been right: the teacher was just sitting down to read a book to the class!*
6. Tom Bowles kept being woken up by a voice in the dark telling him he was buried alive every time he turned off the light off to sleep.
He soon learned to sleep with the light on.
Unless the voice was right, and he was just imagining he was asleep in his bed with the light on…
7. A trip to a local winery could have led to disaster for Martina Morrow if she hadn’t heeded the voice in her head.
It warned her that the vineyard’s owner, who also crushed the grapes with his feet as part of the “experience”, would reveal cloven hooves.
She made her excuses and left before he took his shoes off, saving herself a battle with the devil.
The last one hadn’t gone so well, and she wasn’t in the mood for a repeat.
8. Peering into the cloudy blue eyes of the newborn in her arms, Patricia Keyes knew he wasn’t her baby.
She had seen the nurse help him out of her body and hand him straight to her.
But the voice in her head insisted that her child had been swapped for this one while still in her womb.
9. Dave Weston was saved from a nasty bite when the voice in his head warned him the burger he was about to eat looked “mean.”
Using his knife and fork to examine the beef patty, he found several half-crushed, sharp-edged teeth poking out of the meat.
10. The voice in his head told Karl Weizenmüller not to eat the basil he had planted because it was already flowering.
He didn’t listen, however, and it’s always possible to smell when Karl is around, because of the
scent of basil.
A more unfortunate side-effect is that he can no longer go to Italian restaurants as seeing people eat pesto makes him cry.
*possibly this one: I Need a New Butt!
(Excerpted from my newsletter dated 26th November, 2022. Sign up for the full, up-to-date experience!)
