It was March 2018. My wife, Ingrid, woke me up in the middle of the night. She said, ‘The bathroom door is locked, and our son Rob is sleeping in his bed.’ You could only lock the door from the inside, so that was strange. The lock requires force. It couldn’t close itself by accident. Ingrid feared a burglar might be hiding inside. I took a knife from the kitchen to unlock the door. Ingrid was standing behind me, holding a heavy object to smash into the head of the burglar. Only I never believed a burglar was hiding there. I had become too accustomed to God’s pranks to consider it might be something else. The unusual had become the new normal. Even the laws of physics had gone out the window a few times. And I was right. No burglar was hiding in the bathroom. Ingrid was baffled.

It was the last seriously peculiar incident in the Decade of Strangeness. The number of unusual events that have taken place is truly remarkable. Most occurred between 2008 and 2018. After that, strange events became rare. Ingrid and Rob also noticed the spooky incidents. Whenever something mysterious happened, we hummed the theme from Midsomer Murders, a British crime drama series. It radiated an atmosphere of mystery and eeriness, much like the theme of The Twilight Zone.

Candles had popped out from their stands, travelling eye-popping distances on several occasions, leaving Ingrid with the question, ‘Are there any ghosts out there doing this?’ And so, once Ingrid decided to test the supposed spooks dwelling in our house, by saying, ‘If you are here, pull this card from the refrigerator.’ A magnet attached the card to it. And then she waited. Nothing happened. However, the next day, the card was on the ground, at a noteworthy distance. Something had shaken the refrigerator. The toothpaste on top of it had also fallen. That is no proof of ghosts, but it is a remarkable coincidence.

If something happened that defies the laws of nature and we couldn’t think of a natural explanation, or was in other ways highly peculiar, thus a noteworthy coincidence, I just put up my Sneek accent, and said, ‘Het is gewoon behekst juh.’ It’s just haunted, man. In other words, nothing to worry about. Ingrid is not a logical thinker who understands science. Otherwise, she would have shared my logical conclusion that this world is not real. But if I said that, Ingrid rolled her eyes or became angry. And so, I made these jokes, or I would say, ‘There is more between heaven and Earth, Horatio.’ Ingrid wasn’t religious, so I couldn’t bring up God either, as another logical conclusion is that Someone created us.

Before the Autumn of 2008, I didn’t take notice. Something was slightly off, but I just accepted it without questioning my worldview. There had also been incidents suggesting A******* was interfering with my life from a distance, and some of them scared me, but there were too few to become suspicious. There was no reason to suspect a connection with the other incidents either. However, the events of the Autumn of 2008 made me take notice from then on. And there was no turning back. We live in a scripted reality, and God directs the script. Related remarkable coincidences are doubly strange. Something weird happens, and then something equally strange happens with a meaningful relation to the previous peculiar event. As the following example demonstrates, we usually don’t notice. As the Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff once said, ‘You only see it once you get it.’

At the office, our team, the Green Team, worked on twelve Java services. They all had names, which were acronyms like GAS, CIQR, CBBOX or OGWS. One was named KISS, and another was named CUS, which sounds like the Dutch word for kiss. On 27 January 2025, I completed a release for CUS, and the release number became 3.45.0, which I told the other team members. Someone else then said, ‘That is strange. I just released that same version 3.45.0 for KISS.’ Releasing two services with the same release number on the same day is remarkable already. But the names of the services made the coincidence truly astounding. I alerted the other team members and stressed the amount of planning that would have gone into making this happen if it were intentional. The others didn’t appreciate it as much. And I thought, ‘Welcome to the Matrix.’ Seconds later, another team, the Yellow Team, on the opposite side of the aisle, began discussing a matrix they had built inside one of their Java services, loudly enough for me to hear.

On 1 March 2006, my father had worked for forty years for his employer, Roelofs, a road constructor. His employer threw a party for that occasion, but an exceptional snowstorm blocked the roads. Several guests were unable to attend. People slept in their cars on roads blocked by snow. As far as I know, that didn’t even happen during the epic winter of 1979 when parked cars became covered in snow, but not while driving. But it was March by then, while we had a regular winter that year. In the Netherlands, the winters are mild. In hindsight, the roadblocks happening on the same day my father had a party, as he had worked forty years for a road construction company, is a noteworthy coincidence. Only, it didn’t suggest that anything out of the ordinary was afoot.

In 2006, Ingrid went to a psychic fair. A medium asked the audience, ‘Did someone drop a plate today?’ She had dropped a plate that morning. Then the medium continued, ‘I see trains and railroads.’ We live next to the railway station. She asked, ‘Does anyone recognise this?’ Ingrid remained silent. She didn’t want to go on stage. Then the medium said something Ingrid couldn’t relate to. After that, the medium said, ‘I see a sensitive boy who could benefit from swimming.’ Ingrid believed it referred to Rob. A year later, I started swimming to cope with repetitive strain injury, and have been doing so ever since.

In 2007, Ingrid’s mother had passed away during the night. In the morning, we didn’t know that yet. I woke up Rob because he had to go to school. After that, I closed the door of his room. A few minutes later, Rob couldn’t get out. The door lock malfunctioned. It was impossible to open it. I had to use an axe to free Rob. By then, it was too late for Rob to go to school as the school bus had already left. Then the phone rang. Rob’s grandmother had passed away. And so, Rob could come with us to see her lying body.

We then had to clean up Ingrid’s mother’s apartment. We brought most of her belongings to a second-hand shop. There was a lot of stuff, including a doll that had always been on her bed. A few months later, Ingrid returned to her mother’s apartment to fetch the mail of her late mother. A new tenant had moved in. That same doll, wearing the same clothes, sat on the bed in her mother’s bedroom again. A decade later, Ingrid returned, and the same woman still lived there, so Ingrid discussed the doll with her. And then the truth came out. It was not the same doll, but another one of the same type.

On 1 January 2008, an epic fog covered the Netherlands. It was the densest fog ever seen, enhanced by powder fumes from the fireworks. Car drivers couldn’t see the road before them. Pedestrians walked in front of cars to point the way. We were staying with my brother-in-law to celebrate the New Year. I didn’t dare drive back home, so we walked. At the end of 1988, I had walked through a dense fog, thinking it resembled the future’s visibility as I planned to look for a room in 1989. That was the year A******* crossed my path. That visibility of the future was similar in 2008, even though it didn’t cross my mind at the time, and A******* would again have something to do with it.

In January 2008, the lottery jackpots of the two major Dutch lotteries fell in my hometown of Sneek within two days.¹ It is a small town, so it is not so likely to occur, but also not so unlikely that you would call it a miracle. But what was about to happen to me that year was a statistical miracle, probably less likely than winning the lottery jackpot twice.

In the summer of 2008, a good-looking woman sat by the side of the swimming pool. She was watching me. The following week, she was there again, watching me. It had been quite a while since a good-looking woman had shown interest in me. That gave me the good feeling of still being attractive, but I kept a distance. It went on for a few months. I wasn’t willing to cheat on Ingrid. And I had a family and a responsibility. It couldn’t go on, so one day, I walked out when she came in. She understood the hint and didn’t return. I then realised I would never become unfaithful to Ingrid. That was just weeks before I learned about my True Love, and also about my primary responsibility. Things were about to go wild.

She says, ‘Ooh, my storybook lover
You have underestimated my power, as you shortly will discover’

Paul Simon, She Moves On

Featured image: dense fog, somewhere in the Netherlands on 1 January 2008

1. Jackpot valt weer in geluksstad Sneek. Leeuwarder Courant (11 January 2008).