ABC in Northern California and other oddities
I've lived such a banal existence that I don't have any earth-shattering experiences to share, but did have three that struck me at the time(s) as very odd:
1 - Was staying with a friend at the home of his sister and her family in a town to which I'd never been before: Fairfield, California, which is east of San Francisco. It may be hard to picture anywhere near a major California city being out in the boonies, but these places do exist. My memory of this place is of lots of dry, golden, rolling hills and a few California live oaks in the yards (they're called "live oaks," I'm not suggesting it's unusual to have live trees in CA). The family's home was a typical, modest ranch-style place, big yard, neighbors not too far away, but not too close. Not a subdivision; homes were built just off a two-lane country road.
Given that we were there three days or so, we did pitch in with some housework so as not to wear out our welcome. I was doing dishes in the kitchen, which was in the back of the house, occasionally looking out the window above the sink, which was facing west (can't believe I remember this so clearly; this happened about 18 years ago and I don't think I remember the name of a single person there other than my friend). I saw the family dog and cat near a tree in the yard probably 15 feet from where I was standing in the kitchen. I looked down at the dishes, then looked up again and noticed an extremely large black cat that looked to me just like a leopard moving from the left part of my field of vision and very gracefully leaping up onto a low branch of the tree. At that point I noticed that the other animals had taken off. I don't now recall how that animal moved away, but it was quickly, as I couldn't spot it again a moment later. That animal was there, and I recall asking my friend's sister if the had any black cats in the hills. She said that there were occasionally cougars/mountain lions spotted in the area, but that it was extremely unusual to see one.
Their house and yard were right up against a hill, so I could almost think it would be reasonable to see one of those golden mountain lions in the yard. But again, they're golden, not black, and what I saw looked precisely like a black panther to me. She just looked at me like I was nuts and we didn't talk about it again.
2 - In junior high, my family and I lived just outside of the town of Morgantown, West Virginia. Just for the heck of it, a group of girls from the neighborhood took a walk down a country road that went past our subdivision to look for "the haunted house." This was a rundown house on an even more remote country road that was probably half a mile from our homes. The area did have a lot of rumors of odd things happening over the years, and my brother had an odd encounter related to the house. We girls thought it was spooky that we found a toy devil's head by the side of the road on our way there, but we didn't experience anything at the house. That night, however, my younger sister had a little friend over to spend the night, and as they were playing Yahtzee at the dining room table, the friend, Elizabeth, said, "I keep looking at those little windows by the front door and thinking that the old witch from the haunted house is at the door." Shortly after the girls went to sleep (quite late) that night, I was sitting in my beanbag chair reading (this was the late 70's), then fell asleep. I woke up to hear what sounded like loud knocking on our front door (which was about 5 yards from my bedroom door). It repeated itself a moment later. I can still remember looking at the window in my bedroom and wondering why whoever it was who was visiting in the dead of night wasn't using the doorbell. Then I heard footsteps coming down the hall and they simply stopped very close to my door. I never heard them go anywhere else. In the morning my father said he had heard knocking, too. I don't have any idea what his reason was for not answering the door. Weeks later he couldn't remember anything about it.
Not the world's spookiest story, but it was truly frightening for me. Maybe one of those hypnagogic experiences.
3 - This one is a garden-variety psychic experience, nothing next to what many people seem to experience on a regular basis. I have, on occasion, spontaneously called people by highly unusual nicknames only to have them give me the strangest looks and say things like, "My father used to call me that when I was little and I haven't heard that in 30 years!" But on this occasion, I had begun working at a new job for a software company in Orange County, CA and didn't like the area at all (longed for the beautiful old trees and homes of Pasadena, near L.A.), and I hardly knew anyone at that point. I was at a birthday lunch for one of the software developers, sitting next to a woman who reported to me (she was an odd character in herself, but those are stories of a different sort), when she looked toward the entrance of the very busy restaurant we were in and said, "Oh! That's Mike, from Cisco (her former job). Mike.... Mike... Oh, what IS his name. It's one of those long, Italian names." And I was hardly paying attention to her at all (she was a bit of a drama queen and I tend to give very little energy to people like that) and sort of staring off into space when I swear to you all that the word literally just arrived in my brain, and I said, "Calabrese." She looked at me just gobsmacked (as you Brits say--love that word!) and said, "That's right. It's Mike Calabrese." Now, mind you, everyone I knew in Orange County at that point was sitting at that table. And I had never known a single person with that family name, nor did I even know it was a family name. In fact, at the time I was undergoing some root-canal procedures with an endodontist named Dr. Cavalieri, so if I were going to invent some multisyllabic Italian name, it probably would have been that one, as I thought it was a cool name (cavalier, caballero, all that cool etymological aspects intrigued me). I swear on my grandmother's grave I had never heard the name before. As she continued to look at me strangely I said, "I know when you're cheating on your expense report, too, so keep that in mind."
So it gets weirder. That same day I went to dinner with a colleague, to a Tuscan restaurant. Our waiter was at the table and I said, "Is everyone who works here from Tuscany? What does a Tuscan look like, anyway?" And he said, "I'm not from there, but one of the the other waiters is. I'll send him over" (he probably wanted to bail from our table in order to escape my blazing wit). Shortly thereafter, a waiter came over and introduced himself and said the other guy had sent him and I said, "He said you were from Tuscany. Are you Tuscan?" And he said, "No, I am from Calabria. I am Calabrese."
I swear it's true. Freaked out a second colleague that day.
Don't know what it means, if anything. Perhaps just Jung's synchronicity coming into play.
Cheers.
That's a good one! 
