Meant to Be (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

MrBallen (0:01)

Today, I'm going to tell you four stories that are about people who had really incredible experiences. Some incredibly good, some incredibly bad. But in all of these experiences, the people in these stories came out of them believing that everything that happened had a purpose. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark & Mysterious, delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to get the follow button, a nice ice cold coffee. But don't tell them it's just watered down mud. Okay, let's get into our first story called Cab Trouble.

On the night of October 23rd, 1975, a middle-aged man named Mike Crane closed the garage door of the taxicab company that he owned in Boston, Massachusetts. He was getting ready to head home for the night, but as he went around checking that all the doors were locked and that the lights were off, the phone in the office began to ring. And so Mike was a little annoyed because it's late, he wants to go home, but still he went over, he answered the phone, and it was one of his drivers. And the driver said that his car battery had died on the road, and he now needed to jump. Now, Mike did think about just calling a tow truck because then he could just go home. But this particular driver was really young, and he was new to the job, and so Mike felt bad, leaving him stranded out there. So he said, all right, I'll be there in a minute. He grabbed his car keys, and he headed out the door. A few minutes later, Mike was driving a spare taxi cab down a dark side street full of apartment buildings on either side, until he saw the broken down cab on the side of the road, and his cab driver was outside waving him down on the sidewalk. So Mike pulled over, he popped the hood of his own cab, he got the jumper cables out, and he went out and he connected them both to the broken down cab and his own. And then once they were in place, Mike got back in his own cab and he started the engine. Then he rolled down his window and he was about to lean out and tell the young driver what to do next, when there was this flash of movement outside the passenger side window that caught his eye. And he squinted into the darkness and he saw there were these two men, sort of shady looking guys, leaning up against this wall of an apartment building across the street. And they weren't doing anything, they were just standing there. And all of a sudden, Mike, who was a very practical, no-nonsense person, had what he could only describe as a vision. In this vision, he saw those two strange men walking across the street and coming over to the driver's side window of his cab. And then one of them asked Mike for a cigarette, and while Mike was distracted fumbling for his pack of cigarettes, the second man yanked open the door and put a knife to Mike's throat. And as soon as he saw that, the vision faded and it went back to the two guys still standing across the street. It was just this vision that Mike's had sort of inexplicably.

But to Mike, the vision was so clear, so vivid that this shock of fear coursed through his body. It was like it had been beamed into his mind from somewhere else, like a movie projected onto a screen. I mean, he had never experienced anything like this before. In fact, really, he didn't even believe in the idea of psychic visions. But for some reason now, he had a feeling in his gut that he had just seen a glimpse of his own fate. And what he'd just pictured in his mind was literally about to happen. He just knew it. But before Mike could figure out what to do with these thoughts he was having, the two men across the street began walking in their direction, just like Mike had envisioned. And as soon as this began happening, Mike's heart began to race. He looks out his windshield and he sees his cab hood is still popped. He and the other cab, they're still connected, so he couldn't just drive away without first getting out and disconnecting and shutting everything. And then also, he didn't want to just abandon his other driver, whose cab didn't work right now. Like the battery was still dead and had not been jumped yet. But then, Mike remembered that he had a gun in his briefcase, which he kept with him because he had to carry these large sums of money around town for his business. And so just before these two strange men crossed the road and came to his window, just like in the vision, Mike quickly fumbled and opened up his briefcase, pulled out the gun, and positioned it under the window, aiming outside where the men couldn't see he had the gun. And at the same moment that Mike has this gun in position secretly, one of the men came around right to the driver's side of the window, and he leaned into the window sort of conspicuously. And just like Mike envisioned it, he asked Mike for a cigarette. The second man was positioned behind the first man, and he was sort of near the door handle, right where Mike had originally seen him in his vision. And even though Mike couldn't see a knife in the guy's hand, he just knew it was there. And so he knew he had to act right now. So Mike raised the gun out of hiding and aimed it at the two men and shouted at them to drop the knife. And the men, they froze in confusion, and Mike suddenly wondered what on earth he was even doing. I mean, he really had no reason to believe these guys actually meant him any harm, other than the fact he had had this vision, which he couldn't explain. But then the second man, he reached through Mike's window, and he dropped something into Mike's lap. And then both of these men turned, and they ran away. Once these guys were gone, Mike, who's got this incredible surge of adrenaline going through his body, he like can't believe this is real, he picks up the item that's been dropped in his lap, and it's a knife. And Mike was so shocked that he had been right, that this vision had been right, that he began turning the knife over, just to make sure it was real, but it wasn't like his mind playing a trick on him. And as he rotated the knife and just sort of looked at it from every angle, he saw something on the knife that was so crazy, he just couldn't believe it. To Mike, it felt like the last of many signs that his vision was real, and wherever it came from, it was meant specifically for him.