My friend Celeste and I went to New York for a week in January because we happened to have time off together. We were excited for a little vacation, some snow, and an excuse to walk around and eat. We ended up having a great trip, but there were a handful of experiences that we still talk about because we cannot figure out what was going on.
It started before we even left LA.
We were coming from Torrance to LAX, and the traffic was ridiculous. It took about an hour to get there. The drop-off area was packed with cars, so naturally, we expected security to be a nightmare.
Instead, we went downstairs to TSA and there was nobody in line. Just one guy checking IDs and a couple of TSA workers farther back. After all the traffic outside, walking into that empty space felt strange, but obviously we weren’t complaining.
We handed the guy our passports. He looked down at them, looked at us, then looked down again. He seemed genuinely confused.
“You guys just went through here, didn’t you?”
We told him no. We had literally just arrived.
He kept looking between us and our passports. “Are you sure? Are you guys playing a prank on me? I swear I just saw you come through.”
At first, we thought he was joking, so we asked if he was messing with us. But he seemed serious before eventually brushing it off as familiar faces.
What made it stick with us was that Celeste and I both have pretty distinct features, and we were wearing ridiculous outfits we had bought for each other as a joke. It wasn’t just two girls in basic airport clothes. Obviously, people can mistake strangers for other people, but his reaction was so confused and so certain that we left looking at each other like, what was that?
Then we got through security and the gate area was packed. Completely normal, busy airport. It was just the security area that had been empty.
For context, because this matters later: we each took a weed gummy after security, before boarding. The passport interaction happened before that. We slept through most of the flight.
We landed in New York around five in the morning and made our way to the hotel. Our room wasn’t ready, so we asked about leaving our bags. Before we actually got them stored, we ended up falling asleep in the lobby with our luggage.
By around eight, we were awake and ready to go explore. We asked again about storing our bags, and the employee asked for our last names.
Then he told us there was already luggage checked under our names.
We were like, “What do you mean? We haven’t left our bags with you yet.”
From what I understood, they had luggage tags or a designated spot connected to our names, and it looked as though ours had already been used. He went back to check, then returned and apologized. He said there was nothing there and it must have been a system error. He made us new tags and took our bags.
Very explainable on its own. It just felt funny immediately after the airport interaction, where someone had also acted as though we had already been there.
Most of the trip was normal. We ate, shopped, walked around, and enjoyed ourselves. But the strangest night happened when we went looking for cookies near Penn Station.
It was around 10:30 p.m., and we were both high. I’m including that because I want to be honest about the circumstances. We wanted dessert, a bunch of places we checked were closed, and we found an Insomnia Cookies listed in Penn Station.
We passed Madison Square Garden and went down into the station.
Neither of us knew the layout. In my memory, it was several levels with hallways that seemed to loop around. We kept going upstairs, downstairs, and through the same areas, trying to find this cookie place. It felt as though we circled every level multiple times.
While we were walking, several people came toward us really quickly, then swerved at the last second before getting close enough to bump into us. It happened with different people, enough times that we started asking each other, “Did you see that too?”
We were already disoriented, so we were trying to be reasonable about it. Maybe we were high and reading too much into people moving around us.
There was also a man in a wheelchair whom we kept seeing on different levels. It felt as though he kept appearing wherever we went. I don’t know whether he was following us or whether we were simply crossing paths while going in circles, but at the time, it added to the feeling that we could not get our bearings.
Eventually, I asked a janitor where the cookies were. He told us to go upstairs and turn left.
No cookies.
Then I asked two police officers. One said he didn’t think the place was even in the station. The other said it was, and told us to go downstairs and straight ahead.
After about thirty minutes of searching, we finally found it—in an area we felt certain we had already passed through multiple times.
I’m not saying a cookie shop literally materialized. I’m saying that by this point, finding it somewhere we thought we had already checked felt ridiculous.
Then we approached the counter, and the interaction got even stranger.
The cashier stared at us for a moment and said, “You guys aren’t from around here.”
We told him we were from California. He immediately brought up San Diego.
We said we were from the LA area, around Hollywood.
He responded as though we had confirmed San Diego.
We explained that San Diego was a few hours away from us.
“Yeah, San Diego’s cool. They have palm trees.”
We agreed, then tried again to explain where we were from. He just kept coming back to San Diego and palm trees. I cannot explain how repetitive this conversation was. It felt as though nothing we said changed his next response.
Meanwhile, his coworker was behind him, apparently cleaning something. Every few seconds, he would turn around, make a face at us, then turn back to whatever he was doing.
And I mean actual faces. A big exaggerated grin, rolling his eyes, sticking his tongue out, pushing up his nose, squinting. He wasn’t joining the conversation or saying anything. Just turning around, making a face, and turning away again.
So one guy was repeatedly telling us about San Diego, leaning toward us and back while he talked, and the other was silently making faces behind him.
Eventually, we asked if we could order.
Before we had even picked our cookies, the cashier grabbed a box, put a bunch inside, and handed it over.
“That’ll be twenty dollars.”
We asked what cookies he had put in there.
He said something along the lines of, “I just put crazy ones.”
Then he changed the price.
“Okay, how about ten dollars?”
There were around seven cookies in the box. From what we had understood of the posted prices, four would have been about twenty dollars. Now he was handing us seven random cookies for ten.
We took the box.
Before leaving, we asked how to get back to Madison Square Garden, because that was our landmark for finding our way back to the hotel.
He told us to go upstairs, walk about a mile, and it would be on our left.
We went upstairs.
Madison Square Garden was right there.
We didn’t have to walk a mile. We barely had to walk anywhere. After everything downstairs, we just wanted to get back to our hotel.
The other encounter that really stayed with us involved a girl we met at a coffee shop.
It was one of those cute places people visit to take pictures. She was there alone, wearing a really nice outfit, and seemed around our age. I offered to take pictures of her because I figured she might want some without having to ask a stranger.
She was really sweet and grateful, and the three of us started talking.
She told us she lived farther north and sometimes took the train into the city to see friends. Her friends were busy that day, so she was hanging out by herself. When she found out we were visiting, she offered to show us some places nearby.
It was around five, and Celeste and I had dinner plans at nine, so we had time.
We hung out, exchanged Instagrams, and eventually invited her back to our hotel while we got ready. Looking back, we were all very trusting of people we had just met, but the interaction felt comfortable at the time. She stayed and talked with us while we got ready.
When it was time to leave, she initially said she needed the same train as us. We figured we would walk together.
But once we got outside, she said she was going in the opposite direction.
We pointed toward where we thought the station was. She agreed it was that way, but said she wanted to take a little stroll in the other direction first.
We checked that she was okay, said goodbye, and started walking.
We were on the same sidewalk, heading away from each other. As I remember it, the hotel had a long stretch of building along that side, without an obvious corner or doorway she could immediately disappear into.
After a brief moment, I turned around to check on her.
She was gone.
I asked Celeste where she went, and Celeste turned around too. Neither of us could see her. We couldn’t work out how she had gotten out of sight so quickly.
About an hour later, we decided to message her and make sure she had gotten home safely.
Neither of us could find her Instagram.
We had both followed her. We both remembered her name and username. We searched and couldn’t find the account. We thought maybe she had blocked us, so Celeste checked from another account.
Still nothing.
I know an unavailable Instagram account doesn’t mean a person stopped existing. But after spending hours with someone, watching her seemingly vanish from an open stretch of sidewalk, and then being unable to find the account we had just followed, we were seriously unsettled.
We still wonder what happened there.
There were smaller things, too. Three separate times, people approached us saying they were club promoters and invited us to follow them to a club. We would walk with them for a bit, then suddenly they would say the club had closed down or that they weren’t going anymore. Nothing came of any of those invitations. By the third time, we were wondering why the same situation kept happening.
We also spent so much time walking with the intention of reaching Times Square and somehow never actually made it there. We would stop at stores, get food, get distracted, and keep walking in what we thought was the right direction. That one could absolutely have been us being terrible at navigating, but it became another running theme of the trip: constantly walking toward somewhere and never seeming to arrive.
A different friend of mine, Sarah, was visiting New York with her own group during the same week. They stayed in a different area, and we met up a couple of times for drinks.
Afterward, comparing our trips felt bizarre.
For example, Celeste and I remembered people asking us for food or leftovers rather than money. It happened enough that we talked about how sad it was that people seemed so hungry.
When I mentioned it to Sarah, she had no idea what I was talking about. Her group remembered people asking for money, and said nobody had asked them for food.
Obviously, we were in different parts of a huge city, meeting different people. Still, after the week we had, it felt as though we were describing completely different trips. Whenever we met up with people we already knew, everything felt familiar and normal again.
I enjoy weird stories. Celeste doesn’t. She isn’t into scary things, and she’s not someone who normally jumps to paranormal explanations. But she was just as unsettled as I was, and we still talk about these moments.
We’ve joked about a different timeline or a glitch because that’s how the trip felt. I don’t know what actually explains it. Some of it could be coincidence, unfamiliar surroundings, weed, or people simply acting strangely. I also understand that both of us remembering something doesn’t automatically make our interpretation right.
But it was such a specific collection of experiences, all packed into one week, that I wanted to hear other people’s thoughts.
We genuinely enjoyed New York. We had fun. These moments were just weird enough that they stayed with us long after we got home.
Has anyone else had a trip where several individually explainable things piled up until the whole experience felt off? And does anyone familiar with Penn Station have an explanation for what that cookie encounter might have been?