I’ve had one inexplicable thing happen in my life. I remembered it today and texted an old buddy about it, and his memory of it was identical to mine.

One day after high school, 3 friends and I piled into my car and drove to Kansas City to meet up with some other friends who had moved there. They weren’t home when we arrived, and at some point we had the idea to go to the zoo to kill time because we thought it was free (and we were broke). Turns out the KC zoo was very much not free, so we decided to go back to our friends’ home.

We tried to take a shortcut through the parking lot of the Blenheim Square Research Hospital next to the zoo but got turned around in a series of one-way lanes and toll gates before we were dropped back onto the surface streets. Thing is, when we got back on the road and were trying to get our bearings, none of us could see the hospital we’d just left. We pulled into a gas station a block away and asked the attendant which direction we were from the hospital.

“Which hospital? I don’t know where that is.” When we asked him to show us where we were on a map, he pointed to the corner of Lamar Ave & Shawnee Mission Parkway - which was a good half an hour drive from the hospital whose parking lot we’d been in less than 5 minutes ago.

We were utterly flummoxed. I can’t emphasize this enough: our 1 block drive dropped us 30 minutes from where we’d started. We drove through a parking lot, turned around, and were… transported?… across town. Everyone was cold sober and very freaked out. When we compared notes, we all remembered it exactly the same way. We kind of jokingly (and more than a little seriously) talked about the “wormhole” through Kansas City.

To this day, my recollection of this is crystal clear and I simply cannot explain what happened that day.