Ok, before I tell this story I want to preface it by stating:

Yes, I was on a combination of several drugs of varying degrees of legality and illegality when this happened, and so was my friend, but the next day he corroborated the story exactly as I remembered it, down to every last detail.

So, a few years ago me and a few friends went, as we did most weekends, to Rotterdam for a party. We were really into the Drum 'n Bass scene at the time, and Rotterdam was had the best raves in the country. They went on all night, they had the finest DnB and Breakcore DJs in the world regularly performing, so we regularly took the train down on the weekends.

Now, we lived in The Hague, as I still do, and so after the party we would always have to take the train back to The Hague from Rotterdam. This meant that we would have a choice to make that usually split up our group: either leave "early" at 4-ish to catch the last night-train that left around 4:30AM, or stay till the end of the party and catch one of the first morning trains back at around 6:30 or 7ish. The latter option was always the more fun, because it meant you got to stay at the party longer, and you got to ride the morning train which was always full of people on their way to work in their suits, where we would then wander in completely off our heads on various substances and generally annoying everyone. When you're 18, this is hilarious.

The split was usually pretty simple: those of us who didn't do drugs left for the last night-train, and those of us who were on drugs would stay until the lights would turn on at 6 at which point we'd leave still jumping around and smiling incessantly. So one night/morning, we arrived at Rotterdam's Blaak Station to wait for the train. This particular night me and one of my friends had consumed an absolutely ridiculous amount of XTC and alcohol, and we were in dire need of something to drink to avoid dehydration kicking in, so we walked over to a vending machine at the end of the platform. It was way at the end of the platform as well, so we were separated from the rest of our group by a very long and abandoned train platform.

All messed up and shaking we put our last remaining bits of small change together and came to the realisation that we were ten cents short of enough money to get that bottle of water that was just calling to us through the glass like a siren from Greek mythology. We looked around in a bit of a panic, thinking we weren't going to be able to get a drink, but all we saw was an empty platform and a basically empty train station. Then someone coughed behind us, and we both turned around, startled. There was an old man there, like a tiny, crumpled up, really old dude.

He didn't say anything, he just held out his hand, and then opened it to reveal two 5cent coins lying in his palm. He looked at me as if to say "take it". I took it and hurriedly starting shoving coins into the vending machine and pressed the button corresponding to the bottle of water. We wanted to thank the old man so we turned around but we couldn't see him anywhere. Bear in mind we were surrounded by nothing but a long and empty train platform and only a few seconds had passed between me taking the money from his hand and shoving everything into the machine, and he was really old, so in order to have walked down to the beginning of the platform and disappeared into the station he would've had to have run very fast, which didn't seem possible considering how old and decrepit he looked. There was also nowhere else he could have gone except onto the train tracks, but we didn't see him anywhere, no matter how hard we looked (creeped out as we were).

The next day I wasn't sure if it was a memory, a dream, an illusion or just me being high on substances, so I texted my friend something like "yo, do you remember us getting a drink from the vending machine at Blaak and something weird happening?", and got a text back like 20 seconds later saying something along the lines of "the old man??? I was convinced that had only happened in my head..", so I called him up and asked him what he remembered happening, and he repeated the story exactly as I remembered it, with every detail in the right order, not missing anything. We still occasionally talk about it, and we still don't have an explanation as to where the old man came from, or how/where to he disappeared.