A Family Checked Into A San Diego Airbnb — Then Dad Spotted Himself In The Giant Beach Photo On The Wall

A family checked into an Airbnb in San Diego, looked around the room and stopped at a huge aerial photograph of people swimming at the beach. The father said: “That looks like me.” Then the rest of the family was in it, too, swimming in the water – 10 years in the past. This was a random rental with no connection to the family.

“We are literally in this picture. It’s the craziest thing.”

@aubsbirrell We can’t make this up….. this is the craziest thing 😭 @libby_birrell #fyp #sandiego #creepy #tf ♬ Blue Danube Waltz – The London Symphony Orchestra

It’s being estimated that the odds of this is in the “tens or hundreds of millions.”

The wall art appears to be an aerial photograph printed on canvas. It’s not a bespoke painting. The people in it are too small and too far overhead for their faces to be recognizable. But the family genuinely recognizes themselves as the swimmers in the photo.

• It’s possible they’re wrong. Dad says “that looks like me” and everyone maps tiny faceless figures onto familiar relatives. It could be confirmation bias.

• But it seems to be an actual coincidence, where an aerial photographer captured the family that happened to be at the beach and the image wound up used as commercial wall art. The San Diego short-term rental owner bought a copy.

Aerial beach scenes are common mass decor. Target sells canvases like that. Gray Malin does too.

I don’t know what the actual odds of this would be – how many copies of the print exist, how many beaches the family visited, how many rental walls carry aerial beach art, or how many people appear in the photograph.

And a family that vacationed at a location beach might return to the area, a coastal rental is probably more likely than average to display local beach photography, and while there are billions of people in the world people going to the beach, getting photographed, and finding the photograph when traveling again around the same place years later maybe isn’t that long tail an event?

But let’s actually take a claimed ‘one per 100 million guest arrivals’ Airbnb actually says it’s had more than 2.5 billion guest arrivals, so this would have happened 25 times!

Regardless, people are freaked out between this mix of horror movie, simulation theory, and coincidence (and background belief that the Aribnb owner was somehow manipulating the whole thing).

“I change it out for every new guest.”
“The Matrix is getting very lazy.”
“Now those are SUPERHOSTS.”

One commenter imagined the host researching every booking and printing guest social media photos as a personalized welcome. Another wondered what would happen if the brother disappeared and then vanished from the picture like in Back to the Future.

One woman claimed an uncle who received a Mackinac Island postcard whose random background tourist was her late grandfather eating an ice cream cone, like the watch in Somewhere In Time (1980).

I’ve actually experienced the deliberate version of this, when the W Doha Googled me before my stay and filled a table with custom Photoshopped memes of my face.

The St. Regis Abu Dhabi later put this site’s logo on a cake. Both of those were a decade ago, and I’ve never really been recognized that way since (which is good).