From Wikipedia
An anecdote is a brief, revealing account of an individual person or an incident. Occasionally humorous, anecdotes differ from jokes because their primary purpose is not simply to provoke laughter but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, such as to characterize a person by delineating a specific quirk or trait, to communicate an abstract idea about a person, place, or thing through the concrete details of a short narrative. An anecdote is “a story with a point.”
Anecdotes, as stories, can be real or fictional.
From Wikipedia
Anecdotal evidence is an informal account of evidence in the form of an anecdote. The term is often used in contrast to scientific evidence, as evidence that cannot be investigated using the scientific method. The problem with arguing based on anecdotal evidence is that anecdotal evidence is not necessarily typical; only statistical evidence can determine how typical something is. Misuse of anecdotal evidence is an informal fallacy.
Anecdotal evidence is all that exists. Even so called hard facts are ultimately accounted for by your personal experience, otherwise you could not be aware of such facts. Just because someone else agrees that your experience of the facts is in alignment with their experience does not shift the experience itself to be an objective phenomena. It simply shows an alignment of the subjective (and anecdotal) experience of two (or more) people.