Historical Coincidences That Defied The Odds

Some events that happened in history are truly unbelievable, and these events include many coincidences.

The odds of these things happening were very low and yet, they happened. Let’s take a look at some unbelievable historical coincidences you may not know about.

The Titan And The Titanic

We all know about the wreck of the Titanic thanks to that wonderful movie released in the ’90s. The Titanic was a huge ship that was deemed “unsinkable” yet… it sank in 1912.

Shockingly enough, a novel called The Wreck of Titan: Or, Futility was released just a few years before. The story is about a great ship called the Titan that hits an iceberg and sinks. You can’t make this stuff up!

Cheating Death

Situations like this one really make you think whether destiny is real or not. A Dutch cyclist named Maarten de Jonge was supposed to be in not one, but two flights that ended up in tragedy.

He was scheduled to board the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared and was never found, and the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, but he canceled both reservations shortly before they took place.

The Costume Of Oz

The Wizard of Oz was an amazing movie released in 1939 that was based in the novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. When the crew were getting the costumes ready for the movie, they discovered something incredible.

They went to a thrift store to get a tattered jacket for the character of Professor Marvel when they noticed the jacket had a name stitched in the pocket:“L. Frank Baum”. Can you believe the jacket used to belong to the author of the original novel?

James Dean

Beloved film star James Dean tragically passed away in a traffic collision in 1955. His car was then involved in a series of strange events that led many people to believe it was cursed.

The crushed car was sold and torn apart. Its engine was put into another car, which also ended up crashing and taking someone’s life. The rest of the car was sent to a mechanic, whose legs were crushed by the car as it was being unloaded.

The Simpsons

It is know a well-known fact The Simpsons have somehow predicted many events that ended up happening in real life. One coincidence is interesting, two are suspicious, but more is just insane.

To name a few, the beloved animated sitcom predicted Donald Trump’s presidency, the invention of smartwatches, Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show, and Disney’s acquisition of Fox.

The Jim Twins

Jim Lewis and Jim Springer were a set of twins that was separated at birth and adopted by different families. Even though they grew up without knowing the other one existed, they led almost identical lives.

The two had the same likes and dislikes, bit their nails, vacationed at the same place in Florida, married a woman named Betty and, of course, they were both named James. At age 39, they found each other and were shocked to find how similar they were.

Wreck Survivor

The chances of surviving a tragic accident are not very high, but surviving two very similar ones is a coincidence that just blows your mind. This is what happened to Violet Jessop, an ocean-liner stewardess.

She was on board the Titanic and the HMHS Britannic, both of which famously sank and led to hundreds of deaths. She still worked as a stewardess on ships after that, for some reason.

Father And Son

During a poker game in 1958, a man named Robert Fallon was caught cheating. Back in the day, people resolved their disputes in a much more brutal way than they do today, so Fallon was shot dead.

His body was promptly moved and a young man was called in to replace him at the table. Unbeknownst to everyone, even the young man himself, he was the son of Fallon. The two had been estranged for decades and did not recognize each other.

The Childhood Book

A woman just happened to be at a bookstore in Paris and decided to look through the kids section. She spotted her favorite childhood book, Jack Frost and Other Stories, and realized that the cover looked familiar.

She took the old book, opened it, and saw that her name and childhood address were on the inside cover of the book. It turns out that it was her copy of the book that somehow ended up at that bookstore and is now in her hands again.

World War I

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is regarded as the tipping point that led the world into the first World War back in 1914. He and his wife were shot dead in a car, whose license plate read “A-III-118.”

Coincidentally, the armistice that put an end to the war was signed on November 11, 1918, or 11/11/18, the same as the license plate from the car where it all began.

The Baby Magnet

A street sweeper named Joseph Figlock came to be known as “The Baby Magnet” for the strangest reason. One day in 1937, as he was sweeping the street, a baby fell from a four-story window and landed right on top of him. Figlock eased its fall, so the baby survived.

That was strange enough, right? Well, only a year later, the same thing happened again, also from a four-story window. Both Figlock and the baby survived, and he became a local hero.

Laura Buxton

A 10-year-old girl named Laura Buxton decided to release a balloon into the air with a note that said “Please return to Laura Buxton“. The balloon traveled for a whopping 140 miles and was found by another little girl who was also named Laura Buxton.

Shockingly enough, when these two girls decided to meet, they found even more coincidences. They were the same height, had the same eye color, had a labrador dog of the same age and Guinea pigs, and were dressed in similar clothes upon their meeting.

Mark Twain And Halley’s Comet

Halley’s Comet is a comet that can only be visible from Earth every 75-76 years, so spotting it in the sky for a couple of seconds is basically a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Mark Twain even wrote that, because he was born on the day that the comet passed Earth in 1835 that he would most likely die the year it came back around. And sure enough, Twain passed away in 1910 when the comet was visible again.

The Hoover Dam

The Hoover Dam was a great piece of engineering, but it took many lives as it was being built. One of the first casualties of this massive project was J.G. Tierney, a worker who died on December 20, 1921.

Over the next years, 96 people died in different construction accidents. The very last casualty was suffered fourteen years later, also on December 20, and you know who it was? Tierney’s only son, Patrick Tierney.

Crash Prediction

This one is a very scary one. It is normal to have nightmares about things happening before a flight because many people are terrified of flying. A man’s nightmare, however, predicted what would happen just a day later.

Hélio Neto, a defender for the Chapecoense soccer team, dreamed that his plane would crash. He ignored it just like any rational person would, and boarded the plane with his teammates. The plane tragically crashed, yet Neto was one of the only six survivors.

Jean Marie Dubarry

The French were famous for their guillotine executions. One of the convicted criminals who suffered this fate was a man named Jean Marie Dubarry, who was executed for murdering his father on February 13, 1746.

100 years later to the day, another man named Jean Marie Dubarry was executed for also killing his father. You may argue that the name was not uncommon in France, but what are the chances?

The Cursed Moped

This is one of the craziest coincidences to ever be recorded. A teenager named Neville Ebbin was driving his moped in Hamilton, Bermuda, when he was killed by a cab that struck him.

Only a year later, his younger brother, Erskine, was driving the same moped and was struck and killed by the same cab, which even more strangely, was carrying the same passenger and was on the same street.

Deus Ex

The horrific terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, is still ingrained in everyone’s memory. The Twin Towers were an important landmark of New York, and it was hard to find any New-York-related material that did not include them.

The video game Deus Ex did not include the Twin Towers in its landscape, however, because the creators forgot to add them. To save face, it was explained that in the game, the towers had been destroyed in a terrorist attack. A year later, 9/11 happened.

The Lincoln Coincidence

It is a well-known historical fact that President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a man named John Wilkes Booth as he was enjoying a play at the theater. There’s a strange coincidence that connected the two men a year before this event took place.

A year before Lincoln’s assassination, Booth’s brother, Edwin, saved Robert Todd Lincoln’s life. Robert was Lincoln’s eldest son, and he almost died when he fell onto train tracks but was pulled back up by Edwin, who was a famous stage actor.

The Mignonette

Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in 1938. Although this wasn’t the main plot point of the novel, there’s a scene with a shipwreck in which the crew kills a cabin boy named Richard Parker and eats him.

Flash-forward 40 years and a ship called the Mignonette sank. Its crew ended up killing and eating a cabin boy in order to survive, and what was his name? Richard Parker.