Historical Coincidences That Defied The Odds

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Historic Coincidences

There are many events to happen in history that have left so many people lost for words. There have also been a lot more coincidences than you’d think. The odds of these events being coincidences is next to nothing and they still happened.

Here we’ll look at home coincidences put into huge proportions as they interacted with historic events. You may not have thought any of these were even possible.

The Titanic

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After the movie “The Titanic” released in the ’90s, everyone knows about the ship’s story. The ship was built in the early 1900s and was said to be unsinkable. But on its voyage in 1912, it sank, taken a lot of the people on board with it.

But a few years earlier a novel called The Wreck of Titan: Or, Futility was published. The book follows a ship called the Titan that seem infallible in every aspect until it ends up hitting an iceberg and sinking.

Maarten De Jonge

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This next event will have you questioning if destiny is real. A Dutch man named Maarten de Jonge escaped death twice! he’s really lucky!

He was supposed to board Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 which vanished and was never recovered. He was also supposed to be on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which got shot down over Ukraine. Thankfully de Jonge never boarded either of those flights.

The Wizard Of Oz

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The movie The Wizard of Oz was based on a book called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by Frank Baum. The crew stumbled upon something amazing when they were prepping the costumes for the movie.

They were looking for an old jacket for Professor Marvel, one of the characters. They found the perfect one in a thrift store and bought it. When they were getting it ready for the set they found the old owner’s name written in the jacket – Frank Baum. How small are the chances that they found the author’s jacket?

James Dean

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James Dean sadly died in a car crash in 1955. People believed that his car was cursed after it was attached to some strange events.

After Dean’s death, the car was taken apart. The engine was used for another car which ended up also being in a fatal collision. The rest of the car crushed its new owner’s legs as they were taking it off of a flatbed.

The Simpsons

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The show The Simpsons has aired for a long time and throughout the course of the series, it had a few premonitions. Maybe one would just be chance, but a few is rather suspicious.

From the elections that would put Trump in power, to smartwatches, to Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl Appearance, to even Disney taking over Fox!

Jim and Jim

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Twins were separated at birth and ended up living with two different families. Jim Lewis and Jim Springer grew up not know about each other and they led very similar lives.

The twins liked and disliked the same things, they both liked to go on holiday at the same place, and to top it off they both married a woman by the name of Betty. They ran across each other when they were 39 and were both met with surprise.

Survivor

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A lot of people die in tragic accidents all the time and the likelihood of walking away is very small. Now imagine surviving two tragedies! Violet Jessop was a stewardess on an ocean-liner.

She was on the infamous Titanic when it sank and was rescued. Afterward, she was on board the HMHS Britannic which also sank and took the lives of hundreds. After walking away from both tragedies she still served as a stewardess at sea!

Caught Cheating

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In 1958, Robert Fallon was found cheating in a game of poker. The punishment was more severe in those days. Fallon was shot and died.

His seat at the table became vacant and a young man came to replace him. This man was actually Fallon’s son unbeknownst to everyone including the son. They hadn’t seen each other in years and didn’t recognize each other.

Jack Frost and Other Stories

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A woman in Paris flipped through a book in the kid’s category in a bookstore. It was Jack Frost and Other Stories, her favorite book as a child. She then noticed that the cover looked very familiar.

She looked at the first page and saw her name written inside. She was so surprised that her book over the years had wound up in this bookstore and of the hundreds of books they had she picked hers up.

World War I

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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

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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

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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

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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 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 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

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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

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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.