There are a lot of strange things happening in this world, both good and bad. But the weirdest is when seemingly random things coincide too perfectly.
#13
On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama won the presidential election. On November 5, one of the winning combinations in the Illinois lottery was 6-6-6.
#12
South African astronomer Daniel du Toit had just finished a lecture in which he concluded that death could strike at any moment. He then sat down and put a mint in his mouth. Unfortunately, he choked on the candy and died.
#11
During the creation of Deus Ex (a video game released in 2000), the development team forgot to add the twin towers. The game provided an explanation: the buildings were destroyed in a terrorist attack.
#10
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered World War I. He was shot and killed in a car with license plate A III 118. The war ended with an armistice on 11-11-18, at 11 a.m.
#9
In 2002, a seventy-year-old Finnish man was killed by a truck while trying to cross a highway on a bicycle. Two hours later, his identical twin was killed under exactly the same circumstances, less than one kilometer down the same highway.
#8
In 1883, Henry Siegland abandoned his longtime girlfriend. Heartbroken, she hanged herself. Her brother vowed to avenge her and tracked down Siegland. When he finally found him, he took aim at his head and shot him. Siegland fell to the ground.
The girl’s brother, thinking he had gotten his revenge, killed himself by shooting himself in the head with the same gun. He did not know Siegland would survive, as the bullet only grazed his cheek and lodged in a nearby tree.
A few years later, Siegland tried to cut down that very tree. He had the bright idea to use dynamite, and as a result of the explosion, the bullet that had been in the tree all these years flew out and hit him right in the head.
#7
In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published a novel, The Tale of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Island. The novel tells the story of four men who find themselves at sea after their ship has sunk. Desperate, the men kill and eat a young boy named Richard Parker.
Forty-six years later, a ship called the Mignonette suffers the same fate. Four starving survivors killed and ate the boy yungu, whose name was actually – you guessed it – Richard Parker.
#6
Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was born in 1835, shortly after the appearance of Halley’s Comet. He later predicted that he would die when the comet returned. In 1910, the day after Halley’s brightest comet appeared, Mark Twain died of a heart attack.
Perhaps Twain thought the comet was a harbinger of death. If so, he had good reason. In 1222, when the comet passed close to Earth, it appeared to be moving westward. At the time, Genghis Khan was preparing for an invasion. Believing it to be a sign, he also moved westward, killing millions in the process.
#5
September 20, 1911. RMS Olympic, White Star Line’s lead transatlantic ocean liner, collides with the British warship HMS Hawke. The Olympic suffers severe hull damage and nearly capsizes. Fortunately, no one is seriously injured or killed.
Seven months later, the sinking of the Titanic would become one of the deadliest maritime disasters, killing more than 1,500 people.
On the morning of November 21, 1916, the White Star Line’s largest and newest Olympic-class ship, the HSMS Britannic, exploded. Fifty-five minutes later it sank in the Mediterranean Sea. Thirty people were killed. It is unclear whether the explosion was caused by a torpedo or an underwater mine.
What do all these disasters on the water have in common? Well, other than the fact that they involved three modern passenger ships owned by the same shipping company? One nurse was present on all of these vessels when everything went wrong. She survived all of those disasters.
#4
A Frenchman named Jean Marie Dubarry was executed for the murder of his father on February 13, 1746. One hundred years later, on February 13, another man was executed for patricide. His name? Jean Marie Dubarry.
#3
A French baron named Rodemire de Tarazon was murdered by Claude Volbonne in 1872. Two decades earlier, Baron de Tarazon’s father had been murdered by another man, also named Claude Wolbonne.
#2
On July 28, 1900, King Umberto I of Italy was dining at a restaurant in the city of Monza. To his surprise, he discovered that the owner of the restaurant looked exactly like him, and his name was also Umberto.
Moreover, their wives had the same names, and the restaurant had been opened on the same day as the coronation of King Umberto. The next day both Umberto’s were shot dead in unrelated incidents.
#1
On November 26, 1911, three men were convicted of murdering Sir Edmund Berry and were promptly hanged at Greenberry Hill in London. The men’s names were Green, Berry and Hill.
