40 Amazing Coincidences You Won't Believe Actually Happened

1 | Mark Twain's birth and death coincide with Halley's Comet.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known more popularly by his nom de plume, Mark Twain, was born in 1835, the same year that Halley’s Comet made its first appearance. The comet made a second appearance in 1910, the year that Twain died, and the author, according to the New York Times, famously predicted that the two events would coincide. He's quoted as saying, “The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”

2 | Stephen Hawking shares his birth and death dates with Galileo and Einstein, respectively.

Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking was famously born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death, and died on what would have been Einstein’s 139th birthday. That said, the far more confounding question of statistical improbability surrounding Hawking’s life was the fact that he survived to be 76 despite living with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Though we know very little about the disease, according to Scientific American, most of those diagnosed live for about five years past diagnosis. Yet Hawking survived for more than five additional decades, allowing him to share his crucial insights and gifts with the world—not to mention his legendary humor.

3 | Political adversaries Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of each other—on July 4th.

The relationship between former presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams took quite a few twists and turns over the years. They began as allies, then gradually grew into adversaries as their politics divided them. As the last two surviving members of the American revolutionaries from the British Empire, they eventually reconciled and corresponded by letter until their final years. They famously died within hours of one another on the same day in 1826: on the Fourth of July, no less.

4 | A meteor hit the Commette family's home.

National Geographic reports that your odds of being killed by a meteor are 1 in 1,600,000. So the odds would seem infinitesimally small that a meteor—which had been flying through space for more than four-and-a-half billion years without hitting a target—would hit the home of a family with the last name “Commette.” According to Time, in a bizarre case of cosmic synchronicity, that is exactly what happened to one family in France. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and the Commettes are now the proud owners of their own extremely rare extra-terrestrial rock.

5 | Anthony Hopkins happened upon a signed copy of the book he was searching for in a train station.

In the early 1970s, Anthony Hopkins was slated to play Kostya in a film adaptation of The Girl from Petrovka. To prepare for the role, he set out to read the book, but was unable to find a copy in any book store despite a rigorous search. Then, as internet legend has it, while sitting in a London Tube station, he noticed a copy of that very book that someone had left behind. When he opened it, he found that the book had also been signed by its author, George Feifer.

6 | John Wilkes Booth's brother saved Abraham Lincoln's son from death.

John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln reportedly had a coincidental family connection long before Booth shot Lincoln on that fateful day in April in 1865. Booth's brother, Edwin, was a somewhat famous stage actor who ardently supported the Union during the Civil War. While in a train station in New Jersey, Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, leaned up against a stopped train, nearly falling onto the tracks as it started up again. Edwin Booth grabbed him by the collar and saved him just in time. The younger Lincoln recognized his hero and wrote about the incident, but it wasn't until years later that Booth found out who he had saved.

7 | And that same son of Lincoln's witnessed three presidential assassinations.

While it would be rare to be present for the death of any president, Robert Todd Lincoln was in some way present for not one, not two, but three presidential assassinations. Though he wasn’t there at the theater during his father’s fateful shooting, he was rushed to his deathbed and sat by his side until the elder Lincoln passed away. Later, he was an eye-witness to the killing of President James A. Garfield. Finally, in 1901, Lincoln was nearby in Buffalo, New York, at the invitation of President William McKinley, when the president was fatally shot.

8 | An engaged coupled discovered their parents almost married one another.

As told in an episode of NPR's This American Life, titled “No Coincidence, No Story,” Stephen and Helen Lee had just gotten engaged when they made a shocking family discovery. While looking through family photos during their engagement party in New York, they realized that the bride’s mother and groom’s late father had nearly gotten married in Korea in the 1960s, but moved onto other relationships because their parents disapproved. By incredibly narrow odds, the two loves of Lee's father's life—from two different sides of the world, no less—now share grandchildren decades later.

9 | One woman survived the Titanic, Britannic, and Olympic shipwrecks.

Violet Jessop was a nurse and ocean liner stewardess who earned the nickname “Miss Unsinkable” by surviving both the accidents of the Titanic in 1912 and its sister ship, the HMHS Britannic, which met the same fate in 1916. Jessup was also reportedly on board a third boat, the RMS Olympic, when it hit a war ship—but fortunately, the Olympic stayed afloat.

10 | The first and last battles of the Civil War were fought next to the same man's property—in different towns.

The Civil War broke out in 1861 with the First Battle of Bull Run. "Bull Run" references the name of a stream that wound its way through the farm of a 46-year-old grocer named Wilmer McLeanin Manassas, Virginia. After the devastation of the battle, McLean left to find safety in a new home with his wife in Appomattox, Virginia, and, for roughly four years, he was indeed safe as the bloody war overtook the nation. In 1865, the war came to a close when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appottomax Courthouse—just steps from McLean’s new property.

11 | The first and last soldiers killed in WWI are buried next to each other.

By the time World War I came to an end, it had claimed an estimated one million British lives. Yet somehow, without any planning, the first recorded English casualty of the war, 17-year-old soldier John Parr, and the last recorded casualty, 30-year-old George Edwin Ellison, reportedly have graves that face one another just 15 feet apart in the Saint Symphorien Military Cemetery.

12 | One man missed two Malaysian Air flights that crashed.

In 2014, there were two tragic plane crashes involving Malaysian Air flights. The first was shot down over Ukraine, and the second disappeared without a trace somewhere over the Indian Ocean in the greatest aviation mystery of all time. Beyond the fact that both incidents involved the same airline in such a short time span, there was another striking coincidence: Dutch cyclist Maarten de Jongewas scheduled to take both flights, but cheated death by bumping his ticket at the eleventh hour, when cheaper options became available.

13 | A father and son were the first and last casualties during the construction of the Hoover Dam—14 years apart.

According to the United States Bureau of Reclamation, out of the estimated 21,000 people that worked on the building of the Hoover Dam, there were 96 deaths on the job site. Among the first was J.G. Tierney, who drowned along with his colleague on December 20, 1922 while conducting a geological survey prior to construction. Fourteen years later, on the exact anniversary of ‎Tierney’s death, the final death of the project was recorded. It was his son, Patrick Tierney, who, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, fell from an electrical tower.

14 | A woman's husband found a dollar she wrote on, hoping to find a husband.

As told on an episode of NPR’s This American Life, Esther and Paul Grachan had been seeing each other for a short time when Paul decided to ask her to be his girlfriend. That day, while paying for a sandwich, he noticed that a dollar bill he was about to hand the cashier had the name “Esther” written on it in pencil. How strange, he thought, that this should happen right when he was thinking about their relationship. He kept the bill and decided to frame it and give it to her as a gift. She was “speechless” when she saw it, but told him to ask her about it later.

Years passed, they got engaged and then married, and the framed dollar resurfaced in their home. Apparently, Esther had written her name on the dollar and a few others after a breakup, and said to herself at the time that she would marry the man that brought it back to her. She didn’t tell him why she was so speechless because she thought bringing up marriage so soon in the relationship would scare him off. But she believed in that moment he was “the one.”

15 | 10-Year-Old Laura Buxton released a red balloon—and another 10-year-old Laura Buxton found it.

In a story told on the WYNC podcast Radiolab, in 2001, a 10-year-old girl named Laura Buxton stood in her front yard with a red balloon. On the side of the balloon, she had written the words, “Please return to Laura Buxton,” along with her address. She then released it into a strong wind.

The balloon traveled roughly 140 miles south before descending, and finally landed in the yard of another 10-year-old girl. The second girl’s name? Also Laura Buxton! After getting in touch and explaining the coincidence, the girls decided to meet, and discovered a whole range of uncanny similarities. Not only did they look and dress alike, but both girls had three-year-old chocolate labs, a grey rabbit, and a guinea pig, and both had brought their guinea pigs to the meeting, unplanned.

16 | Joan Ginther scored more than $20 million in four scratcher lottery wins.

As Business Insider notes, we should be a bit skeptical of the “coincidence” of Joan Ginther winning the lottery four times over. Not because it smacks of urban legend, as so many of these stories do, but because the Stanford Ph.D. graduate studied statistics, and may have stacked the odds in her favor. Yet even with the help of a strategy, the chances of successfully pulling off a four-time win are still low. Ginther scored multiple million-dollar scratch-off tickets each of the four times, winning a grand total of more than $20 million. And if you want to hit it big, know that These Are the Most Common Powerball Winning Numbers.

17 | Tsutomo Yamaguchi survived both Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Tsutomo Yamaguchi is either incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky, depending on how you look at it: unlucky in that he happened to be present in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the times of their catastrophic atomic bombings, and yet lucky that he miraculously survived both. Yamaguchi reportedly fled Hiroshima in search of safety, winding up in Nagasaki only to see a second flash of white light that would cover over half of his body in burns from radioactive ash. Yamaguchi is the only person recognized by the Japanese government as having survived both bombings. Sadly, he died in 2010 of cancer.

18 | "Dog," in the lost language Mbabaram, is "dog."

Mbabaram is a dying Aboriginal language in Australia—and one that couldn’t sound less like English. So, it came as quite the surprise when linguists studying Mbabaram realized that the tribe’s word for “dog” is “dog,” with no connection to or derivation from the English word. The coincidence is technically considered a false cognate, since they sound the same but only coincidentally share a meaning. This particular case is often used to warn people of assuming a relationship between words based on surface-level similarities.

19 | A French poet encountered the man who introduced him to plum pudding every time he ate plum pudding.

According to mathematician Joseph Mazur’s book Fluke, the 19th-century French poet Émile Deschamps experienced a coincidence for the record books. As a teenager, he met an Englishman named Mr. de Fortgibu, who introduced Deschamps to plum pudding for the first time. Roughly a decade later, Deschamps saw plum pudding on a restaurant menu and ordered it, but the waiter said they had sold the last one to a man in the back of the restaurant, then called out to Mr. de Fortgibu by name. Another decade passed and Deschamps went to a dinner party that served plum pudding. He joked that the party must be for Mr. de Fortgibu, who then inexplicably showed up at the door at that very moment! He had accidentally come to the wrong door, on his way to another dinner party.

20 | A couple found wedding vows in a bottle written on the same day they wed.

As CBS News reported, Fred and Lynette Dubendorf were strolling down the beach with their dog, picking up the odd bits of trash they found to throw away, when they noticed something in a small plastic bottle washed up on the shore. Upon closer look, they found that it was a message, containing the marriage vows of another couple, Melody Kloska and Matt Behrs, who had recently had their wedding ceremony on a beach across Lake Michigan.

The note contained the couple’s address and the wedding date, which the Dubendorfs were amazed to discover was the same as their own beach wedding date. They took it as a happy sign that both of their marriages were “meant to be,” and wrote them a letter to congratulate the newlyweds—to their utter shock.

21 | Amanda Birch found out her professor and mother lived in the same house.

In a story for NPR’s Hidden Brain, a radio show and podcast “about life’s unseen patterns,” a woman named Amanda Birch recounted an astounding discovery she made while talking to her writing professor at the University of Rhode Island. The professor mentioned that she lived in a small Vermont town, which Birch excitedly shared was the same town her mother had grown up in. When Birch told her professor her mother’s maiden name, that’s when things got really eerie—they realized that the professor now lived in the very same house her mother had grown up in.

22 | Solar eclipses require such specific conditions they're almost impossible.

Just as we have remarkable coincidences, so does our solar system. The total solar eclipse is such a strange and unlikely occurrence that throughout history, it’s been interpreted as a paranormal omen and mythologized with folklore. Though the sun and moon are very different sizes, the phenomenon is able to take place because the sun is about 400 times wider than the moon, but also 400 times farther away, making the two appear the same size. According to LiveScience, if the sun were any bigger or the moon were any further away, we would likely never see a total solar eclipse, because the moon wouldn’t appear wide enough to block our view.

23 | Flight 666 flew into HEL on Friday the 13th.

There are a lot of “coincidences” (read: far-flung conspiracy theories) on the internet involving the number 666, but this story happens to be true! Finnair flight 666 departed from Copenhagen and landed in Helsinki (HEL) on Friday the 13th. You read that right: Flight 666 flew straight to HEL on the most nefarious of days. Thankfully for the passengers aboard, the coincidence ended there: They landed safely at their final destination.

24 | Two sets of twins who were separated at birth found each other.

In 2015, The New York Times Magazine published the extraordinary story of two sets of identical twins that had been split up at birth and raised as two sets of fraternal twins in Bogota, Colombia.

The story began when a colleague of Jorge, one of the twins, had a chance encounter with his biological twin, William, in the butcher shop where William worked. The colleague was shocked by William's incredible likeness to Jorge, and told him what she'd seen. When she showed Jorge a picture of the man in the butcher shop, they pulled up his Facebook page only to discover that he was in many pictures with someone that looked just like Jorge's own brother, Carlos. The two sets of twins eventually met one another and remain in touch today.

25 | A couple found themselves in the same childhood photo.

Aimee Maiden and Nick Wheeler were sifting through old family photographs in anticipation of their upcoming wedding, only to discover a striking coincidence: they had unknowingly taken their first picture together as children, 11 years before they had met. Though the two grew up over 300 miles apart in opposite corners of England, Nick's family had been on a beach vacation in Aimee's hometown, and the snap of the two shows Aimee and her family sitting just feet behind Nick, both playing in the sand.

26 | A father found his long-lost daughter in the background of his photo.

According to The Daily Mail, Michael Dick and his estranged daughter, Lisa, hadn't seen each other in over 10 years when he began searching for her again. Michael and his then-wife had separated, and Lisa and her mother moved away to Suffolk, England. In the hopes that Lisa would see it and contact him, Michael reached out to a newspaper and requested that they publish a current picture of him and his other two daughters.

Not only did Lisa see the picture, she realized that she and her mother were actually standing in the distant background of it. Her father had been totally unaware that she was just yards away when the photographer snapped the shot.

27 | Sailor Richard Parker was cannibalized—just like Poe's character of the same name.

In Edgar Allen Poe's 1838 novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a four-man crew is shipwrecked and lost at sea without food or water. Ultimately, the team decides that they must turn to cannibalism to survive, and they draws straws to decide who will be sacrificed so that the rest may live. The character chosen (and subsequently eaten) was named Richard Parker.

In 1884, a real ship was shipwrecked and one of the mates—also named Richard Parker—became ill after drinking sea water. The rest of the crew decided out of desperation to kill and eat Parker before he became too tainted by disease. The remaining men were saved, but charged with murder upon their return to shore.

28 | Two Dennis the Menace characters emerged in different countries during the same year.

You're probably familiar with the cartoon character Dennis the Menace, a lovable, if mischievous, little boy who burst onto the scene in March of 1951 with his dog, Ruff. But did you know that in the same month of that very same year, just across the Atlantic in the U.K., another cartoon Dennis the Menace was launched? This British Dennis was a bit more sinister than his American counterpart, intentionally rather than inadvertently causing chaos. Amazingly, there are no signs of plagiarism in this case—the characters were made independently but simultaneously, ultimately occupying a similar place in their respective country's cultural landscape.

29 | Author Robert Morgan predicted the Titanic's tragic end.

Author Robert Morgan penned The Wreck of the Titan, Or Futility in 1898, fourteen years before the Titanic would meet its end—and there are some uncanny similarities between the fictional novella and the actual events that took place. Beyond the coincidence of the ships' names and both being described as "unsinkable," it is reported that both the fictional Titan and the Titanic ran into trouble after hitting icebergs on the starboard side of the ship. They were both 400 miles off Newfoundland when they sank, both on April nights, and in both cases, the passengers suffered tragically due to a shortage of lifeboats.

30 | Triplets met after being separated at birth as part of an experiment.

The 2018 documentary Three Identical Strangerstells the story of three young men—Robby, David, and Eddie—that discovered in 1980 that they were identical triplets, adopted to different families. Two of the three boys attended the same university by coincidence, and were later contacted by the third brother after the fluke meeting was publicized by the media. It turns out that the boys had been separated as part of a "nature vs. nurture" study by a New York psychologist in the 1960s. The study was never published, but their lives were of course permanently altered by their adoptions.

31 | The "Jim Twins" were separated at birth, but led nearly identical lives.

Twins and coincidences seem to go hand-in-hand. For starters, the very likelihood of conceiving twins is relatively low at 33 in 1,000, but frequently, the uncanny circumstances run deeper than that—and the "Jim Twins" are a prime example. Separated at birth and raised by different families in Ohio, they finally met at the age of 39. Both sets of adopted parents named the boys James and called them "Jim" for short. Both men married twice; remarkably, both first wives were named Linda and both second wives were named Betty. Both had one son, who they had both named James Allen. According to Ripley's, they drove the same car, had similar jobs and even vacationed in the same place!

32 | Anne Parrish bought herself the same copy of a book she owned as a child.

In 1929, the novelist Anne Parrish was ambling along the Seine, and stopped at a book stall to browse titles. One of her old favorites, Jack Frost and Other Stories, caught her attention, so she bought the copy for one franc. She then met her husband, who was sitting at a nearby café, and showed him the copy. His jaw dropped when he saw what was written inside: her name and address. The copy had been hers, when she was a child.

33 | The Simpsons predicted Donald Trump's presidency.

It's not the only accurate prediction to come out of The Simpsons' writer's room, but it sure is the most extraordinary: in 2000, the show ran an episode that saw Donald Trump as President. While some may argue that the show's predictions can be explained, let's also keep in mind that pundits, pollsters, most of the American population, and even Donald Trump himself were all astounded by Trump's win. Whether writers for The Simpsons have a fortune teller on speed dial or are uniquely in tune with the pulse of the American people, this was a pretty remarkable prediction (unless, of course, the cartoon gave him the idea to run).

34 | Alec Guinness predicts James Dean's death.

In the case of the car that killed James Dean, there's a real question of whether we're looking at an unfortunate series of coincidences, a curse, or some shoddy engineering. According to Jalopnik, when Alec Guinness saw the "sinister" looking car, he told Dean, "If you get in that car, you will be found dead in it by this time next week." Seven days later, he was. After Dean's fatal accident, the recoverable parts of the Porsche 550 Spyder were re-sold, and went on to cause several other accidents for their new owners, including two other independent fatalities and several injuries.

35 | The odds of the universe existing are so small, they're practically impossible.

If chance meetings and plum pudding make you question the fabric of the universe, try this one on for size: As explained by Professor Katie Mack, our entire universe could be described as a coincidence, as we exist in an implausibly unlikely false vacuum that could collapse at any time if it came into contact with a true vacuum.

36 | Enzo Ferrari's doppelgänger Mesut Ozil was born in the same year Ferrari died.

Enzo Ferrari, founder of the Italian car company by the same name, died in the same year that soccer player Mesut Ozil was born: 1988. This in itself would be completely meaningless, except that the two men look nearly identical in many photographs, leading people to remark that the genetic coincidence makes a strong case for reincarnation.

37 | Twins Helen Mae Cook and Clara Mae Cook died on the same day.

Identical twins Helen Mae Cook and Clara Mae Mitchell always did everything together. The sisters were born on February 2, 1932, and family members reported a close-knit bond between them from childhood through their golden years. So, when Clara died of a heart attack at the age of 83, it came as no surprise to their family that Helen would die just hours later on that same day. To the rest of us, however, the fact is undeniably eerie. Helen had been battling Alzheimer's for over six years, and could have succumbed to her disease at any time. "It's how they would have wanted it," remarked Helen's daughter in an interview with USA Today.

38 | Xu Weifang saved a drowning father and son 30 years apart.

It would have been an incredible story without the coincidence: 80-year-old Xu Weifang of Jiangsu Province, China saved an eight-year-old boy from drowning, despite his advanced age and recent injuries. But, according to Newsweek, the events took an odd turn when Xu discovered that 30 years prior, he had actually saved the boy's father from drowning as well. With those odds, it's clear why some people believe in guardian angels!

39 | Roberto Clemente became the first baseball player to reach 3,000 hits—on his last day playing ball.

Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Roberto Clemente made baseball history by becoming the first Latin American player (and 11th in the entire Major League) to reach 3,000 hits in 1972. The coincidence of it all? This highly anticipated milestone would be his last hit ever on the Major League field, according to the MLB. The Hall of Famer was unfortunately killed shortly after in a plane crash off the coast of Puerto Rico while en route to a humanitarian trip in Nicaragua.

40 | Royce Burton explained how a Texas Ranger saved his life—and the ranged walked in, mid-story,

As reported by CNN, Royce Burton experienced an incredible coincidence in front of an entire classroom of witnesses. Burton, a teacher at a New Jersey university, decided to tell his class a story that had taken place in 1940, back when he was a Texas Ranger in the Rio Grande. As the story went, he had become disoriented while climbing out of a canyon, and nearly lost his balance just as he reached the top. At just the right moment, another Ranger stepped in and dragged him to safety by his rifle strap. The two connected, but lost touch when they both enlisted as soldiers in World War II. Just as he recounted the story, who should walk into the classroom but Joe, the other ranger. Joe had tracked him down all those years later and just happened to walk in at the precise moment he was telling the story. And if you're looking to make the most of your travel, steal these 33 Travel Hacks That Make Summer Vacation a Total Breeze!

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