Topic: 13 Coincidences that Will Really Creep you Out
mightymoe's photo
Thu 03/19/15 07:59 PM
Edited by mightymoe on Thu 03/19/15 08:01 PM


Here are your 13 coincidences with a side order of creepy. On the house.

#13
On November 4, 2008 Barack Obama won the Presidential Election. On November 5, one of the winning combinations at the Illinois Lottery was 6-6-6.

#12
South African astronomer Daniel du Toit had just finished giving a lecture with the conclusion that death could strike at anytime. Afterwards, he sat down and popped a peppermint in his mouth. Unfortunately, he choked to death on that piece of candy.

#11
During the production of Deus Ex (a video game released in 2000), the development team forgot to add the Twin Towers. An in-game explanation was given: the buildings had been brought down by a terrorist attack.


#10
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked World War I. He was shot down in a car that had the license plate A III 118. The war ended in an armistice on11-11-18, at 11 a.m.

#9
In 2002, a seventy year old Finnish man was killed by a truck when he attempted to cross a highway on his bike. Two hours later, his identical twin was killed under the exact same circumstances, less than one mile down the same highway.

#8
In 1883, Henry Ziegland dumped his longtime girlfriend. Heartbroken, she hanged herself. Her brother vowed to avenge her and hunted down Ziegland. When he finally found him, he aimed for his head and shot. Ziegland fell to the ground. The girl's brother, believing he had exerted his vengeance, committed suicide with the same gun. Little did he know that Ziegland would survive, for the bullet had merely grazed his cheek and lodged itself in a nearby tree.

Several years later, Ziegland attempted to cut down that particular tree. He had the brilliant idea of using dynamite and the resulting explosion sent the dormant bullet right through his skull. It seems the bullet refused to miss its target.

#7
In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The novel includes the tale of four men stranded at sea after their ship sank. Desperate, the men kill and eat a cabin boy named Richard Parker.

Forty-six years later, a ship called Mignonette suffered the same fate. The four starving survivors killed and ate the cabin boy whose real name was -you guessed it- Richard Parker.

#6
Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain was born in 1835, shortly after the appearance of Halley's Comet. Later in life, he predicted he would die when the comet returned. In 1910, one day after Halley's Comet appeared at its brightest, Mark Twain died of a heart attack. Perhaps Twain considered the comet a harbinger of death. If so, he had good reason. In 1222, as the comet passed near Earth, it appeared to be moving west. At the time, Genghis Khan was preparing for his invasion. Believing this was a sign, he also marched west, killing millions in the process.


#5
September 20th, 1911. The RMS Olympic, White Star Line's lead transatlantic ocean liner collides with a British warship called HMS Hawke. The Olympic suffers severe damage to its hull 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, claiming the lives of more than 1,500 people.

In the morning hours of November 21st, 1916, the White Star Line's largest and latest Olympic class vessel, the HSMS Britannic was shook by an explosion. Fifty-five minutes later, it sank in the Mediterranean Sea. Thirty people lose their lives. It is unclear whether the explosion was caused by a torpedo or underwater mine.

What do all of these disasters on water have in common? Well, besides involving three out state of the art passenger ships belonging to the same shipping company? One stewardess/nurse was present on all of them when things went bad. She survived them all, leading some to believe she was an albatross.

#4
A Frenchman called Jean Marie Dubarry was executed for murdering his father on February 13, 1746. One hundred years later, on the 13th of February, another man was executed for patricide. His name? Jean Marie Dubarry.

#3
A French Baron named Rodemire de Tarazone was killed by Claude Volbonne in 1872. Two decades earlier, Baron de Tarazone's father had been killed by a different man, also named Claude Volbonne.

#2
King Umberto I of Italy was having dinner in a restaurant in the city of Monza, on July 28th, 1900. To his astonishment, he found out the restaurant's owner looked exactly like him and was also named Umberto. Furthermore, their wives had the same name and the restaurant had been opened on the same day as King Umberto's coronation. The next day, both Umbertos 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.

no photo
Thu 03/19/15 09:18 PM
These are intriguing...

Kindlightheart's photo
Thu 03/19/15 09:33 PM
I love things like this...right up there with folding a twenty dollar bill just right...coincidental things are good for the brain...keeps it thinking...:wink: flowerforyou

jacktrades's photo
Thu 03/19/15 10:17 PM
I really enjoyed those do you have any more?

mightymoe's photo
Fri 03/20/15 07:50 AM
In 1858, Robert Fallon was shot dead, an act of vengeance by those with whom he was playing poker. Fallon, they claimed, had won the $600 pot through cheating. With Fallon's seat empty and none of the other players willing to take the now-unlucky $600, they found a new player to take Fallon's place and staked him with the dead man's $600. By the time the police had arrived to investigate the killing, the new player had turned the $600 into $2,200 in winnings. The police demanded the original $600 to pass on to Fallon's next of kin - only to discover that the new player turned out to be Fallon's son, who had not seen his father in seven years!

mightymoe's photo
Fri 03/20/15 08:01 AM
This one is an old story, but worth recounting because it is so unusual. It revolves around an unusual number of coincidences that occurred between Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln in regards to their assassination. For example, both men were elected 100 years apart (Lincoln in 1860, Kennedy in 1960); they were both succeeded by Southerners named Johnson, and the two Johnsons were born 100 years apart (Andrew in 1808, Lyndon in 1908). Both assassins were born 100 years apart (Booth in 1839 and Oswald in 1939) and both died before they could be brought to trial. Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin was cornered in a warehouse, while Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin was captured in a theater. Finally, Lincoln was shot in Ford’s theater, while Kennedy was shot while riding in a Ford Lincoln, and to top it all off, Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln (Evelyn Lincoln) while Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. The list goes on from there and has been the source of considerable debate ever since. Of course, mathematicians have been quick to spoil all the fun by trying to show how all these things were bound to happen despite the long odds, which is why most people consider mathematicians poor party conversationalists.

mightymoe's photo
Fri 03/20/15 08:04 AM
Edited by mightymoe on Fri 03/20/15 08:06 AM
In what has to be one of the biggest long-shots in history, in May of 1944 retired school teacher Leonard Dawes, who had been compiling the daily crossword puzzle for London's Daily Telegraph newspaper for over twenty years, put together a series of puzzles that somehow managed to include the names of two of the landing beaches "Utah and Omaha" along with several other super secret codewords like Overlord, Mulberry, and Juno. nobody outside of General Eisenhower's staff was supposed to know. Assuming Dawes was a German agent, they instantly interrogated the man, only to release him a short time later once they became convinced the words were entirely randomly chosen. While the chances of inadvertently using one of the codewords is not remarkable, Dawes puzzles contained no fewer than five codewords. all over the course of two weeks. The odds for such a thing happening has to be considered close to one-in-a-billion, but I'll leave that for the mathematicians to figure out.