8 Real Coincidences From History That Sound Completely Made Up
If you put these in a movie, people would say they’re too unrealistic. But every one of them actually happened.
1Mark Twain and Halley’s Comet
Mark Twain was born in 1835, shortly after Halley’s Comet passed Earth. He said he expected to “go out with it” too. He died in April 1910 — the day after the comet’s next closest approach to the Sun.
2The man who survived both atomic bombs
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business when the first atomic bomb hit in 1945. Injured, he returned home to Nagasaki — just in time for the second bomb. He survived both and lived to 93.
3“Miss Unsinkable”
Violet Jessop was a ship stewardess and nurse. She was aboard the Olympic when it collided with another ship in 1911, survived the Titanic sinking in 1912, and survived the sinking of the Britannic in 1916.
4Lincoln’s son and the Booth family
Around 1864, Robert Todd Lincoln slipped on a train platform and was pulled to safety by Edwin Booth — a famous actor and the brother of John Wilkes Booth, who would later assassinate Robert’s father.
5The first and last soldiers
In a cemetery in Belgium, the first British soldier killed in World War I, John Parr, and the last, George Ellison, are buried just a few meters apart — by chance, facing each other.
6Richard Parker
In Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 novel, shipwrecked sailors eat a cabin boy named Richard Parker. In 1884, real shipwreck survivors from the yacht Mignonette killed and ate a cabin boy… named Richard Parker.
7The novel that predicted the Titanic
In 1898, Morgan Robertson wrote a novella about a huge “unsinkable” ship called the Titan that hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks, with too few lifeboats. The Titanic sank 14 years later.
8The Jim twins
Identical twins separated at birth and reunited in 1979 were both named James by their adoptive families. Both had married women named Linda, divorced, and then married women named Betty. Both had named a son James Alan (one spelled it Allan) and had a dog named Toy.
