Post by Joanna on Oct 26, 2015 2:55:13 GMT -5
13 Coincidences That Will Give You the Creeps
Following are 13 coincidences with a side order of creepy:
1. On November 26, 1911, three men were convicted of murdering Sir Edmund Berry and promptly hanged at London’s Greenberry. The men’s names were Green, Berry and Hill.
2. King Umberto I of Italy was having dinner in a restaurant in the city of Monza on July 28, 1900. To his astonishment, the restaurant’s owner was his doppelgänger, the two looked so much alike they could have been identical twins and they were both named Umberto. The king soon discovered the two shared a birthday, March 14, 1844, and both were born in Turin, Italy. The wives of both men were named Margherita, they had sons named Vittorio, and the two had served in the military and were promoted on the same day. Additionally, the restaurant owner opened his eatery on the day Umberto was crowned king. Amazed by the uncanny coincidences, the following day (July 29, 1900), the king invited his doppelgänger to the palace, but soon learned the second Umberto couldn’t make it because he had been killed in a gun-related accident. That evening, King Umberto was shot four times by the Italian-American anarchist Gaetano Bresci and died of his wounds.
3. Rodemire de Tarazone, a French baron, 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.
4. A Frenchman named Jean Marie Dubarry was executed for murdering his father on February 13, 1746. One hundred years later, on February 13, 1846, another man was executed for patricide. His name? Jean Marie Dubarry.
5. In 1898, Robert Morgan penned The Wreck of the Titan, Or Futility, a novella about a fictional “unsinkable” 800-foot British ocean liner that sinks after it strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic. The disaster occurred during the month of April and there weren’t enough lifeboats to accommodate all on board. Fourteen years later, on the night of April 14, 1912, the 882-foot RMS Titanic, also said to be “unsinkable,” hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Because there weren’t enough lifeboats to accommodate the passengers and crew, in excess of 1,500 people lost their lives.
6. On September 20, 1911, RMS Olympic, the White Star Line’s lead transatlantic ocean liner, collided with the British warship HMS Hawke. Olympic sustained severe damage to its hull and almost capsized. Fortunately, no one was killed or seriously injured. Seven months later, the sinking of the Titanic, another White Star ship, would become one of the deadliest maritime disasters of all time, claiming the lives of more than 1,500. At 8:12 on the morning of November 21, 1916, the White Star Line’s newest and largest Olympic-class vessel, HMHS Britannic, was shaken by an explosion. Fifty-five minutes later, it sank into the Mediterranean Sea. Thirty people lost their lives. It is unclear whether the explosion was caused by a torpedo or an underwater mine.
What do these water disasters have in common? Well, besides involving three state-of-the-art passenger ships belonging to the same shipping company, one stewardess/nurse, Violet Jessop (above), was present on all three vessels when things took a turn for the worse. She survived them all, leading some to conclude she was a “Jonah,” an individual (either a sailor or passenger) who brings bad luck to a ship.
7. 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 to be a propitious sign, he also marched west, killing millions in the process.
8. In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The tale is about four men stranded at sea after their ship sank. Desperate, the men killed and ate a cabin boy named Richard Parker. Forty-six years later, a ship called Mignonette suffered a similar fate and the four survivors killed and ate the cabin boy whose real name was ... you guessed it – Richard Parker.
9. In 2002, a 70-year-old Finnish man was hit and killed by a truck as he was crossing the highway on his bicycle. Two hours later, his identical twin was killed under the exact same circumstances, less than a mile down the road.
10. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, sparked World War I. He was shot to death in a car bearing the license plate “A III 118.” The war ended in an armistice on 11-11-18 at 11 a.m.
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 insert was provided explaining the buildings had been brought down by a terrorist attack.
12. In May 1959, South African astronomer Daniel du Toit had just finished giving a lecture, which he concluded by saying death could strike at anytime. He then sat down, popped a peppermint into his mouth and choked to death on the candy.
13. On November 4, 2008, U.S. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois won the presidential election. The following day, one of the winning combinations at the Illinois Lottery was 6-6-6. It gets even creepier because this isn’t the first time the Illinois Pick 3 has come up 6-6-6. The Numbers of the Beast also came up 1-16-2008, the one-year anniversary of Obama’s announcing his candidacy for president; 3-22-2008, the day New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson endorsed Obama for president; 10-23-2008, the day the New York Times endorsed Obama; and 12-10-2013, the day Obama called on Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to resign.
Sources: Mad Patriots; Unbelievable; and Stranger Than Fiction.