From plane crashes to freak injuries, these historical figures cheated death in the most unexpected ways.
Ann Hodges
In November 1954, 31-year-old Ann Hodges was taking a nap on her couch in Sylacauga, Alabama, when an 8.5-pound stony meteorite penetrated the roof of her house and fell onto her.
After bouncing off her radio console, the space rock hit Hodges in the hip, causing a large, dark purple bruise roughly the size of a pineapple. Hodges was the first confirmed human being to survive a direct hit by an extraterrestrial object.
Winston Churchill
The future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom experienced a near-death experience in New York City while on a lecture tour. Crossing Fifth Avenue, Churchill looked left instead of right, forgetting that traffic in America drove on the right side of the road. He was hit by an oncoming motor car at a speed of 30 mph (48 km/h), knocked down onto the pavement and dragged some distance.
He suffered severe scalp lacerations, two broken ribs, and a hole in his thigh. Churchill would go on to lead Britain during World War II less than ten years later, and later penned an article for a newspaper stating how he had been saved by six inches.
George Washington
Long before he became America’s first president, a 21-year-old Washington was heading home after a diplomatic expedition through the forests of western Pennsylvania. During the crossing of the ice-choked Allegheny River on a wood raft, Washington’s pole was struck by an ice floe.
He fell into ten feet of icy water and had to grab onto logs from the raft to pull himself to a nearby island to wait out the freezing night before making his way to safety the following morning.
Violet Jessop
Ocean liner stewardess Violet Jessop became known as “Miss Unsinkable” after surviving three shipwrecks. She survived the collision of RMS Olympic with a warship in 19ll, escaped the sinking RMS Titanic in a lifeboat in 19l2, and was on board the Titanic’s sister ship, HMHS Britannic, which struck a naval mine in 1916.
When the Britannic began to sink, Jessop leaped from her lifeboat back into the water to avoid being sucked into the ship’s propellers. One of them had started spinning as it descended, and she hit her head on the ship’s keel, fracturing her skull, before someone dragged her back into the lifeboat.
Joseph Stalin
As a schoolboy in Gori, Georgia, Stalin was injured when two horse-drawn carriages collided. Severe blunt trauma, followed by infection, caused damage to his left arm’s joints and muscles. The arm grew to be permanently shorter than his right one, leaving him with a stiffened elbow and restricted movement.
This childhood disability likely saved his life, however, because imperial examiners determined that his withered arm would not make him a capable combatant, so he did not have to serve in World War I.
Ernest Hemingway
During a sightseeing safari in East Africa, the Nobel laureate miraculously survived two plane crashes, both within 48 hours. Hemingway chartered a plane which flew into a utility pole, crash-landing into the Ugandan bush and leaving Hemingway stranded overnight with his wife.
A rescue plane became combusted while taking off and crashed, causing him internal injuries, a cracked skull, and severe burns.
Theodore Roosevelt
While campaigning for president in Milwaukee, former President Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest at point-blank range by assassin John Schrank. The bullet’s velocity was greatly reduced after passing through his bulky wool coat, a steel eyeglass case, and finally through a folded copy of the 50-page speech he was carrying.
When he realized he was not coughing blood and his lungs were apparently intact, Roosevelt insisted on finishing the 90-minute speech with a bullet in his thoracic wall before going to get medical attention.
Abraham Lincoln
Years before he would guide the nation through its Civil War, 9-year-old Abraham Lincoln was nearly killed by a horse on his family’s farm in Indiana. Trying to make a horse-powered grist mill run faster so he could grind some corn, he shouted at the horse. It kicked out behind him, hitting Lincoln square in the forehead.
He instantly blacked out, suffered severe blood loss, and lay in a coma for the rest of the night. His family believed him dead until morning, when he woke up, completing the sentence he was saying when struck.
John F. Kennedy
In the South Pacific during World War II, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy’s patrol torpedo boat PT-109 was struck by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri traveling at full speed in the darkness. The bow of the Japanese destroyer sliced through PT-109’s wooden hull and cut Kennedy’s boat in half.
Kennedy suffered a spinal injury and severe cuts, but he managed to drag a severely burned crewman three miles through open water by clenching the strap of the crewman’s lifejacket. Kennedy sheltered with his surviving crew members on remote islands for days before being rescued, after he used a knife to carve a message into a coconut shell.
Grigori Rasputin
Rasputin was once stabbed in 1914 at point-blank range, two years before his infamous assassination. In his home village of Pokrovskoye, Rasputin was approached by a woman named Chioniya Guseva. She stabbed Rasputin once in the stomach with a dagger, making his intestines protrude from his abdomen.
Grabbing his intestines in his hands, Rasputin proceeded to beat his assailant before making his way to a local hospital, where he survived after emergency surgery and returned to St. Petersburg to continue ruling over the imperial court with an iron fist.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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