Some of history’s most bizarre coincidences seem almost too perfect to be real, yet they really happened, often involving people who had no idea what was coming
The twins with almost identical lives
Image Credit: Shutterstock.Jim Lewis and Jim Springer were identical twins who were separated at birth and later managed to reunite. That was just the start of the weird coincidences. They were both born in 1940 and grew up with different families in Ohio before meeting again in 1979. They both married women named Linda and divorced them.Â
They then remarried women named Betty and had dogs called Toy. To make things even stranger, they both owned the same Chevrolet model and vacationed along the same stretch of Florida beach. They might have spent nearly 40 years apart, but somehow, their lives were nearly identical to one another.
The life saved by the wrong brother
In late 1864, Robert Todd Lincoln fell between a platform and a moving train in Jersey City. He was almost crushed to death before a complete stranger named Edwin Booth managed to grab his collar. He pulled Lincoln back to safety. The incident itself wasn’t that unusual, yes, but what happened later made it a little weird.
Edwin’s younger brother was John Wilkes Booth, and Robert’s father was President Abraham Lincoln. The following April, John assassinated Abraham. One Booth saved a Lincoln and another Booth killed one, just a few months apart.
The date that kept repeating
Most scientists agree that earthquake prediction is nearly impossible because there’s no rhyme or reason when they happen. That is, unless you live in Mexico. An 8.1 earthquake devastated Mexico City on September 19, 1985. It killed thousands of people. Then, on September 19, 2017, another powerful earthquake struck the country and killed hundreds of people.
It happened again in 2022, when a 7.6 earthquake hit Mexico on September 19, just after a nationwide earthquake drill. Yes, that’s right. Three powerful earthquakes, in the same country, on the exact same day, just years apart. The chances of that happening are just so small.
The numbers that came back
On September 6, 2009, the winning lottery numbers were 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, and 42. Nobody won the full set of numbers. Then the unbelievable happened. Four days later, on September 10, the winning lottery numbers were the exact same six numbers.
It was such a weird coincidence that the Bulgarian government got involved to see whether the numbers had been manipulated. But no, it was a complete fluke. There was a one in 4 million chance of it happening, and eighteen people won the second time.
The second winning ticket
That’s not all for lottery luck. Australian truck driver Bill Morgan won a car in 1999, thanks to a scratch-off lottery ticket, and a television news crew came to report the story. They wanted him to reenact the moment when he won. So, he bought another ticket and scratched it for the cameras.
But the second time he played, he actually ended up winning again. He won a prize worth 250,000 Australian dollars. The cameras managed to catch his initially staged reaction that turned out to be completely real. He won a bigger prize while pretending to win his first one.
The mother who was already there
Tammy Harris had been searching for nearly a year for her biological mother. She soon realized how close she actually was. Turns out, the 21-year-old had been working alongside her mother, Joyce Schultz, at the same convenience store for six months.
The pair lived two blocks from one another. In February 1991, Schultz overheard Tammy talking about her search and looked at Tammy’s birth certificate. The pair reunited in the store manager’s office.
The prisoner who was already inside
Will West arrived in 1903 at the prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, and immediately confused the staff there. He was supposed to already be inside. In fact, they had both photographs and body measurements of the inmate. He looked almost the same, so they thought he’d escaped.
Will insisted they’d made a mistake, and it turns out they had. They had another inmate by the name of William West who was already locked up. He looked very similar to Will West and had almost the same proportions, but fingerprint analysis proved they were different.
The television plot that came too close
September 11, 2001, was one of the darkest days in American history. Six months before the deadly attacks, Fox aired an episode of The Lone Gunman that was eerily close to reality. It involved a group of people remotely hijacking a commercial airplane.Â
The hijackers aimed the plane directly toward, you guessed it, the World Trade Center. The fictional characters in the show stopped the collision. But a mere 191 days later, life imitated art and terrorists flew two hijacked passenger planes into the Twin Towers.
The comic that arrived a month early
It’s a similar story with Pearl Harbor. National Comics #18 was released in October 1941 and featured a story by Harry Stein that showed enemy forces attacking Pearl Harbor. In the comic, the attackers were German, rather than Japanese.
But the attack happened in real life just over a month later, on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed the base. Essentially, readers got a fictional version of the site’s destruction very shortly before it actually happened. How spooky.
The two women with matching lives
In 1978, a Maryland woman named Wanda Marie Johnson was having a real problem. Her identity kept getting confused with another woman of the same name. But when she did a little digging, she learned the similarities went beyond the name.Â
Both Wanda Marie Johnsons were born on June 15, 1953, and had previously lived in Washington, D.C. They both had two children and owned two-door 1977 Ford Granadas. The only difference in their cars’ serial numbers was the final three digits. That seems too freaky to be a coincidence.
The reunion that became three
Robert Shafran arrived at Sullivan County Community College in New York in 1980, and everyone there seemed way too friendly toward him. Complete strangers treated him like a close friend, for one. That was because they had confused him with a former student named Eddy Galland. He looked a lot like Shafran.
The pair later met and found out that they were identical brothers who had been separated through adoption. The newspapers printed their story, and it got the attention of a man named David Kellman. He thought he looked quite similar, too. Yes, he was actually their brother, and the trio were identical triplets who’d spent 19 years growing up in different families.
The writer who met his fictional fate
British journalist William Thomas Stead published a story in 1886 about disaster striking a passenger ship. The ship didn’t have enough lifeboats, and many people died aboard it. Then, six years later, he wrote a separate disaster story about a ship striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic.
Both details appeared in the Titanic disaster on April 15, 1912. But the strangest part is that Stead was actually on the Titanic, and he died when the ship went down. It was almost like he predicted his own death, somehow.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
13 strange historical coincidences that are almost impossible to believe
History sure likes to write some crazy plot twists that sound too strange to be true.
13 strange historical coincidences that are almost impossible to believe
