What are the origins of this fun-filled festive custom?
McLean was indeed safe for around fours years, until in 1865 he was approached by a Confederate colonel to host the meeting between General Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant where Lee surrendered and ended the American Civil War—right in McLean’s parlor.
On July 4, 1826, coincidentally as the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of American independence, 83-year-old Jefferson passed away at his Virginia estate, Monticello. The 90-year-old Adams, unaware of his friend’s death while on his own deathbed in Quincy, Massachusetts, reportedly whispered a few last words: “Thomas Jefferson survives.” The friends died mere hours apart.
On July 4, 1831, James Monroe became the third president and Founding Father to die on the Independence Day anniversary.
Halley’s Comet is a periodic comet that returns to Earth’s vicinity around every 75 years, and it was in the sky when famed author Mark Twain, originally Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835. By 1909, 74 years had passed, and Twain was quoted as saying, “It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.”
The UK comic by David Law first appeared in The Beano, and the US comic by Hank Ketcham was published as a syndicated newspaper comic strip. The two creators had no idea what the other was working on, and in fact the characters are quite different, as the British Dennis was more mean-spirited and the US version was a happy-go-lucky type who caused trouble without meaning to. The characters were made independently but simultaneously.
Twain continued, “The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” Then on April 21, 1910, the day after Halley’s Comet emerged from the far side of the sun, Twain died suddenly of a heart attack.
Born in Argentina to Irish immigrants, Violet Jessop became a ship stewardess at 21 to provide for her family. She ended up working for White Star, which launched its trio of gigantic luxury liners—the Olympic, the Titanic, and the Britannic—in 1911. All three ships faced disaster, but Jessop lived to tell the tale.
Jessop was serving aboard the Olympic when the liner collided with the HMS Hawke near the Isle of Wight, in southern England. She then moved to the Titanic in time for its disastrous maiden voyage in 1912, and was one of the people who made it onto a lifeboat. Jessop later became a nurse in the British Red Cross and was serving on the Britannic, which was used as a hospital ship after World War I, in 1916 when the ship struck a mine in the Aegean Sea. The ship sank but only 30 people died, and Jessop survived again. “Miss Unsinkable” reportedly continued working on cruise ships after the war.
On March 12, 1961, a character named Dennis the Menace debuted twice, on either sides of the Atlantic, mere hours apart, and by two people who had never met.
The song was such a smash hit that the band was still performing it in 2010. But one fateful morning, after Boney M. had performed a set that included ‘Rasputin,’ 61-year-old Bobby Farrell was found dead in his hotel room on December 30—the anniversary of the "Mad Monk's" death—and in St. Petersburg, no less.
Bobby Farrell, a member of German-Caribbean disco group Boney M., reached fame with his bandmates for the disco ballad ‘Rasputin,’ which sings of a debauched Russian mystic healer, renegade monk, and known sexual deviant who was murdered on December 30, 1916, in St. Petersburg.
The historic nuclear blasts the US delivered to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, are infamous for how many deaths they caused from both the blast and the radiation afterwards, killing nearly 90,000 people. But in 2009, the Japanese government confirmed that one man survived both blasts.
The coincidence was made even more eerie in 2022, as again on September 19, as memorials were in place to mourn those lost on the previous September 19s, another powerful earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 struck.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on August 6 for a business trip when he experienced the first blast. He miraculously survived and returned to his home in Nagasaki, only to experience the traumatic event a second time. Despite the double radiation exposure, Yamaguchi only died in 2010 from stomach cancer at the impressive age of 93.
The people of Mexico have suffered through three major earthquakes, the first of which occurred on September 19, 1985, and killed more than 10,000 people and leveled hundreds of buildings. They suffered a second disastrous earthquake in 2017—also on September 19.
In 1864, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert (pictured) found himself in a potentially fatal situation when he fell between a moving train and the platform. He could have died if it weren’t for someone yanking him up to safety. Robert later wrote that he’d immediately recognized his savior as the famous stage actor Edwin Booth.
Not only did the last fatality also occur on December 20, but the man who died was Tierney’s only son, Patrick William Tierney. He reportedly fell to his death from one of the intake towers on the Arizona side of Black Canyon.
Stephen Hawking had strong theories about the peculiarity of time, but perhaps not even he could predict that the day he was born and the day he died would link him in time with two other historical geniuses that helped pave the way for a mind like his.
Hawking was born exactly 300 years to the day of Galileo's death (January 8), and he died on March 14, 2018, which not only coincides with Albert Einstein's 139th birth anniversary, but also what is known as “Pi Day,” as the date 3/14 coincides with the first three digits of pi.
There were 96 fatalities attributed to the building of the Hoover Dam in Nevada, official records show. One of the first fatalities was a man named John Gregory Tierney, who tragically drowned during a flash flood in the violent Colorado River on December 20, 1921. The last fatality occurred exactly 14 years later…
The archduke hurried off in his car, but his driver made a wrong turn and happened to pass right by the café where the attacker was getting a sandwich. He took his second chance and shot the archduke and his wife. The assassin then took a cyanide pill, but it only made him sick, and he went to jail where he died four years later from tuberculosis.
Sources: (The Wall Street Journal) (History) (Los Angeles Times) (Reader’s Digest) (Mental Floss)
See also: Curious examples of the "pizza effect"
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand is said to have been the launch point for WWI, but what most don’t know is that a stop at a café for a sandwich is the only reason the assassins were given a second attempt. Their original attempt to kill the archduke failed as the bomb hit the car behind Ferdinand’s and he escaped unscathed. Upset, one of the assassins stopped to get a sandwich at a nearby café...
Then on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, ending 28 years of Cold War separation and cementing the date as a historic one.
Some 50 years later, a real-life yacht called the Mignonette sank and the four-man crew escaped on a dinghy with little provisions. They ended up eating a tortoise, and then in desperation resorted to eating one of their own, just like Poe's story. Even weirder, the unlucky man who was eaten was named Richard Parker!
In Edgar Allan Poe’s 1838 novel ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,’ a ship’s crew ends up in a desperate situation, and they eventually draw straws to decide who among them will be the next life-sustaining meal. The unlucky character who gets eaten is named Richard Parker, and the characters also eat a tortoise. A few decades later, the story came to fruition.
November 9 is known as the “Day of Fate” in Germany due to a strange number of major events in German history taking place on that day. On November 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication of the throne was announced, putting an end to the German monarchy. The horrors of Kristallnacht in 1938 also occurred on November 9.
No matter whether you believe in destiny or not, the way some things have been written across time is enough to make a person wonder if someone really is pulling all the strings. Some coincidences we can accept as random happenings, but then there are other coincidences that are just too tragic, poetic, or downright bizarre to ignore.
From cosmic synchronicity to mind-boggling personal ties, click through to be spooked by and find yourself in awe of the strangest coincidences in history.
Little did Robert Lincoln know that he was just saved by the brother of the man who would later kill his father. John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.
In 1861, grocer Wilmer McLean and his family were living in Manassas, Virginia, when the Civil War broke out along the stream known as Bull Run, which ran through McLean’s property. After the devastation caused by battle, McLean left to find safety in a new home in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
Intriguing coincidences that are hard to explain
From bone-chilling plot twists to the most peculiar synchronicity
LIFESTYLE Strange
No matter whether you believe in destiny or not, the way some things have been written across time is enough to make a person wonder if someone really is pulling all the strings. Some coincidences we can accept as random happenings, but then there are other coincidences that are just too tragic, poetic, or downright bizarre to ignore.
From cosmic synchronicity to mind-boggling personal ties, click through to be spooked by and find yourself in awe of the strangest coincidences in history.