Current Events > You want coincidences?

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Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died hours apart on the same day: July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of American independence.

Less than a year before John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln, Booths brother Edwin saved the life of Lincolns eldest son, Robert.

Speaking of Robert Lincoln, he was on the scene for not one, not two but three presidential assassinations (James A. Garfield and William McKinley).

The Civil War began in Wilmer McLeans front yard... and ended in his front parlor.
In the summer of 1861, Wilmer McLean and his family were living on his wifes plantation near Manassas Junction, Virginia. As Union forces approached, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard took over the farm as his headquarters. On July 21, 1861, Confederate and Union troops clashed in the first major battle of the Civil War along the small stream known as Bull Run, which ran through McLeans property. By the end of 1863, McLean and his family had relocated to the small hamlet of Appomattox Court House, some 120 miles southwest of Manassas Junction. McLean, who supplied sugar to the Confederate Army, was in Appomattox on April 9, 1865, when Confederate Colonel Charles Marshal approached him for assistance finding a suitable place to host a meeting between General Robert E. Lee and his Union counterpart, Ulysses S. Grant. That afternoon, Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Grant in McLeans parlor.

Mark Twain came into the world with Halleys Comet, and (just like he predicted) he went out with it as well.

Violet Jessop was on board three gigantic sister ships (Titanic, Olympic and Britannic) when disaster struck them, and lived to tell the tale.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes.

Stephen Hawking died on Einsteins 139th birthday, Galileos 300th death-day, and Pi Day.

96 people died during the building of the Hoover Dam. One of the first fatalities was John Gregory Tierney, who drowned during a flash flood in the violent Colorado River on December 20, 1921. Fourteen years later, on the same day, December 20, 1935, another man died, it was Tierneys only son, Patrick William Tierney. He was the last fatality attributed to the dam. He fell to his death from one of the intake towers on the Arizona side of Black Canyon.

World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The license plate of the car in which he was riding at the time of his death was AIII 118. WWI officially ended on Armistice Day: 11/11/18.

In the midst of World War I, the British army converted the passenger ship RMS Carmania into a battleship. To avoid enemy fire, it was disguised to look like the German ship SMS Trafalgar . In 1914, the Carmania sank a German ship off of the coast of Brazil. The sunken ship was the Trafalgar, which had been disguised to look like the British Carmania.

Adolf Hitler was born 129 years after Napoleon Bonaparte. Hitlers rise to power took place 129 years after Napoleon's; he invaded Russia 129 years after Napoleon, and he was ultimately defeated 129 years after the defeat of Napoleon.

Edgar Allan Poe had but one novel published: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, released in 1838. The novel tells of a doomed Antarctic journey in which four shipwrecked crewmen decide to eat cabin boy Richard Parker in order to survive.
In 1884, four crewmembers survived the ship wreckage of a vessel named the Mignonette. The survivors decided to eat their cabin boy in order to live. As fate would have it, that cabin boy's name was Richard Parker.

Two of America's presidents, namely Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy, share a multitude of barely believable coincidences. Both were killed from gunshot wounds to the back of the head; both died on a Friday; both died before a celebration (Kennedy was assassinated on the eve of Thanksgiving, Lincoln was killed right before Easter); and each one of them were accompanied by their wife and another couple. But there's more! Both had a friend called Billy Graham, both had four children, both had secretaries named after the other (Kennedy's secretary was called Mrs. Lincoln, while Lincoln's secretary was called John), and both of their successors were vice presidents called Johnson!

The first and last British soldiers killed in the First World War are buried in Belgiums Saint Symphorien cemetery. Their graves are located just 6 metres apart and their headstones face each other, which is a major coincidence considering that this arrangement wasn't at all planned.

On June 20, 1940, Soviet archaeologists uncovered the tomb of Tamerlane in what is now Uzbekistan. Tamerlane, who saw himself as Genghis Khan's heir, was a Turco-Mongol conqueror and the founder of the Timurid Empire in Persia and Central Asia. A warning inscription on his tomb read "Whomsoever opens my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I." Clearly not superstitious, the Soviet archaeologists ignored the warning and opened the tomb anyway. 3 days later, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest military invasion of all time, upon the Soviet Union.


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