Random Eeriest Coincidences Throughout History (14 items)

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  (#3) Edgar Allan Poe's Macabre Tale Comes True

  Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, features a scene in which the crew of a ship, stranded in the ocean and starving, draws straws to see who will be sacrificed for the others' bellies. The loser of the draw is one Richard Parker.

  46 years later, in 1884, a few crew members aboard the ship Mignonette escaped a deadly storm just before their boat sank. Stranded without food, the men decided to sacrifice a 17-year-old crew member after the boy attempted to drink salt water to quench his thirst, causing his health to rapidly decline. They could not wait for him die and risk his body becoming infected in the process of death, so the boy was stabbed to death and devoured. 

  The boy's name? Richard Parker.
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  (#10) This Bullet Had One Job

  This one is an oldie but goodie. It's likely not true, as there are no concrete records of the event, not to mention it's fairly implausible - but it's fun nonetheless.  

  The story goes, Henry Ziegland left his long-time fiancée in 1893. Her brother vowed vengeance, and accosted Ziegland on the man's property. The brother shot Ziegland in the face, then killed himself shortly thereafter.  

  But the brother's bullet only grazed Ziegland's face and lodged itself in a tree behind him. He almost literally "dodged a bullet."

  Fast forward 20 years, to 1913, Ziegland decided to remove that same tree from his property. Unable to do so with an axe, he decided to blast the tree with dynamite. The resultant heat from the explosion caused the bullet to shoot out from the tree and, yep, shoot Ziegland right in the head.
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  (#12) 9/11 'Predictions' In Media

  While conspiracy theorists will insist that certain members of Hollywood had prior knowledge of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks, the truth is that instances where 9/11 seemed to have been "predicted" by movies and television shows are mere coincidences.  

  Even still, the connections between fiction and real life are startlingly eerie. Take for instance the 1997 episode of The Simpsons, "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson," which features a bus pamphlet advertising a trip to NYC for $9. The positioning of the number 9 next to a silhouette of the World Trade Towers seems to spell out 9/11.

  Then there was this Pakistani airlines advertisement from 1979, showing the shadow of a large jet flying toward the towers.

  Perhaps the eeriest of them all came from the TV show The Lone Gunmen, a spinoff of The X-Files. The series featured an episode involving the titular trio thwarting a terrorist attack that involved crashing a plane into the World Trade Center, even suggesting the plot was an inside job carried out by a small faction within the US government. The episode aired in March 2001, mere months before the very real September 11 attacks.
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  (#1) Twins Killed By The Same Taxi With Almost Too Many Similarities

  This incident occurred in 1974 in Bermuda. One of the twins died when a taxi cab struck his moped scooter. One year later, the other twin, riding the exact same scooter, was struck and killed by the exact same taxi, driven by the exact same driver, who was driving the exact same passenger as in the death of the first twin.

  The odds of this happening might seem astronomical, leading you to believe the story was made up, but this might have really happened.
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  (#9) Bruce Lee Predicted His Son's Death

  Never mind the coincidence that both Bruce Lee and his son, Brandon, died while filming movies, there's an even freakier coincidence surrounding the deaths of father and son. Bruce's last film, which was incomplete at the time of his passing, is called Game of Death. In it, there is a scene in which a prop master explains how to properly use a fake gun for the purposes of filmmaking.

  In 1993, while filming The Crow, Brandon was killed in a manner almost exactly mirroring the scene in Game of Death - a gun was accidentally loaded with a dummy cartridge still equipped with a projectile and a primer, and thus the round behaved like a regular bullet, killing Brandon, who was struck in the abdomen.
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  (#11) Man Survives Atomic Blasts At Both Hiroshima And Nagasaki

  Tsutomu Yamaguchi happened to be on a business trip to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the day US bombers dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered severe burns, but was otherwise okay in the end.

  He returned to his home in Nagasaki, where the US dropped a second atomic bomb just days later, and he managed to survive that attack as well.

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