Buzz
Luck is immeasurable — it defies quantification, yet some people are clearly luckier or unluckier than others. Think of the person who consistently wins at bingo or the one who never seems to catch a break.
Then there are those rare individuals who straddle both extremes of luck. Being both fortunate and unfortunate simultaneously may sound contradictory, but a few have experienced it. These ten individuals are the luckiest yet unluckiest people, each with a captivating story to share.
10. Robert Evans
In 2008, Robert Evans was struggling with homelessness in an encampment near Boulder, Colorado. While cycling along the road, he became the unfortunate victim of a hit-and-run accident, which resulted in an ambulance ride to the hospital.
Luckily, the accident wasn’t serious, and he was released with only minor injuries. While walking back to his encampment along a narrow railroad bridge, the man who had just survived a car crash was struck by a train. The impact threw him off the bridge into a creek below. While such an incident would have been fatal for most, Evans’ bizarre luck — if it can even be called that — led to him being taken to the same hospital just seven hours after his initial visit following the car accident.
Jim MacPherson of the Boulder Police Department summarized Evans’ night, stating, “He had two ambulance rides in one night,” MacPherson remarked. “It’s incredibly rare for someone to be hit by both a car and a train in the same evening. I doubt this has ever happened in Boulder before.”
9. Violet Jessup
Three sister ships of the White Star Line — the RMS Titanic, Olympic, and Britannic — were all involved in major accidents and disasters. While the Titanic is the most famous, it was just one of three similar Olympic-class ocean liners.
Violet Jessup, a woman of extraordinary luck and misfortune, served on all three ships. She survived Tuberculosis as a child and began working as a stewardess for the White Star Line in 1908, eventually finding herself aboard the Olympic in 1910.
That ship collided with the HMS Hawke in 1911 and nearly sank. Jessup escaped unharmed and later joined the crew of the Titanic, surviving the disaster by caring for a baby on a lifeboat. When war erupted, she served as a nurse on the Britannic, and as fate would have it, disaster struck again.
The Britannic struck a mine, but Jessup wasn’t fortunate enough to board a lifeboat. Instead, she jumped into the water and was pulled under the ship’s keel, striking her head. She survived, albeit with a skull fracture. Despite her harrowing experiences at sea, she continued working on various ships until her retirement at 61.
8. Matthew
On September 11, a man named Matthew was walking near the World Trade Center when it was attacked. He was heading to a meeting when a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers. Miraculously, he escaped unharmed despite the falling debris.
After the attack, he “ran halfway across Manhattan” and lived to recount the tale. Surviving one terrorist attack is rare, but for Matthew, this was only the start of his encounters with terrorism.
On November 13, 2015, Matthew was at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan in Paris, France, when terrorists armed with automatic rifles, grenades, and suicide vests stormed the venue. The attack claimed 89 lives, but Matthew was not among the victims.
Although shot in the leg, Matthew took control of his fate. He pretended to be dead, and when the terrorists paused to reload, he dragged himself to safety. “I moved forward inch by inch… I saw the edge of the exit within reach. I managed to grab it with one finger, then another.”
7. Arthur John Priest
Arthur John Priest worked as a stoker, or “fireman,” responsible for keeping a ship’s boilers running by shoveling coal. While serving on the Olympic, he survived after the ship was struck and damaged below the waterline in 1911.
The next year, he joined the crew of the Olympic’s sister ship, the Titanic. Despite a massive layoff that left many of his colleagues jobless, he secured a position in the ship’s depths. When the Titanic sank, he survived, but this was not his last brush with death at sea.
During World War I, he served on the armed merchant ship Alcantara. The ship sank after a battle, and once again, he survived. Later, he was aboard the Britannic, another sister ship to the Olympic and Titanic. As fate would have it, the Britannic struck a mine and sank in November 1916, but Priest lived through that disaster as well.
The following year, the sailor with the strangest mix of luck and misfortune served on the Donegal. The ship was torpedoed and sank in the English Channel. He survived this too, but it marked the end of his seafaring career. A head injury forced him to retire from military service in 1917.
6. Roy Cleveland Sullivan
Surviving a lightning strike is incredibly rare. A single bolt can carry up to 100 million volts, peaking at around 20,000 amps, which is more than enough to kill any living creature.
Yet, some people do survive. However, no one has survived as many lightning strikes as Roy Cleveland Sullivan. Sullivan worked as a park ranger in Shenandoah National Park, starting his career in 1936. By 1942, he was earning the nickname “Human Lightning Rod.”
His first encounter with lightning occurred near a fire lookout tower, where a bolt scorched a half-inch strip along his right leg and blew off his toenail. In 1969, he was struck again while inside his truck, losing his eyebrows and eyelashes. The third strike happened in 1970, this time in his front yard.
Between 1942 and 1977, Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times, surviving each incident despite injuries. While he was fortunate to endure such rare events, the toll was heavy. Later in life, people avoided him out of fear of attracting lightning, and in 1983, he tragically took his own life at the age of 71.
5. Austin Hatch
Surviving one plane crash is rare, but Austin Hatch endured two. In 2003, he was on a plane piloted by his father when it crashed, killing his mother and two siblings. Though he escaped with minor injuries, the emotional toll was immense for the young boy.
Hatch survived the crash and grew up relatively well, considering the trauma he endured. Sadly, tragedy struck his family again eight years later when he was involved in another plane crash.
In June 2011, Austin Hatch was aboard a small plane piloted by his father when disaster struck again. The plane crashed, killing his father and stepmother. Hatch survived but suffered a traumatic brain injury, a punctured lung, and a broken collarbone, leaving him in a coma for two months.
Despite losing his entire family and enduring life-threatening injuries, the 23-year-old didn’t let it break him. He recovered and earned a scholarship to play college basketball at the University of Michigan. Today, he shares his story as a public speaker, inspiring others with his resilience.
4. Mason Wells
In 2013, Mason Wells was just one block away from the Boston Marathon bombing. He emerged unharmed, but the event left a lasting impact. However, this wasn’t his only encounter with terrorism, as he later found himself near another attack overseas.
A few years after Boston, Wells was in Calais, France, when three Americans thwarted a terrorist on a Thalys train. This hit close to home, as he frequently used the trains to travel between cities. While he escaped that incident unharmed, he was in Brussels in 2016 when the airport was bombed.
While serving as a Mormon missionary, Wells was at the airport when ISIS terrorists launched an attack using suicide bombs and explosives. He was caught in the blast, suffering a ruptured Achilles tendon, second- and third-degree burns on his hands and face, and shrapnel wounds across his body.
His father noted that Wells’ survival was partly due to his experience during the Boston bombing years earlier. He explained that it helped him stay calm, and “despite being on the ground and bleeding, [he] maintained a sense of humor and composure throughout the ordeal.”
3. Frane Selak
Frane Selak has survived more near-fatal accidents than anyone, earning him the nickname “The World’s Most Unlucky Luckiest Man.” His first brush with death came in 1962 when he survived a train crash that claimed 17 lives.
In 1963, his first plane ride ended abruptly when the door opened mid-flight, ejecting him. He landed in a haystack, while the plane crashed, killing 19 people. In 1966, he survived a bus crash that left four dead, and in 1970, his car caught fire and exploded, yet he walked away unharmed.
Three years later, another car accident burned off all his hair, but he escaped without further injury. In 1995, he was struck by a bus, and the next year, he narrowly avoided a head-on collision by crashing into a guardrail.
For reasons unknown, death seemed to chase Selak, but he always managed to evade it. His fortunes shifted when, two days after his 73rd birthday, he won €900,000 in the lottery. He purchased homes and a boat but donated most of his winnings in 2010.
2. Tsutomu Yamaguchi
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing approximately 140,000 people in the blast and its aftermath. Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived, was in the city on his final day after spending the summer designing a new oil tanker.
When the bomb exploded, he jumped into a ditch, but the shockwave flung him into the air, spinning him before landing him in a potato patch. He was less than two miles from Ground Zero. His eardrums were nearly ruptured, and his face and forearms suffered severe burns, but he lived through the ordeal.
He boarded a train to his hometown, which, unfortunately, was Nagasaki. Upon arrival, he sought medical attention at a hospital. On August 9th, while recounting his experience to the Mitsubishi company director, another flash of light outside forced him to dive to the ground once more.
Miraculously, despite still recovering from the first blast, Yamaguchi survived the second atomic bomb, making him one of the few to endure both wartime nuclear attacks. Reflecting on the Nagasaki explosion, he later said, “I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima.”
1. Anna & Helen
Surviving a pandemic is no small feat, as the world has come to understand. While many avoid infection by taking precautions, contracting a deadly pathogen like the Influenza strain A/H1N1, which ravaged the globe between 1918 and 1920, can be fatal.
The Spanish Flu claimed an estimated 20-100 million lives due to its rapid spread and lethality. Among the survivors were Anna Del Priore and her sister Helen, who were young children during the pandemic and managed to overcome the virus.
Although they weren’t the sole survivors of the pandemic, Anna and Helen are part of a rare group who lived through two global pandemics over a century apart. At the ages of 105 and 107, respectively, they contracted COVID-19.
Despite their advanced age during the infection, both women defied the odds and recovered. Anna shared her secret to longevity, stating, “Treat others well, cherish good friendships, stay honest, love God — and don’t forget to eat plenty of hot peppers!”
