Do you think you are lucky? Well, if you have come this far and are now able to read this, you have definitely had some luck on your side. Lady luck isn’t always nice, though, as she looks at some people the wrong way, and they seem to be hit by misfortunes over and over. When you get hit by lightning seven times and survive each time, are you lucky or unlucky? What if you survive super-close brushes with death more than 5 times watching those around you die every time? These are only a few of the misfortunes some people have faced, and here is a look at other 10 most misfortune-prone people that ever lived…
Costis Mitsotakis
It is not normal for everyone in a village of 200 people to win a lottery, but in this case, the whole village did except one man, Costis Mitsotakis. The town has a homemakers’ association that buys lottery tickets for Spain’s famous Christmas lottery worth over $700 million. In 2012, while the tickets were being sold, the homemakers forgot about Costis, a filmmaker whose house is at the furthest end of the farming village.
Everyone in the town had a win, including those who bought individual tickets and some that shared the cost for tickets. Costis soon became famous as the unluckiest man in Spain as he happened to be the only person that didn’t beat the 1,00,000 to 1 odds that everyone in his village beat. He, however, had his luck as he got to be the producer of the most viewed documentary about Sodeto’s Lottery winnings.
Violet Jessop
Now, this was one titanic survivor you didn’t want aboard your ship. Violet Jessop was born in Argentina, and her mother was a Stewardess with the famous White Star Line. She had her first brush with death at a young age when she caught tuberculosis, which was a major killer at the time. At the age of 23, she began her first job on RMS Olympic in 1911. The ship crashed into HMS Hawke while Jessop was on board, although everyone made it ashore after the harrowing event.
She went on to sign up as a Stewardess on RMS Titanic in 1912. Of course, you know what happened to that one. She only survived thanks to the “women and children first” rule that got her a spot on a lifeboat. Jessop wasn’t done with ships yet; she again boarded ill-fated HMHS Britannic in 1916, which also exploded during WWI, killing 30 people. She became the survivor of three of the worst shipwrecks of the 20th century.
Frane Selake
Many people consider him the luckiest man in the world, but if you attract near-death events so many times in your life, you may well be called the unluckiest man alive. The humble music teacher’s troubles began in 1962 when he survived a train crash by swimming across a river. He then fell out of a plane in 1963 and luckily landed in a haystack only to be involved in another accident a few years later when the bus he was in plunged into a river.
His ill fate continued when his car’s petrol tank exploded while he was inside, followed by a petrol pump malfunction in 1973 that sent flames blowing his way. In 1995 he was hit by a bus in Zagreb. Then, finally, in 1996, an overturned truck hit his Skoda while he was riding on a mountain road. His fate, however, turned in 2002 when he won a lottery ticket, allowing him to age in peace.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi
Yamaguchi died in 2010 after going into history books as the only man who survived both atomic bombs that struck Japan in 1945. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a Japanese engineer and a resident of Nagasaki. In August 1945, he was working on an oil tanker for Mitsubishi in Hiroshima, and it happened to be the fateful day that the first atomic bomb was dropped in Japan. He was about two miles away from the centre of the blast and survived with burns to his upper body.
After spending the night in a bomb shelter, he decided to go back home to Nagasaki the following day to his family. On August 9, 1945, while seeking medicine for his wounds, another bomb, bigger than the one he had survived in Hiroshima, dropped on his home town. He survived in an air raid shelter a second time, and luckily for him, his family survived too. He became the famous Nijyuu Hibakusha (the person who was bombed twice) of Japan and, of course, the luckiest man from the whole ordeal considering the extinction-level death tolls.
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Henry Ziegland
This 19th-century tale is still hard to believe because of the number of coincidences involved. This is how it goes; Ziegland, a man from Honey Grove, Texas, dumped his girlfriend in 1893. The devastated girl took her life. While seeking to avenge his sister, the girl’s brother decided to kill Ziegland. He shot him in the face, although the billet only grazed Ziegland, who fell unconscious and buried itself into a tree behind him. The brother wasn’t ready to face charges for the murder, so, thinking Ziegland was dead, he turned the gun on himself and died. Ziegland survived to live another 20 years but not without the guilt.
In 1913, Ziegland decided to cut down the tree that had taken the bullet meant for him, but instead of using an ax, he decided to blow it up with dynamite. Don’t worry, though; the dynamite explosion didn’t kill Ziegland. Actually, the bullet that had missed him 20 years earlier was released during the explosion and hit Ziegland in the head, killing him on the spot.
Calamity John
Well, Britain has had lots of unlucky people over the years, but none seems to have luck as bad as John Lyne. He has suffered over 15 major accidents and lived to tell the tale. His troubles started at birth since he was born with underdeveloped lungs. Then while just 18 months old, he drank disinfectant and had to be rushed to the hospital to have his stomach flushed. Then he fell off a horse and survived only to be run over by a delivery van, but somehow, the tires missed his tiny body.
At age 12, he fell off a tree and broke an arm, while on his way to the hospital, his bus collided with a lorry and he broke another part of the same hand he was going to patch. Bad luck has followed him through the years as he survived a lightning strike, being hit by a bus, a mining accident, and a collapsing mine. His most recent misfortune was falling into a manhole that damaged his back, making it hard for him to walk, but somehow, he is still alive.
Roy Sullivan
Roy Sullivan holds the world record as the man who was struck most times by lightning and survived, hence his name, the human lightning conductor. Now, the chances of being struck by lightning once in your lifetime are about 3000 to 1. However, increase that number to seven, and you got some impossible figure. He worked as a ranger in Shenandoah National Park, when one day in 1942 while hiding from a storm in a fire lookout tower, lightning struck and burnt his leg and toe. The second time, it hit him while in his truck, causing minor burns. He went ahead to survive five more deadly encounters with lightening until 1983 when he finally died from a bullet wound.
Melanie Martinez
Melanie Martinez is also known as America’s unluckiest woman after losing her five homes to five different hurricanes. She has always been a resident in the Louisiana plains driving a school bus for a living. Martinez lost her first home to hurricane Betsy in 1965, only to lose the one she rebuilt to hurricane Juan 20 years later. She was a victim of hurricane George in 1998 and again, lost another house to hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Things seemed to come back to normal when she finally settled in another house, but in 2012, her town, Braithwaite, was the only one whose flood barriers were breached by hurricane Isaac sweeping away her home that had just received a makeover courtesy of an A&E reality show called Hideous Homes.
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The Terrorist Magnet Couple
How do you survive three different terrorist attacks while on vacation in three different countries? The only explanation is that Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence are the unluckiest couple in the world. When 911 happened, the couple were having a vacation in New York. They then went to London on vacation in July 2005, the same day a string of suicide bombings wreaked havoc in the city, but again they managed to stay out of harm’s way. When they finally decided to go East in 2008, they took a vacation in Mumbai, India. It happened to be the same time the deadly terrorist bombings occurred in the city, forcing them to cut the vacation short.
Harry Jenkins
Harry Jenkins’ story will teach you never to go ice fishing with a dog, or dynamite, or both. Jenkins illegally obtained a stick of dynamite to blow up a fishing hole on Lake Ten Miles in Minnesota. When he got to the lake, he lit the dynamite and threw it over the ice, forgetting to keep Jerry, his Labrador retriever on a leash. Jerry assumes this is a game of fetch and runs over the ice, then picks the nearly exploding dynamite and starts running back towards Jenkins and his friends.
The three guys realize their mistake and take off in the opposite direction leaving the poor Labrador to explode. To make matters worse, he had parked his jeep too close to the lake, and with the explosion, the ice breaks and the jeep sinks to the bottom of the lake. Insurance refused to pay for the jeep leaving Jenkins with huge losses to mourn.