Random Eeriest Coincidences Throughout History (14 items)

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  (#4) Separated Identical Twins Live Nearly Identical Lives

  Two identical twin boys were separated at three-weeks-old and adopted to separate families in Ohio in 1940. 39 years later, in 1979, the brothers were reunited. They'd both been named James by their adoptive parents and they both went by Jim. Both became law enforcement agents as adults. Both married women named Linda, divorced, and then remarried women named Betty. Both had dogs named Toy at different times in their lives. And both had sons named James Allan (or Alan).  

  Coincidence, a strong argument for nature over nurture, or unconscious psychic communication?
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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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  (#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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  (#2) Twins Die On The Same Day, In The Same Manner

  In early 2002, a pair of 70-year-old twins died on the same day in Raahe, Finland. Not so strange, right? Wrong. The men both were struck and killed by trucks while riding their bicycles on the exact same stretch of road, about a mile apart from each other, within a span of two hours.  

  Police did not suspect premeditated suicide, as the twin to die last had no knowledge of his brother's death before setting out on his bike. Their near-simultaneous and eerily mirrored deaths were simply a freak accident.
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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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  (#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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