The Eeriest Coincidences Throughout History

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.

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.

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.

Morgan Robertson published his novella Futility in 1898. In it, a massive commercial cruise liner named Titan collides with an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean, causing the ship to sink. 14 years later, nearly the exact same thing happened in real life with the Titanic disaster. Not only were the ships' names similar, Robertson's boat was nearly identical to the Titanic.

AP writer Michelle McQuigge noted:

The ships are approximately the same size, with the Titanic being only 25 metres longer than the Titan's 243. Both were capable of maximum speeds over 20 knots, and both carried only the bare legal minimum number of lifeboats for the thousands of passengers on board... 

Both vessels were hailed as unsinkable, and both proved all too vulnerable after striking icebergs in mid-April.

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?

A church exploded in the small Nebraska town of Beatrice on March 1, 1950, at around 7:25 PM. As choir practice always began around 7:20 PM, all 15 choir members perished in the blast, right? Nope. No one died. No one even incurred any injuries.

How? All 15 members were running late for their own personal reasons. They were nowhere near the church when it exploded. What could have been an utter tragedy for Beatrice ended up being relatively fine, save for the loss of the town church.