My Strange Coincidences & Stephen Hawking’s Death
Do you believe in ESP or a sixth sense?
Throughout my life I have had many strange coincidences and they always amuse me and leave me feeling a little bit….well spooked.
- Last week I bought Stephen Hawking’s autobiography which I have been reading and on Tuesday night I started working on a blog post about the book and his life and he died on Wednesday morning.
- A few weeks ago I started watching the TV show Frasier from the beginning of the series and chatting to my wife I mentioned that I wondered if they would ever get together for another show , as they were all still alive and a few days later John Mahoney , who played the dad Martin died.
- A few months ago I was chatting to a friend about another friend we had known whilst living in London and had lost contact with and how much we would like to reconnect with him. We had tried to find him via the usual channels on social media etc without any luck and as we didn’t know his address or contact details we hit a dead end. The very next day he sent me a message from Facebook , he’d be looking for me also.
- About ten years ago I was on holiday in Lanzarote with my family and the wife and I met a couple from Preston whom we got talking to and hanged out with during the evenings in the bar. The husband was an electrician .When we return home to London I never give them another thought. A few years later we moved up north to Leyland , which is near Preston and we needed an electrician to do some work for us. So I called the first one I came across in the local directory and guess what? Yep , it was the guy who we’d met years before on holiday.
- When I first moved to London I was looking for part time work and went to sign up to an agency that covered advertising and marketing which was what I was doing at the time. I was called into a room for an interview and the guy who interview me was called John Chambers , exactly the name as me.
I have loads of these and will do a post about them at a later date.
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Well I never!
The most mind-boggling real-life coincidences revealed
“I couldn’t believe what happened,” Mrs Fletcher recalled.
“All these people came rushing down the aircraft towards me.”
The cardiologists were able to keep her stable while the plane was diverted to North Carolina and she even made it to the wedding.
Mould Magic
Alexander Fleming locked up his London lab one evening in September 1928 without bothering to do the dishes. When he returned a few days later and reluctantly began to tackle the toxic detritus of his failed experiments he noticed that one Petri dish containing a staphylococcus culture had begun to grow blue mould and that the mould had apparently killed any staphylococcus bacteria it had come into contact with.
Fleming conducted a series of experiments on this miraculous mould – presumably leaving his washing up to its own scientific endeavours – and determined that it was penicillium notatum, now commonly known as penicillin.
Brad Pitt damaged his Achilles tendon while playing Achilles in the film Troy
HOW UNFORTUNATE
Ticket to Hell
Choosing a holiday destination became the stuff of nightmares for Birmingham couple Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence after they inexplicably witnessed three international terrorist atrocities over seven years.
In 2001 the couple were visiting New York when the Twin Towers were struck; they were in London for a few days in July 2005 when three Tube trains and a bus were bombed and they were in Mumbai in November 2008 when a coordinated shooting and bombing spree brought tragedy to the city.
In something of an understatement Mrs Cairns-Lawrence told reporters: “It’s a strange coincidence. The terror attacks just happened when we were in the cities.”
Mamma Mia!
Police in Bari, Italy, were able to apprehend a thief who had grabbed a woman’s handbag as he sped past on his motorbike after she gave them an exceptionally detailed description of him. It turned out she was his mother.
Catch a falling Star
In all of human history only one person is unlucky enough to have been struck by a meteorite. And while the laws of probability dictate that meteorites will generally fall into uninhabited areas such as deserts or oceans, this one landed on a woman who was snoozing on her sofa.
In November 1954 Ann Hodges was asleep in her lounge in Sylacauga, Alabama, when a chunk of space rock crashed through her ceiling and hit her, causing an enormous bruise on her thigh but leaving her otherwise unharmed.
“You have a better chance of getting hit by a tornado and a bolt of lightning and a hurricane all at the same time,” astronomer Michael Reynolds told National Geographic.
Method Acting
Brad Pitt went all out to get into character on the set of Troy (2004) but it was probably a performance he’d rather forget than win an Oscar for. During a particularly tricky fight scene against his enemy Hector, Pitt leapt and landed badly, tearing his Achilles tendon in the process and ruling out the filming of other fight scenes for weeks.
Apt, considering Pitt was portraying Achilles, the mythical Greek hero.
Impossible Title
Proving that no amount of international fame can counter the weight of public emotion, pop star Kylie Minogue felt compelled to make an expensive and time-consuming last-minute change to the title of her 1997 album following the death of Princess Diana in August of that year.
The rather unimaginative new title was Kylie Minogue – the original had been Impossible Princess.
President John F Kennedy spookily ‘predicted’ his own death on the morning of his assassination
HISTORY REPEATING
Uneasy Rider
In July 1974, 17-year-old Neville Ebbin was riding his moped in Hamilton, Bermuda, when he was hit by a taxi and killed. One year later, his younger brother Erskine, now 17 himself, was killed in an identical accident.
That is, entirely identical: same moped, same road, same taxi, same taxi driver – and even the same taxi passenger.
See: The Expressed for more amazing coincidences
If you have any stories regarding strange coincidences I’l love to hear about them
Belfast Child 