Regardless of whether you think that coincidences are a random online casino slots real money casino win or there’s some kind of bigger pattern behind the occurrences, you have to admit that there have been some bizarre, eerie and frankly, somewhat unbelievable coincidences throughout the course of the world’s history – some of them, in fact, playing significant roles in how future events played themselves out.
Check out Sloto’s list of some of the most surprising coincidences of all time.
Demon Cat
Reports dating back to 1862 state that when sightings of an elephant-sized demon cat are recorded at the U.S. Capital, a national emergency soon follows. The sightings are considered a “ghost story” but there’s physical evidence that they do indeed occur.
Over the course of the last 170 years visitors to the Rotundra have seen a ghostly cat image, sometimes reported as a tabby and sometimes described as being all black. Two of those sightings occurred before national tragedies – one in November 1963 right before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and one before the stock market crash in 1929.
In 1892 the Washington Post wrote that the cat "swells up to the size of an elephant before the eyes of the terrified observer," while in 1935 the Post reported after another sighting that the cat's eyes "glow with the all the hue and ferocity of the headlights of a fire engine." Skeptics believe that the story got started with some drunk White House guards in 1862 and just rolled on from there but the random sightings in 1929 and 1963 are cause for questions.
Robert Todd Lincoln
Another set of coincidences also date to the Lincoln era and involve Robert Todd Lincoln, son of President Abraham Lincoln. Before John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in 1865 Booth’s brother Edwin saved Robert Todd Lincoln from being crushed by a train.
Robert Todd Lincoln was involved in another set of coincidences in the ensuing years, when he witnessed 3 presidential assassinations (the 4th assassination took place after Robert Todd Lincoln’s death).
After Abraham Lincoln was shot in the theatre, Robert Todd sat by his side at the White House until he passed away. In 1881 he was walking across a train station toward President James Garfield when Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau.
Robert Todd Lincoln spoke with the President as lay dying on the train station floor. Then, in September 1901, Robert Todd Lincoln was entering Buffalo by train when he was informed that President William McKinley had just been shot in that city.
Booth visited McKinley whom, everyone believed, was recuperating from the bullet wound, but shortly after he left, McKinley died.
Lunch
The location of a café sparked World War 1. History students learn that World War I was set off by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in June 1914.
The couple were assassinated by Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip who was a member of a group of Bosnian Serb students who wanted to free Bosnia and Herzegovina from Austria-Hungarian rule and establishing a South Slav state. They were supported by a shadowy “Black Hand” Serbian nationalist group.
The group actually tried to kill their victims twice. The first time, they threw a bomb at the Archduke but it hit the car behind his carriage and he escape unscathed. Following the failed attempt, Princip went to a café to get a sandwich and suddenly saw the Archduke’s carriage which had veered off course and was driving down the street next to the café, lost. Princip jumped up, leaving his sandwich half-eaten, and shot the archduke and his wife.
Triplets
In 1980 a young man named Robert Shafran arrived as a new student on the campus of a New York community college and was astounded to find that he was being greeted warmly by other students….but by a different name. He was soon introduced to the other student who looked just like him, Eddy Galland, and the two discovered that they shared the same birthdates and both had been adopted.
When the story was reported in the press a third young man who also looked exactly like Eddie and Robert and who shared their birthday contacted them and the three found out that they were biological triplets who had been split up at birth.
Despite having been brought up by different families, all three men liked the same kinds of girls, smoked the same cigarettes and were wrestlers.
Another case of separated-at-birth multiples uncovered even more similarities between the brothers, despite the fact that they were separated at birth. The “Jim twins” as they came to be called were separated at age 3 weeks and adopted separately.
Both were named “James” and called “Jim.” Both had childhood dogs named Toy, both were good at math and woodworking, both married women named “Linda” and then women named “Betty.” Both had sons that they named “James Alan.”
Both Jims were heavy smokers, both drove Chevrolets and both worked in security (one as a deputy sheriff and the other as a security guard). They both vacationed regularly near the same Florida beach.
In a University of Minnesota twin study that they participated in after finding each other it was found that their brain-wave tests and medical histories were almost identical as were the results of their personality tests.
