Beyond Coincidence (18 page)

And coincidence stories themselves, though not actually lost, can be found in some strangely coincidental ways. While researching this book, Brian King went into the BBC's offices to work at a computer. He was explaining to one of the department's producers, Amanda Radcliffe, that he was looking for stories for a book about coincidence when she said, “Look at the e-mail I've just received from my friend Cathy in Australia.” Among some general chitchat, Cathy had written about an extraordinary coincidence she had recently witnessed. Here is the story, “Two Rings in the Bay,” along with a variety of other remarkable tales of people and things lost and found.

T
WO
R
INGS IN THE
B
AY

Graham Cappi of Bristol was devastated when he lost his wedding ring while on honeymoon in Nelson Bay in Australia. It fell into deep water, beyond any hope of retrieval. Graham returned to England not expecting to see the ring again.

Fifteen months later, another Englishman, Nick Deeks, was on holiday at Nelson Bay and lost his wedding ring while snorkeling. He returned the next day in the forlorn hope of finding it. After several dives he finally surfaced triumphant with a ring. But it wasn't his—it was Graham Cappi's. Encouraged by the find, he carried on diving and, incredibly, eventually found his own wedding ring.

He had no way of knowing who might be the owner of the other ring, but by chance, a few inquiries in the local town turned up some people who remembered an English visitor who had been making inquiries about a ring. Connections were made and Graham Cappi was eventually contacted in England. He was overjoyed to learn that his wedding ring had been found. It was returned to him by a young local girl making a planned trip to England. She was intrigued to discover that Graham's wedding date, inscribed on the ring, was also the date of her birthday.

T
HE
G
OLDEN
M
ATCHBOX

The golden matchbox was a gift from the Prince of Wales to his friend and fellow fox hunter, Edward H. Sothern—a successful actor in the 1890s.

Out on a hunt one day, Sothern fell from his horse and the matchbox broke from its chain and was lost. Sothern had a duplicate made, which, after his death, went to his son Sam. Sam, also an actor, took the matchbox on a trip to Australia where he gave it to a Mr. Labertouche. Returning to England, Sam learned that the original matchbox had been retrieved, twenty years after its loss, by a farmhand who had found it while ploughing a field that very morning.

Sam explained what had happened in a letter to his brother Edward H., the third actor in the family, who was touring in America. Edward read it while traveling on a train with a companion, Arthur Lawrence. Edward told Lawrence the story, which prompted his friend to take a watch chain from his pocket. Dangling from its end was the duplicate golden matchbox—a gift from the Australian Mr. Labertouche.

W
HERE
T
HERE'S
M
UCK

Barbara Hutton accidentally flushed her antique bracelet down the toilet. Months later she was in a jeweller's when a man brought in a bracelet to be valued. It was Barbara's. The man had found it while working in a sewer.

B
ACK FROM THE
D
EAD

Alpha Mohammed Bah feared his partner and children were dead. He describes the moment when coincidence reunited them as “like being born again.”

In early 1997 Alpha was working as a commercial photographer in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. His partner Fatmata and their two daughters Sordoh and Marian lived across the city.

“It was a good life—I was self-reliant, making a living for my family,” he said.

But everything changed when a military junta seized power and Alpha was forced to become the head of security for his local community.

“Everyone was very afraid of the government,” he said. “Random executions and other atrocities were happening day to day. I couldn't bring myself to prosecute innocent people—but if I refused I would be shot—so I decided I would have to leave.”

Alpha was forced to flee without saying good-bye to Fatmata and his daughters—aged three and a few months at the time—as they lived on the other side of Freetown and he could not cross the checkpoints. He fled to New Guinea and waited for the situation to change back home.

In 1998, the junta were overthrown for a short time, and Alpha returned to try to trace his family. “I searched in many displacement camps for my relatives, but could not find them,” he said.

“During the year I was there I did not meet anyone who could tell me whether they were alive or dead. I started to believe they were dead because I had nothing to keep my hope alive.”

As the political situation began to deteriorate again, Alpha made the decision to emigrate to New York. En route, he was detained and questioned by immigration officials at Heathrow. He decided to seek asylum in Britain.

He settled in Wales, where he helped other refugees with translation and completing their asylum application forms. Some months later, he was contacted by a friend who asked him if he could help a woman and two children from Sierra Leone who had just arrived in Britain.

To his amazement he found it was Fatmata and his daughters.

“I could not believe it,” he says. “She just started weeping—and I was crying tears of joy. She later told me she had given up hope of ever seeing me alive again.”

H
OMING
B
RUSH

During the First World War, a U.S. soldier was on board a troop ship torpedoed off the French coast. He survived, but lost all his possessions. He also survived the rest of the war. In America after the war he was by the seashore near Brooklyn when he found a shaving-brush cast up on the shore. It had an Army number on the back. It was his own shaving brush.

A R
ADIO
Y
OU
C
AN
R
ELY
O
N

Canadian Mike Mandel tells this story about his father, who was active in the amateur radio scene in Toronto in 1976. Mike's father knew his subject, having been a radio communications tutor with the British army during World War II.

One evening a radio enthusiast friend came round to pick up some gear he had bought from Mike's father and the pair lugged it from the basement of the townhouse to the car outside, where they stood chatting.

Mike's father asked the friend if he had ever heard of a 19 set. The friend shook his head and Mr. Mandel explained that the 19 set was an old Russian tank radio that he had used to train radio operators during the war. The gauges were in Russian but the radio had the advantage of being reliable and simple to use. He hadn't seen one since the war, he said, but he'd love to get hold of one.

They said good-bye and Mike's father was walking back to the house when he noticed a pile of junk at the bottom of a wall. On top of the pile of junk was a 19 set Russian tank radio.

“Dad said he got a chill when he saw it,” said Mike. “He took it from the junk pile and carried it to our townhouse. He plugged it in and it worked perfectly. All the ancient tubes were intact.”

They made enquiries but never discovered where it came from. When Mike's father died the 19 set was donated to Ottawa's National War Museum, which displayed it with a photograph of Mr. Mandel senior seated at it.

P
HOTO
F
IT

Colin Eves was standing outside his local shopping mall when a man approached him and introduced himself as Derek from the local post office.

“I've seen a photo of you,” he said. “You were looking out over the harbor.” Derek took Colin back with him to the post office and produced some prints that had been found loose in some incoming mail. They were indeed pictures of Colin. His mother had taken them on a visit to see her son and had sent them to him but the envelope split open during processing at the post office.

A W
ARM
W
ELCOME FOR
J
ACK
F
ROST

Novelist Anne Parrish was excited to find a copy of
Jack Frost and Other Stories,
published in English, in one of the secondhand bookstalls beside the Ile de la Cité, in Paris. It had been a favorite book in her nursery in Colorado Springs, but she had not seen a copy since she was a child. She showed the book to her husband, who opened it at the title page, where he found the inscription: “Anne Parrish, 209 N. Weber Street. Colorado Springs.”

A D
IARY'S
S
ECRET
E
NTRY

A diary lost in a field in 1952 turned up just over a year later at the feet of its owner, who had stopped to light a cigar in the same field. Leon Goosens, a famous oboist, picked up the battered object and flicked through it. The bindings had sprung apart and inside he could see that the covers had been stiffened with squares of newspaper. This was normal practice in book binding at the time, so there was nothing unexpected about that, but what gave him pause was that this particular scrap of newspaper was about him. It was a piece from a nineteen-year-old gossip column about his marriage in 1933.

M
EET THE
F
AMILY

Sometimes things we have lost turn up in the most unexpected circumstances, many years after they disappeared. In the case of Kari Maracic, it happened to be her brother.

Ila Manner was only seventeen when she discovered she was pregnant by a young surfer named Chris Maracic she had met at a Florida high school dance. Maracic had just been drafted to Vietnam so when the child, a boy, was born, Ila's parents arranged for him to be adopted. On the adoption form Ila wrote that the parents' occupations were hairstylist and oceanographer, jobs they had dreamed of doing.

Eventually Maracic returned from Vietnam and the two were married. A year later, they had a daughter they named Kari.

The son, named Ben, grew up knowing he was adopted, but not who his real parents were or that he had a sister. “While I was in high school I took a test to determine what I was going to be when I grew up,” Ben said. “One of the options that I was given was an oceanographer. My foster dad said that was amazing because the adoption papers had said that my real father was an oceanographer.”

Kari meanwhile had moved to San Francisco where she shared a room with a girl named Erin Kehoe. One evening Erin invited Kari to a dinner. Also at the meal was a friend of hers named Ben Davis. At some point in the evening Erin asked Kari about her long lost brother.

Kari told how she had looked for her brother for eleven years without luck. Ben told her that he had been adopted from Florida. This in itself seemed quite a coincidence. Kari then told him the date of her brother's birthday and a startled Ben replied, “That's my birthday.” Erin looked hard at them both. “Hey you guys do look kind of alike,” she said.

But the possibility that they were brother and sister seemed to be dashed when Ben told them the occupations his natural parents had put on the adoption papers.

When Kari next spoke to her father on the phone she told him about the meeting. He became animated when she mentioned the adoption paper occupations of Ben's parents. He told her that at the time Ila had been studying to be a hair stylist and he had planned to be an oceanographer. At this point, said Kari, her stomach turned over. She knew she had found her long lost brother.

V
IETNAM
J
ACKET

The anonymous winner of a “strange but true” story competition posted the following account on the Internet.

“One weekend I went with a new male friend to a local flea market. My pal—a Vietnam veteran—had voiced a casual interest in finding a fatigue field jacket and I was keeping my eyes open for one.

“I spotted a field jacket and for some reason looked inside the cuff, where I noticed my friend's last name printed in black marker. It's a somewhat unusual name, and my first thought was that this was strange, and I wondered first if the seller had heard us talking and was pulling a gag, but that was ridiculous.

“I just said, ‘Look at this. Isn't that weird,' and then I looked up at his reaction and his face had gone white. He didn't speak, he just gulped and nodded.

“It was his jacket from Vietnam. He had turned it in to the army when he got out. He bought the jacket and wears it occasionally.”

5

LIFE IMITATING ART

The scene is familiar to millions of moviegoers. Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson and Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater plunging into the icy waters of the North Atlantic after the mighty ocean liner the
Titanic
sinks below the waves to the wails of the drowning and Celine Dion.

As a historical record, James Cameron's blockbuster leaves a lot to be desired, but that's beside the point here.

The point is that this celluloid reconstruction of the tragic sinking of the RMS
Titanic
was an example of art imitating life. What many people don't know is that the real-life events surrounding the
Titanic
's maiden voyage in 1912 appears to be an example of life imitating art.

The
Titanic
is by no means the only example of this eerie phenomenon.

T
HE
T
ITAN
AND THE
T
ITANIC

No one has ever come up with a theory that even begins to explain the extraordinary parallels between the novella
The Wreck of the Titan or, Futility,
written by American writer Morgan Robertson in 1898, and the real-life events surrounding the sinking of the RMS
Titanic
some fourteen years later in 1912.

Robertson might as easily have been writing a piece of journalism describing the tragic sinking of the
Titanic,
so similar were many of the details. The month of the wreck, the number of passengers and crew, the number of lifeboats, the tonnage, length, and even speed of impact with the iceberg were all close to identical.