Beyond Coincidence (22 page)

Mrs. Allison Raymond of Ontario, Canada, and her family also took some stones away from the volcano. She told reporters, “My husband was killed in a head-on car crash, and my mother died of cancer. My younger son was rushed to hospital with a pancreas condition that's slowly getting worse. Then he broke his leg. My daughter's marriage nearly broke up and it was only when I posted the rocks back that our luck improved.”

Nixon Morris, a hardwood dealer from El Paso, Texas, was another who, in 1989, ignored warnings and took a Mauna Loa stone home. He promptly fell off his roof, his house was struck by lightning, and his wife fell ill with a mysterious infection that left her knee swollen. Morris then broke a hip and thigh when he fought with a burglar in their house, and his granddaughter fell and broke her arm in two places.

Morris had broken the Mauna Loa rock in two and given half to a friend. He said, “He brought the rock back to me after he wrecked four cars in less than two years and he'd never before had a wreck in his life.”

In March 1981 Morris sent the rocks back to Hawaii.

John Erickson, a naturalist at the Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii, said he receives up to forty packages of rock a day from tourists who have returned home and experienced strange sequences of bad luck.

F
RIDAY
A
FTERNOON
C
AR

James Dean died in 1955 when his Porsche Spyder sports car ran off the road. The car was taken to a garage, where it fell on a mechanic, breaking his leg. The engine was sold to a doctor who put it in his racing car, crashed, and died. In the same race, a car using the drive shaft from Dean's car crashed, and that driver was killed, too. When the car's shell was put on display, the car showroom burned down. It was exhibited again in Sacramento and fell off its stand onto a spectator, breaking his hip. The car was transported to Oregon, where it broke its mountings and smashed a shop window. In 1959 it is said to have broken into nine pieces while sitting on steel supports.

B
ABY
C
HAIR

Nine women working at a supermarket in Kent, UK, became pregnant over a ten-month period. They had all worked at checkout number 13.

T
HE
K
IMONO THAT
B
URNED
D
OWN
T
OKYO

A kimono successively owned by three teenage girls, each of whom died before she had a chance to wear it, was believed to be so unlucky it was cremated by a Japanese priest in February 1657. But as the garment was being burned a violent wind sprang up, fanning the flames and spreading them beyond control. The ensuing fire destroyed three-quarters of Tokyo, leveling 300 temples, 500 palaces, 9,000 shops, and 61 bridges, and killing 100,000 people.

M
ARTHA THE
B
OLT

Being married to Martha Martika had its positive and negative sides. The woman's first husband, Randolph, was struck down by lightning during a storm. Martha was devastated, but married again—to a young man called Charles Martaux. He, too, was killed by a lightning bolt. Martha fell into deep depression and sought help from a doctor. They fell in love and married. But he completed Martha's hat trick of electrifying bereavements when he stepped out into a thunderstorm and was struck and killed by lightning.

L
IGHTNING
S
TRIKES
A
GAIN

British cavalry officer Major Summerford was fighting in the fields of Flanders in the last year of the First World War when he was knocked off his horse by a flash of lightning. He was paralyzed from the waist down. He moved to Vancouver in Canada where, six years later, while fishing in a river, lightning struck him again, paralyzing his right side.

Two years later, he was sufficiently recovered to take walks in a local park. One summer's day in 1930, lightning sought him out again, this time permanently paralyzing him. He died two years later.

Zeus still hadn't had enough of Major Summerford. Four years later, lightning destroyed his tomb.

L
IGHTNING
L
IKES
M
E

Kenny MacDonald could be forgiven for believing that lightning has developed a taste for him. During his thirty-four years working as a telephone line repairer, he was struck by lightning no fewer than three times.

“It wasn't really so surprising,” he admits. “I was working in some pretty remote parts on telephone lines that were sometimes as much as thirty to forty miles long. Lines tended to come down in bad weather, and I would be sent out to repair the damage. People in remote communities rely on their telephones so perhaps I took some risks I shouldn't have.

“If you're up a pole at the end of a thirty-mile piece of wire in the middle of a thunderstorm, there is a real chance that lightning is going to find you. It was something of an occupational hazard. I was struck three, maybe four times in all those years, but the electricity passed straight through me and I have lived to tell the tale. If I'd been on the ground I would have been killed, but all I felt was a tickle and my hair stood on end. It leaves a coppery taste in the mouth.”

Kenny thought that when he retired a few years back, his brushes with the brutal electrical force of nature were over. He was wrong.

On one wild and windy day he got up early with his son and set off in his car to go fishing. As they got near to where they planned to fish, the weather deteriorated. The clouds grew thicker, hail began to fall, and a thunderstorm erupted.

“Without warning a huge bolt of lightning struck us,” says Kenny, who knows lightning when he sees it. “It blew a hole in the roof of the car. There was a huge bang, blue flames, and the smell and taste of copper. Our ears were ringing for twenty minutes.

“My son turned to me and said, ‘Dad, was that what I thought it was?' I said yes and he said, ‘Wow.'”

Kenny says they were saved from injury because the car's tires prevented the lightning from finding earth. If they'd had a flat tire they would almost certainly have been killed.

But Kenny wasn't about to let a little thing like a lightning strike get in the way of him and his beloved fishing. They limped on in their damaged car and settled down for a day's angling. Toward the end of the day Kenny managed to land a six-pound salmon. He caught it with a fly called “Thunder and Lightning.”

Looking back on the events Kenny says he can't help but feel that lightning is following him around. He considers himself unlucky to have been struck so many times, but lucky to have walked away unscathed.

As for the future, he promises to be more careful around thunderstorms, particularly if he's fishing. “These new carbon fishing rods make fantastic lightning conductors,” he says. “You can't be too careful.”

And he has a word of comfort for those people who are frightened by the sound of thunder. “You never hear the lightning bolt that kills you,” he says.

T
HE
S
COURGE OF
L
EO AND
M
E

In the late 1970s, actor Michael J. Fox starred in a Canadian sitcom named
Leo and Me.
In the years that followed, Fox and three other colleagues from the series were diagnosed with the neurological disorder, early-onset Parkinson's disease. Is the fact that four people associated with the same show contracted the same relatively rare disease more than just coincidence? If it is then it may be possible to find a cure.

Early-onset Parkinson's disease has no universally recognized cause. “This is like a detective story,” says Dr. Donald Calne of Vancouver's University of British Columbia Hospital, who treats Fox's three former coworkers. “We have to find the culprit. We have to consider a virus or a toxin.”

Although he can't think of any environmental links, Don S. Williams, a former director on
Leo and Me
who developed Parkinson's in 1993, says the study of his case gives him hope. “I try not to get too excited,” he says, “but I want to see if this leads to a cure.”

8

HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF

The case of the moped rider killed in a collision with the same taxi that had already knocked down his brother on the same moped exactly a year before shows us that history has a nasty habit of repeating itself.

Why does it seem to be the unpleasant things in life that tend to come around a second time?

M
URDER
M
OST
S
IMILAR

Two girls of the same age were murdered on the same day of the year, in the same place, 157 years apart. Mary Ashford, twenty, was found dead on May 27, 1817. The strangled body of Barbara Forrest, also twenty was found at the same location on May 27, 1974.

The bodies were found at points four hundred yards apart. Both girls had visited a friend earlier in the evening and they had both changed in order to go on to a dance. Both girls were raped before they were murdered. The deaths had occurred at approximately the same time of day, and in both cases attempts appeared to have been made to hide the bodies.

The men arrested for the murders were both named Thornton—Abraham Thornton and Michael Thornton. Both men denied the charge and both men were acquitted.

C
ROSSING
O
VER

A man whose daughter was killed by a train at a crossing four years before died at the same spot and at the same time. The train was being driven by the same man, Domenico Serafino.

Vittorio Vernoni, fifty-seven, used to drive back and forth to work several times a day over the Via Cartoccio crossing near Reggio Emilia, northern Italy, where his daughter Cristina, nineteen, was killed in 1991. The crossing, unmanned and without a protective bar—the legal norm for Italy's local railways—was equipped with two flashing lights and a bell to warn motorists of approaching trains. The crossing itself was situated near a bend. His daughter had been hit on the crossing on a bright winter morning and Vittorio drove over the crossing for the last time in his Renault on a sunny morning in November 1995. When the train driver, Domenico Serafino, spotted the car on the line and braked, it was already too late. His engine ploughed into the car and dragged it for several dozen yards.

Suggestions that Vittorio had decided to take his life at the place where his daughter had died were repudiated by his family and the train driver. Investigators said his death was accidental. Vittorio's son, Andrea, twenty-two, described it as an incredible, absurd fatal coincidence.

O
NLY A
F
OOL
M
AKES THE
S
AME
M
ISTAKES
T
WICE

Though this chapter may so far have suggested otherwise, history doesn't always repeat itself merely to spite us. Sometimes when it drags things round again it turns out to be helpful. It certainly helped one of this book's authors, Martin Plimmer, when he was applying for his first job as a reporter on a local paper.

Martin hadn't learned much in life at that point, but somewhere along the line he had become aware of the maxim that we should learn from our mistakes. Even if it hadn't yet sunk in, here was a heaven-sent demonstration of the principle.

Martin was fresh out of journalism college, schooled in law, newspaper practice, libel, shorthand, and writing and interview techniques. His knowledge of religion, however, was sadly lacking. He learned how vital this could be at his first job interview.

It was an old-fashioned local newspaper in a tall and gloomily daunting Victorian building. The editor sat in a den of an office, seemingly sealed off from the hum and crackle of life. At the end of the interview, which was very formal, the editor said, “Now, I'd like to test your general knowledge.” He stood up, walked across to his bookcase and picked out a thick blue book. He opened the book at random, looked the page up, and down, closed it, opened it again at random and said, “Ah yes, ‘religion.' 1. What was the name of the mountain that Noah's ark came to rest on after the Great Flood?”

“Mount Sinai,” Martin said. The editor frowned and asked a further nine questions. Martin got eight of them wrong. He didn't get the job.

When he got home that evening his father wanted to know how the interview had gone. He told him about the religious questions. “What questions?” asked his father.

“What was the name of the mountain that Noah's ark came to rest on after the Great Flood?”

“Ararat, of course. What did you say?”

“Sinai.”

“No, that was the mountain where Moses was given the Ten Commandments.” And so on through the ten questions.

A week later, Martin went for his second interview, at a different paper. It was a modern building this time, and once again the interview took place in the editor's office. It seemed to be going well but Martin's heart fell when the editor stood up, saying, “Now I'd like to ask you some general knowledge questions” walked over to his bookcase and took down a thick blue book. He opened the book at random and said, “Ah, this will do: religion.…”

Martin had to struggle not to answer the ten questions too fast. He deliberately got one wrong so as not to seem cocky. He got the job.

T
RAIL
B
LAZER

Alleged arsonist Douglas Hunziker was the victim of an extraordinary series of coincidences, according to his attorney.

Witnesses at his arson trial said the former California firefighter trainee was present at nine of the ten blazes he is charged with setting, often helping to put out the flames or to evacuate people from the area. But the fact that Hunziker, twenty-two, was at nine fires in less than seven months didn't mean he started them, said his defense attorney Darryl Genis.

“It is entirely plausible,” Genis told the jury, “that Douglas Hunziker is nothing more than a victim of extremely bad luck.”