Beyond Coincidence (30 page)

Very well, said the sister-in-law. Elaine had given birth to a little boy, Sean, during the night. “I didn't even know she was pregnant,” said Susie.

C
ALLING
E
SMERELDA

The ring of a telephone very early in the morning woke Mrs. M. Rigby while she was staying at a friend's apartment in 1976. Realizing that it wouldn't be for her she went back to sleep and fell into a dream of telephone calls. She dreamed she was in the same bed, in the same apartment, but that when the telephone rang again she got up and went to the hall to answer it. The mournful voice of a woman asked if she could speak to Esmerelda. Mrs. Rigby said she was sorry, but there was nobody of that name in the apartment. Again the woman asked, and again Mrs. Rigby told her there was no Esmerelda there. In the dream she hung up and got back into bed.

Later that morning, over breakfast in the kitchen, she asked her friends who had called so early. One of the friends, Johnny, said that it had been his mother. Mrs. Rigby then described her dream and Johnny went quiet. He said that before he was born his mother had given birth to a little girl who only lived three weeks. Before she died they had her baptized. Her name was Esmerelda.

A
TTACK OF
W
IND

Nineteenth-century French occultist and astronomer Camille Flammarion was writing a chapter about wind in his book on the atmosphere, when a gust blew through his window, lifted the loose pages he'd just written from his desk, and sucked them back out of the window. Days later he received a routine parcel of his latest proofs from his publisher containing transcripts of the very pages that had gone missing. The porter, who acted as a regular messenger for Flammarion, solved the mystery. He had been passing the house by chance, saw the pages in the street, collected them up and took them to the publisher in the normal way.

D
OG
D
AYS IN
C
OMORO

Ali Soilih was a tin-pot dictator with a superstitious streak. Four weeks after the Comoro Islands, situated between Madagascar and the African mainland, gained independence from France in 1975, Soilih seized power with the help of French mercenary Colonel Bob Denard, and subjected the islanders to a tyrannical regime. A witch told him that he would meet his end at the hands of a man with a dog, so Soilih had all the dogs on the islands put to death. That was when Denard, now working for the other side, arrived to confront his former boss. He was leading an Alsatian. Whether Denard knew about the prophecy, which seems likely, and brought a dog with him deliberately to sow ominous fears, we don't know.

T
HE
L
ITTLE
B
OOK

In
The Challenge of Chance,
Arthur Koestler tells of a synchronistic episode concerning a book—an experience so dramatic that it converted him to a belief in psychic phenomena.

The year was 1937 and Koestler was imprisoned in Spain by the Franco regime awaiting the order for his execution.

“In such situations,” writes Koestler, “one tends to look for metaphysical comforts, and one day I suddenly remembered a certain episode in Thomas Mann's novel
Buddenbrooks.
One of the characters, Consul Thomas Buddenbrook, though only in his forties, knows he is about to die. He was never given to religious speculations but now falls under the spell of a ‘little book' that for years had stood unread in his library, in which it is explained that death is not final, merely a transition to another, impersonal kind of existence, a reunion with a state of cosmic oneness. The book was Schopenhauer's essay on death.”

Koestler was exchanged for a hostage held by the other side and the day after his release he wrote to Thomas Mann to thank him for the comfort he had received from the passage reflecting on Schopenhauer's essay. Mann replied that he had not read the essay for forty years, but a few minutes before the postman handed him Koestler's letter he had had a sudden impulse to fetch the volume from his library.

J
UNG
S
TRIKES
B
ACK

The writer and adventurer, Laurens van der Post, tells this story about his friend Carl Jung, in his book
Carl Jung and the Story of Our Time.

“I was making a film of the story of the life of Jung some years ago. The time schedule for the film had been determined nearly a year before we started filming. The final sequence on the last day of all was to be filmed in Jung's old house. We had worked all morning in his home and all day long the cameraman, producer, and myself—without mentioning it to one another—had an indescribable feeling that Jung was near to us. I heard the cameraman saying to an assistant, half jokingly at the time, ‘You know I had a feeling as if Jung were looking over my shoulder all the time.'

“It was a dry, hot, blazing afternoon and we left the house at lunchtime to do some background filming in the afternoon in the oldest section of Zurich, intending to return for the filming of the final scene by his home at sunset. On our way from Zurich to Kusnacht to do so, suddenly out of the hot blue sky the thunder clouds tumbled without forewarning, as if in a great hurry. By the time we reached Kusnacht the lightning was flashing, the thunder rumbling, and the rain pouring down.

“When the moment came for me to speak direct to the camera about Jung's death and I came to the description of how the lightning demolished Jung's favorite tree (two hours after his death) the lightning struck in the garden again. The thunder crashed out so loud that I winced and to this day the thunder, wince, and the impediment of speech it caused are there in the film for all to see.”

15

BOUNCING BABIES AND GOLF BALLS

Some coincidence stories defy classification.…

T
HE
I
NSTANT
G
RANDAD

Texan Ron Thompson's family grew by four in less than twenty-four hours in 1990, when three of his daughters, Mary, Joan, and Carol, gave birth to four boys.

First in line was Mary, aged twenty-eight, who was driven to the hospital by her nineteen-year-old sister Joan (also nine months pregnant). Five hours later, Mary gave birth to Shane. Seven hours after that, Joan was herself driven to hospital, by her pregnant sister Carol, and gave birth to a boy, Jeremy, a minute after midnight. Then twenty-four-year-old Carol went into labor, delivering twin boys just before 3 a.m.

H
OLE IN
O
NE

American golfer Scott Palmer claims to have hit nineteen holes in one. The chances of getting one are about 43,000 to 1. Scott, who has rounded up sixty-five witnesses to verify his claims, says he hit four of them on consecutive days in October 1983.

Palmer says his method is to conjure up a mental image of a faceless woman pouring a glass of milk at the moment he hits the drive. Sounds simple enough.

D
EATH
T
AKES A
H
OLIDAY

In 1946 Mildred West decided to take a week's vacation. She was the obituary writer of the
Alton Evening Telegraph,
New York. For the first time in the memory of anyone on the newspaper, during the seven days she was away, there were no deaths recorded in Alton, a city of thirty-two thousand. Normally they averaged ten a week.

O
NE
G
IANT
H
OME
R
UN FOR
M
ANKIND

San Fransisco Giants' baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry recalls how his former manager once rather pessimistically predicted that “they'll put a man on the moon before he hits a home run.”

The unflattering assessment, made by manager Alvin Dark in 1964, was a bit unfair, as Perry had a fairly respectable batting average for a pitcher, but it turned out to be uncannily accurate.

Six years later, on July 20, 1969, during a home game against the Dodgers, Gaylord Perry finally hit his first home run—but he was nipped at the wire by
Apollo II
's lunar module that had touched down on the moon just minutes earlier.

N
OISY
N
EIGHBORS

Two commemorative blue plaques in a London street reveal that Jimi Hendrix and George Frederick Handel lived next door to each other.

Handel (1685–1759) lived and died at number 25 Brook Street; Hendrix (1942–70) lived for one year at number 23.

M
ONK TO THE
R
ESCUE

The nineteenth-century Austrian portrait painter Joseph Aigner had a death wish, but thanks to repeated interventions by a Capuchin monk, it took him fifty years to realize his ambition. He first attempted to kill himself when he was only eighteen. His clumsy efforts to hang himself were interrupted by the arrival of the mysterious monk. Four years later he made a second attempt to hang himself, but was again thwarted by the same monk. At the age of thirty it looked like his death wish would be fulfilled when he was sentenced to be hanged for his political activities. Once again he was saved by the intervention of the monk.

Aigner was sixty-eight before he finally succeeded in ending his life. He shot himself with a pistol. His funeral ceremony was conducted by the same Capuchin monk—a man whose name Aigner never even knew.

T
HE
F
OUR
T
OWERS

In the wake of the World Trade Center tragedy on September 11, 2001, a group calling itself The Two Towers Protest Organization began a campaign to prevent the second film of the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy being named
The Two Towers.
Although the film is named after J. R. R. Tolkien's book, written and titled more than fifty years ago, the protest organization rejected the argument that the title was merely an innocent coincidence.

The organization, which described itself as being made up of “like-minded individuals who were greatly affected” by 9/11, issued a statement that read: “We believe that Peter Jackson [the film's producer] and New Line Cinema's actions are in fact hate speech. The movie is intentionally being named
The Two Towers
in order to capitalize on the tragedy of September 11. Clearly, you cannot deny the fact that this falls under hate speech. We believe that if they will not willingly change the name, the government should step in to stop the movie's production or to force a name change.”

The
Two Towers
film project was named long before the tragedy in keeping with the second book of Tolkien's trilogy. Immediately after the September 11 crisis Jackson did briefly consider renaming it, but decided against it because it would upset Tolkien enthusiasts, and also the book bearing the name is permanently in mass publication. Another fact that everybody seemed to overlook in the controversy is that the World Trade Center was never referred to as the Two Towers, it was always the Twin Towers.

T
HE
U
NFORTUNATE
A
NAGRAM

Naturalist Sir Peter Scott was an enthusiastic believer in the Loch Ness monster. So great, in fact, was his confidence in the creature's existence that he promoted the use of the Greek name for it:
Nessiteras rhombopteryx.
This name, which he and underwater photographer Robert Rines coined in December 1975, may be roughly translated as “the Ness monster with diamond-shaped fin.” As London newspapers quickly pointed out, the name is also an anagram for the words “Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S.”

H
ERE A
M
OO

The postal code of a Canadian farmer called MacDonald contained the letter sequence EIEIO.

P
OOR
T
OSSER

In an attempt to demonstrate a fifty-fifty probability in his first lecture at a new university, a professor of statistics tossed a coin that landed on a smooth floor on its edge. The likelihood of this happening has been estimated at approximately 1 billion to 1.

D
UDLEY
D
ANGER

The comedian Peter Cook once wrote about how his “minute seaweed-eating partner” Dudley Moore had an irrational fear about one of their more surreal sketches. The particular routine involved a graphic, if somewhat scatological, account of lobsters crawling up the bottom of the late actress Jayne Mansfield.

Said Cook, “Dudley was terrified of being beat up by Mickey Hargitay, Jayne's muscular ex-husband. I talked to Dudley yesterday. He has just rented a house in Los Angeles for six months. Only after he moved in did he discover the identity of his next-door neighbor. Yep, Mickey Hargitay.”

A T
OWN
L
IKE
A
LICE

In a man's world, the town of Pacifica, California, was a remarkable exception.

Back in 1992, the thirty-eight thousand residents of the town, which lies just to the south of San Francisco, voted in the first all-female city council in California and the first in the country for more than a century.

“I earnestly feel with all my heart and soul that it's not a woman's issue in Pacifica,” said Barbara Carr, a real estate agent who was one of four women voted onto the council. “It's just coincidence.”

The extraordinary turn of events came about after the three remaining men on the council, and one woman, were ousted in a recall election, held following a battle over a lighting and landscaping tax.

No one expected all seventeen men running for the council to be defeated in the subsequent election, and four of the five women in the race to come out on top.

“I really don't think the voters made any conscious decision to elect only women,” said councilwoman Bonnie Wells, who is likely to be chosen by the others as the new mayor. “That's just the way results turned out. I think they chose four people who could do the job and they happened to all be women.”

16

APOCRYPHA