Unbelievable Historical Coincidences Around The World

Human history is riddled with an uncomfortable amount of coincidences, many of which seem too crazy to believe. Like the fact almost every American president is descended from one particular ancient king. Or the disturbing reason many disconnected cultures around the world have historical myths about vampires. And how about the 19th-century book that prophesized Donald Trump? Let's investigate all of this and much more, as we voyage into the most bizarre historical coincidences around the world!

US President Coincidences

Sharing a death day is worse than sharing a birthday and no one knows this more than John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the 2nd and 3rd Presidents of the United States of America. These heroes coincidentally died within five hours of each other on a very significant day indeed.

In 1826, a 90-year-old Adams was on his deathbed. Just before he died, he proclaimed “Thomas Jefferson still survives”, happy that the revolutionary spirit still lived on in his compatriot. Little did Adams know, Jefferson had died only hours before.

The most remarkable part of this coincidence is that they died on the 4th of July, which also happened to be the 50th anniversary of American independence. The only other president who’s since died on Independence Day was James Monroe, the 5th president.

While we're exploring Presidential coincidences, did you know, presidents Obama and Washington are practically cousins? Turns out, every American president, except old Martin Van Buren, is a descendant of the 13th-century English tyrant, King John.

Four of King John’s descendants were passengers on the Mayflower, one of the first ships to bring European settlers to the Americas. Those four English passengers are ancestors of all the U.S. presidents up-to-and-including President Obama.

It gets even weirder when you learn just how interconnected family trees are in general. Think about this: your DNA comes from your 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on. This doubles each generation, so by 20 generations back, which is roughly 600 years ago, you have over a million genetically-contributing ancestors! By 40 generations back, that number is over 1 trillion!

This seems confusing, given that the population of the world 40-generations-ago, around the year 800, was only around 250 million people. But here’s why it works: many of these ancestors are actually overlapping repeats, as family trees weave back on themselves a ton. Having offspring with distant relatives is a lot more common than it’s comfortable to think about.

So, with regard to Old King John, it only typically takes a couple of generations for royal offspring’s offspring to re-join the regular folk’s gene-pool. Every person’s lineage is an enormous, insanely complex, overlapping network of ancestors, consisting of both commoner-classes and upper-classes alike! So, we can tell from genetic research that DNA is shared at the grand-scale between people who can trace their ancestry to specific geographical areas, like England, for example.

There actually aren’t detailed ancestral records forming a direct chain from each president to the king; for the most part, these records don’t exist, or they’ve been lost over time. And while many of the earlier presidents were from landowning families, which did have more direct and recent royal links, the connecting lines of later presidents are more a case of association by the sheer number of common ancestors accumulated over a certain number of generations.

Instead, the presidents only need to trace their lineage as far back as Englishmen aboard the Mayflower to make the royal connection! And amazingly, for that reason, a sizeable percentage of the people reading this article are also related to King John: statistically, almost anyone with English ancestry!

Bizarre presidential connections don’t end there. Kennedy and Lincoln share an uncomfortable amount of coincidences. Both Presidents began their careers a century apart, with Lincoln getting elected to Congress in 1846 and Kennedy doing the same in 1946. Then, both men became President, also a century apart, with Lincoln winning in 1860, and Kennedy winning in 1960. It gets weirder though.

Both presidents have seven letters in their last names, were heavily involved in civil rights, lost children while living in the white house, and were both fatally-popped in the noggin on a Friday. Lincoln was targeted in Ford’s Theater, while Kennedy met his maker in a Ford Lincoln. Both men’s assassins were also ganked before their trials.

Both presidents were succeeded by Vice Presidents named Johnson, who’re also born a century apart: Andrew Johnson, born in 1808 and Lyndon Johnson, born in 1908! But the presidential coincidences continue on into more recent presidencies! Specifically, two 19th-century books, by Ingersoll Lockwood, which read like they’ve been written for Donald Trump and his son Barron.

Lockwood’s novels follow a wealthy young man called Baron Trump, Baron being his title, not his name. In Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Journey, Baron Trump sets off on an adventure after being given a manuscript written, intriguingly, by a character referred to as Don. Like Baron Trump, Don is his title, not his name, but as Baron Trump journeys to mystical underground lands, he meets various fantastical peoples each with a wise lesson.

The first group warn Trump against considering the loudest man in the room, the greatest. The second criticize surface rulers’ vanity. The third teach about the dangers of being hot-headed. Then finally, the fourth are a group of small-headed people, who end up so terrified of Trump’s huge head that they push him back to surface world through a portal. Baron then returns to Castle Trump having learnt very little.

Some folks have noted it’s pretty coincidental how all of the lessons are relevant to Donald Trump, in as much as these are traits his critics have applied to him.

In another of Lockwood’s books, a divisive political outsider wins the Presidential election causing New York City to erupt into chaos. Lockwood calls specific attention to how a “Fifth Avenue Hotel will be the first to feel the fury of the mob”, the street where Trump Tower now stands. Indeed New York saw a number of protests when Trump was elected in 2016, several of which spilled over into 5th Avenue and the vicinity of Trump tower!

While these are all very bizarre coincidences, it doesn’t necessarily mean Donald Trump has access to a time machine. Then again, his uncle had direct access to Nicolas Tesla’s files and who knows what kind of scientific marvels were hidden within? If you don’t know, Tesla was a ground-breaking inventor, credited with many revolutionary inventions like the induction motor, and pioneering wireless technology. But some folks are convinced Tesla was also working on technology that was far more advanced.

Two days after Tesla died, the FBI called an MIT Professor to go through Tesla’s estate. That professor was John Trump, Donald Trump’s uncle. John Trump claimed that he didn’t find much, saying the files were “speculative, philosophical and promotional”.

Despite dismissing them, only 60 of the 80 trunks of files were sent back to Tesla’s home. What was inside those extra 20 trunks will always remain a mystery, we might never know if it had blueprints for a flux capacitor and the location of a Delorian hidden in a cave!

Vampire Myths Around The World

Let's sink our teeth into something a little darker. This bizarre coincidence explores how the legends of many seemingly unconnected cultures all feature a version of the same monstrous fiends with bat-like features. You may know them as vampires.

In Togo and Ghana, West Africa, a vampiric creature called the Adze haunts the Ewe people’s folklore. The tales tell of a firefly that transforms into a human, possessing and feeding on its victims as they sleep. The Ashanti people, also from Ghana, have a similar tale of an iron-toothed creature, the Asanbosam, which stalks its human prey from the trees.

Then over in Madagascar, there are stories of the Ramanga, a creature who would drink noble blood and eat toenail clippings. Over in Zanzibar, the Popobawa is an evil spirit that takes animal form during the day, usually a bat, and changes into a human at night to seduce its victims before finally feeding from them.

Over in India, Hindu folklore tells of the Vetala. A sinister creature that haunts cemeteries and possesses the dead. While over in the Philippines, the Manananggal is very similar to traditional European vampires, having a thirst for blood, and a fear of garlic and sunlight. Tales of vampiric creatures go back millennia, with stories from ancient Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia, telling stories of demons with a taste for blood.

You’re probably most familiar with the European take on the concept, as laid out with Bram Stoker’s terrifying 1897 novel, Dracula. But the earliest literary mention of vampires in Europe comes from The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, an encyclopedia published in 1689. It features the tale of a recently-deceased peasant who started harassing his widow and feeding on his former neighbors. Back then, European vampires were known as dark-red-skinned, bloated undead creatures that visited loved ones and caused trouble in their old neighborhoods.

This fun European myth made its way over to North America and gripped parts of New England in a period known as the Great Vampire Panic. Between the late-18th and late-19th-century, families were rampantly digging up and burning departed relatives, fearing that vampires had taken over the region, often encouraged by local ‘doctors’.

In hindsight, the people of New England were seeing their friends and families ravaged by a disease they called ‘consumption’. Its victims would rapidly lose weight, develop fevers, and suffer extreme exhaustion, alongside more ghastly side effects, making it look like they were being ‘consumed’ by a supernatural force. Unable to explain it medically, the superstitious people would attribute the sickness to vampires, instead of what we know of today as the bacteria-caused disease, tuberculosis.

As a matter of fact, this misunderstanding of germs and expired bodies could explain the presence of vampire myths worldwide. As the no-longer-living often carry plenty of diseases, extended exposure to them can make people sick. Back before modern medicine came up with germ theory, diseases were believed to be spread by either bad smells or malicious entities, the undead being among them.

Humans have understood the need to keep the dead buried away from the living for a long time, with the oldest intentional burial site dating back 100,000 years to a cave in Qafzeh, Israel. Much later, between the 5th and 3rd centuries BCE, the Ancient Greeks would sometimes lay heavy stones or pottery fragments on top of the dead to pin them down in case they rose as undead.

Keeping away from human remains would have been a valuable survival instinct that kept us disease-free in our earliest, primal days as a species; not least because, in the simplest terms, if something killed someone, it might still be around to get you too!

So, having stories passed down through generations, metaphorically highlighting the danger of the dead in simple terms, and the dead-like, makes a lot of sense. Or maybe vampires used to be a lot more common, and have since either been hunted to extinction or simply understood that hiding is the only way to survive.

Wartime Coincidences

Imagine if a number close to you, like your phone number or even your license plate predicted a significant event caused by your death. While that sounds unbelievable, it happened. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were driving around Sarajevo, a city in the former Austria-Hungary, on June 28th 1914. That afternoon, the Archduke coincidently drove past an assassin who’d failed to take him out earlier that day.

The assassin was sitting in a café, when he noticed the Archduke’s open-top car pull up on the opposite side of the street. Seizing the bizarre coincidence, the hitman didn’t let the Archduke get away again, and so sparked World War One.

The best detail about this bizarre coincidence is that if we take a look at the Archduke’s car’s number plate it reads: A III II8. In other words, Armistice, November 11th, 1918, the date World War One ended. Armistice day. It’s worth noting the first three vertical figures are actually the letter ‘i’, but it’s certainly still a remarkable visual.

20 years later, another curse seemed to have caused the next world war. In 1941, Soviet archaeologists were hunting down the remains of Timur the Lame under direct orders from Stalin. Timur was known as one of Asia’s most ruthless military generals during the 14th century. During his ferocious 40-year career, 17,000,000 people died as a direct result of his tyrannical military rule.

Soviet Archaeologist, Mikhail Gerasimov, wanted to examine the remains to see what Timur looked like so he could create a sculpture of the tyrant. This, Soviet leaders hoped, would enable them to control the historical narrative, cementing their influence over Central Asia.

When the Soviets found his tomb and dragged open the heavy coffin lid, an inscription lay waiting. It read “Whoever opens my tomb shall unleash an invader more terrible than I”. Two days later, the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany. Terrible coincidence or a powerful curse?

Historical wartime coincidences haven’t been exclusive to the 20th century, though! In the summer of 1861, Wilmer McLean and his family were living on his wife’s plantation near Manassas Junction, Virginia, when Confederate General Beauregard, commandeered his farm; transforming it into his battlefield headquarters and hospital for the upcoming Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the American Civil War.

While Wilmer didn’t exactly have a choice, he didn’t object either. As a young man, he was an officer in the Virginia Militia, and so he understood that sacrifices sometimes have to be made.

However, by the end of 1862, his wife was pregnant and the danger suddenly far outweighed any potential profits. It was so dangerous, in fact, that Beauregard rather humorously recorded in his diary that when he sat down for dinner in the McLean’s home, a cannonball came through into the kitchen, and embedded itself in the fireplace, totally ruining dinner.

By the end of 1863, the McLean family relocated 120 miles southwest to Appomattox County. Two years later, Wilmer had been supplying sugar to the Confederate army when, on April the 9th, he was approached by Confederate Colonel Charles Marshal. The colonel was scouting a safe location for a secret meeting. Despite Wilmer suggesting other places, they eventually settled on the McLean family home.

At one o’clock that afternoon, Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Union General Ulysses S. Grant met in the McLean parlor to discuss the Confederacy’s surrender. Half an hour later, the war was over. The Union had won, and in the home of the very same family who hosted the war’s beginning.

To thank the McLean family for their hospitality, Union soldiers then plundered the family home for souvenirs, forcing money into a protesting Wilmer’s hands.

Telegraph Patent Coincidence

In 1837, scientists, separated by thousands of miles, coincidentally invented and patented the same revolutionary device: the electric telegraph.

In England, Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone patented an electric telegraph system. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Samuel Morse, the man who also created Morse Code, was also granted a patent for his version of an electric telegraph system.

Morse designed an electronic transmitter, called a port-rule, that could send signals through an open circuit. The transmitter had ridges representing dots and dashes, the basic components for Morse Code. To send something, you’d arrange the dots and dashes in the desired sequence, then crank an arm to transmit it. This arm then made and broke contact with two cups of mercury, opening and closing the circuit. The resulting electronic pattern would then spell out your message Morse code.

On other hand, the Cooke and Wheatstone invention was easier to use. It had five needles that pointed to letters when they received electrical signals. The sender would use simple electrical pulses to send the messages, making it far more accessible.

Both inventions received their fair share of success. In 1843, Morse secured government funding to build a 35-mile-long prototype telegraph line between Washington D.C and Baltimore. A year later the system was finished, and the first message was telegraphed in the United States, launching the 100-year telegraph era in the U.S.A. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Cooke and Wheatstone system was adopted by the British Railway to standardize timings and signals.

Both inventions paved the way for the age of communication, and were both sparked at essentially the same time, in the perceptive brains of scientists able to see the technology of their time, and build a vision for the future.

Sea Peoples

3,200 years ago the Bronze Age Mediterranean world disintegrated in what’s now known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, leaving an archaeological trail of destroyed cities dating between 1250 and 1150 BCE. Evidence of devastating earthquakes, droughts, famines, rebellions, and invasions by mysterious marauding "Sea Peoples" coincidentally gripped the Mediterranean all at once with hellish effects.

Between 1225 and 1175 BCE, a powerful series of violent tremors, often referred to as an "earthquake storm", savaged the Mediterranean. This sequence of earthquakes began with a large tremor that weakened a fault line, leading to other earthquakes days, months, and even years later. Evidence suggests that over a 40 to 50-year period, magnitude 6.5 quakes repeatedly struck the region; tremors strong enough to bring down modern buildings, let alone Bronze Age ones.

Around the same time, between 1250 and 1100 BCE, a megadrought coincidentally ravaged the region. For 150 to 300 years, the land became the driest it had been for the entire bronze age, a 2,000-year period. Civilizations located near dependable water sources, such as Egypt with its Nile River, managed to survive, but others were plunged into famine.

This would’ve undoubtedly caused mass migration, as climate refugees desperately searched for resources. Historians suggest that this is a possible origin of those Sea Peoples mentioned earlier. The historical term Sea Peoples refers to a group of ancient tribes, credited with the destruction of many Bronze Age empires. While many civilizations that encountered these marauders were destroyed, the ancient Egyptians survived. Their records tell of a people coming from the sea, likely from various Mediterranean islands, but include few details.

The only thing we do know is that the Egyptians watched as the Sea People destroyed the Hittite Empire, the Mycenaean Greek civilization, and several other Cypriot kingdoms, as well as devastating many independent cities along the Levantine Coast. They were finally scattered when they decided to try their luck against Ramses the third, ruler of Ancient Egypt, who defeated them in a surprise ambush and an ensuing land battle.

While we don’t fundamentally know who these people were, we do know that they’re the final cherry on top of the very unhappy series of coincidences that triggered the Bronze Age Collapse, which altogether spelled absolute disaster for countless souls in the region.

Roy Sullivan Got Hit By Lightning 7 Times

Park Ranger, Roy Sullivan, AKA the “spark ranger” must’ve angered Zeus, because he was struck by not one, not two, not three, but seven bolts of lightning.

It began in April 1942, when Mr. Sullivan took shelter from a storm in a fire lookout tower in Shenandoah National Park, where he worked. Lacking a lightning rod, the tower was struck eight times, setting it ablaze. Just as Mr. Sullivan ran out the door, a stray bolt struck him, burning his leg and leaving a hole in his shoe.

That’s enough for a lifetime, but nearly three decades later in 1969, Mr. Sullivan was driving when another bolt deflected off a tree right into his open truck window. He escaped with his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes alight, but otherwise mostly unharmed. Then in 1970, while standing in front of his house, lightning deflected off a nearby transformer, right into his left arm. He survived, albeit with a medium-rare shoulder.

The fourth happened in 1972. While Roy was working inside his ranger station, a bolt of lightning found its way in and struck his head, setting his hair on fire again. Then, in 1973, Sullivan was driving to escape a storm, and the second he stepped out of his truck thinking he’d reached safety, he was struck again.

He walked away with scorched arms, legs, and another flamin’ haircut! The sixth came in 1976 while Sullivan was lying on the forest floor having sprained his ankle. As he noticed storm clouds forming overhead, he tried to stand but was struck immediately. Talk about a bad day!

The final strike happened in 1977 during a fishing trip, when Sullivan’s head was once again set ablaze by a lightning bolt. Panicked, he ran for the sanctuary of his car when at that very moment, a hungry bear emerged, sniffing Sullivan’s haul of fish. Sullivan, the lightning-crazed-maniac, ran at the beast, chasing it away and saving his fish.

While Sullivan was reportedly avoided by folks out of fear that they too might get struck by lightning, he thankfully passed the remainder of his life without another strike. But talk about a chain of shocking coincidences!

Ancient Pyramids Around The World

As everyone knows, Ancient Egyptians built pyramids as tombs for the Pharaohs. They contained everything a monarch could need in the next life. Food, clothes, and, in one 200-year period within the 3,000-year timeline of Ancient Egypt, even a handful of servants and religious loyalists thrown in! And of course, there was always heaps of gold.

But here’s where the coincidence comes in. Throughout history, highly-similar pyramids have appeared thousands of miles away. As early as 4000 B.C.E., down the street in ancient Mesopotamia, they built Ziggurat pyramids for astrological and religious reasons, similar to Mesoamerican pyramids in South and Central America, which appeared between 1,000 and 400 B.C.E. In North America, for about 200 years on either side of 1000 C.E., the Hopewell and Mississippian peoples made their versions of pyramids that were used as burial sites and platforms for temples.

Over in China, pyramids had been built in various levels of size and complexity since as early as the Neolithic Hongshan culture, centuries before Ancient Egypt, and later, in more sizeable forms by the Han dynasty. It wasn’t just pyramids either; stone megaliths have repeatedly, coincidently appeared in vastly separate cultures throughout history.

England’s Stonehenge, for example, began construction around 3000 B.C.E., and is just one of hundreds of stone megaliths in Britain, and of thousands worldwide. From the Nabta Playa standing stones on the most easterly tip of the Sahara desert, constructed as far back as 7500 B.C.E., to Mongolia’s Deer Stones from 1400B.C.E., distant disconnected tribes have consistently chosen to create specific arrangements of standing stones.

While some believe this round-the-world, seemingly-synchronized emergence of very similar archaeological sites and designs, is proof of a lost ancient, global mega-civilization, it’s not necessarily that complicated. The Multiple Discovery or Simultaneous Invention hypothesis explains that, in its simplest form, great minds think alike. The Multiple Discovery theory states that independent development often finds the same solutions. So two disconnected cultures having the same problem would both find the easiest solution.

When multiple societies were having trouble building large buildings, they’d separately figure out that, logically, pyramids, with their geometrically-sturdy bases, are the solutions. If they were having difficulty tracking harvest times: They’d put up standing stones to help accurately track the sun, stars, and seasons. All humans experience the same laws of physics, so it makes sense that we all come to the same conclusions.

Seven-Headed Serpents

Surprisingly, many geographically-separate cultures’ mythologies all feature seven-headed entities and creatures. In Central America, Chicomecoatl, the Aztec goddess of food and sustenance is also known as seven serpents and you can see it in the image below represented by seven snakes sprouting out of an Aztec person’s neck.

Over in West, South, and South East Asia, a seven-headed serpent is often depicted alongside cherished deities crossing religious affiliations. Both Buddhist and Hindu deities are protected by a seven-headed snake, referred to as a seven-headed Naga, Naga meaning snake in the 8,000-year-old Sanskrit.

Over in Khakassia, Russia, this 5,000-year-old neolithic petroglyph was found depicting a seven-headed deity. The region wasn’t settled at the time, so it was likely left by nomadic peoples as they moved from place to place.

Further south, Albanian mythology talks of a creature called the Kulshedra, depicted as a large seven-headed dragon. 4,500 years ago, the ancient Sumerians also told myths of a beast with the body of a lion and seven snake heads. At the same time in Ugarit, modern-day Syria, they believed in a monster with seven heads they called Lotan. Even in the Bible’s book of Revelations, a seven-headed beast with 10 crowns is described as emerging from the sea. The list goes on and on, but what caused these cross-cultural, 7-headed coincidences?

The most intriguing theory suggests that the myths all grew out of an original, ancient Sumerian creation myth that uses a metaphorical seven-headed monster to represent the seven dry months of their year. In the tablet below, a Hero-god wearing grain on their head can be seen using a sickle to fight the seven-headed dragon.

It’s widely interpreted as the culture’s metaphorical depiction of the harvest season coming along to kill the dry season, ending famine and drought. Since so many Sumerian tales are found adapted in later mythology around the world, this ancient story being the birthplace of the others is quite plausible, not to mention the fact that the effect of the seasons on crops is a relevant issue all over the world. Much like how the Great Flood can also be found in lots of cultures’ mythos, a story also originating in Sumerian mythology.

If you were amazed at these historical mysteries, you might want to read about more bizarre historical coincidences. Thanks for reading!