• From being hit by a meteorite to having your five of your homes destroyed by hurricanes,
we count ten people who had the worst luck ever!
7 – Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence, • English travellers Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence
have had more tussles with terrorists than 24’s Jack Bauer.
They were unlucky enough to be at the epicentre of the September 11 bombings and went on to
witness two more attacks in the following years.
• Not only did the unlucky couple have their New York holiday interrupted by the worst
terrorist attack in history, but they were also in London during the devastating 2005
London bombings.
Three years later, they went to exotic Mumbai and witnessed another terror attack that took
the lives of hundreds.
• That’s three devastating once-in-a-lifetime experiences in the space of eight years.
I bet staying at home for the rest of their lives is starting to look really good to them.
6 – Ann Hodges, • On an ordinary day in 1954, Ann Hodges
was having a nice relaxing nap on her couch when she was struck by a meteorite.
Okay, so it was only a small piece of one, and she survived, but Anne is still the only
person in recorded history to have been hit by a meteorite.
This makes her statistically very very unlucky.
• The tiny fragment of chrondite rock actually broke through Anne’s roof and struck her
in the hip.
Once she’d finished swearing at the gods, she realised the hunk of space rock might
make her very rich.
It might have too – until the United States Air Force swooped in via helicopter and confiscated
it.
• She eventually got it back after a gruelling legal battle, but then her landlady tried
to claim it.
All the public attention became too much for Ann, so she donated the meteorite to the Alabama
Museum of Natural History.
5 – Man at Berlin Zoo, • No matter how shit a day you’re having,
just remember that it could always be shittier – err, worse.
There could, for instance, be footage of you on the internet getting projectile pooed on
by an elephant.
That’s what happened to an unfortunate guy visiting Berlin Zoo.
• The tourist didn’t do anything to provoke the animal.
It seems the elephant just decided he’d look better covered in faeces.
Such wise creatures…
7 – Henry Jenkins, • Harry Jenkins’ explosive misfortune
involves a stick of dynamite, a fishing trip, a dead dog and a sunken truck.
He and his buddies had grand plans to go fishing at Minnesota’s Ten Mile Lake.
Unfortunately, the lake had completely frozen over, so Harry, the thinker, lit a stick of
dynamite and threw it across the ice.
• What he hadn’t accounted for was Jerry, his pet Labrador retriever, who raced across
the ice and collected the dynamite, thinking his master was throwing him a stick.
The men screamed, but Jerry kept on running towards them, wagging his tail.
Harry and his friends narrowly escaped, but Jerry went straight to doggy heaven.
• The explosion also cracked the ice near their truck, causing it to plunge straight
to the bottom of the lake.
Worse still, Harry’s insurance company refused to pay on his sunken truck claim.
Definitely one of the unluckiest days of his life.
6 – Melanie Martinez, • Melanie Martinez is the queen of home
owner misfortune.
She lost five houses to five hurricanes!
Because she lived on a Louisiana flood plain, Melanie’s homes were devastated by Hurricane
Betsy in 1965, Juan in 1985, George in 1998 and Katrina in 2005.
• Fortunately, reality TV came to her rescue, as the producers of a renovation show had
heard of her bad luck and offered to help.
Melanie’s home was generously made over with a new kitchen, cupboards and top of the
line appliances.
• But then, on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the category-1 hurricane
‘Isaac’ swooped in and dealt her home another devastating blow.
You could almost hear the voice on the wind saying, ‘No, Melanie…
You can’t have nice things…’
5 – Costis Mitsotakis, • An entire Spanish village won the lottery
– expect for one unlucky resident.
• The Christmas lottery, known as El Gordo, is so huge that its name translates to ‘the
fat one’.
The prize pool was a staggering $950 million, and sixty-nine out of Sodeto’s seventy households
bought a winning ticket.
This meant that farmers and down-on-their luck construction workers became instant millionaires.
• Except, of course, for poor old Costis Mitsotakis, who was dubbed ‘the world’s
unluckiest man’.
Despite his misfortune, Costis says he has no hard feelings.
He even went on to make a documentary about the small village of millionaires.
4 – Roy Sullivan, • Statistically, there’s a 3,000-to-one
chance the average person will get struck by lightning, but that didn’t stop Roy Sullivan
from getting hit seven different times.
The odds of this happening are literally twenty-two septillion to one!
• As a US park ranger, working outside may have contributed to his incredible bad luck.
He was hit while on a lookout tower, while driving, while fishing, and even inside a
ranger station.
It takes a special person for lightning to search you out inside a building.
• Sadly, he committed suicide at age seventy-one, but after seven strikes it’s remarkable
his death had nothing to do with lightning.
3 – John Lyne, • John Lyne, Britain’s unluckiest man,
has had an absurd number of accidents.
Firstly, he was lucky to survive childhood as he was born with underdeveloped lungs and,
as a toddler, drank toxic chemicals from under his grandmother’s sink.
• He was later struck by lightning, had eight of his teeth knocked out by a rock,
was involved in multiple car crashes and was run over by a van.
When he was a teen he fell from a tree and broke his arm.
While on his way to the hospital, the bus he was in crashed, causing him to break the
same arm again just in a different place!
This was on Friday the 13th too…
• Despite his chronic bad luck, John says he’s just happy to be alive.
Life insurance companies wouldn’t touch him, though.
2 – Jeanne Rogers, • Jeanne Rogers has had so many unlucky
things happen to her you’d swear she was cursed.
‘Dying doesn’t scare me,’ she’s quoted as saying, ‘but living scares the crap out
of me!’
• Jeanne’s bad luck begins at eighteen, when she fell over the railing on a cruise
ship.
Her friend, who must’ve been caught in her unlucky aura, somehow slipped and knocked
herself out while going to get help.
After surviving that incident, Jeanne was struck by lightning twice, mugged and shot
at, and fell into an open manhole.
• The most unbelievable incident, though, was when a bat latched onto her scalp as she
walked down the street.
She frantically knocked on doors for help, but no one wanted a bar of the crazy bat-haired
lady.
The commotion caused the bat to urinate and claw at her scalp and poor Jeanne eventually
had to drive herself to the vet.
Now that’s unlucky. 1 – Man Lives Through Two Nuclear Bombings,
• Tsutumu Yamaguchi is the only person unfortunate enough to have lived through two nuclear bombings.
He was an engineer who visited Hiroshima in August 1945.
He’d actually planned to leave the day the bomb dropped, but forgot his train travel
stamp.
Because of this delay, he ended up being three kilometres from the impact site when the American
bomber The Enola Gay dropped its ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb.
• The explosion ruptured Tsutumu’s eardrums, temporarily blinding him and leaving him badly
burned.
He returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day for medical treatment and, when
he returned to work days later, a second atomic bomb – the ‘Fat Man’ – again fell
three kilometres from where he was.
• Trsutumu wasn’t injured in the second bombing, but his burns required constant care
and his wife and son later died from radiation-related afflictions.
Amazingly, Tsutumu didn’t harbour any anti-American sentiments and actually became a passionate
anti-nuclear weapons campaigner before dying of stomach cancer
in 2010.