You can’t measure luck — it simply isn’t quantifiable, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who are luckier or unluckier than others. That person who always seems to hit their numbers at bingo or the one who never catches a break probably comes to mind.

Then there are those people who somehow find themselves on both sides of the scale. Someone who is both lucky and unlucky at the same time sounds strange, but there are a few who’ve managed it. These ten are the luckiest unlucky people, and each had a fascinating tale to tell.

Top 10 Luckiest People In The World

10 Robert Evans

Robert Evans was already having a difficult time living without a home in an encampment outside of Boulder, Colorado, in 2008. While riding his bike along the road, Evans became the unlucky victim of a hit-and-run car accident, which earned him an ambulance ride to the local hospital.

Fortunately, the accident wasn’t severe, and he was discharged with minor injuries. Walking his way back to his encampment, along a narrow railroad bridge, the man who had survived a car accident only hours earlier, was hit by a train. The passing train, which knocked him from the bridge into a creek, would have killed most people, Evans’ strange luck — if you want to call it that — saw him taken to the same hospital seven hours after he first landed there following the car accident.

Jim MacPherson of the Boulder Police Department summed up Evans’ evening, saying, “He got two ambulance rides last night,” MacPherson said. “It’s an extreme oddity that someone is hit by a car and a train on the same night. I can’t imagine that this has ever happened before in Boulder.”

9 Violet Jessup

Three White Star sister ships were involved in severe accidents and disasters, including the RMS Titanic, Olympic, and Britannic. The Titanic is the best-known, but it was only one of three similar Olympic-class ocean liners.

Serving aboard all three ships was Violet Jessup, a seriously lucky, unlucky woman. She survived Tuberculosis at an early age, and by 1908, she began working as a stewardess for the White Star line, finding her way aboard the Olympic in 1910.

That vessel collided with the HMS Hawke in 1911 and nearly sank. She walked away and joined the crew of the Titanic, which she survived by caring for an infant on a lifeboat. When war broke out, she served aboard the Britannic as a nurse, and you know what happened next.

The Britannic hit a mine, but Jessup wasn’t lucky enough to jump into a lifeboat. Instead, she leaped overboard and was sucked under the keel, where she hit her head. She survived (with a skull fracture). Despite her naval experiences, she continued to work aboard various ships, retiring at 61.

8 Matthew

On 9/11, a man named Matthew was walking along the street under the shadow of the World Trade Center when it was struck. He was on his way to a meeting when an aircraft slammed into one of the Twin Towers, and he was fortunately uninjured by any of the falling debris.

Following the attack, he “sprinted across half of Manhattan” and survived to tell the story. Having a close call with one terrorist attack is rare enough, but for Matthew, it was just the beginning of his interaction with terrorists.

On November 13th, 2015, Matthew was attending an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan in Paris, France, when it was attacked by terrorists armed with automatic rifles, grenades, and suicide vests. The Bataclan attack resulted in the deaths of 89 people, but Matthew wasn’t one of them.

He was shot in the leg, but he made his own luck after that. He played dead, and when the terrorists began to reload, he dragged himself to safety. “I inched forward centimeter by centimeter….I saw the ledge of the exit at arm’s reach. I was able to grip it with one finger, then the other.”

7 Arthur John Priest

Arthur John Priest worked as a stoker, or “fireman,” whose job was to keep the boilers of a ship steaming by constantly shovelling coal. While serving aboard the Olympic, he survived when the vessel was struck and holed below the waterline in 1911.

The following year, he got a job on the Olympic’s sister ship, the Titanic. A massive layoff saw many of his peers lose work, but he made it into the bowels of the ship. When it sank, he survived, but it wasn’t the last time he nearly died in a shipwreck.

His WWI service saw him aboard the armed merchant ship Alcantara. A battle saw the vessel sink, and he survived that as well. He later served aboard the Britannic, the other sister ship to the Olympic and Titanic, and you can guess what happened. The Britannic hit a mine and sank in November 1916, and Priest survived.

The following year, the luckiest unlucky sailor in history was serving aboard the Donegal when it was hit by a torpedo and sank in the English Channel. He survived, but it was the last vessel he called home, ending his military career in 1917 due to a head injury.

6 Roy Cleveland Sullivan

Typically, people don’t survive being struck by lightning. A single bolt carries up to 100 million volts, peaking at around 20,000 amps, which is more than enough to kill any living thing on the planet.

Still, people survive, but none have survived being struck by lightning as much as Roy Cleveland Sullivan. Sullivan worked as a park ranger in Shenandoah National Park, where he began his career in 1936. By 1942, he was on his way to becoming known as the “Human Lightning Rod.”

He was first struck outside a fire lookout tower when a bolt burned a half-inch strip along his right leg, ultimately blowing off his toenail. He was hit again in 1969 while inside his truck, resulting in the loss of his eyebrows and eyelashes. In 1970, he was struck in his front yard.

Between 1942 and 1977, Sullivan was struck seven times, and he survived each instance, though, with injury. He was lucky for surviving so many unlucky events, but it took its toll. Later in life, people avoided him out of fear of lightning, and in 1983, he took his own life at the age of 71.

5 Austin Hatch

It’s rare enough to survive a single plane crash, but Austin Hatch’s string of horrible luck involving airplanes saw him survive two. In 2003, Hatch was aboard a plane his father was flying when it went down, claiming the lives of his mother and two siblings. He wasn’t horribly injured, but the loss was difficult for the young boy.

Hatch managed to survive the wreck and grow up reasonably well, considering what he went through. Unfortunately, tragedy wasn’t going to strike his family only once, and eight years after the first crash, he was involved in another.

In June of 2011, Austin Hatch was a passenger in a small plane his father was flying when tragedy struck once more. The plane crashed, resulting in the death of his father and stepmother. The young man walked away, though he did so with a traumatic brain injury, punctured lung, and a broken collarbone, leading to a two-month-long coma.

Surviving the loss of his entire family and injuries that nearly killed him didn’t destroy the 23-year-old. He recovered and went on to play college basketball, thanks to a scholarship he received at the University of Michigan. He also works as a public speaker, sharing his experiences with the world.

4 Mason Wells

In 2013, Mason Wells was one block from the Boston Marathon bombing, which he survived unscathed. Despite being so close to the detonation, Wells was impacted by the event, but it wouldn’t be the only time he came into contact with terrorism, as he found himself near another attack across the ocean.

A few years after Boston, Wells was in Calais, France, when three Americans on a Thalys train subdued a terrorist. The incident was close to home, as he used the trains weekly to get from one city to another. He wasn’t a victim of that attack, but not long after, he was in Brussels when the airport was bombed in 2016.

While working as a Mormon missionary, Wells was in the airport when three terrorist members of ISIS attacked, using suicide bombs and other explosive devices. He was caught in a blast, which ruptured his Achilles tendon, inflicted 2nd and 3rd-degree burns on his hands and face, and peppered his body with shrapnel.

His father explained that Wells survived partly due to his experience at the Boston bombing years earlier. He said it helped him remain calm, and “despite being on the ground and bleeding, [he] actually had a sense of humor and remained calm through the situation.”

3 Anna & Helen

As everyone now knows all too well, surviving a pandemic isn’t easy, but it’s possible. Most people never contract the disease if they take precautions. Still, getting infected can be deadly, especially if the pathogen is particularly nasty, like the Influenza strain A/H1N1 that devastated the world between 1918 and 1920.

The Spanish Flu claimed some 20-100 million people, thanks to the fast spread and speed at which the virus killed infected people. Two women who were infected and managed to survive the virus were Anna Del Priore and her sister, Helen, who were small children during the Spanish Flu pandemic.

While they weren’t the only people to survive the pandemic, they are among a small community of people to survive two worldwide pandemics set more than a century apart. Anna & Helen were 105 & 107-years-old respectively, when they were infected by COVID-19.

Despite their age at the time of infection, they both managed to beat the odds and survive. Anna explained how others might succeed in living as long as she and her sister, saying, “Be good to others, keep good friends, be honest, love God — and I eat lots of hot peppers!”

2 Tsutomu Yamaguchi

On August 6, 1945, the United States of America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing around 140,000 people in the blast and subsequent radiation. One man who survived, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, was spending his final day in the city after a Summer spent designing a new oil tanker.

When the bomb detonated, he managed to jump into a ditch, but the shock wave pulled him into the air, spinning and hurtling him into a nearby potato patch. He was less than two miles from Ground Zero. He nearly ruptured his eardrums, and his face and forearms were severely burned, but he survived.

He made his way to a train and left for his hometown, which was unfortunately Nagasaki. Upon arriving, he made his way to a hospital. On August 9th, he was recounting his experience to the Mitsubishi company director when a flash of light outside had him leaping to the ground one more.

Miraculously, while still injured from the first blast, Yamaguchi survived the second, and thus far, only two atomic bombs used in war. He later recalled the Nagasaki blast, saying, I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima.”

1 Frane Selak

Frane Selak has survived more fatal accidents than anyone, earning him the title of being the “World’s Most Unlucky Luckiest Man.” In 1962, Selak’s first brush with death came when he survived a train crash that killed 17 other passengers.

In 1963, he took his first ride in a plane, which ended when the door opened and sucked him out. He landed in a haystack while the plane crashed, killing 19 people. In ‘66, he survived a bus crash that killed four people, and in 1970, his car caught fire and exploded, but he managed to walk away.

Three years later, a similar car accident managed to burn off all of his hair, but he was otherwise unharmed. In 1995, he was hit by a bus, and the following year, he nearly hit a car in a head-on collision but survived by slamming into a guardrail.

For whatever reason, death was always coming for Selak, but he managed to avoid it at every turn. His luck changed a bit when, two days after he turned 73, he won €900,000 in the lottery. He bought some houses and a boat but gave most of his winnings away in 2010.

10 Good Luck Charms And Their Origins

As we approach the 20th anniversary of the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil, we’re reminded of the day’s cascading tragedies. Four hijacked planes. Two imploded skyscrapers. The seat of the most powerful military on Earth bursting into flames.

Nearly 3,000 people died that day in plane crashes, building collapses and desperate leaps from burning buildings. Still, such disasters often have a select few who stand out as unlikely survivors. Here are ten.

RELATED: 10 Disturbing Raw Videos From 9/11

10 First One Down, Last One Out: Ron DiFrancesco (South Tower, 84th Floor)

Of the two collapses, the South Tower’s was more stunning simply because it occurred first. Never had a building that gigantic completely come down, so most thought they had far longer to escape than the scant 56 minutes between impact and implosion.

So as he approached the South Tower’s ground level, Ron DiFrancesco figured the worst was over. Less than an hour before, the Euro Brokers executive was in his 84th Floor office when United Airlines Flight 175 slashed threw at an intentional tilt to cause maximum damage. The plane’s cabin and fuselage struck below him; the right wing sliced through the floors directly above.

DiFrancesco was trapped; he couldn’t ascend or descend without flames and smoke. Finally, using sheered off sheetrock as a shield, he plowed his way through intense heat downward until he heard a voice. It was a firefighter, who guided DiFrancesco below the impact zone.

By the time he reached street level, a rescue worker was ordering everyone to exit via the basement; the plaza had too much debris (including, horribly, jumpers). DiFrancesco was nearly done descending at 9:59am. The building was collapsing.

DiFrancesco turned, saw a huge fireball… and blacked out. He woke up in a hospital, with burns over most of his body and his contact lenses melted in his eyes. He is the last known person to leave the South Tower.

9 Tied Up: Joseph Lott (Marriott Hotel)

On the morning of September 11, Joseph Lott woke up at the Marriott Hotel sandwiched between the two World Trade Center towers. A sales representative with Compaq Computers, he was participating in a presentation that day at Windows on the World, the renowned restaurant and conference venue occupying the North Tower’s uppermost floors.

Little did he know that his quirkiest hobby would soon save his life. Lott has an affinity for “art ties,” neckties featuring famous masterpieces. And when he arrived at the hotel lobby for a pre-presentation breakfast with colleagues, one of them, Elaine Greenberg, had a gift for him: a Monet tie. Lott loved it, and said he’d wear it when he spoke at the conference that morning.

Greenberg’s fashion consciousness spared Lott’s life: “Well, not with that shirt. You’re not going to put on a red and blue tie with a green shirt.”

After breakfast, Greenberg went up to Windows on the World while Lott went up to change his shirt. He was leaving his hotel room when the first plane struck. Lucky tie in tow, Lott was among the first to evacuate to safety. Everyone at Windows on the World—including Elaine Greenberg – died that day.

8 Saved by a Squeegee: Jan Demczur & Five Others (Elevator Shaft, North Tower)

Combined, the Twin Towers had 198 elevators, a system where express lifts took passengers to “Sky Lobbies” for transfer to local floor service. On 9/11, an estimated 200 people died in or near elevators. Some plunged to their deaths after the planes severed elevator cables; others incinerated as flames shot down shafts. Still others perished in stalled lifts when the buildings collapsed.

At 8:45am, window washer Jan Demczur was transferring at the North Tower’s 44th Floor Sky Lobby for an elevator to floors 67-74. He boarded a lift with five others: Shivam Iyer, John Paczkowski, George Phoenix, Colin Richardson and another man whose identity remains unclear.

Seconds after their ascension began, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the building. The elevator shook violently, then stopped. Soon, an intercom announced an explosion, and they figured they’d better find their own way out. They poked at the ceiling hatch and pried open the doors.

They were between express landings – no exit, just a wall, marked “50.” Demczur rapped on it. Sheetrock. Thank God for flimsy construction materials. Were it concrete, they were goners.

They had just one tool: Demczur’s squeegee handle. They shaved away one, two, three inches… then hit tiles. Smashing through them, they crawled out… into a bathroom.

The men made a beeline for the stairwell, reaching street level at 10:23am – five minutes before collapse. The life-saving squeegee is displayed at the National Museum of American History.

7 Words Can’t Describe: Sheila Moody (Pentagon, E Ring)

Though significantly shorter than the Twin Towers, the U.S Pentagon is actually the world’s largest office building. Key to this distinction is its thickness: the building comprises five concentric rings – a girth-over-height emphasis that, considering the WTC’s complete collapse, certainly saved lives that day.

Something else saved lives, too: American Airlines Flight 77 impacted the Pentagon’s west side, which was undergoing construction and was emptier than usual. Still, 184 Pentagon personnel died. Their fates were, unsurprisingly, highly dependent on what ring they occupied. Many staff in the outermost circle, E Ring, simply didn’t have a chance; for example, of the 40 workers at the Program, Budget and Managerial Accounting divisions, just six survived. Of these, Sheila Moody was likely the luckiest.

At 9:37am, Moody heard a “whistling sound…. then a rumble, and a large gush of air and a fireball came into the office and just blew everything… and knocked us over.” Though the path to safety – the gaping hole created by the plane – was just yards away, Moody couldn’t see it through the thick smoke. She tried to call out for help – then realized she couldn’t breathe, let alone yell. Overcome, she began to black out.

“So,” Moody recalls, “I started clapping my hands.”

Her rescuer, Staff Sergeant Chris Brahman, extinguished the flames between them and carried her out. Moody was hospitalized for burns throughout her body – including her life-saving hands.

6 Grounded: Steve Scheibner (Pilot, American Airlines)

By September 2001, Steve Scheibner had a solid decade of service with American Airlines; before that, he was a Navy pilot. If you were boarding a cross-country flight, he was the kind of guy you’d want flying it.

And fortunately for him, he still is.

On September 10, 2001, Scheibner logged into American Airlines’ pilot registration system. It was common for assignments to be filled as late as the day before a flight. Scheibner noticed just one available assignment for the following day: an early-morning leg from Boston to Los Angeles. He snagged the open slot and, that afternoon, told his wife he’d be flying to L.A. the next day.

In American Airlines’ system, once an assignment slot was claimed a pilot with seniority has half an hour to override it. It was called “bumping” and, considering the tight time constraint, didn’t happen too often. But much to Scheibner’s chagrin, this time it did: a colleague with slightly more tenure, Tom McGuinness, supplanted Scheibner’s spot.

The next morning, McGuinness and co-pilot John Ogonowski became the first two victims of 9/11 when, at about 8:18am, hijackers led by Mohamed Atta stormed the plane’s cockpit and either killed or incapacitated them. About 28 minutes later, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Scheibner’s experience is recounted in a 2011 short film called “In My Seat.”

5 Keystroke of Luck: Elise O’Kane (Flight Attendant, United Airlines)

Like American Airlines, United Airlines also had a computer-based assignment request system. Schedules were typically set a month beforehand, so in August flight attendant Elise O’Kane logged in to register for her usual trip from Boston to Los Angeles. Unfortunately (at the time, anyway), she mistakenly inverted two code numbers and ended up with an unintended schedule.

No biggie, though. In the ensuing weeks, O’Kane was able to trade flights with other flight attendants for all her typical assignments except for one: Flight 175 on September 11.

So on September 10, O’Kane logged in and requested that flight. But as luck would have it the system froze. By the time it finally processed her request, it was one minute past the airline’s deadline for such changes. Her request for Flight 175 was denied. She’d have to settle for Denver rather than LA.

The next morning, O’Kane’s Denver-bound plane left Boston’s Logan Airport between American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, and United’s Flight 175, which struck the South Tower. O’Kane promptly switched jobs, eventually becoming a nurse.

4 Saved by “Bandana Man”: Ling Young (South Tower, 78th Floor Sky Lobby)

As many as 200 people were crowded into the South Tower’s 78th Floor Sky Lobby – a transfer point between express and local elevators – when, at 9:03am, United Airlines Flight 175 sliced directly through it. Only a handful survived. Ling Young was one of them.

“I flew from one side of the floor to the other side,” Young recalls. “When I got up I had to push things off me. I can’t see because my glasses were filled with blood… I looked around and saw everybody lying there, not moving. It was like a flat land. Everybody was lying down.”

Next to Young was a man whose facial features had been shorn off his skull. Young herself had severe burns whose pain was muted only by shock. Then, she heard a young man’s voice.

“I found the stairs,” he said. “Follow me.”

Young recalls two details about the young man. First, he was carrying another woman over his shoulder. Second, he was wearing a red bandana. Young struggled to her feet and followed him down. At the 61st floor, the man put down his human cargo, told them both to continue down, then ascended back upstairs. He was never seen again.

For months, the hero who became known as the Man in the Red Bandana went unidentified, before he was discovered to be 24-year-old Welles Crowther, an equities trader at Sandler O’Neill and Partners.

3 Finally Freed: Genelle Guzman (North Tower, 64th Floor)

An administrative assistant with the Port Authority, Genelle Guzman was in her 64th Floor office when she felt a huge crash overhead. She looked out the window and saw a giant fireball.

That day, those inside the towers generally had less info than those outside; Guzman and her colleagues didn’t realize the cause and extent of the explosion until they turned on the television. One look sent most fleeing for the exits. But Guzman and about 15 other coworkers stayed…

… because the intercom told them to. The PA system asked everyone to remain in place and await further instruction. There they stood until, at 9:03am, United Flight 175 slammed into the opposite building. Time to go.

Progress was painstaking. Packed stairwells were clogged further first by ascending firemen, then, at 9:59am, by the collapse of the South Tower, which sent plumes of debris and smoke pouring into its still-standing sibling.

They reached Floor 13 when, at 10:28am, the North Tower came down. Everyone died.

Except Genelle Guzman. Her head was pinned between two concrete pillars and her leg was so badly mangled it would nearly be amputated, but she was alive. And she stayed alive – in a smoldering maze of twisted steel – for an amazing 27 hours before firefighter Paul Somin and his rescue dog found her. In the early afternoon of September 12, Guzman became the last of the few survivors found in what became known to rescuers as “the pile.”

2 The Plane Dodger: Stanley Praimnath (South Tower, 81st Floor)

In the North Tower, no one at or above the impact zone of American Airlines Flight 11 survived. The plane irrevocably blocked all elevators and staircases, sealing the fates of some 1,400 people on floors 93 and above.

In the South Tower, only 18 people survived at or above where United Airlines Flight 175 slammed through floors 78-84. Among the most fortunate was Stanley Praimnath, an employee at Fuji Bank on the 81st Floor.

For starters, Praimnath’s salvation should have been far less miraculous. After the first plane hit the opposite building, he had descended to the South Tower lobby where – in a scenario that unfortunately cost many others their lives, including Praimnath’s boss, Kenichiro Tanaka – a security guard assured him the building was secure. So Praimnath returned to his office. A few moments later, he was on the phone when he glanced at a familiar object on the horizon: the Statue of Liberty.

“And that,” he said, “was when the plane caught my eye.”

Seconds later, Praimnath dove under his desk as the jet smashed through walls, brought down the ceiling and annihilated every desk – except his. So close was his call that a piece of the plane’s wing was wedged in his office door.

Praimnath came to buried in rubble. Eventually a stranger, Brian Clark, heard Praimnath’s desperate cries and freed him from the debris – an ordeal that involved hurling himself over a smoldering office partition.

1 Saving Her Saved Them: Josephine Harris (North Tower, 73rd Floor)

Josephine Harris tops the list because an entire group of firefighters see her as their guardian angel.

A Port Authority bookkeeper, Harris began evacuating her 73rd Floor office after the first plane struck 20 stories above. However, Harris had an injured leg from a car accident, making progress slow and painful.

Meanwhile, Ladder Company Captain Jay Jonas had led his crew up 27 floors of the North Tower when he felt an earth-shattering rumble. An FDNY radio report confirmed his fears: the South Tower had collapsed; time to go. The team ran down seven flights of stairs…

… right into Josephine Harris. They couldn’t leave her. The descent slowed to one arduous step at a time.

By the 4th Floor, Harris was in such pain she told the firefighters to leave and save themselves. They refused and, while waiting for her to regain some strength, the rumbling returned – only this time from directly overhead. They ducked, covered and prayed as the booms of pancaking floors drew ever nearer. And then it stopped.

It was part miracle, part mathematics. The rubble from a 110-story building exceeded four stories, and the staircase’s central location left pockets of life for evacuees – including precisely where the group was.

“It was a freak of timing,” said Jonas. “We know the people below us didn’t fare well. Above, to my knowledge, none got out. God gave us the strength and courage to save her, and unknowingly, we were saving ourselves.”