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

Military history shows us that, no matter where you’re from, strict discipline, training and dedication along with some innovation and cleverness can do amazing things. But along with that comes a long list of rituals, beliefs and superstitions that sometimes make sense and sometimes are absolutely baffling to outsiders and sometimes even insiders. Take, for instance, these more unusual examples of things that have at one time or another been considered unlucky by members of the military.  

10. Apricots 

The military has a long history of having food problems. Soldiers in the field need to be fed, and that has not always been easy to do. Many of the methods to ensure this happens have been fumbles at best. Check out some reviews of MREs to see just how bad food can get sometimes. But there are also some unexpected problems that have arisen with food in the military, and one of the strangest deals with apricots. Specifically, the Marines considered the dried fruit extremely unlucky.

Back in 1968, a correlation was drawn up in the minds of the Marines of the First Amphibious Tractor Battalion. Any time someone ate apricots, they got hit by enemy artillery. The answer was apparently clear – apricots caused the enemy to attack. 

Legend has it that the bad luck started in WWII when numerous vehicles that had been destroyed were found to be carrying one item of cargo in common – apricots. By the time Vietnam rolled around, Marines didn’t want to be near anyone eating apricots lest they become targets themselves. Apparently it got so bad that if a fellow Marine caught you eating an apricot in the tent you shared, you’d be kicked out until the apricot was gone.

Even in modern times, apricots have been blamed for vehicle breakdowns in the Persian Gulf. The military stopped including them in MREs back in 1995.

9. Charms Candy

Apricots are not alone in their cursed presence in MREs. The dreaded Charms candy was another item that made soldiers wary to the point that the military had to stop issuing them in MREs as well.

The little candy squares were mostly just fruit-flavored sugar but no Marine would eat them. Stories tell of new Marines having them slapped right out of their hands if they tried to eat them. The reason was simple – Charms were bad luck and everyone knew it.

Charms could do anything from setting off roadside bombs to bringing mortar fire down on your position. All a Marine had to do was open the package to bring the horror. The different flavors had different effects. Lime would bring rain. Lemon would sabotage your vehicle. Raspberry? That’d kill someone. 

How did Marines overcome the danger of Charms? They just threw them away. Soon the Marine superstition made it to the Army and drill instructors were outright telling soldiers to throw the unopened candies on the field. By 2007, the DoD stopped including them in MREs since they were such a problem. 

8. Clean Coffee Mugs

Lots of military personnel enjoy a stiff cup of coffee in the morning and those in the Navy are no different. What is different is how coffee cups are treated in the Navy. If you want to fit in, you do not clean your mug. Not ever. The nastier and more terrifying your coffee mug is, the better. This habit has become so ingrained that sailors keep it up at home, with rumors of spouses and partners being remarkably unimpressed with the outcome.

The idea is that a well-seasoned coffee mug, which is to say one that’s stained as dark as night, shows stature and seniority. It means it’s seen a heck of a lot of cups in its day and that means you, as the cup owner, have been around the block yourself. There’s also a rumor that it somehow makes the coffee taste better.

A filthy mug becomes a point of pride and maybe impresses others. Consider it like having the biggest scar or the grossest wound. It’s a weird way to compete and show some prowess, even if it’s vaguely disgusting. 

7. Air Force Wings

In the Air Force, when you graduate from undergraduate pilot training you’re issued your wings. Even though it seems like the badge issued to you in honor of your graduation is the sort of thing, you should actually use and wear, the opposite is true. According to Air Force tradition, doing so is bad luck.

Instead, you need to break those wings right away and give half to someone important to you. The two halves of the wings should only come together again when the pilot dies. The tradition is actually older than the Air Force itself and dates back to the Army Air Corps and is generally accepted as official conduct every pilot should engage in. 

6. Lucky Cigarettes

Have you ever heard of a lucky cigarette? In the military this tradition is about as old as cigarettes themselves. The idea is that, upon opening a new pack of smokes, one cigarette is flipped upside down and put back in the pack. That’s the lucky one. You don’t smoke the lucky one until the very end of the pack. 

The exact origins of the tradition are mired in mystery but there have been some guesses. One is that the tradition dates back to the Second World War when soldiers were given Lucky Strike cigarettes. In this version every cigarette but one is flipped so that the Lucky Strike stamp was on top. Since cigarettes were unfiltered back then, you could smoke either end. If the cigarette was flipped, you’d burn the Lucky Strike logo away quickly so that, if you later dropped the cigarette, the stamp would be gone and the enemy wouldn’t know what country the smoker had come from. If you managed to live to the end of your pack, you smoked the final unflipped one, proving yourself lucky. 

The Vietnam version of the story sees soldiers flipping just one cigarette. They were filtered at this time, so the one flipped one made more sense in this context but, again, the idea was you were lucky if you lived long enough to get to it. 

5. Sniper’s Taking Hog’s Teeth from Enemy Snipers

In the world of snipers there are PIGs and HOGs. A PIG is a professionally instructed gunman, meaning that sniper has learned how to use their rifle. But the PIG becomes an official HOG when they have taken out an enemy sniper and are now a Hunter of Gunmen. 

When a Marine sniper graduates from sniper training they are given a Hog’s Tooth. That’s a 7.62 round of ammunition on a nylon cord. But this isn’t technically a real Hog’s Tooth. A real Hog’s Tooth is a round from your enemy’s gun, taken after you’ve killed them.

Part of the lore of the Hog’s Tooth states that any sniper in the world is destined to be taken out by another sniper someday. But if you could get the drop on your sniper and take that bullet, your bullet, it becomes your Hog’s Tooth and proves you cheated death and are essentially invincible. And, at least in a head to head with another sniper in the moment, that’s kind of true. If you and another sniper are squaring off, odds are only one of you will survive. 

Considering you not only need to find a sniper, square off, defeat them, make your way to their position and then take a round for their weapon, getting a true Hog’s Tooth is a hell of a task. But once you have it, you’re the luckiest man alive.To not take it would be most unlucky as it means the bullet with your name on it is still out there.

4. Lighting Three Cigarettes on the Same Match

The saying “three on a match” isn’t the most well known in the world but you may have run across it before. The superposition states that it is bad luck to light three different cigarettes with a single match. The potential origin is the First World War and was a warning against snipers. The idea was that if you’re hiding in a trench or some such at night and light your match, an enemy sniper will see it light the first cigarette, take aim on the second and fire on the third.

The superstition seems to have returned stateside and spread among smokers, who didn’t actually understand the reason why it might be bad luck. It also only worked when people were using matches which is why it’s died out significantly in modern times with the drop off in both smoking and matches to light them. 

Another theory suggests that it’s the idea of invoking the holy Trinity for a callous and unimportant act that makes it unlucky, as anything done in threes could be considered disrespectful and may open them to evil.

3. Even Saying the Name of Ham and Lima Beans Was Unlucky

You can find a lot of places online that will rank the taste of MREs. Some seem to be surprisingly good, while many are food-borne atrocities. Many of these have to deal with modern MREs, however, and will never know the scourge of the old-timey MREs our grandfathers had to endure in Korea and earlier. 

One dish that has become infamous and dates back to World War II, though it seems to have survived all the way through to Vietnam, is ham and lima beans. This dish was so bad that soldiers refused to even use the proper name for it for fear it would be unlucky. Instead, that gave it a new name that can’t be said in polite company. Ham and M-F’ers would be one sanitized way of referring to it.

According to James Mosel, a US Marine who served in Vietnam, they were also known as beans and balls, beans and dicks, chopped eggs and ham, and nobody ate them.

2. Military Eggs Will Lower Your Libido

As we’ve seen, soldiers can be a little finicky about what they eat. One of the oldest and most pervasive food rumors deals with eggs. As the story goes, the military was doctoring the breakfast of the soldiers with saltpeter in an effort to lower everyone’s sex drive. The rumor is alleged to have started back in the Navy during colonial times.

The rumor has enjoyed a long life owing to the fact that there is anecdotal evidence to support it. Men sign up, all virile and full of life, and then as the weeks of training go by they find their energy levels lower and their libido has fallen off a cliff. So the idea that it’s something outside of them, a kind of chemical sabotage, seems to make sense, even if the truth is they’re just exhausted.

Ironically, saltpeter doesn’t actually reduce sexual urges, but the military still doesn’t hide it in food either way, so there’s not much to worry about.

1. It’s Bad Luck to Sheath a Combat Knife Before it Draws Blood

Have you ever come across a piece of knowledge that everyone in a certain group just knows? That seems to be the case with one of the most widespread superstitions in combat history that also has the curious distinction of being totally untrue in the sense that everyone must agree it can’t possibly be followed. This one goes beyond just the military to anyone who may use a bladed weapon for fighting and it states that if you draw a blade, then you can’t sheath it until it has drawn blood.

On the surface that’s some very warrior stuff. It even shows up in fiction dealing with alien races.And it could never be true because people need to clean their blades or otherwise maintain them all the time when no enemies are around so it’s silly to think you’d be stabbing someone any time you draw a blade. That said, it is everywhere. You can find about 3 million hits if you Google it. 

The myth seems to specifically target combat knives, but it’s not exclusive to the US military by any means. Hopefully no one out there is actually practicing it, but it certainly seems like most people know it.