You can’t measure luck – it simply isn’t quantifiable – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who ride the wave of fortune a little more often than the rest of us. Some individuals seem to attract both calamity and a bizarre sort of rescue, ending up on the very edge of disaster only to be pulled back by sheer, almost inexplicable good fortune. In this roundup we spotlight the top 10 luckiest unlucky survivors, each of whose lives reads like a thriller script.

Why These Are the Top 10 Luckiest Survivors

10 Robert Evans

Robert Evans was already scraping by, living in a makeshift encampment outside Boulder, Colorado, back in 2008. While pedaling his bike down a rural road, a reckless driver ran him off the pavement, resulting in a hit‑and‑run that landed him in an ambulance and then, thankfully, at a local hospital with only minor injuries.

After being discharged, Evans decided to walk back to his camp, crossing a narrow railroad bridge. In a cruel twist of fate, the very same night he’d survived the car collision, a passing freight train slammed into the bridge, knocking him into the water below. The impact would have been fatal for most, but Evans miraculously survived, receiving a second ambulance ride to the same hospital just seven hours after his first rescue.

Jim MacPherson of the Boulder Police Department summed up the night’s absurdity, noting, “He got two ambulance rides last night. 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 – the Olympic, Titanic, and Britannic – each met with their own share of disaster. While the Titanic is the most famous, all three shared a grim reputation. Violet Jessup, a tenacious stewardess, managed to serve aboard each of these ill‑fated vessels.

She first signed on with the Olympic in 1910, only to experience a collision with the HMS Hawke in 1911 that nearly sank the liner. Undeterred, Jessup transferred to the Titanic, where she survived the infamous sinking by caring for an infant aboard a lifeboat. When World War I erupted, she served as a nurse on the Britannic, which later struck a mine.

During the Britannic’s catastrophe, Jessup didn’t have time to board a lifeboat. She leapt overboard, was sucked under the keel, and suffered a skull fracture. Remarkably, she lived to tell the tale and continued working aboard various ships until her retirement at age 61.

8 Matthew

On September 11, 2001, a man named Matthew was strolling beneath the Twin Towers when a hijacked plane slammed into one of them. He escaped unscathed by any falling debris and, in a burst of adrenaline, sprinted across half of Manhattan to safety.

Years later, on November 13, 2015, Matthew found himself at the Bataclan concert in Paris, a night that turned into a terrorist massacre. Shot in the leg, he pretended to be dead, and when the attackers paused to reload, he dragged himself toward an exit, inching forward “centimeter by centimeter” until he could grasp the doorway with one finger, then the other.

His harrowing escape left him with a lingering scar, but his story stands as a testament to sheer resilience in the face of two separate terrorist attacks.

7 Arthur John Priest

Arthur John Priest earned his living as a stoker, shoveling coal to keep massive steamships moving. His career placed him aboard the Olympic, where in 1911 the vessel was holed below the waterline, yet Priest survived the incident.

The following year he secured a berth on the Titanic. When the infamous iceberg collision occurred, Priest managed to survive the sinking, escaping the icy Atlantic. He later served on the armed merchant ship Alcantara during World I, survived its sinking, and then joined the Britannic, which struck a mine in 1916 – another narrow escape.

His final brush with death came in 1917 aboard the Donegal, which was torpedoed in the English Channel. Priest survived that attack as well, though he sustained a head injury that forced his military discharge. His career reads like a catalog of maritime near‑disasters.

6 Roy Cleveland Sullivan

Lightning, with its 100 million‑volt punches, usually spells doom for anyone it strikes. Yet Roy Cleveland Sullivan, a park ranger at Shenandoah National Park, earned the nickname “Human Lightning Rod” after surviving not one, but seven direct lightning strikes between 1942 and 1977.

The first strike singed a half‑inch strip from his right leg while he was outside a fire lookout tower, even blowing off his toenail. In 1969, a bolt hit his truck, scorching away his eyebrows and eyelashes. The following year, a strike landed on his front yard, leaving him with additional injuries.Though he survived each encounter, the cumulative trauma took a toll on his life. By the early 1980s, people began to avoid him out of fear, and in 1983 he took his own life at the age of 71, ending a life marked by extraordinary electrical encounters.

5 Austin Hatch

Plane crashes are terrifying enough, but Austin Hatch endured two such tragedies. In 2003, he was aboard a small aircraft piloted by his father when it crashed, killing his mother and two siblings. Austin escaped with relatively minor injuries, though the loss of his family was devastating.

Eight years later, in June 2011, another crash claimed his father and step‑mother while Austin was a passenger. He survived, but not without severe consequences: a traumatic brain injury, a punctured lung, a broken collarbone, and a two‑month coma.

Defying the odds, Austin recovered, earned a basketball scholarship at the University of Michigan, and later became a public speaker, sharing his harrowing experiences and the resilience that kept him moving forward.

4 Mason Wells

In 2013, Mason Wells found himself a block away from the Boston Marathon bombing. Though the explosion ripped through the surrounding streets, he emerged physically unharmed, but the experience left an indelible mark.

His brushes with terror didn’t end there. While traveling in Calais, France, he witnessed three Americans subdue a terrorist on a Thalys train – an event he observed from the platform. Later, in 2016, while serving as a Mormon missionary, Wells was inside Brussels Airport when ISIS militants detonated suicide vests, shattering glass and releasing shrapnel.

The blast ruptured his Achilles tendon, gave him second‑ and third‑degree burns on his hands and face, and peppered his body with shrapnel. His father noted that Mason’s calm demeanor—rooted in his earlier Boston experience—helped him survive the chaos with a sense of humor.

3 Anna & Helen

The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic claimed tens of millions worldwide. Two sisters, Anna Del Priore and Helen, survived that deadly wave as children and, astonishingly, lived to face another pandemic a century later.

When COVID‑19 swept the globe, Anna was 105 and Helen 107. Both contracted the virus but, defying the grim statistics for their age group, they each pulled through, showcasing extraordinary resilience across two historic health crises.

Anna attributes her longevity to a blend of kindness, strong friendships, honesty, faith, and a surprising love of hot peppers. Their stories serve as living proof that age need not be a barrier to overcoming severe illness.

2 Tsutomu Yamaguchi

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a 26‑year‑old engineer, was in the city, working on an oil tanker design, when the explosion ripped through the landscape.

He dove into a ditch, only to be lifted by the shock wave and hurled into a nearby potato field, sustaining severe burns, ruptured eardrums, and facial injuries. Remarkably, he survived and managed to board a train that took him to his hometown of Nagasaki.

Three days later, as he recounted his experience to a Mitsubishi executive, another flash of light forced him to the ground – the Nagasaki bombing. Injured from the first blast, Yamaguchi survived the second atomic blast as well, later reflecting that he felt the mushroom cloud following him from Hiroshima.

1 Frane Selak

Frane Selak has earned the moniker “World’s Most Unlucky Luckiest Man” after surviving a staggering series of fatal accidents. His first brush with death came in 1962 when a train crash killed 17 passengers, yet Selak walked away unharmed.

The following year, a plane he was on suffered a catastrophic door failure, sucking him out into a haystack while the aircraft crashed, killing 19 people. In 1966, he survived a bus crash that claimed four lives, and in 1970 his car ignited and exploded, though he escaped unscathed.

Three years later another vehicle fire burned his hair off, but left him otherwise fine. In 1995, a bus struck him, and in 1996 a head‑on car collision was avoided only by slamming into a guardrail. Each incident left him miraculously alive.

His luck turned when, two days after his 73rd birthday, he won €900,000 in a lottery. He invested in houses and a boat, later donating most of his winnings in 2010, proving that even the most accident‑prone lives can enjoy a windfall.

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.