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.
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