Coincidences...?non political snippits

I added a couple of links to the coincidence stories that has more information.

-Adopted at four weeks by different families, identical twins from Ohio were both given the name James. When they met for the first time at 39 they found both had married women called Linda, divorced them, then married women named Betty. Their sons were called James Alan and James Allan and both had owned dogs called Toy. Both went to law enforcement schools and worked as sheriffs.

-Lorraine and Levinia Christmas of Norfolk who both on the spur of the moment decided to drive to one another's houses to deliver presents on Christmas Eve 1994. The country road between their villages was precariously icy and both sisters were involved in a head-on crash... with each other. They ultimately spent Christmas in the same hospital as their father -Father Christmas- who was recovering from surgery.

-During WWI, the British army turned a passenger ship, the RMS Carmania, into a "Q" ship disguised as another passenger ship, the German SMS Trafalgar. Confused yet? It gets better. The disguised ship sank a German ship off Brazil in 1914. That ship was the real Trafalgar, which the Germans had disguised to look like the British Carmania.

-In a somewhat grisly coincidence, Barbara Forrest and Mary Ashford, were both victims of a similar crime committed in the tiny village of Erdington, five miles outside of Birmingham in England. Both twenty-year olds -who happened to share the same birthday- had been raped and strangled, their bodies were found 300 yards apart, and both had been found on the same day -May 27th- 157 years apart. Even more remarkable, both had just visited a friend that evening, both had changed into a new dress that night, and both had gone to a dance where they presumably met their killer. Also, the man accused in both crimes was named Thornton, and that both Thornton's were eventually acquitted for the crime.

-Hitler was born 129 years after Napoleon. He also came to power 129 years after Napoleon, invaded Russia 129 years after Napoleon, and was defeated 129 years after Napoleon.

-Monty Python star Eric Idle and Conservative politician John Major were both born on March 29, 1943. In 1993 Idle wrote to Major, then prime minister, to wish him a happy 50th birthday. "Has it ever occurred to you that, but for a twist of fate, I should be prime minister and you could have been the man in the Nudge Nudge sketch from Monty Python? I do hope you don't feel too disappointed. Happy birthday anyway".

-The first British soldier killed in WWII is buried only several meters from the last British soldier killed in WWII. This was not intentional.

-In 1980, Beatles singer, songwriter, and guitarist John Lennon was shot and killed by an obsessed fan in New York City. His assassin was a man named Mark Chapman, a schizophrenic night security guard and general loser. Five years later, NBC decided to make a biography about Lennon and his wife, entitled John and Yoko: A Love Story. Unfortunately, the actor they hired to play Lennon, unbeknownst to them, happened to be named Mark Chapman. After realising the fact, the studio quickly gave the part to someone with a different name.

-On the morning of November 22, 1963, Jackie Kennedy was unnerved by a full page ad placed in the Dallas Morning News. Not so much because it accused the president of being a communist sympathiser but rather because it had a black border and resembled a death notice. JFK tried to comfort her saying "We're heading to nut country today. But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle nobody can stop it so why worry about it?" That Kennedy made such a comment about his assassination on the day he was shot is coincidence enough but that he so casually predicted the precise method of his death is nothing short of sinister.

-There were only two cars in the state of Ohio in 1895. They ran into each other. Then there were no cars.

-In 1858, Robert Fallon was shot dead, an act of vengeance by those with whom he was playing poker. Fallon, they claimed, had won the $600 pot through cheating. With Fallon's seat empty and none of the other players willing to take the now-unlucky $600, they found a new player to take Fallon's place and staked him with the dead man's $600. By the time the police had arrived to investigate the killing, the new player had turned the $600 into $2,200 in winnings. The police demanded the original $600 to pass on to Fallon's next of kin - only to discover that the new player turned out to be Fallon's son, who had not seen his father in seven years.

-Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath must have thought he was having a nightmare when he learned on September 4, 1974 that his yacht Morning Cloud III had been lost at sea en route to the Isle of Wight, just two days after a similar fate had befallen his former yacht Morning Cloud I. The previous week he had posed for a photo with author John Dyson at the launch of his thriller The Prime Minister's Boat Is Missing.

-In 1965, at the age of four, Roger Lausier was swimming off a beach in Salem. He got into difficulties and was saved from drowning by a woman called Alice Blaise. In 1974, on the same beach, Roger was out on a raft when he pulled a drowning man from the water - amazingly, the man he saved was Alice Blaise's husband.

-When Norman Mailer began his novel Barbary Shore, there was no plan to have a Russian spy as a character. As he worked on it, he introduced a Russian spy in the U.S. as a minor character. As the work progressed, the spy became the dominant character in the novel. After the novel was completed, the U.S. Immigration Service arrested a man who lived just one floor above Mailer in the same apartment building. He was Colonel Rudolf Abel, alleged to be the top Russian spy working in the U.S. at that time.

-In 1996, Paris police set out to investigate a late night, high speed car crash, both drivers had been killed instantly. Investigations revealed that the deceased were in fact man and wife. Police initially suspected some kind of murder or suicide pact but it became apparent that the pair had been separated for several months - neither could have known that the other would have been out driving that night.

-When JK Rowling needed to choose a birth date for Harry Potter it seemed natural enough that she would use her own birthday July 31. It was only many years later when she was tracing her maternal ancestry at a records office in Paris that she discovered that the grandfather she had never known had also been born on July 31.