Two similar individuals who switch places are the subject of Mark Twain's story The Prince and the Pauper. One is a king, the other a commoner in poverty. Sounds outlandish and improbable, which is why the tale of Italian King Umberto and restaurateur Umberto is so impossible.

The King, so the tale goes, went to a restaurant to eat. The men were shocked to see how similar they looked when the owner wished to see the monarch. Both their names and their birthdays were the same. On the same day, both got married to Margherita women.

King Umberto was slain the following day after they had a meeting. He received four shots. That day, a second meeting between the two men was planned, but it was never held. The restaurant owner, Umberto, had also been shot that morning and had passed away.

It's a very strange coincidence, if the report is accurate. Without realizing it, the two men could have been identical twins. Yet, the passing of a random restaurant owner in 1900 did not make a lot of news, especially because it occurred on the same day that the monarch was slain. As a result, information about his life—if it ever existed—has been destroyed.

Many incredible coincidence stories seem too good to be real. Once you start digging, they disintegrate. Yet, a well-known rumor of two brothers who were slain one year apart by the same taxi driver while driving the same passenger could potentially be true.

Records on the incident are somewhat scarce because it is said to have occurred in Bermuda in 1975. Yet, internet sleuths looking to solve the mystery have combed through the evidence to locate the answers. There is a 1975 Telegraph article that presents the occurrence as actual fact. The brothers died one year apart while riding the same scooter on the same road when they were both 17 years old. In some sources, the taxi driver's name and even the roads where the boys were struck are mentioned.

A 1974 bulletin from a Bermuda worker's union did have a brief statement of sympathy following the passing of a 17-year-old with the same name as the original account, giving the entire affair a lot of credence even though verifiable details are hard to come by.

"My Way" by Frank Sinatra went another 49 weeks in the top 75 after spending 75 weeks in the Top 40. The song, which is still well-liked today, was undoubtedly Sinatra's biggest and most enduring hit of all time. At least in the Philippines, it might even be too well-liked. Those who sing it there have negative outcomes.

At that, a dozen people died in connection with "My Way" between 2002 and 2012. Karaoke is extremely popular and taken very seriously in the Philippines. Severe enough for at least one of the 12 individuals to have died as a result of singing the song out of key. The song had reportedly already been removed from many playlists because when it was sung poorly, violence would frequently erupt.

In 2018, a confrontation that started before the song even began resulted in the stabbing of another victim. The song was being sung by a four-year-old when an argument between two adults broke out, and one man attacked with a butcher cleaver. It appears that the only thing in common between the murders is the music selection, thus there isn't much more to explain the murders than the snide lyrics that enraged people.

Many sons continue in their fathers' footsteps. Typically, that's a positive thing. But, this was not the case for the Tierney family, who suffered a generational tragedy at the Hoover Dam. 96 people had died by the time the Hoover Dam was completed. On December 20, 1921, one of the people passed away. Flooding caused John Gregory Tierney to become trapped and drown in the Colorado River. The family that Tierney left behind includes his little son Patrick.

14 years after his father's passing, Young Patrick Tierney had started working at the scene of his father's murder. Patrick fell from an intake tower on December 20, the anniversary of his father's passing. He would be the last person to pass away related to the dam's construction.

On Wednesday, March 1, 1950, choir practice was to start at 7:20 p.m. at the West Side Baptist Church. It always began at that hour, so this was not at all odd. The church burst around 7:25, which was rare. It has been hypothesized that the blast may have been caused by a gas leak that occurred after the furnace was lit to prepare for the choir's arrival. It was so strong that it even managed to take the local radio station off the air and blow the windows out of neighboring buildings. And because nobody was present, nobody was injured.

One evening, every single choir member was running late. Everyone was running behind schedule for various reasons. After lighting the furnace, Reverend Klempel returned home to have supper but was delayed since his daughter's clothing got soiled and his wife was ironing a clean one.

After eating her own dinner, the church pianist passed out at home and didn't wake up until 7:15. A high school student was having trouble with one of her homework's mathematics problems. Two further team members struggled to start their vehicles. While one man assisted her mother, another was having trouble penning a letter. The chapel was empty when it finally blew because a total of 15 different people were late for a total of 15 different reasons.

When asked to name the greatest physicists of all time, the average person is likely to only be able to name a few. Let's face it, fame isn't usually one of the benefits and science isn't exactly attractive. Yet, that does not imply that all of them succeed. At the top of the list are individuals like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. And while their scientific minds probably wouldn't give strange coincidences any credibility, the rest of us can.

On January 8, 1942, Hawking was born, and he died on March 14, 2018. On the 300th anniversary of the famous astronomer Galileo Galilei's passing, he was born. On the 139th anniversary of Albert Einstein's birth, he passed away. Pi Day, which is celebrated on March 14 and honors the mathematical constant Pi, was also happening that day.

As you might expect, there were a plethora of amusing jokes on social media about the date of Hawking's passing, but even if there was no deeper significance about relativity and time, it was still an incredibly coincidental event.

While working on his sixth film, Game of Death, Bruce Lee passed away in 1973. It was all but inevitable that he would pass away due to cerebral edema. He left a wife and two kids behind. One of their kids, Brandon Lee, is well-known for following in his father's acting career. As most of us are aware, Brandon Lee unfortunately passed away as well in 1993 while filming The Crow.

Brandon made five movies before The Crow. A prop gun that was not properly prepped for usage led to his death. The dummy rounds were created from modified live rounds, and when the blank was shot, one of the dummy bullets was still in the chamber, leading the blank to shoot like a typical gun.

A scene that almost identically replicated this line of events occurs on screen in Game of Death, which turned out to be a curious coincidence. Bruce Lee plays an actor in the movie. The props guy instructs the actors and crew on how to use the prop pistol on the set of the movie in which he has a starring role. He says that even if the gun is filled with blanks, they should only shoot upward because a piece of paper could accidentally discharge and do damage to someone. Lee would have lived if the actor on the set of The Crow had complied with those directions.

The actor who shot Bruce Lee's character in the movie then purposefully switched the fake round for a real bullet while using the prop gun. The parallels between what transpired onscreen and what his son went through 20 years later were uncannily prescient.

Life magazine helped George Story become well-known from the beginning. The inaugural edition of Life magazine was released on November 23, 1936. The first image in that first edition was of a doctor giving birth to a child. The caption, which cleverly played off the title of the magazine, read "Life begins." George Story was the child.

Life would revisit that photograph and check in on George throughout the years. The man spent some time working as a journalist after growing up. In 2000, Life magazine ceased to be published. They planned to add one last image of George with the tagline "A Life ends" in their final issue. Story fell away from congestive heart failure two days before the photographers arrived to capture the last pictures.

Whether or whether they are always accurate, people love to talk about the strange coincidences that happened to Abraham Lincoln. The very strange coincidence of the president's son's near-death experience is just one of the bizarre aspects about the president's life that make you want to scratch your head.

Everyone is aware that John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln. How John Booth's brother Edwin preserved Robert Todd Lincoln's life is less well known. The same as his brother, Edwin worked as an actor. He was actually a great supporter of Lincoln and the Union, unlike his brother.

In New Jersey, Edwin and Robert had a fortuitous encounter during the Civil War. Of course, neither of them knew each other personally, and Edwin was visiting a friend while Robert was on vacation from college.

Robert was thrown from a train station and crashed to the ground near to the train, which had already begun to move. Robert felt trapped as he abruptly felt someone grab him and pull him back up. Even though Edwin Booth didn't know who Lincoln was, he could tell that he was an actor. Only one or two years later, John Wilkes Booth killed the president.

Every year, almost 4,000 kids under the age of 10 suffer injuries from window falls. After all is said and done, that seems like a lot. And that might be the cause of the strange coincidence that happened to Joseph Figlock in 1938. Figlock reportedly worked as a street sweeper in Detroit. He was passing a building one day as he walked down the street when a baby fell from somewhere above him. Both of them were hurt when the youngster fell on Figlock, but they both made it through.

While Figlock was clearing out an alley a year later, a toddler who was two years old again fell from a fourth-story window and landed on Figlock. The same outcome as earlier occurred, with Figlock cushioning the falls sufficiently for the youngster to survive.

This story may be told again with embellished details, like how the same baby fell on Figlock exactly one year later and he caught it both times. The initial reports made no mention of such specifics and, in fact, stated that one kid was a male and the other was a girl.