Luck or Intervention?

History is packed with wild stories of individuals who faced certain doom and somehow walked away with nothing but a cool story to tell at dinner parties. Whether it was surviving sinking ships, dodging dozens of assassination attempts, or literally falling from the sky, these folks seemed to have a "get out of jail free" card from destiny itself. You'll probably find yourself wondering how on earth they managed to pull it off.

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1. Fidel Castro

You've likely heard that the Cuban leader survived over six hundred assassination attempts throughout his long life. The CIA tried everything from exploding cigars to poison-lined wetsuits, yet none of these elaborate schemes actually worked. It’s almost impressive how he managed to outlive nearly all the people who were specifically hired to take him out.

Fidel_Castro_-_MATS_Terminal_Washington_1959.png: Warren K. Leffler derivative work: Damiens.rf on Wikimedia

2. Grigori Rasputin

This Russian mystic was famously difficult to dispatch when a group of nobles decided he simply had to go. They reportedly poisoned his food, shot him multiple times, and beat him, but he still kept trying to fight back and escape. Eventually, they had to throw him into a frozen river just to ensure the job was finally finished for good.

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3. Violet Jessop

Passengers called her “Miss Unsinkable”. The stewardess/nurse survived both the Titanic and the Britannic when they sank on separate trips. She even survived the maiden voyage of Olympic when it collided with another ship. You could call her lucky or unlucky to be aboard so many tragedies.

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4. Roy Sullivan

Roy Sullivan was once struck by lightning seven times. That’s right, seven times. And you thought getting struck once was bad luck. The park ranger lived for years despite the astronomical odds against surviving even one lightning strike.

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5. Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Imagine being in Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb fell and then traveling home to Nagasaki just in time for the second one to hit. This engineer lived through both nuclear blasts and actually made it to the ripe old age of ninety-three. His story stands as a stunning testament to human resilience in the face of unimaginable technological destruction.

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6. Juliane Koepcke

Teenaged Juliane survived falling two miles out of a plane while still strapped to her seat during a storm in Peru. She suffered only a broken collarbone when she plummeted through the air and lived eleven days in the jungle afterward. Her incredible survival instincts allowed her to endure dangers in the wild until she was finally found.

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7. Frane Selak

This Croatian music teacher is often called the world's luckiest man after escaping a train crash, a plane accident, and multiple car explosions. After dancing with death for decades, he topped it all off by winning a million dollars in the lottery on his eighty-first birthday. It seems like the universe decided to pay him back for all the stress it put him through over the years.

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8. Theodore Roosevelt

While he was giving a campaign speech in Milwaukee, a would-be assassin shot the former president right in the chest at close range. Instead of rushing to the hospital, Teddy realized his thick manuscript and metal glasses case had slowed the shot and decided to finish his ninety-minute talk. He told the shocked crowd that it takes more than a single shot to take down a "Bull Moose".

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9. Vesna Vulović

Flight attendant Vesna fell 33,000 feet when her plane exploded. That’s the longest fall survived without a parachute. She landed in snow, which broke her fall, and survived to tell the tale.

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10. Robert Surcouf

The legendary French privateer spent his life engaging in high-stakes naval battles against the British while being massively outnumbered. Despite facing cannons and musket fire on a daily basis, he escaped every skirmish without a scratch and retired as a wealthy man.

You have to respect a guy who could make a living by dodging death on the high seas for so long.

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11. Winston Churchill

Long before he led Britain through World War II, a young Churchill escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp during the Boer War. He traveled hundreds of miles through enemy territory with nothing but some chocolate and a bit of luck to keep him going. This daring getaway turned him into a national hero and set the stage for his future political dominance.

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12. Douglas Mawson

Along with his supplies and two traveling companions, Mawson fell into a crevasse during his Antarctic expedition. He spent thirty days crawling through the snow before reaching solid ground, even surviving a fall into another crevasse. He had lost the skin on his feet by the time he reached camp, but lived.

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13. Adrian Carton de Wiart

This British officer was attacked in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear across several different wars. He also survived two plane crashes and tunneled out of a prisoner camp, famously stating that he actually enjoyed the conflicts. He even bit off his own fingers when a doctor refused to amputate them, which is about as tough as a human can get.

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14. Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc was shot through the shoulder with a crossbow bolt during battle.

She had the presence of mind to remove the bolt herself before charging back into battle. Her sheer willpower seemed to keep her going long after her body should have given up.

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15. Hugh Glass

While he was out on a fur-trapping expedition, a grizzly bear mauled this frontiersman so badly that his friends left him for dead in a shallow grave. He woke up alone, crawled over two hundred miles to the nearest fort, and survived by eating raw rattlesnakes and wild berries. His story is so intense that it eventually inspired a major Hollywood movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

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16. George Washington

During the French and Indian War, the future first president had two horses shot out from under him and found four holes in his coat. He miraculously escaped without a single wound, leading many of his contemporaries to believe he was under divine protection. It’s wild to think that American history could’ve been completely different.

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17. Anne Green

In 1650, this English woman was hanged for a crime, but when doctors opened her coffin for an autopsy, they found her still breathing. They gave her some hot cordial, and she made a full recovery, eventually being granted a formal pardon because everyone figured she'd suffered enough.

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18. Leon Trotsky

After he was exiled from the Soviet Union, the revolutionary survived multiple elaborate assassination attempts orchestrated by Joseph Stalin's secret police.

One particularly violent machine-gun attack on his home failed because he and his wife hid under their beds while firearms riddled the room.

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19. Andrew Jackson

When a deranged assassin tried to shoot the seventh U.S. President with two different pistols, both weapons mysteriously misfired despite being in perfect working order. Instead of running away, the elderly Jackson proceeded to beat the attacker with his heavy cane until his aides stepped in. The odds of both guns failing are roughly one in one hundred and twenty-five thousand.

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20. Wenceslao Moguel

During the Mexican Revolution, this soldier was captured and sentenced to perish by a firing squad that shot him nine times. He even took a final "coup de grâce" shot to the head at point-blank range but somehow stayed conscious and crawled away once the soldiers left. He lived for decades after his own execution, showing off his scars on talk shows as a living miracle.

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