The Unluckiest People Who Ever Lived

#1 Costis Mitsotakis

The entire village won the lottery, except for this guy. Two hundred and fifty villagers in Spain, mostly poor farmers, got together and purchased a lottery ticket as a group. Costis Mitsotakis didn't get in on the purchase, and the farmers won a portion of the $950 million jackpot, giving each townsperson over $130,000. He took it in stride and congratulated his friends and neighbors, buy you've got to know that deep down he was super pissed.

#2 Frane Selak

This man escaped death not once, but seven different times. In 1962 he was on a train from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik that hit ice and crashed into a river killing all 17 people on board except for Selak, who survived with minor cuts and scrapes. One year later while on a plane, the passengers were forced to evacuate and all 19 died except for Selak who was found lying alive in a haystack.

In 1966, he survived a bus crash. In 1970, he managed to escape from his car covered in flames due to a faulty pump. In 1973, another of Selak’s cars caught fire, he again escaped with small injuries. In 1995, he was hit by a city bus. In 1996, he drove off a cliff to escape an oncoming truck, then landed on a tree, and watched his car exploding 300 feet below him.

Unlucky? Yes, but after surviving all these terrible accident, he won $1,000,000 dollars in the Croatian lottery. Which is why he could be seen as one of the luckiest and unluckiest men in the world.

#3 Harry Jenkins

Harry Jenkins and his two buddies go ice fishing one day at Ten Mile Lake in Akeley, Minnesota. The lake is completely iced over and Harry tossed an illegal stick of dynamite onto the ice to create a fishing hole. his dog Jerry, thought he was playing fetch and ran after the dynamite. The dog begins rushing towards the three men, who retreat in horror. The men narrowly escape, but Jerry wasn't so lucky. The explosion kills the poor dog and creates a hole next to Harry's truck, which sank to the bottom of the lake. In addition to losing his dog, Mr. Jenkins became a double loser when the insurance company refused to pay on his claim for the sunken truck.

#4 Ann Hodges

Ann Hodges is the only person know to survive an extraterrestrial attack. She was struck by a meteorite while taking a nap at her Alabama home on November 30, 1954. She was just sleeping in a recliner on her front porch when a freaking meteorite fell from the sky right on her and badly bruised and scarred a large portion of her body. The odds of that happening are like one in a billion.

#5 Roy Sullivan

They say lightning never strikes twice – but it struck Roy Sullivan a whopping seven times. Yes, seven. Roy was a U.S. park ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and holds the Guinness World Record for the amount of times lightning has struck one human being. You’d think that after the sixth time you’d probably just stay inside… or start buying lottery tickets – but not Roy! The final time was arguably the most impressive. After Roy was struck while he was fishing, a bear then added insult to severe injury by trying to steal a trout from his fishing line. Having none of it, Sullivan had enough energy to strike the bear with a branch and get his fish back. That’s tough.

Sadly, he wasn’t thankful to God for sparing his life 7 times, he shot himself in the head in 1983 at the age of 71. He had been diagnosed with severe mental health issues caused from his numerous lightning strikes.

#6 John Lyne

‘Calamity’ John Lyne is often called Britain’s unluckiest man – suffering 16 major accidents in his life, including lightning strikes, a rock fall in a mine and three car crashes. Then there was the time a stone, propelled by a catapult, hit him in the mouth smashing eight teeth. Mr. Lyne’s mishaps cover a lifetime. When he was born, one of five children to a farming family, it was uncertain whether he would survive. He had underdeveloped lungs and needed steroids and special care. But, setting a pattern for later in life, he beat the odds.

Perhaps his most famous incident occurred when he was a teen. After breaking his arm falling from a tree, he went to the hospital for treatment. On the way home from the hospital, the bus he was traveling on crashed – so he broke the same arm again in a different place. Oh yeah, and it was Friday 13th. Reality is often stranger than fiction!

#7 Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence

They've been attacked by terrorists more times than John McClane. It wasn't just New Yorkers who were traumatized by the September 11th World Trade Center attacks. Tourists from all over the country and the world were in the city at the time, as they would be on any given day. Tourists like the English couple Jason and Jenny Cairns-Lawrence, whose relaxing vacation was interrupted by the worst terrorist attack in history, experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime horror. Wait, did we say once in a lifetime? Because four years later, on July 7th, 2005, they happened to be in London, during the worst terror attack in their history. A series of bombs exploded across the city's transit system, killing 52 people.

Three years later, they took another vacation. This time, to the exotic Indian city of Mumbai. There they saw the worst terror attack in that country's history, as shooting and bombing attacks killed and wounded hundreds. News stories say the couple "refused to cut short their holiday" after the Mumbai attack. It's kind of hard not to imagine them as Clark Griswold, screaming "NO! Not this time! We took this fucking vacation and we're going to enjoy it, damn it."

#8 Melanie Martinez

After losing four houses to four hurricanes, Melanie Martinez, a school bus driver, was arguably America’s unluckiest woman. There was Betsy in 1965, Juan in 1985, George in 1998 and Katrina in 2005. Such was the peril of living on a flood plain in Louisiana. But then a reality show came along and promised to rebuild her house. The team spent a week and $20,000 transforming the Martinez home with a new kitchen, new cupboards, and new appliances, including a 50 inch smart TV.

But on August 29, 2013, the seventh anniversary of Katrina, a category 1 hurricane named Isaac howled in from the Gulf and hit her again. Martinez and her family were rescued by boat along with their five kittens and three dogs. Everything else was lost. “Now I’ve lost five houses to five storms. Every time a wipe-out.”

Melanie, please go find a hill to live on.

#9 Jeanne Rogers

This lady survived life. She's basically a female George Costanza. She's more of an encumbrance than a friend, really, resembling those annoying hostages in first person shooters that have terrible AI and need to be led to safety while continually stumbling into danger. Sure, she hasn't been struck by lightning as many times as Roy Sullivan, but she has been struck. Twice. She fell off a cruise ship while being photographed. A bat attacked her while she was walking her toddler and ripped apart her scalp. She's fought off muggers, survived an abusive husband, and been shot at and fell into an open manhole.

After surviving these accidents, Rogers were asked if she’s feared of accidental deaths. She simply replied, “Dying doesn’t scare me, but living scares the crap out of me.”

#10 Robert Todd Lincoln

If you were a president, the worst person to hang out with would have been Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln. He was with three US Presidents when they were assassinated. Talk about being a jinx! The night when John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, Robert Todd was with his father. In 1881 he became the Secretary of War under President James A. Garfield and traveled with him on a train trip that was interrupted by a lethal shot by Charles Guiteau who killed the President.

But it didn’t end there. Two decades later his bad luck returned to kill another president. This time the victim was President William McKinley. Although Lincoln wasn’t technically with him at the time of the assassination, but was on was on his way to meet McKinley when anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot the president twice at close range.

#11 Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only officially recognized survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts at the end WW2. Only two cities have ever been destroyed by atomic bombs. This man was in both of them. Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 am, on August 6, 1945. After surviving atomic bomb with a couple of scratches on his body, he decided to return his hometown Nagasaki. But The day he went to work, America dropped another bomb, this time on Nagasaki.

He has written books on his experience and was an anti-nuclear protester, though it seems like he'd be the one guy out there saying we shouldn't worry about nukes because, really, you can just walk away from that shit. People say he is unlucky but who else has survived two nukes?

#12 Violet Jessop

She's been called one of the luckiest people ever, and also unluckiest. I say, she's bad news for the cruise ship industry. Violet was present on two of the most disastrous ship sinking in the history. She survived both the RMS Titanic and HMHS Britannic wreckage, in 1912 and 1916 respectively. Not only that, she was on board RMS Olympic when it collided with a British warship in 1911. She lived long after that and died at the age of 84, due to congestive heart failure in 1971.