By
03/08/2011 09:14
From time to time, you might think you've fallen victim to bad fortune, but your trials and tribulations cannot compare to those inflicted upon the unluckiest men in history.
You pour out some cereal, and realise you've run out of milk. You open the front door and see a clear blue sky, and the heavens open as soon as you step through it. Your train is late, and when you get to the office you remember it's a bank holiday.
And then you lift your head to the gods and cry: "Am I the unluckiest man in the world?"
To which the only answer is, no, no, and thrice no. Here are some of the unluckiest men in history. You're nowhere close.
Major Summerford
Major Summerford was fighting on the fields of Flanders during the first world war when a bolt of lightning threw him from his horse.
Years later, in 1924, lightning struck the tree he was sitting under. In 1930 he was hit again as he strolled in a park.
The Major died two years later. Four years after his death, during a fierce storm, a gravestone was struck by lightning and smashed into pieces. Guess whose gravestone it was?
Tsutomu Yamaguchi
Last year death finally came to claim poor old Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only man to be caught up in two atomic bomb blasts.
In 1945 he was on a business trip to Hiroshima when an American atomic bomb detonated above the city, killing 80,000 people in an instant (and many more from the effects of radiation later). He was knocked to the ground and suffered serious burns, and spent a terrible night in an air raid shelter among thousands of his screaming, dying, mutilated compatriots.
In the morning he negotiated his way through the ruined streets and caught a train back to his home - the city of Nagasaki. Heavily bandaged, he reported to work a day later, and was just relaying the terrible events of Hiroshima to colleagues when he witnessed once more the terrible flash of an exploding atomic bomb.
Again, he survived, but being present in the only two cities ever to be attacked with atomic weapons must make Tsutomu Yamaguchi the unluckiest survivor of all.
On Bing: read more about the experiences of Tsutomu Yamaguchi
John Lyne
Dubbed 'Calamity John' by the press, John Lyne must surely be Britain's unluckiest man.
In 2006 he fell down a manhole at work, injuring his back, his leg and both knees, but by his own standards the accident was hardly worth mentioning.
By that point the 52-year-old had suffered 16 major accidents, including - as a child - falling off a cart and being run over by an oncoming van. As a teenager, Lyne broke his arm falling out of a tree, and broke it again when the ambulance taking him home from hospital crashed.
On Bing: read more about 'Calamity' John Lyne
William "Bud" Post
William Post felt pretty lucky when he scooped $16.2 million on the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but not for long.
His brother hired a hitman to try and kill him and an ex-landlady successfully sued him for a share of the loot, claiming Post had agreed to split any winnings.
Other siblings pestered him to put money into businesses that were no better than money pits, and he incurred the expense of six divorces. By the end of it all Post was $1 million in debt and living on food stamps. "I was much happier when I was broke," he moaned. He died in 2006.
On Bing: lottery winners who ended up broke
Wilmer McLean
Wilmer McLean's farm in Prince William County, Virginia, was being used as a Confederate headquarters when a Union cannonball - one of the first shots fired in anger in the American civil war - came through his fireplace.
Wilmer McLean's home was repeatedly ransacked owing to its significance to the start of the American civil war
McLean moved his family 140km north to Appomattox County where, four years later, his parlour became the scene for the surrender of Confederate general Robert E Lee to his Union counterpart Ulysses S Grant.
Confederate-supporting McLean said that the war, "started in his front yard and ended in his front parlour." He later lost his home because he couldn't keep up payments on the mortgage, in part due to the pillaging of furniture and furnishings by Union forces anxious for mementoes of the triumphant occasion.
Henry Ziegland
The story goes like this. In 1893 Texan Henry Ziegland broke off his engagement and his heartbroken girlfriend shot herself. Her brother then shot Ziegland before turning the gun on himself. But the bullet had only grazed lucky old Henry, before lodging itself in a tree.
Twenty years later, Ziegland's luck changed. He wanted the huge old tree removed and decided to use dynamite. The force of the explosion dislodged the bullet and shot it across the yard, hitting Henry in the head and killing him - as it was meant to do 20 years before.
Some people claim the story is too remarkable to be true, but it has been reported in serious news media for years. And is it really less believable than the following (100% verified) story?
Frane Selak
Is Frane Selak - a Croatian music teacher - the world's luckiest or unluckiest man? He's suffered enough accidents to suggest he's cursed by bad fortune but the fact that he has survived them all makes him extremely lucky too.
In 1962 Selak survived a train crash that killed 17 passengers, though he ended up with hypothermia, shock, bruises and a broken arm. A few years later the door of the aeroplane he was flying on blew off and he was sucked out of the cabin. He landed on a haystack while 19 of his fellow passengers lost their lives in the subsequent crash. In 1966, the bus he was travelling on skidded into an icy river, killing four while Selak again survived.
By 1970 he'd obviously had enough of public transport, but the car he was driving burst into flames on the motorway. He fled the stricken vehicle moments before the fuel tank exploded.
After a couple of more minor mishaps his final death-defying moment came in 1980, when his car careered through a crash barrier and down a 300ft ravine. He managed to throw himself clear moments before impact and watched from a tree as the car exploded.
And then, in 2005, he won the lottery with his first ever ticket, the lucky so-and-so.
John Wade Agan
Florida resident John Wade Agan was taken to hospital earlier this year after suffering a lightning strike - in his own home. He was talking on the telephone at the time.
Previously, Agan had been robbed at gunpoint in his taxi and locked in the boot, stabbed in the chest with a butcher's knife and bitten by two poisonous snakes - at the same time.
Roy Sullivan
There have been several mentions of lightning in this list already, but nobody could attract lightning like Roy Sullivan, a ranger in the Shenandoah national park in Virginia. You have about a one in 10,000 chance of being hit by lightning once in your life.
Roy Sullivan, the national park ranger struck by lightning on seven separate occasions
Roy Sullivan, the national park ranger struck by lightning on seven separate occasions
The chances of getting struck by lightning seven times, as Sullivan was, is about 22 septillion to one against. In other words, it almost defies belief.
And yet it happened to Sullivan, whose ill luck earned him a place into the Guinness Book of Records. It didn't end with lightning though. Sullivan shot himself, aged 71, over an unrequited love.
Adrian Campbell
Chichester man Adrian Campbell was a keen basketball player before he was struck down with myasthenia gravis, a muscle-wasting illness that effects just one in 7,000 people. While recovering from that, Campbell was afflicted with neuromyotonia, a condition that weakens neck muscles and has a hit rate of only one in 100,000.
Despite these misfortunes, Campbell was making progress in his recovery and getting his life back on track... right up until he was struck down by Morvan's syndrome, a disease that can affect short-term memory.
There have been only 14 recorded cases of Morvan's syndrome in the world. Campbell is now slowly recovering from a rash (sorry!) of medical bad luck that doctors reckon carries odds of 700 million to one against
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