The problems had begun when both women still lived in the District of Columbia—one on Girard Street, the other on New Jersey Avenue.
They both had babies at Howard University Hospital and attended the same Howard clinic; Wanda of Girard Street realized something was wrong when doctors at the clinic began referring to the other Wanda’s medical information.
All her efforts to trace her namesake were unsuccessful.
The two Wandas were eventually brought together by a newspaper reporter. They got on fine, but neither was prepared to change her name.
UMBERTO, DEUXBERTO
Umberto the restaurant owner bore a striking resemblance to King Umberto I of Italy. He had the same name and he, too, was born on March 14, 1844, in the same town. He also married on 22 April, to a woman also called Margherita. His son, just like the king’s, was called Vittorio, and on the day of the king’s coronation in 1878, he opened his restaurant.
All this wouldn’t have had a lot of significance had the king and the restaurant owner never met, but, just like in a fairy story, the two Umbertos’ paths did cross. They were to find out that their lives had more similarities than just these simple facts.
The king had come to Monza, near Milan, to present prizes to athletes. The night before the tournament he and his aide went for dinner at Umberto’s restaurant. As he sat there the king noticed the physical resemblance between Umberto and himself. He called the man over and as they swapped vital statistics the two men began to marvel. The list of similarities was teased out, savored and remarked upon and then, to top it all, they discovered they had both been decorated for bravery on the same day, on two occasions, in 1866 and in 1870. The king determined at that point to make the restaurateur a Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy and invited him to the athletics tournament the following day.
Like many a fairy tale, this one also has a violent ending. There was no sign of Umberto the next morning and when the king asked after him he was told the restaurateur had died that day in a shooting accident. Saddened, King Umberto declared that he would attend his funeral. It was never to be. The king was killed that day by three shots from the pistol of the assassin Gaetano Bresci.
NOT FEELING HIMSELF
We like to think of coincidences as benign or amusing, but often the opposite is true. Here are the ingredients of a nightmare: two patients at the same hospital, with the same Christian name and surname, both suffering from brain tumors and nobody realizing the link between them.
In this case a simple coincidence caused weeks of fear and misunderstanding for two families, though as luck would have it, a second coincidence made the resolution of the problem possible.
When Sheila Fennell’s son Stephen began a worsening sequence of depressions and blackouts, and eventually suffered a fit, his doctor arranged for him to have an electroencephalogram, or EEG test. The family then had a long and tense wait for the results. Eight weeks went by, the results hadn’t arrived, and Stephen’s health was rapidly deteriorating. When he suffered another fit, Sheila called an ambulance and he was admitted to the hospital. But there was still no EEG result. Another ten days went by. The hospital kept telling Sheila he’d had a scan on August 31 that had shown he was okay. Stephen hadn’t had a scan on the thirty-first.
Puzzled and increasingly desperate, the Fennells began clutching at straws. Sheila remembered that her husband had once mentioned that there was a young man at the power station where he worked who was also named Stephen Fennell. It seemed unlikely but he agreed to ask that Stephen if he’d ever had a brain scan. Sure enough he had, and his family were also desperate, but for a different reason: they had received results telling them that their Stephen had a very large and inoperable brain tumor.
Of course, the results had been sent out to the wrong patients, but this brought no relief to Sheila because her son now seemed to be fighting for his life. Fortunately the tumor turned out to be benign, and though large, it was possible to drain it. Stephen started to get better and after two years began to look more like his old self.
The mix-ups weren’t over though. Three years later he got a letter asking him to go to the specialist urgently. The doctor asked him if he was still getting the headaches he’d reported in March. This time they were able to direct the doctor to examine his files carefully. Once again the two files had been muddled together.
Knowing what had happened before, this was something they could easily sort out, but Sheila often wonders how the story would have ended if her husband hadn’t, by coincidence, worked alongside a man called Stephen Fennell.
MARTIN GUERRE
In the summer of 1557, Frenchman Martin Guerre returned to the village of Artigat after eight years away from home fighting in the wars that culminated in August that year, in the battle of St. Quentin, in which the English and Spanish defeated the French.
Guerre, a wealthy landowner, soon settled back into family life with his wife Bertrande and his relatives. Life was comfortable, with good rents coming in from his properties. To his delight his first child, a daughter, was born.
But some among his family, in particular Guerre’s younger brother Pierre, thought that the war had changed him a little more than was credible. He seemed to have forgotten expressions common to his dialect, he showed no interest in his once engrossing interests, swordplay and acrobatics, and worse, he sold off some parcels of land that had been in the family for generations.
Others in the village believed he was genuine and Bertrande, who realized he was an impostor, but preferred this warm, charming man to her rather heartless (and what’s more absent) husband, insisted it was so.
A few years later Pierre, who had never stopped campaigning against the man, succeeded in having him arrested as an impostor. A long and complicated court case ensued with many witnesses called. The case went to appeal in Toulouse and due to the impossibly contradictory nature of all the many testimonies, the court was on the verge of giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt, when a one-legged man on crutches hobbled into the courtroom. Bertrande collapsed. It was the real Martin Guerre, who (perhaps having got wind of the case) had returned from Spain, where he had spent the last few years living a new life.
The truth of the story was that during a battle in Flanders, Martin Guerre had lost a leg and been left for dead on the battlefield. Another soldier, Arnaud du Tilh, came across Guerre and, realizing they looked alike, down to having the same twisted fingernail, the same four warts on the right hand and an identical scar on the forehead, concluded that his material needs would be solved if he took the place of the man he assumed to be dead. Arnaud du Tilh, a clever rascal and skilled actor, walked into the village in 1557 and took over Guerre’s home.
For du Tilh there remained only the gallows. Bertrande, spared the rope because of her gender, was forced to watch the execution of the man she had grown to love and return to live with the cold man who had deserted her to live in Spain.
TWIN SISTERS
Tamara Rabi and Adriana Scott couldn’t understand why strangers kept approaching them in the street claiming to know them.
The girls, both students at nearby universities in New York, grew increasingly puzzled. It happened so regularly that they started to believe they must have doubles or doppelgängers in the neighborhood.
The explanation was that Tamara and Adriana were in fact identical twin sisters, born in Mexico in 1983 and given up for adoption at birth. They were handed over to different sets of adoptive parents who had flown down from America.
By an extraordinary coincidence they ended up living just twenty-five miles apart, but their upbringings were entirely different. Tamara was adopted by a Jewish couple who lived close to Central Park in Manhattan; Adriana grew up in a Roman Catholic family, in the Long Island suburb of Valley Stream.
They were eventually brought together on their twentieth birthdays. Justin Latorre, a friend of Tamara’s, happened to be invited to Adriana’s party. She was startled by the resemblance between
the two girls and decided it could not be mere coincidence. She insisted that the pair make contact.
Both girls knew that they had been born in Mexico and adopted, but knew nothing of each other’s existence. Adriana sent Tamara a photograph of herself.
“I had seen her face every time I looked in a mirror,” said Tamara. “I just felt that I had known her all my life.” Both girls put some pointed questions to their adoptive parents, and the truth emerged.
A few days later, the young women met for the first time and spent the following weeks getting to know each other. They learned that both had lost their adoptive fathers to cancer. Adriana when she was eleven, and Tamara only the previous autumn. Both had crashed into plate glass doors in childhood and both were musical and loved to dance. Both even had photographs of themselves as infants wearing identical Minnie Mouse romper suits.
“Then we discovered that we both had the same recurring dream,” said Tamara. “It involves a very loud noise, then everything going quiet, and then very noisy again, and it was always very scary,” said Adriana. “It must have been something that happened to us when were together in our mother’s womb,” said Tamara.
DOUBLE ACT
Albert Rivers and Betty Cheetham shared a table with another couple for dinner at the Tourkhalf Hotel in Tunisia in early 1998. The other couple introduced themselves—Albert Cheetham and Betty Rivers. All were in their seventies. Other similarities emerged. Both couples were married on the same day and at the same time. Both had two sons, born in 1943 and 1945. Both had five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. The Bettys had worked in post offices in their home towns while their husbands had been carriage bodybuilders in railway workshops. Neither woman could show her engagement ring as both had lost them, but they did have identical watch bracelets, which had repairs to the same links.
IF THE KEY FITS
Sales representative Robert Beame could certainly be forgiven for believing he had stepped into a parallel universe back in 1954 when he was traveling in Iowa.
Leaving his hotel one morning, he returned to his car and began his journey to his first business appointment of the day in a nearby town. A few miles out, he pulled over to look at some papers in his briefcase, which was still lying on the passenger seat where he had left it the previous evening.
Pulling out some documents, he found to his astonishment that they did not belong to him. Checking the contents of the briefcase more carefully he realized it was not his. Had someone swapped the briefcases? Nothing else seemed to be out of place in the car. It did not appear to have been broken into. He then checked the glove compartment and found other items that did not belong to him. Beame eventually drew the inevitable conclusion that he had somehow got into the wrong car.
He drove back to the spot where he had parked the previous night and standing there was a man in front of an identical car that proved to be his. The coincidences continued. The owner of the car he had taken in error was a man he had roomed with in college seven years earlier. They had not been in touch since. When the two men examined their cars they found they were identical down to the hood ornament that each had specially ordered.
“As I recall my key fitted his car but his key did not fit mine,” says Robert.
LINCOLN AND KENNEDY
A study of the lives and violent deaths of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy reveals some remarkable coincidences. Eminent mathematician Professor Ian Stewart is not convinced that the parallels amount to something “beyond coincidence,” but he concedes that not everything that happens in the universe can be understood or explained. The circumstances, he agrees, are certainly very compelling.
Many books, newspapers, and Internet sites have catalogued the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences. Most, in their enthusiasm, contain inaccuracies, distortions and exaggerations. But most agree on the following details:
• Lincoln was elected president in 1860. Exactly one hundred years later, in 1960, Kennedy was elected president.
• Both men were involved in civil rights.
• Both were assassinated on a Friday, in the presence of their wives.
• Both men were killed by a bullet that entered the head from behind.
• Lincoln was killed in Ford’s Theater. Kennedy met his death while riding in a Lincoln convertible made by the Ford Motor Company.
• Both men were succeeded by vice presidents named Johnson who were Southern Democrats and former senators.
• Andrew Johnson was born in 1808. Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908, exactly one hundred years later.
• Assassin John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839. Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939, one hundred years later.
• Both assassins were Southerners. Both were murdered before they could be brought to trial.
• Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and fled to a barn. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theater.
But even this consensus view contains at least one often-repeated glaring error—Booth was, in fact, born in 1838, not 1839.
The most detailed investigation into the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences has been conducted by Australian writer, Ken Anderson. In his book, The Coincidence File, he agrees that the coincidences involving the two presidents are often inaccurately reported, but says he believes he has uncovered parallels that more than compensate.
Among the points he makes are:
• Both Oswald and Booth shot their victims in the head. According to Anderson, assassins in public places tend to aim at the heart or other vulnerable body parts when using a gun. Examples include Charles Guiteau, whose bullet struck President James Garfield in the pancreas on July 2, 1881, and Arthur H. Bremner, who shot Alabama governor George Wallace five times in the body on May 15, 1972.
• Both Lincoln and Kennedy liked to be able to travel openly around the country and disliked being surrounded by guards. Kennedy had ordered the top to be removed from his Lincoln Continental so that he and his wife Jackie could be more easily seen during the cavalcade through Dallas. Lincoln had also been careless about his security. When Booth entered Ford’s Theater, he found the presidential box unguarded. John Parker, the White House policeman charged with protecting the president, had left his side several times, once to get a drink and on another occasion to get a better view of the production.
• At the time of their assassinations, both presidents were accompanied by their wives and another couple. In each case the other man was wounded by the killer. John Connally, the governor of Texas, and his wife were traveling in the car with President Kennedy. A bullet passed through Connally’s body and emerged to hit him in the wrist, before entering his thigh. Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Miss Clara Harris were in the box at the theater with President Lincoln. Rathbone attempted to tackle Booth after the shooting and was stabbed in the arm with a hunting knife.
• Both presidents were sitting beside their wives at the time of the shootings. Neither woman was injured. Both women cradled their dying husbands’ heads in their hands. Each had to wait while doctors made desperate but unsuccessful attempts to save their husbands. Both women had married at the age of twenty-four. Both had three children and both had a child die while they were in the White House.
• Shortly after the shootings, both Oswald and Booth were stopped and questioned but allowed to proceed.
• Oswald and Booth were murdered in similar circumstances. Both were surrounded by their captors under a blaze of lights. Their assassins, Jack Ruby and Boston Corbett, each used a Colt revolver and fired a single bullet.
So what accounts for this quite extraordinary catalog of similarities? If you remove errors, distortions, and exaggerations, and make allowance for the fact that similarities can be found in the lives of any two human beings, the Kennedy/Lincoln coincidences still take some explaining.
MORE PRESIDENTIAL COINCIDENCES
In 1992, the Skeptical Inquirer held a “Spooky Presidential Coincidences Contest,” asking readers t
o compile lists of coincidences between other pairs of presidents. One of the joint winners, Chris Fishel, a student at the University of Virginia, came up with many coincidences relating to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both men served two full terms; both their wives died before they became president; each had six-letter first names; both were in debt at the time of their deaths; each had a state capital named after him, and both their predecessors refused to attend their inaugurations.
JULY 4 COMMISERATIONS
In what may have been more than just coincidence, three early U.S. presidents died on July 4. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, in 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of their signing the Declaration of Independence. Adams’s final words, that his long-time rival and correspondent Jefferson “still lives,” were mistaken, as Jefferson had died earlier that same day. James Monroe died on the same date five years later. Historians suggest that Adams and Jefferson made an effort to hang on till July 4. James Madison rejected stimulants that might have prolonged his life, and he died six days earlier on June 28, 1836. Only one president, Calvin Coolidge, was born on July 4.
IDENTICAL TWINS
Twin boys, born in Ohio, were adopted by different families shortly after birth. In 1979, after thirty-nine years apart, they were reunited. It was discovered that each had been named James; that each had had law-enforcement training; that each liked mechanical drawing and carpentry. Each married a woman named Linda and had a son—one named James Alan and the other James Allan. Each had divorced, and then married a second wife, named Betty. Both had had dogs named Toy. Also, both favored the same St. Petersburg, Florida, vacation beach.
A SINGLE LIFE
Bachelor twins, Bill and John Bloomfield, died as they had lived—inseparably. They lived together throughout their lives, dressed alike, wore the same kind of glasses and kept their hair cut in the same short style. As they grew older, they both had hip replacement operations and took to carrying identical walking sticks. In May 1996 the twins, then aged sixty-one, attended a body building competition. Suddenly one of them collapsed. Officials called an ambulance. The call was logged at 12:14 a.m. At 12:16 a.m. the emergency phone rang again. The other twin had collapsed. Neither man recovered.
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