True stories too strange to be fiction.
In 2002, identical twin brothers in Raahe, Finland, were each struck and killed by trucks while riding their bicycles — on the same stretch of road, separated by almost exactly one year. No fiction editor would approve this plot. Reality didn't ask for approval.
On a warm January afternoon in Boston's North End, a 50-foot steel tank holding over two million gallons of molasses catastrophically collapsed, unleashing a sticky, suffocating wave that killed 21 people and injured 150 more. It sounds like a joke. It was anything but.
Roy Sullivan was a mild-mannered park ranger in Shenandoah National Park who became the most lightning-struck human being in recorded history. He survived all seven strikes — but the psychological weight of feeling cosmically targeted may have been the cruelest blow of all.