World’s Unluckiest (or luckiest?) Man

Frane Selak was a music teacher from Croatia. He is the luckiest man in the world; or maybe he is the unluckiest. His unbelievable story begins on a cold winter’s day in 1962. When he and his family were traveling from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik, his train jumped the track and plunged into the freezing river. All the other passengers were killed, but Frane survived with only a broken arm.

This accident was just the beginning of bizarre events of his life. The following year, while travelling on a small plane to Rijeka, the plane began losing altitude, a door blew off, and poor Frane was sucked out of the aircraft. Tumbling through the air without a parachute, Frane thought he was going to die. But Frane somehow landed in a haystack and survived with only minor injuries. 19 passengers lost their lives in that accident.

Two years after the plane crash, Frane was travelling by bus when another accident happened. The wheels of the bus locked up because of the ice, and the vehicle skidded into the valley below. Four passengers died, but not Frane. Frane was tired of public transport, so he began to travel mostly by car but that didn’t seem to help either.

In 1970, his car set on fire, but Frane was able to jump out before it exploded. Another car fire came in 1973, and he survived this deadly accident, too. In 1995, he survived being hit by a bus. In 2003 at the age of 72, Frane bought a lottery ticket, his first one in over 40 years. He won the jackpot, and this made him the luckiest unlucky person to ever live.