Frane Selak, a Croatian music teacher, began his unlucky streak in 1962 on a train going from Sarajevo to Dubrovnik. The train unexplainably jumped the tracks and fell into an icy river killing 17 passengers.
Selak managed to swim to shore suffering from hypothermia and a broken arm. A year later while on an airplane, its door flew off and Selak was sucked out of the airplane. The plane crashed and he woke up in a hospital. He’d been found in a haystack.
Then in 1966, Selak was on a bus that went off the road and into a river. Four people were killed, but he suffered minor injuries.
In 1970, his car caught on fire and he stopped it and got out just before the whole car blew up. In 1973, Selak was driving another car when a faulty fuel line sprayed gas all over the engine and flames blew through his air vents. His only injury was the loss of most of his hair.
In ’95 he was hit by a bus, but on sustained minor injuries. Finally in 1996 he was driving on a mountain road when he went around a bend and saw a truck coming right at him. He ran is car through a guardrail and jumped out to watch his car blow up 300 feet below him.
In 2003, Selak bought a lottery ticket for the first time in 40 years at the age of 74. He ended up winning $1 million.
Damn
Not much is known about Hugh Glass, but he is famous for being mauled by a bear. He was an American fur trapper in the early 1800s. Glass was scouting for an expedition in 1823 when he stumbled upon a grizzly bear with her two cubs. The bear charged Glass, picked him up, and threw him to the ground before he could gather his rifle. He got up and repeatedly stabbed the grizzly while it clawed him over and over again.
Glass managed to kill the bear with the help of his two partners, but was badly wounded and unconscious by the end of the ordeal. Convinced that he wouldn’t live, his superior had Glass’s two partners stay with him until he died and then have him buried.
The partners ended up taking Glass’s things and running off, because they said some Indians arrived. Glass regained consciousness, though, with a broken leg, wounds on his back exposing his ribs, and abandoned without any equipment or weapons. He was 200 miles from the nearest town, Fort Kiowa.
Glass set his own leg and covered himself with the bear hide. He laid his wounded back on a rotting log and allowed the maggots to eat his dead flesh to keep from getting gangrene.
Glass crawled to the Cheyenne River and made a raft to float on. He made it to Fort Kiowa and began his recuperation. He then set out to get his revenge on the two partners that abandoned him. He ended up sparing one, because he was so young and the other because he’d joined the army. He did, however, get his lost rifle back. What a man!
They don’t make men like they used to.
