There are very strange coincidences. Sometimes unrelated phenomena surprisingly coincide in time, place and circumstances under which they occur. Mathematicians argue that such coincidences are quite natural and they can be calculated and predicted in advance, since millions of people perform billions of the same actions every day - it is quite obvious that an outwardly direct relationship can sometimes arise between absolutely unrelated phenomena.
From this point of view, coincidences appear to be nothing more than natural explainable phenomena. Mathematicians don't believe in their abnormality. However, despite their confidence, there are a number of highly respected authors who, like myself, consider it their duty to study genius coincidences.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of this is the life examples of people who bring trouble.
In the specialized literature, this is called the syndrome of a person who brings unhappiness. This specialized form of unexplained coincidence occurs when one factor - a person or an object, or even a name or a number - strangely becomes the center of tragic events, incomprehensibly grouping around it.
Generally speaking, such coincidences are more likely to lead to unhappiness than good. The most common type of this is Jonah's syndrome. The syndrome is that a loser becomes the center of tragic events.
These people do not want to do anything bad and at the same time they constantly cause all sorts of accidents around them, remaining unharmed themselves. The people they live with or work with get sick or die altogether. Society usually turns such unlucky people into outcasts, accusing them of deliberate crimes.
Until now, the most famous person who brings misfortune, and, perhaps, the most "productive" in the spread of evil is "Typhoid Mary". A young American maid appears to have been sadly responsible for the emerging typhoid epidemics, which claimed an estimated 40,000 lives at the turn of the century.
In 1906, typhus outbreaks occurred in several wealthy New York families. It turned out that in all these families, shortly before the illness of their members, a girl named Mary worked as a cook.
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Typhoid Mary; image from a 1909 newspaper publication
And although no one could explain the persistent immunity to this disease of Mary herself, doctors and the police came to a consensus that it was she who was the cause of other typhus. For three years she was kept in a separate cell in prison. During this time, the tests carried out could not prove the correctness of the opinions of doctors. Without any evidence, the investigation was forced to release her, forbidding her to work in the future as a servant or a cook for hire.
Unfortunately, she did not fulfill this condition. Five years later, several women in childbirth fell ill with typhus in the Sloane maternity hospital. Unfortunate Mary worked here as a cook, though under a different name. And again she was imprisoned, now forever.
"Typhoid Mary" ended her days in solitary confinement, charged with mass murder and dubbed the most "prolific" assassin of all time. Although later doctors doubted that the explosion of epidemics was provoked by the girl. Why, for example, no one got sick during the period when she worked as a delivery girl after her first imprisonment? Why didn’t numerous medical examinations over several years reveal the typhoid virus in her?
Victims of Typhoid Mary in the Hospital
This mystery was never solved, but the fact remains undeniable: "Typhoid Mary" did become the epicenter of outbreaks. Was she just an unlucky, unaware victim of a force as deadly as typhus itself, only less studied than this contagious disease?
We will never know if the American girl was indeed a Misfortune Man. But Jean Weber really deserves such a name. Weber, a French, middle-class woman, has been nicknamed "The Ogre."
In 1906, she was charged with the murder of four children at once, two of whom were her sons. Each of these children died while in her care. The medical report proved her complete innocence - the death of children came from various, unrelated, natural causes. However, her misadventures did not end there.
A few months after her release from prison, Jean Weber stayed at the house of her friend, who had a young son. She began to play with a boy who, coughing, suffocated. Again, suspicion of premeditated murder fell on her. Prison again, investigation. When no evidence was found this time, she was again released.
While the two incidents in 1906 remain the most revealing, the reader can rest assured that examples of the Man of Misfortune syndrome still exist today. In February 1980, a similar "talent" for instigating the death of children emerged in Miss Christine Fallings, an eighteen-year-old epileptic from Blownstown, Florida.
On February 2, Miss Fallings, who was a home-based nanny, called the police station to report the death of the baby in her care. The cause of death of the boy was cerebral edema.
In the same year, when she moved to Lakehand, she witnessed two little brothers convulsing at the very moment they began to introduce her as their new nanny. The boys survived and, after spending some time in the clinic, fully recovered.
Just a few days later, another child with whom she was sitting died of myocarditis. The next week, another of her charges died from the same disease. On July 12, 1980, a little girl died in the arms of Christina Fallings right after receiving a whooping cough vaccine.
After this last tragedy, the girl refused to work as a nanny. Fallings underwent a thorough medical examination, the results of which showed that the girl herself was not a virus carrier of any of the infectious diseases.