Anthony Hopkins happened upon a signed copy of the book he was searching for in a train station. In the early 1970s, Anthony Hopkins was slated to play Kostya in a film adaptation of The Girl from Petrovka. To prepare for the role, he set out to read the book, but was unable to find a copy in any book store despite a rigorous search. Then, as internet legend has it, while sitting in a London Tube station, he noticed a copy of that very book that someone had left behind. When he opened it, he found that the book had also been signed by its author, George Feifer.
Abraham Lincoln's son is linked to three presidential assassinations. While it would be rare to be present for the death of any president, Robert Todd Lincoln was in some way present for not one, not two, but three presidential assassinations. Though he wasn't there at the theater during his father's fateful shooting, he was rushed to his deathbed and sat by his side until the elder Lincoln passed away. Later, he was an eye-witness to the killing of President James A. Garfield. Finally, in 1901, Lincoln was nearby in Buffalo, New York, at the invitation of President William McKinley, when the president was fatally shot.
An engaged coupled discovered their parents almost married one another. As told in an episode of NPR's This American Life, titled "No Coincidence, No Story," Stephen and Helen Lee had just gotten engaged when they made a shocking family discovery. While looking through family photos during their engagement party in New York, they realized that the bride's mother and groom's late father had nearly gotten married in Korea in the 1960s, but moved onto other relationships because their parents disapproved. By incredibly narrow odds, the two loves of Lee's father's life—from two different sides of the world, no less—now share grandchildren decades later.
Dog, in the lost language Mbabaram, is dog. Mbabaram is a dying Aboriginal language in Australia—and one that couldn't sound less like English. So, it came as quite the surprise when linguists studying Mbabaram realized that the tribe's word for "dog" is "dog," with no connection to or derivation from the English word. The coincidence is technically considered a false cognate, since they sound the same but only coincidentally share a meaning. This particular case is often used to warn people of assuming a relationship between words based on surface-level similarities.
Two Dennis the Menace characters emerged in different countries during the same year. You're probably familiar with the cartoon character Dennis the Menace, a lovable, if mischievous, little boy who burst onto the scene in March of 1951 with his dog, Ruff. But did you know that in the same month of that very same year, just across the Atlantic in the U.K., another cartoon Dennis the Menace was launched? This British Dennis was a bit more sinister than his American counterpart, intentionally rather than inadvertently causing chaos. Amazingly, there are no signs of plagiarism in this case—the characters were made independently but simultaneously, ultimately occupying a similar place in their respective country's cultural landscape.