A Life That Shouldn’t Have Continued

Frane Selak, a Croatian music teacher, reportedly cheated death so many times it sounds fictional. In 1962, a train he was riding derailed and plunged into an icy river, where 17 people died. He survived with a broken arm and hypothermia. A year later, a plane he was on lost a door mid-flight; he was thrown from the aircraft and somehow landed in a haystack. The plane crashed, killing 19.

…It didn’t stop there.🫣

He survived a bus crash into a river. His car caught fire… twice. Another car of his exploded moments after he stepped out. He was hit by a bus. He drove off a mountain road, only to be saved by a tree that snagged him while his car plunged into a gorge below.

After decades of near-death encounters, you’d expect him to avoid risk forever. Instead, in 2003, he won the lottery.

Selak later said he believed his string of disasters meant something—that fate had spared him for a reason. Whether coincidence, myth, or exaggeration, his story sits in that bizarre space between statistical impossibility and urban legend.