May 30, 2019 | Miles Brucker

Relieved People Describe Amazing Times When Luck Was On Their Side


For many of us, the world can often be harsh, cruel, and unforgiving. More often than not, things can go wrong in dramatic ways, and there usually isn’t much we can do about it. But what happens when the opposite is true? Are there really times when, despite the odds, things just somehow manage to work out perfectly well? It turns out that, at least for some people, miraculous lucky breaks really do happen from time to time—and some of them are beyond amazing. Here are 42 stories about times when luck was on someone’s side.


1. Leaving on a Jet Plane

Some years ago, I was flying to Miami via New York from across the Atlantic, to start my one-year backpacking trip from the United States to Colombia. I had worked for two years and was saving all my money for this trip while living with my parents. I had all the money in cash, along with my plane ticket, passport, and driver's license in a plastic envelope.

I promptly put the envelope in the compartment in the seat in front of me and fell asleep during the flight. When we landed, I left the plane. My uncle picked me up from the airport and drove me to his house. Two days later, I realize that I don't have the envelope with me and I begin to panic. I figure that I must have left it on the plane, so I immediately call the airport and the airline.

I get to the point where a lady is talking to me from the same seat I had sat in. She tells me that there is nothing to be found. Naturally, I'm devastated. It was one of the worst days of my life. Then, somehow, the stars align and I get a call from a friend of mine who tells me that he's in New York and has been looking for my phone number for three days.

He tells me that during his flight, he started to feel nauseous, so he grabbed a paper bag to relieve himself into. To his shock, he found $6,500 in cash along with my passport and driver’s license inside the bag he had picked up. He couldn't believe his eyes. He then proceeded to wire the money and FedEx the documents to me. The year I spent backpacking was one of the best experiences I've ever had and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

This happened nine years ago, and I still call my friend every April 23rd to thank him, and destiny, for saving my bacon.

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

2. Lord of the Rings

My grandfather lost his college class ring while swimming in the ocean off Baja, Mexico. Three years later, he gets a phone call out of the blue from a man who had stumbled upon it with a metal detector. The man had called the Alumni Association and had them search the school records for people who had the initials R.H.P.—which were engraved on the inside of the ring.

Luck Was On Their Side factsFlickr, slgckgc

3. Call Me on the Cell Phone

A few years ago, my brother was skiing through the woods in Killington in about two feet of fresh snow. At one point, he fell down and his phone fell out of his pocket. Unfortunately for him, he didn't notice it at the time and just continued on his way. He took the same trail on the next run, and somehow got separated from his friends on the way down the mountain.

So, he stopped and reached into his pocket for his phone so he could call his friend and find out where he was. After realizing that he didn't have his phone, he started to get pretty pissed and worried. Then, all of a sudden, he hears a ringtone that sounds exactly like his. He starts searching through the snow trying to find the source of the ringtone. Sure enough, it was his phone that he had heard, and it was his friend calling to see where he was.

That’s right, my brother lost his phone in two feet of snow in the middle of the woods, and just happened by chance to stop in the exact same place where he had lost it, at the exact same time when someone was trying to call him. Seems pretty miraculous to me.

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

4. Can You Lend Me a Hand?

A friend of mine once lost his wallet. He had no idea where it had gone. Weeks later, in a random shopping center parking lot, an elderly woman had spotted the wallet on the ground, picked it up, and handed it over to a passerby in the hopes that they could probably decipher the name on the driver’s license better than she could. The woman handed the wallet...to my friend’s sister.

What are the odds of that??!!

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

5. Got It in the Bag

I once had a friend accidentally leave her bag (with wallet, ID, and everything) in the back of a taxi. Before she had realized what she was missing, the taxi had already left. Not even ten minutes later, while we were still in the lobby freaking out, our other friend somewhere in the city had just happened to have caught the exact same taxi back to our hotel, and we were able to get the bag back!

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

6. Without a Moment to Lose

My mother has a large family, and when her father (my grandfather) was passing away from eye cancer, they were having a hard time getting everyone together to see him one last time at the hospital. My mom has five sisters and two brothers, and most of them are teachers who (at the time) were spread out all over the place.

Well, all of them eventually made it to his bedside—all except my grandmother, his wife. My mom tells me that as his body began to shut down, the blood left his arms and legs and headed towards his chest and head to try and keep him alive that much longer. Suddenly, my grandmother burst through the doors yelling: "I'm here, Lou—I'm here!" And gave him a big hug and a kiss.

Just a few seconds later, he gave out and passed on.

Metallica factsPixabay

7. Free Fallin’

When I was only a month old, my mom put me in a car seat on the kitchen counter for all of five seconds, while she looked away to do something. I was a restless child, and I somehow knocked myself off the counter. I fell to the floor face first and, when my mom turned around, she thought I needed to go to the hospital because she had surely "broken her child."

Somehow, even though I fell face first, there weren't any bumps or bruises on me and I was totally fine. I’d call that a lucky break if there ever was one!

Raised a Monster FactsPublic Domain Pictures

8. What a Ride!

My father told me that when he was a young boy, his parents once took him to an amusement park. When they went on a roller coaster, his father's wallet slipped out of his pocket. By a crazy stroke of luck, my dad caught the wallet between his feet and managed to hold it there for the entire ride.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

9. Just in Time

My friend and I were studying abroad in New Zealand. We went out for a night and, after a lot of drinking, he realized that he had lost his passport. We spent the next hour retracing our steps, but we couldn't find it anywhere. The next day, he called the US embassy and found out that he was going to have to fly up to Auckland, fill out a bunch of forms in person at the embassy, and then put in a rush order for a new passport.

It was going to take about three days and cost him over a thousand dollars to do all of it. He was in the process of booking his flight and hotel up there and checked his Facebook while waiting for the airline's page to load. There was a message on there from somebody who had found his passport in the gutter and managed to track him down.

He was literally two seconds away from spending some major money. He got the passport back, bought the guy a couple of beers as a thank you, and everything was all good!

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

10. You Better Watch Out for the Cheesy Twist in This One...

My mom lost her favorite watch on the beach when we were on vacation in Mexico. Three or four days later, we were sitting around the hotel pool and she happened to mention something about being bummed about the lost watch. The family sitting next to us happened to overhear. "You lost a watch? We just found one on the beach earlier today!" one of them said.

They brought it down from their room. Lo and behold, it's the same watch! It still worked, too, despite the finish being all scratched up from tumbling around in the sand and salt water for several days. This was probably seven or eight years ago. The dad of the family had a pretty sweet cheeseburger tattoo on his shoulder that I still remember.

He claimed that his grandfather had invented the cheeseburger.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPexels

11. A Key Moment

A few months ago, I was out partying with a few friends of mine. On my way back from the pub, I realized to my horror that my keys were gone. While trying to retrace my drunken steps back to the pub, I happened to bump into an old friend who lived quite close to the pub. He offered to let me spend the night at his place so that I could go right back to look for them first thing in the morning.

I spent the night, went right back to the pub in the morning, and caught them just as they were about to toss my keys in the lost and found box.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

12. When Snooping Pays Off

When my mom and dad lived in Windsor before I was born, they had a neighbor who was an elderly old man. My parents never went into the backyard at that old place, but for some reason my dad did one particular day. For some reason, he wandered over to his neighbor’s side and randomly decided to peer over the side of the fence—where he just so happened to see the old man neighbor (in his 80s or something like that) curled over and passed out in his garden up against the fence where no one could see him.

My dad saved his life off of a whim of nothing.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

13. Copy Cat

My mother was making a copy of a tax form at our grocery store's copier. The tax return had everything on it that a thief would need to steal her identity. She accidentally left the original inside the copier and left the store. Luckily, the next person to use the copier was my friend's mom, who recognized the name and returned the form.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

14. City Wide Web

This past fall, I was out on a date, walking in the park with my date and my dog. As we headed back, I suddenly realized that my keys were missing. I stayed calm, and my date and I easily walked two miles using our iPhones as flashlights, weaving through pedestrians, a drum circle, and a bunch of folks juggling. Desperate to get my keys back, I posted on Craigslist, but heard nothing. As a last ditch effort, I posted to my city's subreddit, and a Redditor found and returned my keys. Turns out he was one of the jugglers!

Best day ever, and reward paid.

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

15. Breaking Even

A customer in front of me at a gas station had a total of $9.00 even on their purchases. With different items, I also got a total of $9.00. Both of us got to pay with exact change. That doesn’t happen every day!

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

16. Diamonds in the Rough

About five or six years ago, my mom and I were at Walmart heading back to our car when my mom noticed something shiny on the ground. Turns out it was a 1.5-carat diamond that my amazingly honest mother took to the police station where someone had literally just reported it missing. It was some sort of family heirloom.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

17. Hoisted By Their Own Petards

A friend of mine and I once decided to just say "What the heck, let's go to Ohio for the weekend!" Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, but he and I were in the Navy and stationed in Great Lakes, Illinois. The place in Ohio that we were planning to go to was beyond the range where we were permitted to travel. We left Friday afternoon and had to be back by 9 AM on Sunday.

We arrived at our destination on Friday night and parted ways for the night. He had some friends from Michigan to hang out with, and I had my family and girlfriend to hang out with. Fun things ensued for both of us, as we made the time we spent there well worth it. Saturday night rolls around, and we figure that we had better leave at precisely a certain time to get back to our base with at least 30 minutes to spare.

Of course, the return trip can't be that easy. On the way back, we had multiple setbacks. First, we hit a traffic jam at 5 AM. Next, a semi somehow hits an overpass and concrete explodes right above us. We narrowly managed to get out of the way. Through all of that, we figure that we will get back with about five minutes to spare before duty section roll call.

Thirty minutes out, of all of the people to drive past in Chicago and of all of the time we had spent on the road, we just had to drive past the Lead Petty Officer of our barracks in his fancy sports car. He looks right at us, kind of quirkily turns his head as if he wasn't fully sure if he really just saw us, but with enough glare to hint that we were screwed. We floor it in order to get away from him on the highway and get back to base, park the car, and run our behinds off to the barracks as fast as we can.

We have six minutes. We walk into roll call like champs right as they say our names, and we’re both feeling pretty good at this point. Just then, in walks the Lead Petty Officer who had seen us. He immediately shouts out our names and asks us where we’ve been. At this point, we are both just about ready to poop our pants.

All of a sudden, of all people, the Chief of the Barracks, who just happens to be walking past, peeks in and says, "What do you mean?" After a brief explanation from the Lead Petty Officer, our Chief says "No, that couldn't have been them! At about 6 AM, I heard those two idiots making stupid comments over by the vending machine”—which happened to be located just outside of his office.

As it turns out, two guys who didn't like us a whole lot (and by that I mean we had scuffled with them before) had actually been making fun of us at the vending machines earlier that morning. They must have had spot-on impressions of us, because it got us off the hook. We kept our mouths shut the whole time and never questioned a word of it.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

18. Hitting Close to Home

My barber was once telling my mother and me about his trip to Mexico. He went on about how his wife and himself came across this one really young lad in his mid-younger 20s with blond hair, who was sitting on a curb crying. They asked him what was wrong and he explained that he lost his wallet and passport. They soon learned that he was actually from our hometown and that they knew his cousin!

They were able to get in touch with him and make all the necessary arrangements to get him home safely.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

19. Unidentified Drinking Object

I once met a girl at a bar. She had a fake ID and, for whatever reason, decided to show it to me. I instantly recognized it as my best friend's sister's ID. Her sister had never lived where we were, and I asked the girl where she had gotten the ID. She had gotten it from a bar near the border, as we lived in central Texas. I told my friend and she told her sister, who confirmed having gone to the bar and lost her ID there.

We promptly returned it and that was that.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

20. The Tin Man

When I was about seven years old, I was playing in the backyard with my friend and we decided to dig a hole. We ended up finding a tin coffee can that had been hastily duct taped over. When we opened it up, we found a bunch of military pins and medals and a laminated note that said something about these belonging to a dad or relative who died in the Korean War.

My dad ended up tracking down all of the previous owners of our house, hoping to find the man who had buried them. In a crazy twist of fate, he found out that the owner of these medals had been mistakenly reported dead overseas, but had actually ended up returning home from the war a couple of years later. By that point, his family had forgotten all about the medals and had moved somewhere else.

So, out of sheer luck, decades later, we were able to return this honored war vet’s medals and pins to him to finally own! I still remember the awesome look on his face when we gave them to him. I'm still proud to have found that tin.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

21. Wrong Bus, Right Time

I usually drive to campus since I live in within driving distance and there are not many bus stops around my place. One morning, for the first time all year, I parked at a friend’s apartment instead and rode the bus to campus. I stayed on campus for about four hours before heading over to catch the bus back to my car. While waiting for the bus, I noticed a note that read something like, "Hi, I found your phone. It is in the building right next to this bus stop. Hope you find it."

I thought nothing of it and proceeded to hop on the bus. I then quickly realized that I had taken the wrong bus and had to wait 30 minutes until I could get back to campus. Lo and behold, halfway through the bus route, my friend (whose apartment I had parked at) ran on the bus frantically looking for his phone. He was surprised to see me and I told him about the note I had seen. I explained that it might be his.

Evidently, he had been following every bus with his car so he could ask each bus driver if they had seen it. It was his phone, of course, and we went back to the building to retrieve it. He then drove me to my car. It was pretty random and lucky considering 1) that it was the first bus ride I had been on all year, 2) that I had taken the wrong bus by mistake, and 3) that there are 25,000+ people at my university.

Strangest Coincidences FactsShutterstock

22. Winter Wonderland

When I was a little kid, my family and I once visited Lake Louise, Canada. When it freezes over in the winter, literally thousands of people walk across it, creating millions of footprints across its two-mile length. At the end of it is a big waterfall that freezes over, and my dad, brother and I climbed to the top and slid down. We walked back to the Chateau and then to our car.

That’s when things began to go south. “Uh Oh!” we heard our dad say. Apparently, our car keys were gone. After initially laughing at what we thought was a joke, our expressions quickly turned into frantic panic as we had rented the car from a place in Calgary—many, many hours drive away. At this point, my dad is getting super pissed and frustrated, using the Chateau’s phone to call for a personal carrier to drive to Banff and drop off a set of keys for us and drive back.

It was going to cost a FORTUNE, and since my brother and I were younger, we were very annoying, so my dad gave us a couple of bucks to go find a vending machine or something—just to give him some space for a little while. So, he's breaking down on the phone about the bill, and my brother and I are sitting on some benches kicking our feet and thinking about how crappy this is going to be, and how bad we both felt for our dad.

Then, out of nowhere, I watch this one random guy in this very busy hotel walk across the huge front foyer to a desk at the side. For absolutely no reason, I decide that I'm going to walk behind this guy and listen to what he's talking about. I guess it was just because I was so bored by now that I had nothing better to do.

To my utter shock, I heard this guy begin to talk about how he had happened to find a set of keys in a random footprint (that were about half a foot deep then), in the middle of the lake. I SCREAMED with joy, frantically told him and the front desk lady to wait right there and that I was going to get my dad. My dad hung up the phone mid-sentence on whoever he was speaking to, and ran straight to the guy I had overheard.

Turns out they were our keys!! But I mean...the MILLIONS of footprints. The chances!

Speak to the Manager factsShutterstock

23. What Drives Away Must Come Back

I once accidentally left my bag in a cab with about $5,000 worth of things in it, including the laptop that I do all my work on. Amazingly, the same cab drove past me again about three hours later. I managed to successfully chase it down and get my stuff back.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

24. Gaming the System

I was able to track down a long lost friend through the game Halo 2 because he was still using the same game tag as he was 12 years ago.

Luck Was On Their Side factsFlickr, BagoGames

25. Caught Red Headed

Back when I was in college, I got robbed for the first time in my life. I was coming back from a party with an old friend of mine. We were both slightly drunk, but not enough to mess with our memories, and we were just talking, joking around, laughing, etc. All of a sudden, a guy comes up to us and points what appears to be a gun inside his hoodie at us.

He then tells us to hand over our valuables. I couldn't see his face under the pulled hood. All I could see was that he was ginger, from the reddish goatee he had. When he got our stuff and started to walk away, my friend decided to play stupid and suddenly pulled the guy's hoodie down for some inexplicable reason. Fortunately for us, he didn't shoot. We got to see his face very clearly and he just ran away as fast as he could. And that was that.

A couple of months later, during the summer, I go to visit my parents and my baby sister, who was only seventeen years old at the time. Only my father is home when I get there. He lets me in, talks to me about life, tells me how it sucks to be old, all that usual stuff. He also tells me that my mom is coming home soon with my sister and her new boyfriend, so he asks me to help him scare the guy just for fun.

Obviously I'm in, and I start to plan with my dad how we could mess with this guy. Not much later, my mom comes through the door and behind her comes my sister and the redhead who had robbed me. I'm there speechless, the guy takes a minute to recognize me, but he eventually does and starts to freak out. That relationship didn’t last much longer, and I got my money back!

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

26. Ring Around the Rosie

My mom was swimming at a spring in Florida and lost the heirloom ring that her grandmother had given her. A few years later, she was at a totally different spring in Florida and somehow spied it on a scuba diver’s finger. The woman was totally cool about the situation and actually returned the ring to her after my mom was able to tell her where she had found it and proved that it was really hers.

My mom still has it to this day.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

27. It’s Not Easy Being Green

My friend had lost her wallet in one of the horticulture greenhouses on campus two years ago. I saw her initial status and whatnot on Facebook, before she eventually just gave up on trying to find it. A few days ago, I picked up a pot, intent on using it for one of my projects. I threw the old dirt from the pot into a waste bin—and suddenly saw a wallet fall right out of the clump of dirt.

Lo and behold, it was her wallet!

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

28. Jingle Bells

I live in Canada on a border town with the United States, heading to Michigan. One time, my parents took me and my brother over for some shopping or whatever, and accidentally locked their keys in the car. They called a professional locksmith to help get them out. This attempt was unsuccessful. They were simply told “tough luck.”

Just then, my dad hears some jingling and looks to see my brother (then just a REALLY little kid) playing with an extra set of keys that he had brought from home to play with. Whoever said that little kids playing with keys all day is a waste of time?!

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

29. A Driven Attitude

Preface: I am an English exchange student in San Diego, visiting my friend in Philly. My friend and I went by Megabus from Philly to Baltimore for a pro wrestling show. The mega bus dropped us off in some mall on the outskirts and we took another bus into Baltimore. We watched the show and grabbed a bite to eat. Good times were had by all.

We then travel back to the mall for the bus back to Philly, and we wait, and we wait. It’s getting close to midnight. It's a clear, freezing Baltimore January night. In the parking lot where we were standing, we notice that a guy is sitting and watching us from his car. Naturally, we start to panic. A Megabus finally approaches, and we are very relieved to finally get on.

I ask "This is going to Philly, right?" The man in the car has now walked up behind us. The conductor says "Nope, D.C." My heart sank. Here I was, 3000 miles from home in the UK, 2,000 miles from my bed in California. Then, the guy from the car suddenly said: "You guys are going to Philly too?" He offered us a ride. Turns out, he had been waiting for the same bus that never came. So, we drove towards Philly with him.

Where my friend lives is a small suburb called Bridgeport, and it turns out that this guy was going to see his girlfriend who lived a few blocks away from where my friend’s house was. The wrestling theme continued, as it turns out he was the cousin of one of the wrestlers we had been in town to see. THANK YOU, THAT GUY! You saved me and my friend from freezing to death in some dreary Baltimore mall!

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

30. Lost and Found

One time, I helped to make the stars align for someone else. I must have been about 16 or 17 years old at the time. I was working for a local grocery store and it was my turn to round up all the carts out of the parking lot. I was grabbing a few of them to put away when I suddenly noticed a wallet sitting in front of one.

After a bit of deliberation, I opened it up and found $800 inside of it. I turned it in and, as it turns out, the guy who had lost it was stressed out and in a hurry to get going for his honeymoon. One of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced in the world was to know that I helped this guy keep one of the most important events in his life from turning into a disaster.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPexels

31. Baby, You’re a Firework

When I was only 13 years old, I had borrowed my mum's cell phone to go to a three-day music festival that had a total of 25,000 people in attendance. At one point, I suddenly realized that I had lost the phone and was beginning to panic. This was back when cell phones were still a luxury, so to lose one was a really big deal.

It was already nighttime at this point, and I was frantically looking around all the campsites and tents in the dark for hours. Then, all of a sudden, HUGE fireworks started going off at the main stage, completely lighting up the ground in front of me in the process. And there it was, the cell phone!

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

32. First Class

I went for a walk in the park one day and found a school ID on the ground. I went to class the next day, looked at the kid sitting next to me, and realized that it was his ID. I went to a school with over 40,000 people, and it was a small calculus class too!

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

33. Playing Their Cards Right

I once dropped my health card in the bathroom at a bar. Some random girl found it, picked it up and gave it to some random guy—who, in turn, gave it to my friend, asking if she knew who it belonged to.

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

34. One Foggy Evening

This happened to my dad’s friends. Driving home on the highway one time, a thick and dense fog suddenly rolled in. Happens all the time, and lots of times there are car pileups as a result. My dad’s friends got into one such pileup, and usually, they say to ALWAYS stay in your vehicle in a case like this—but for some itching and inexplicable reason, they decided to get out of their car.

As soon as they closed their doors shut, a semi-truck plowed through their car and crushed it into the back of another one, totaling it. They all would have died.

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

35. A Net Win

When my uncle was young, back in the early 1970s, he and his brother went fishing on the lake where our cabin was. My uncle had huge glasses and, of course, he accidentally dropped them into the lake. Searching for them was pointless because the lake was very deep and the water was very dark at night.

They went home and told my grandparents what had happened. Obviously, they were mad because, at the time, money was hard to come by and new glasses would cost a lot of money. Then, all of a sudden, their neighbor came by and handed the missing glasses to my uncle.

The glasses had apparently fallen straight into his fishing net and gotten stuck in the frame.

World's Wealthiest FactsShutterstock

36. What Gets Lost in Vegas Stays in Vegas

My mom lost her purse in the middle of a busy hotel in Las Vegas on our first day there. It had her wallet, phone, tickets to things, and everything else that she needed inside of it. Somehow, we found the purse still sitting in the middle of the lobby, with nothing stolen from it, less than an hour after we had noticed it was missing.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

37. Toeing the Line

I once accidentally dropped a knife right where my brother was standing. It landed directly between the cracks of his toes.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

38. The Voice of Reason

As a teenager, I worked at a McDonald's and, after several months, they put me on drive-thru duty. One day, a customer rudely told me that she hated my accent before driving off with her food. I cried and wanted to quit. My co-workers said no, told me to keep on going, and were very supportive. That same week, a man approached the counter inside, spoke to my supervisor, handed her a business card and left.

She gave it to me very excitedly. She told me that the guy was well known and owned several radio stations. Apparently, he had come through the drive-thru and loved my accent. He wanted me to call him as soon as possible. A few days later, I was hired to do commercials and read weather reports. Very quickly, I was offered a time slot for my own show at a major radio station.

Thus began my career in radio, and much more of my voice that the nasty customer would probably have to hear! Had I quit...

Luck Was On Their Side factsShutterstock

39. The Trick’s On Them!

This happened around Halloween a few years ago. I was at school, just about finished pooping, when I noticed that my stall, the only stall in this small bathroom, was out of toilet paper. My phone was dead, and there were no papers or anything like that in my pockets that I could have used as makeshift toilet paper. I'm in pretty deep you-know-what at this point, no pun intended.

Moments before I decide to just pull up my pants and run to the closest toilet, a couple of idiot kids barge into the bathroom and start chucking toilet paper into my stall. I can only assume it was some sort of Halloween prank. In any other situation, I would have been annoyed, but I was literally tearing up with joy at this glorious and unexpected gift of toilet paper.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

40. One Good Turn Deserves Another

In the aftermath of the First Gulf War, my grandparents had rented their house in Irbil, Iraq to the UN to be used as housing. One of the men inside the house was a UN officer and my family got to know him well. He stayed there for a couple of months before being deployed elsewhere. Months later, my parents decided to leave Iraq.

They sold everything they had and fled to Amman, Jordan. Since they did not have permission to leave, they needed to sneak through the border. However, their plans seemed to have been ruined when their bus suddenly came upon an unexpected Iraqi army checkpoint. My parents were freaking out...until they saw that same UN officer supervising the checkpoint.

He saw my parents, and immediately let them through.

Luck Was On Their Side factsGetty Images

41. Dirty Laundry

I once tried to call a friend, but I accidentally misdialed his number. This was way before cell phones, back when there were still payphones (late 70s). Anyway, I dialed what I thought was his home number and started talking to him about some stuff, before he stopped me and said, "Andy, how the heck did you know I was at the laundromat?" I really couldn't understand what was going on.

After a lot of confusing back and forth, he realized: the phone number of the payphone in the laundromat was different by just one digit from his home number, and I had dialed the laundromat by mistake...where he happened to be, and where he picked up the phone.

Luck Was On Their Side factsPixabay

42. One Last Request

The following situation happened to me and my grandfather. He fell down in his church parking lot and had a large brain bleed or something like that, I forget the exact medical term. I went to visit him and the doctors said his brain had filled up with too much blood or something and that he was basically going to be a vegetable if he even stayed alive much longer. It was so sudden, and none of my family expected this.

Well, my young little soul asked if I could be alone with my grandpa for a minute. I said a prayer to God asking to heal him a little bit. The next day my grandpa is suddenly awake and talking. Doctors had no explanation for it at all, they just said to take advantage of the time that he was able to talk. His first words to the nurse were "Where is my beautiful wife?"

I was so glad that my grandma could talk to him again before he passed since it was all so sudden. He was a war hero and passed away on July 4th. I thought that was pretty cool.

Johann Sebastian Bach FactsShutterstock

Sources: ,


More from Factinate

Featured Article

My mom never told me how her best friend died. Years later, I was using her phone when I made an utterly chilling discovery.

Dark Family Secrets

Dark Family Secrets Exposed

Nothing stays hidden forever—and these dark family secrets are proof that when the truth comes out, it can range from devastating to utterly chilling.
April 8, 2020 Samantha Henman

Featured Article

Madame de Pompadour was the alluring chief mistress of King Louis XV, but few people know her dark history—or the chilling secret shared by her and Louis.

Madame de Pompadour Facts

Entrancing Facts About Madame de Pompadour, France's Most Powerful Mistress

Madame de Pompadour was the alluring chief mistress of King Louis XV, but few people know her dark history—or the chilling secret shared by her and Louis.
December 7, 2018 Kyle Climans

More from Factinate

Featured Article

I tried to get my ex-wife served with divorce papers. I knew that she was going to take it badly, but I had no idea about the insane lengths she would go to just to get revenge and mess with my life.

These People Got Genius Revenges

When someone really pushes our buttons, we'd like to think that we'd hold our head high and turn the other cheek, but revenge is so, so sweet.
April 22, 2020 Scott Mazza

Featured Article

Catherine of Aragon is now infamous as King Henry VIII’s rejected queen—but few people know her even darker history.

Catherine of Aragon Facts

Tragic Facts About Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s First Wife

Catherine of Aragon is now infamous as King Henry VIII’s rejected queen—but very few people know her even darker history.
June 7, 2018 Christine Tran



Dear reader,


Want to tell us to write facts on a topic? We’re always looking for your input! Please reach out to us to let us know what you’re interested in reading. Your suggestions can be as general or specific as you like, from “Life” to “Compact Cars and Trucks” to “A Subspecies of Capybara Called Hydrochoerus Isthmius.” We’ll get our writers on it because we want to create articles on the topics you’re interested in. Please submit feedback to contribute@factinate.com. Thanks for your time!


Do you question the accuracy of a fact you just read? At Factinate, we’re dedicated to getting things right. Our credibility is the turbo-charged engine of our success. We want our readers to trust us. Our editors are instructed to fact check thoroughly, including finding at least three references for each fact. However, despite our best efforts, we sometimes miss the mark. When we do, we depend on our loyal, helpful readers to point out how we can do better. Please let us know if a fact we’ve published is inaccurate (or even if you just suspect it’s inaccurate) by reaching out to us at contribute@factinate.com. Thanks for your help!


Warmest regards,



The Factinate team




Want to learn something new every day?

Join thousands of others and start your morning with our Fact Of The Day newsletter.

Thank you!

Error, please try again.