Frane Selak – “The World’s Unluckiest Man, Or The World’s Luckiest Man”

Luck has always been on his side or vice versa, the Croatian music teacher Frane Selak (born in 1929) is well known for as many fatal accidents as spectacular escapes. The first of his numerous near-death experiences began on a cold January day in 1962, when Selak was on a train to Dubrovnik. Seldom had Selak thought where he was heading until odyssey terminated, with the train suddenly plunging into the icy river killing 17 passengers. Although he managed to escape, not without a broken arm, minor scratches and bruises.

A year later, Selak was flying from Zagreb to Rijeka when abruptly a door blew away from the cockpit of the plane, as he was blown off the plane. The accident took a tool of 19 people; however, Selak was lucky enough to land on a haystack, to wake up in hospital with minor injuries. It was in 1966 that he met with the third misadventure while traveling on a bus that crashed and plunged into a river. There were four people dead, astonishingly Selak managed to escape unharmed.

In 1970, Selak was driving along when all of a sudden his car caught fire. He was fortunate again to have left the car before the fuel tank exploded. Three years later, Selak’s another car caught fire, blowing flames through the air vents. To a greater dismay, Selak only injury was that he lost most of his hair. He named “Lucky” by his friends.

In 1995, Selak was in Zagreb when a bus hit him, this time again it was nothing more for the man, except a few injuries. The following year, while driving through a mountain road, Selak drove off a guardrail to escape an oncoming truck and landed on a tree to watch his car explode 300 feet below.

Surprisingly, with the turn of events in 2003, Selak won $1,000,000 dollars in the Croatian lottery, when he was heard saying “I know God was watching me over all these years.” Selak feels he can be looked upon either as “the world’s unluckiest man, or the world’s luckiest man,” however he prefers the latter.