In the film The World According to Garp, Robin Williams buys a house which a plane has crashed into, because he is sure that nothing bad will ever happen there again. Clearly he had never heard of the cosmic joker.
In Bermuda, a man was knocked off his moped and killed by a taxi. Exactly a year later, his brother was riding the same moped when the same taxi came down the same street carrying the same passenger, who was not a regular taxi user. Again they collided, and again the rider was killed.
In 1784, Daniel Spencer of Leyden, Massachusetts, died following an attack in which he was shot twice. Three years later, Daniel's brother was wearing the same coat whe he to was the victim of an attack and died from two bullet woulds. It was found that the bullets had passed exactly through the same two holes.
These gruesome coincidences cannot compare with events that took place in Tokyo in 1657, however. A kimono had belonged in turn to three teenage girls, each of whom had died before it could be worn. A priest was called in to burn the unlucky garment; but as he was doing so, a wind blew up and fanned the flames out of control. The resulting fire destroyed three quarters of the city and killed 100,000 people.