Unbelievable Facts - Strange Facts - Escapes

Great Escape

Park ranger Roy C. Sullivan of Virginia was struck by lightning no fewer than seven times between 1942 and 1977. He lost nothing ore than a toe-nail and his eyebrows. Having survived all that nature could throw at him, Sullivan committed suicide in 1983 after being spurned by a woman.

American parachutist Eddie turner saved his unconscious fellow skydiver in 1988 by pulling the ripcord of his parachute just ten seconds before he hit the ground.

In 1972 Yugoslav air hostess Vesna Vulovic somehow survived a fall of over six miles without a parachute after the DC-9 in which she was travelling blew up over Czechoslovakia.

Poon Lim of the British Merchant Navy survived 133 days on a raft after his ship, the Ben Lomond, was torpedoed in the Atlantic during the Second World War.

When a ship was wrecked off the coast of South Africa in 1865, all 29 people on board drowned. The only survivor was a pig which was washed ashore alive.

A sheep was found alive after being buried in a snowdrift for 50 days in the Scottish Highlands in 1978.

On being found guilty of the murder of a Mississippi farmer in 1893, 20-year-old Will Purvis shouted at the 12 jurors: “I’ll live to see the last one of you die!” The following February he was taken to the gallows but survived when the noose knot became loose and slipped over his head. Purvis warned a temporary reprieve and was sprung form jail before a second execution attempt could take place. In 1898 Purvis was pardoned, and nearly twenty years later another man confessed to the farmer’s murder. Purvis eventually died on 13 October 1938 … three days after the death of the last juror at his trial.