10
Roy Sullivan, who kept getting struck by lightning
Seven times, over thirty-five years, all survived. Guinness has never found a rival.
7Documented lightning strikes between 1942 and 1977.
Sullivan was a park ranger in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. The strikes took, variously, a big toenail, his eyebrows, and his hair, twice, which is why he took to carrying a can of water in his truck.
The 1977 strike caught him while he was fishing; he was hit on the head, his hair caught fire, and he then had to fight off a bear that wanted his trout. He said it was the twenty-second bear he had fought off with a stick.
The strikes are documented, park service reports, hospital records, the lot, which is what separates him from the first entry on this list. He was not a legend; he was a man with a filing cabinet full of incident reports.
Colleagues eventually avoided standing near him in bad weather, which seems fair. He died in 1983, aged 71, and it was not lightning.
What the list is actually about
Look at them together and they sort into three piles. There are the survivals. Yamaguchi, Jessop, Okene, Sullivan, where luck means the universe missed. There are the windfalls. Lawes, Morgan, Adams, where luck means it hit, and the aftermath varies enormously depending on what the person did next. And then there is Joan Ginther, who is on every luck list ever written and belongs on none of them.
The middle group is the one worth thinking about. Eric Lawes found treasure and phoned an archaeologist. Evelyn Adams won twice and had no plan. Neither outcome was decided by the luck.
Which is the only actually useful thing a list like this has to offer: the luck is the part you cannot do anything about, and it is reliably the less important half of the story.