The Man Who Couldn’t Die: Real Medical Marvel or Urban Legend?
I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel like I’ve lived through things that should’ve killed me. I guess I’ve endured even more that tried to mentally break me than physically as well.
Some people out there survive against all the impossible odds, while others just stumble around and endure what they have left. Then…there are those who simply don’t die, no matter how hard the world tries to take them.
At least, that’s how the legend goes.
A man who reportedly lived through train crashes, plane explosions, car fires, bus collisions, and free falls from cliffs…seven times. His name was Frane Selak, and depending on who you ask, he was either the luckiest man alive…or cursed with a target on his back the size of one of those giant industrial wineries.
Behind the viral TikToks and wide-eyed headlines is something deeper than a man who refused to die: our insatiable craving for survival stories that defy logic.
I mean, what does it say about the body (or the spirit) when someone just keeps walking away from death? I think the most unbelievable part of the story isn’t whether it happened at all, but why we need it to.
The Strange Accidents of Frane Selak
The tale begins in 1962. Mysterious, no?
Frane Selak was a Croatian music teacher with a quiet life and no interest in fame, who one day boarded a train bound for somewhere ordinary. The universe, however, had other plans. As the train passed through an icy mountain gorge, it derailed…slipping from its rails like a ribbon and plunging into a frigid river below. Seventeen people drowned, and Frane broke his arm and nearly froze to death.
He did survive though.
One year later, he boarded a plane. It would be the first (and, allegedly, the last) time he ever flew. Mid-flight, the cabin door blew open. Frak was sucked out into the big ole blue sky. Nineteen people died in the crash while Frane landed in a literal haystack. As if some twisted turn of fate that’s very Final Destination of the universe, the parade of disaster continued. His bus crashed into a river, but Frane escaped. His car caught fire, but he leapt out just in time. Another car exploded, but of course he survived again. I suppose no one was asking by now why so many cars exploded or caught fire around him, but that’s irrelevant I suppose. One day Frane was even hit by a bus in the street, but oddly walked it off. Finally, his vehicle drove off a cliff, but he was ejected midair and landed in a tree.
Seven near-death experiences in total, but zero funerals (for Frane). To top it all off to make it even stranger, he won the lottery in 2003. A part of me wants to laugh at this absurdity of life, but it’s also a little too mysterious for me.
Frane Selak’s tale went viral long before going viral was even a phrase. Tabloids dubbed him the “World’s Luckiest Man.” Skeptics came out of the woodwork to claim “fish story”, while believers lit up with wonder, hopeful that they would one day defy the odds themselves.
I truly hate to burst anyone’s bubble out there, but almost none of this story can be verified.
There are no flight manifests proving the plane story, no train records, no newspaper articles at the time documenting his brushes with death. Most of the stories originated from Frane himself, often told years or decades later. He wasn’t technically trying to become a legend, but the legend found him anyway. Frane reminds me of my own grandpa who loved to tell greatly exaggerated stories from his childhood centering around his friend “Sammy” who would do outlandish things and find himself in silly predicaments more often than not. My family used to call them “Sammy Stories,” and my sisters and I would often beg to hear them before bed.
Alas, this is where the line between reality and folklore begins to blur, because urban legends don’t somehow find themselves being told around the world because they’re true, but because they feel true.
We want someone like Frane Selak to exist, someone who defies the odds and lives to tell the tale. Nothing draws to our beaten-down-spirit like a story of someone who can walk away from fire and utter chaos and still say, “Yeah man, I’m still here.”
Could Anyone Actually Survive This Much?
I mean, there are people out there (rare, but real) who possess extraordinary genetic traits that might have helped them survive against the odds like this. Some people out there do heal faster while others don’t bleed as much. Some have resistance to shock or inflammation that could help their minds stay clear in emergency situations. In medical stuff on the interwebs, they’re called genetic outliers…people who shrug off things that would drop the average human.
While it seems like it might be superpowers that these people have, it’s actually closer to just some rare biology. Technically, Frane could’ve had something like that.
When danger strikes, some people panic (me, I’m some people), while others…detach.
I’m not talking about having courage either, this is neurobiology. In high-stress situations, the brain sometimes flips into survival mode, tuning out fear, flooding the body with adrenaline, and entering a kind of subconscious flow state. Think about the person who calmly lifts a car off someone or dives into ice water without flinching.
It’s dissociation as defense, a sort of glitch…or a gift.
There’s also the most annoying explanation, which deals with statistics. Sorry in advance for this ramble, but sometimes it really is just odds. Sometimes, the improbable happens, then it happens again. Even if it feels like magic…it’s just math, plain and simple. If one-in-a-million events happen to enough people, someone becomes the one because there’s quite a few of us on this planet.
It’s called clustering probability, and it explains why lightning might strike the same place twice, regardless of what that saying is. It could also explain why a man might dodge seven disasters.
The Others Who Shouldn’t Have Lived
Frane wasn’t alone in his myth of extreme survival, the interwebs are absolutely loaded with them. Others have danced on the edge of death and lived to speak softly about it, and these are verified cases.
Vesna Vulović was a flight attendant who fell 33,000 feet from a plane and survived. She holds the world record for surviving the biggest fall in case you were wondering. Yes, this story made me queasy.
Juliane Koepcke fell from a lightning-struck aircraft, and somehow survived alone in the jungle for 11 days before anyone found him.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of my favorite cases talked about in The Violinist’s Thumb, and he survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.
Again, these stories are verified, documented, and public record, you can Google them if you don’t believe me and come up with a whole story to entertain yourself. None of these people were looking for the spotlight either, they just lived when the odds said they shouldn’t.
As a trauma survivor, I hear stories like this and cringe. There’s a weight behind survival most people never think twice about. Ah yes, Frane survived a car accident so severe it probably put him on edge for the rest of his life whenever he was in a car. It might explain why he got so good at surviving in car accidents. I couldn’t even image the nightmares that stewardess experienced after falling 33,000 feet. I have nightmares falling and I never actually fell like that before.
People who live through the impossible don’t always rejoice like we think they do, they grieve. Some of them unravel as the life they built in their heads crumbles to nothing. They walk with ghosts on a daily basis, forced to relive the moments of horror whenever they close their eyes at night.
PTSD, survivor’s guilt, nightmares that curl around the edges of memory like smoke, are all things that probably haunt these “lucky” people. You don’t get to dodge death without collecting scars, seen or unseen.
Why We Need Frane Selak
The real story here isn’t about a man or woman who dodged death a bunch of times, it’s about us. We’re the people who keep telling his tale.
You and I live in a world absolutely dripping in chaos. I mean, our newsfeeds are stuffed to the brim with disaster so much so that hope feels rare and survival feels like a glitch in the system trying to kill us all. We cling to these tales because they give us something to hold onto. I personally like the idea that life, sometimes, chooses us and that we’re more unkillable than we thought.
So was Frane Selak a miracle, a myth, or a master storyteller like my grandpa? Eh, I’m not sure it really matters. Some days we just need reminders that falling isn’t always the end, and there may be a haystack that catches you or a tree that breaks your fall. Odds bend and if someone like Frane could survive seven disasters…we can survive this day.
The thing keeping us alive isn’t just luck, it’s instinct mixed with the part of you that refuses to leave the story just yet.
I truly hope you won’t fall from the sky in your lifetime or have to leap from a burning car, but life has its own battlegrounds. If you’re the type to hope for the best but prepare for the worst (my friends say I’m a tin-foil-hatter), there’s no shame in having a kit to match your courage. Emergency Survival Kit on Amazon. Life is wild and being ready is a dash of paranoia and a lot of good sense.
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The Bacteria That Could Turn Any Blood Into a Universal Donor
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The Ghost Ship Mary Celeste: A Crew That Vanished Without a Trace
The Devil’s Footprints: The Unsolved Mystery That Left England Wondering What Walked Among Them
The Hebridean Hum: Scotland’s Haunting Sound That No One Can Explain
