Lightning won’t strike twice? It struck one man SEVEN times

“IF it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”

So lamented Albert King on his 1967 blues song Born Under A Bad Sign.

The fact the song was a hit kind of flies in the face of what Mr King was complaining about, especially since several other artists including the British rock group Cream covered the song.

In fact, one Lightnin’ Slim would have had more cause to bemoan his bad luck, as the song borrowed liberally from his earlier swamp blues tune Bad Luck Blues, and he received not one thin dime in royalties.

But I digress.

Even Mr Slim wouldn’t merit a mention in any list of those poor, benighted souls whose luck, such as it was, was definitely of the bad variety.

Take Roy Sullivan, for example.

Lightning doesn’t strike twice, so they say, but the unfortunate Mr Sullivan was hit a shocking seven times.

Roy’s role as a park ranger in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia only partially explains why he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records as the person struck more times by lightning than anyone else, earning the nickname “the Human Lightning Conductor” or “Human Lightning Rod”.

He was first struck in 1942, which he said was the worst time as it burned a half-inch strip all along his right leg, while on other occasions he was knocked unconscious, had his eyebrows and lashes burned off and sustained burns to his shoulder, chest and stomach.

After the fourth incident, he began to believe some force was out to get him and started carrying a can of water everywhere with him to put his hair out lest it happen again.

Roy’s wife was also once hit when a storm arrived as she was hanging out washing in their back yard.

Sadly, Roy shot himself aged 71.

John Wade Agan, in contrast, was only struck by lightning once, but that was just one of what Lemony Snickett would call a series of unfortunate events.

The Florida taxi driver has been robbed at gunpoint in his cab, bitten by two different snakes — at the same time! — and once drove to a fire station with a butcher’s knife sticking out of his chest.

Agan reckons he’s the unluckiest man in the world and that the lightning sought him out, as he was hit while standing in his own home, talking on the phone.

But he’s alive, at least, unlike Henry Ziegland who managed to turn an amazing stroke of good luck into fatally-bad karma.

In 1893, the Texan jilted his lover who committed suicide, but when her brother came to shoot him in revenge, the bullet grazed his cheek and lodged in a tree.

Twenty years later, struggling to fell the same tree, Ziegland resorted to dynamite, which not only toppled the tree but blew the bullet through his head, killing him a whole two decades after it was fired.

At least Ann Hodges wasn’t killed by what hit her — a meteorite.

She became the only person in recorded history to have been hit by a meteorite when a 9lb, cricket ball-sized chunk of space rock smashed through the ceiling of her Sylacauga, Alabama home in 1954.

It struck Ann on the thigh, leaving a livid, pineapple-size bruise, but though she donated what is now known as the Hodges Meteorite to the Smithsonian, she didn’t cope with the publicity, had a nervous breakdown and died aged 52.

But at least that meant she outlived luckless Vlad Cazacu by almost a decade.

A fire-eater with a Romanian circus, he seems to have accidentally swallowed some of the flammable liquid which exploded when he brought his flaming torch to his lips.

As one horrified audience member stated: “It was the most awful thing I’ve ever seen. He was so graceful and everyone was applauding — then he burped and was blown to bits.”

One man incredibly lucky not to have been blown to bits was Tsutomu Yamaguchi who was in Hiroshima on business on the day it was flattened by an atomic bomb.

After a night in an air-raid shelter he went home — to Nagasaki.

Finally, to lose one house to a hurricane could be regarded as a misfortune, to lose four looks like carelessness.

But that’s what happened to Melanie Martinez of Louisiana who saw her homes flattened by Hurricanes Betsy (1965), Juan (1985), George (1998) and Katrina (2005).

Touched by her plight, a reality TV show gave her fifth home a $20,000 makeover, just before Hurricane Isaac demolished it in 2012.