A man terrified by a notice he received informing him he had already been cremated died after suffering a heart attack presumably caused by the event. As the 70 year old former resident of India’s death is being investigated, authorities have come to the conclusion that Than Singh may have been the victim of foul play. Others have wondered if it could merely be a matter of unexplained coincidence.
Mr. Singh received the notice in the mail indicating to him that he had been cremated in a town’s local mortuary. As he complained of sharp chest pains and restlessness afterward he was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead upon arrival. After he was taken to the same funeral home to be cremated, his family received an identical notice with the same serial number. The family requested it be replaced with a different one. The prescient cremation notice was destroyed and Mr. Singh’s remains were cremated.
Police investigating the matter are looking at a list of suspects, but meanwhile others are saying the coincidence was almost too perfect to have been planned. Is it possible a mistake led to Mr. Singh’s death? Or perhaps some other unknown force? Death has a way of appearing around incredible coincidences similar to the events described around Singh’s heart attack.
In 1858, for example, a man accused of cheating at a poker game was shot dead. The man who showed up to the poker table next turned the winnings of Robert Fallon (the man who had been killed) into roughly triple what it had been. As authorities arrived to investigate the matter they ordered that Fallon’s winnings be turned over to the man’s next of kin. They soon discovered the mystery player who had joined the game was Fallon’s son, who had been estranged from his father and not seen him in over seven years. Apparently he hadn’t known his father was the one killed in the game. He received the winnings.
In 1975 a man was struck and killed in Bermuda after a Taxi loaded with one passenger ran into the moped the man had been riding. The man riding the moped was identified, but the moped was surprisingly undamaged. One year later the same Taxi with the same driver and carrying the same passenger would be driving down that stretch of road when they would come into a collision with the exact same moped. The man riding it would later turn out to be the brother of the previous man killed.
So is it unfathomable that a man could receive a notice accidentally by mail indicating he had been cremated only to later be cremated in the same way? It’s hard to say. But if it is a mere coincidence, it’s noteworthy enough to question whether this is a case of incredibly bad luck or something more. The last point to consider when looking at this case is the size of the city of Ghaziabad where the incident took place. With an estimated population of a little under one million, the likelihood of this already unlikely event becomes even slimmer.