In Berkeley, California, 1974: Mrs. Willard Lovell was trying to get into her locked apartment after she had accidently locked herself out. At that moment a postman arrived with a letter from her brother who had stayed there a short time earlier. In the letter was her spare key, which he had borrowed and was returning. A story by Edgar Allan Poe told of a shipwrecked open boat, and of three survivors who killed and ate the fourth -- a fictional cabin boy named Richard Parker. Fifty years later, an actual shipwreck occurred in which three survivors in an open boat killed and ate the fourth, a cabin boy named (you guessed it) Richard Parker. A West German farmer's wife had lost her wedding ring forty years earlier in a potato field. She finally found it while dining in her kitchen, inside a potato grown in that field. Death Takes a Holiday: Obituary writer Mildred West chose the perfect time to take a week's vacation. During her absence not a single death occurred in her city of 32,000. Normally, an average of ten deaths occurred each week.