World's 'unluckiest man' struck by lightning

Four years ago, John Wade Agan told deputies he was robbed at gunpoint in his taxicab, roughed up and stuffed into the trunk of the car. Three years ago, he drove to a fire station with a butcher's knife sticking out of his chest. Two years ago, in a news conference from his hospital bed, he told the world he'd been bitten by two different snakes at the same time, a claim experts doubted.

He said he might have been the unluckiest man in the world. Now, Agan, 47, occupies another hospital bed, befallen, he said, by yet another freak calamity: lightning. He said it happened on Tuesday evening during the severe storm that hit the area. He was leaning over a metal kitchen sink, holding a corded phone up to his ear, when he heard a loud boom. He said he blacked out.



His 26-year-old daughter, Misty Agan, was standing just feet away from him and said she heard the phone drop. "Oh! Oh! Oh!" she said she heard her dad say before he crumpled to the ground and began to shake. Agan said he awoke surrounded by paramedics, finding his right shoe off and a big hole in his sock. "It felt like it was on fire," he said.

He knows what people say about him — what they said after reading about his snakebites, what some will say when they read this story — that he's lying or somehow hurting himself, maybe to get pain medicine. "I don't care what people say," Agan said. "Any day of the week, I'll go take a drug test." There's no way to prove someone has or hasn't been struck by lightning, experts say. John Agan doesn't have any obvious burn marks. Most victims don't.