Thousands upon thousands of crosswords are published every day, and solvers are experts at lateral thinking and finding connections between things. So it’s inevitable that every now and then a puzzle will seem to have an almost supernatural “accidental” theme or a spookily precient clue.
For example, in 1944 a bunch of D-Day operation "code names" appeared in the Daily Telegraph crossword during May, which made British secret agents paranoid that their battle plans had leaked. It was just a fluke.
And 9/11 truthers will be intrigued to take a look at the grid that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on the day of the tragic 2001 WTC attacks. The answer to 1-across was INFERNO, intersecting with 2-down FIRE ALARM. The central answer was STARS AND STRIPES. What did the compiler know that we didn’t? Nothing of course, millions of clues create millions of opportunities for eerie timing every day.
Twitter is always awash with solvers clutching at straws to make connections with topics in the news. On the day Etta James died, one social media user commented “She was a clue in yesterday’s crossword. Coincidence?” Um, well yes of course it’s a coincidence. Did they really think the compiler heard Etta was unwell and tried to coordinate the clue with an estimated day of death? In reality, ETTA is an overused bit of crosswordese that would be in dozens of puzzles worldwide every day.
Anyway, the main reason I’m writing this article is to tell you about a great coincidence that happened in relation to one of my cryptic crosswords. I once had an idea for a crossword, the plan being to publish the same puzzle twice. Well, the same exact answers but completely different clues, roughly a year apart. It was for my own amusement really, and I was curious to see if anyone would have a strange feeling of deja vu when solving the second version. So on January 20, 2014 the first version appeared. Link to the puzzle is here, with spoilers in the next paragraph, so be careful!
The puzzle included answers foreshadowing my secret plan to double it up: DEJA VU, REPLICATE, DOPPELGANGER and GROUNDHOG DAY among them. Just over a year later I executed my plan to create the twin version of the grid. The new-clue version appeared in the paper on February 2, 2015. And, as with the vast majority of my secret themes, not a single person seemed to notice…..
Undeterred, I decided to Tweet “There is something special about today's cryptic, and I sincerely wonder whether anyone will mention it”.
Soon, someone answered “Yeah, today is Groundhog Day”.
What?? By complete coincidence, my Groundhog Day puzzle had been published on the actual Groundhog Day, the traditional day of celebration for some Americans and Canadians - February 2. I had no idea that Groundhog Day was even a real holiday and I certainly didn’t know what the date was. I guess the odds are simply one in 365, but that seems unrepresentative of the magic at play here, don’t you think?
Lastly, there is a Sunday Telegraph wordfind of 2013, which contained the supposedly random letter sequence, backwards, spelling MURDOCHISEVIL. The puzzlemaker apparently tried to claim it was all a billion-zillion-to-one coincidence, but I’d be very surprised if they are still compiling wordfinds for a living.