Have you ever heard the expression,

The pen is mightier than the sword?

What about life imitates art?

Or you cannot predict the future, but you can create it?

When writers write, we are creating whole worlds out of our minds.

But what happens when those words become reality?

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I once wrote a story about a woman jumping

off a building while miserable slack-jawed gawkers looked on. And Lord, I hope that one didn't come true after I wrote it.

Although now that I think about it, I did come upon an awful scene on a busy New York

street sometime after that, in which a woman did indeed jump out a window.

Oh, dear God.

Maybe I should start writing stories about an all-woman political administration,

or larger Trader Joe's parking lots, or somehow finding out I have Irish citizenship and a million

dollars. But before I get on that stranger, let's put our floaties and goggles on and sail back

to the late 1800s to explore the moment when fiction became fact with the wreck of the Titan.

One wonders if the folks who bought passage on the ill-fated Titanic ever stopped to consider a popular short story published about 14 years earlier called futility before stepping aboard the unsinkable modern Marvel of the Sea.

Perhaps if they had, they might have thought twice about taking the journey.

That's because futility is about the world's largest and fastest ocean liner,

hitting an iceberg and sinking into the sea.

Morgan Robertson was many things before he became a writer.

In 1877 at the age of 16, after spending the summers of his youth at the side of his father,

a ship captain on the Great Lakes, Robertson joined the merchant marines where he served nine years.

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