‘Jeopardy!’ Bosses Reveal Freak Coincidence on Show Happened Before

Jeopardy!/Instagram

Who says lightning never strikes the same place twice? A freak event on a recent episode of Jeopardy! had fans reeling. Now it turns out that it happened before!

Viewers of the show were stunned when contestant Emily Croke had a familial connection to a clue that helped her win the June 23, 2025 episode. As fans of the show may recall, Croke revealed after correctly answering Final Jeopardy that she was related to the person the clue was about. Host Ken Jennings was shocked by the coincidence, along with the show’s legion of fans.

“Wow!” the host responded.

Fans were torn on how fair the question was, and debated if the show’s producers should look more into their contestants’ backgrounds, but it appears that this isn’t the first time this has happened.

Jeopardy! revealed on its Instagram page that there was a similar occurrence on the show back in 2001 when contestant Bill O’Donnell got a question about his great-grandfather, George Ferris.

In “Stupid Answers,” the $200 clue read, “Last name of the engineer who built the first Ferris wheel.” Contestant Bill buzzed in and answered, “Who is my grandfather, George Ferris?”

“Are you serious?” then-host Alex Trebek asked.

“Yeah,” Bill laughed.

“How about that?” the host replied. “Good for you.”

“My great-grandfather, actually,” Bill corrected.

“It’s not just a stupid answer. It’s a stupid answer within the family,” Trebek said. “And that’s great.”

Trebek commented on the connection when the game show came back from a commercial break. He said him and the producer talked about it during the commercial. “What the odds must be that we would write a clue about the Ferris wheel. You would ring in on that clue. It would come up in your game, and he would turn out to be your great-grandfather,” Trebek said.

“The pride I’d feel in that moment,” an Instagram user wrote.

“Oh, so it has happened before! WOW!,” said another.

“This is so crazy omg,” added a third.

“Hahah. So it had happened before. Nice,” wrote one fan.

However, some fans pointed out that Bill should have gotten it wrong because they claim he didn’t answer in the form of a question, which is typical Jeopardy! style. Others also said that the clue asked for the last name, and he gave the first and last name, and extra facts about it.

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