100-year-old Thelma Arnold isn’t sure why she’s lived so long but she has a suspicion: she once visited a wishing well in Fort Lauderdale and drank two scoops of water. ‘I didn’t think it did anything, but here I am,’ she told her local newspaper. ‘For some reason, I’m still here’.

Tragically, though, this isn’t Thelma’s only brush with the supernatural. She recalls seeing her parents with her two-year-old brother and thinking: ‘I’ll never see him again’. He drowned the same day.

Thelma’s mother moved in with her for a while before passing away at the age of 83 and today her grandson lives with her. He is one of five grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.

Thelma worked as a waitress and a shop assistant, walking to work for years until she passing her driving test at the age of 60.  She thought she’d failed: ‘I was riding along nice when the man said make a right turn and I made the prettiest left turn you’d ever seen. I pleaded poverty and he passed me.’

At 100, she remains mentally alert, reading the newspaper every day and still enjoying watching the TV (recalling that her father regarded the TV as ‘evil’).

Plausibility rating: 1 out of 10. There really is nothing remotely scientific that could support Thelma’s theory. To be fair, that’s as much as there is for homeopathy, which nonetheless supports a multi-million pound industry. But if we’re going to follow the evidence we have to mark this all the way down to one.