Lightning never strikes the same place twice.

The Empire State Building is struck by lightning approximately 25 times per year. The Eiffel Tower, roughly the same. The CN Tower in Toronto is struck 75 to 80 times annually and operates a dedicated lightning research program precisely because of the predictable, repeated strikes it attracts.

The claim that lightning never strikes the same place twice has been demonstrably false since at least 1752, the year Benjamin Franklin installed the first lightning rod. The entire technology of the lightning rod depends on lightning striking the same place, reliably, repeatedly, by design. You attach a grounded metal rod to the top of a building because you want lightning to prefer that path over the rest of the structure. It works because lightning does exactly that.

Lightning is not a random event distributed evenly across the landscape. It follows physics. A cloud carrying an enormous electrical charge seeks the path of least resistance to ground. Tall objects, skyscrapers, radio towers, isolated trees, hilltops, provide shorter paths through the air, which is a poor conductor. They attract lightning because they always have. That is why tall trees in open fields are dangerous places to shelter during a storm, and why a second strike on the same tree, before it falls, is entirely ordinary.

The phrase almost certainly began its life as an expression of probability in everyday speech, meaning roughly: "the same bad luck is unlikely to strike twice in a row." As a comment on human fortune or accident, it's a reasonable heuristic. As a statement about atmospheric electricity, it is precisely backwards. The places lightning has struck before are, by definition, the places with the characteristics that make lightning strikes likely, and are therefore the places most likely to be struck again.