Unusual Deaths

As the saying goes ‘Two things is certain in life, Taxes and Death‘. While the former, at times you can cheat your way out of it, the latter, no one can escape death, everyone dies. Unless of course you’re Micheal Jackson ;-p

When I die, I would like to ‘go out’ peacefully please, but then again you’ll never know your fate as some of these guys have found out. These are some weird way to die!

458 BC: The Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a live tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone.

207 BC: Chrysippus, a Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after watching his drunken donkey attempt to eat figs (figs are shrub or small tree )

1327: Edward II of England, after being deposed and imprisoned by his Queen consort Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, was rumored to have been murdered by having a red-hot iron inserted into his anus.

1559: King Henry II of France was killed during a stunt knight’s jousting match, when his helmet’s soft golden grille gave way to a broken lancetip which pierced his eye and entered his brain.

1601: Tycho Brahe, according to legend, died of complications resulting from a strained bladder at a banquet. It would have been extremely bad etiquette to leave the table before the meal was finished, so he stayed until he became fatally ill.

1671: François Vatel, chef to Louis XIV, committed suicide because his seafood order was late and he couldn’t stand the shame of a postponed meal. His body was discovered by an aide, sent to tell him of the arrival of the fish

1771: King of Sweden, Adolf Frederick, died of digestion problems on February 12, 1771 after having consumed a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, which was topped off with 14 servings of his favourite dessert: semla served in a bowl of hot milk. He is thus remembered by Swedish schoolchildren as “the king who ate himself to death.”

1884: Allan Pinkerton, detective, died of gangrene resulting from having bitten his tongue after stumbling on the sidewalk.

1899: French president Félix Faure died of a stroke while receiving oral sex in his office.

1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination code.

1912: Tailor Franz Reichelt fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he’d told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy.

1916: Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, died of drowning while trapped under ice. Although the details of his murder are disputed, he was allegedly placed in the water through a hole in the winter ice when he stubbornly refused to die after having been poisoned, bludgeoned, castrated, and shot multiple times in the head, lung, and liver.

1923: George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon becomes the first to die from King Tut’s Curse after a mosquito bite on his face becomes seriously infected.

1923: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.

1927: J.G. Parry-Thomas, a British racing driver, was decapitated by his car’s drive chain which, under stress, snapped and whipped into the cockpit. He was attempting to break his own Land speed record which he had set the previous year. Despite being killed in the attempt, he succeeded in setting a new record of 171 mph

1935: Baseball player Len Koenecke was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by the crew of an aircraft he had chartered, after provoking a fight with the pilot while the plane was in the air.

1941: Sherwood Anderson, writer, swallowed a toothpick at a party and then died

1943: Lady be Good, a USAAF B-24 bomber lost its way and crash landed in the Libyan Desert. Mummified remains of its crew, who struggled for a week without water, were not found until 1960.

1960: In the Nedelin disaster, over 100 Soviet missile technicians and officials died when a switch was turned on unintentionally igniting the rocket, including Red Army Marshal Nedelin who was seated in a deck chair just 40 meters away overseeing launch preparations. The events were filmed by automatic cameras.

1972: Leslie Harvey, guitarist of Stone the Crows was electrocuted on stage by a live microphone.

1973: Péter Vályi, finance minister of Hungary fell into a blast furnace (some sources say a pit of molten iron) on a visit to a steelworks factory at Miskolc.

1974: Christine Chubbuck, an American television news reporter committed suicide during a live broadcast on July 15. At 9:38 AM, 8 minutes into her talk show, on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, she drew out a revolver and shot herself in the head.

1977: Tom Pryce, a Formula One driver, and a 19-year-old track marshal Jansen Van Vuuren both died at the 1977 South African Grand Prix after Van Vuuren ran across the track beyond a blind brow to attend to another car which had caught fire and was struck by Pryce’s car at approximately 170mph. Pryce was struck in the face by the marshal’s fire extinguisher and was killed instantly

1978: Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox in 1978, ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild, when a researcher at the laboratory Parker worked at accidentally released some virus into the air of the building. She is believed to be the last smallpox fatality in history.

1981: A 25-year-old Dutch woman studying in Paris, Renée Hartevelt, was killed and eaten by a classmate, Issei Sagawa, when he invited her to dinner for a literary conversation. The killer was declared unfit to stand trial and extradited back to Japan, where he was released from custody within fifteen months.

1982: Vladimir Smirnov, an Olympic champion fencer, died of brain damage nine days after his opponent’s foil snapped during a match, pierced his eyeball and entered his brain.

1983: Tennessee Williams, American playwright, died choking on a bottle cap. He was in a hotel but was too drunk to leave his room or make sufficient noise to attract attention.

1987: R. Budd Dwyer, a Republican politician, committed suicide during a televised press conference. Facing a potential 55-year jail sentence for alleged involvement in a conspiracy, Dwyer shot himself in the mouth with a revolver.

1990: Joseph W. Burrus, aged 32, an aspiring magician, decided to perform the “buried alive” illusion in a plastic box covered with cement. The cement crushed the box and he died of asphyxia.[29]

1990: George Allen, an American football coach, died a month after some of his players gave him a Gatorade Shower following a victory (as it is tradition in American Football). Some argue this resulted in pneumonia.

1993: Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, was shot and killed by a prop .44 Magnum gun while filming the movie The Crow. The gun was pre-loaded by the Weapons Master for the set, but the casing for the blank shattered upon firing and the fragments became instant projectiles. They pierced Brandon’s chest in five places, some in the heart. It was not instantly recognized by the crew or other actors; they believed he was still acting.

1993: Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through the glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in order to prove the glass was “unbreakable”.

1998: Tom and Eileen Lonergan were stranded while scuba diving with a group of divers off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The group’s boat accidentally abandoned them due to an incorrect head count taken by the dive boat crew. The couple was left to fend for themselves in shark-infested waters. Their bodies were never recovered. The incident is depicted in the film Open Water.

1999: Owen Hart, a professional wrestler for WWE died during a Pay-Per-View event when performing a stunt. It was planned to have Owen come down from the rafters of the Kemper Arena on a safety harness tied to a rope to make his ring entrance. The safety latch was released and Owen dropped 78 feet to the ground. The PPV continued even after he was pronounced dead.

2001: Bernd-Jürgen Brandes was stabbed repeatedly in the neck and then eaten by Armin Meiwes. Before the killing, both men dined on Brandes’ severed penis. Brandes had answered an internet advertisement by Meiwes looking for someone for this purpose. Brandes explicitly stated in his will that he wished to be killed and eaten.

2003: Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist who had lived in the wilderness among bears for thirteen summers in a remote region in Alaska, was killed and partially consumed by bears, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard.

2005: Kenneth Pinyan of Seattle died of acute peritonitis after submitting to anal intercourse with a stallion in the town of Enumclaw, Washington. Pinyan had done this before, and he delayed his visit to the hospital for several hours out of reluctance for official cognizance. The case led to the criminalization of bestiality in Washington

2005: 28-year-old Korean video game addict Lee Seung Seop collapsed and died of fatigue in an Internet cafe after playing World of Warcraft for almost 50 consecutive hours.

2006: Mariesa Weber, a 5’3″ Florida woman, fell behind a 6′ tall bookcase in her family’s home and suffocated. She was not discovered for 11 days; her family thought she had been kidnapped

2007: Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman from Sacramento, died of water intoxication while trying to win a Nintendo Wii in a KDND 107.9 “The End” radio station’s “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest, which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating.

2007: James Richards, an American Veterinarian and expert on cats died in a motorcycle accident trying to avoid a cat that had run on the road.