List of unusual deaths
Appearance
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3a/Death_of_Aeschylus_in_Florentine_Picture_Chronicle.jpg/170px-Death_of_Aeschylus_in_Florentine_Picture_Chronicle.jpg)
This list of unusual deaths includes unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history, noted as being unusual by multiple sources.
Antiquity
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Menes | ![]() |
c. 3200 BC | According to Manetho, the Egyptian pharaoh and unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt was carried off and then killed by a hippopotamus.[2][3] |
Teti | ![]() |
c. 2323 BC | According to Manetho, the first king of the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt was mysteriously killed when he was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards. Other sources say he was killed by Userkare, who would then succeed him. His odd death is the earliest-known assassination but is still the subject of speculation.[4][5] |
Sisera | ![]() |
1200 or 1235 BC | According to Judges 4-5, Sisera, the commander of the Canaanite Army for King Jabin of Hazor, was killed in his sleep when the Kenite woman Jael stabbed him in the temple with a tent peg.[2] |
Abimelech Ben Gideon | ![]() |
1126 BC | The king of Shechem and son of Gideon was killed in the city of Thebez by a woman who threw a millstone on his head which crushed his skull or mortally wounded him.[6] |
Tiberinus Silvius | ![]() |
c. 914 BC | It is said that the legendary king of Alba Longa drowned while crossing the Albula river, which became known as the Tiber. This is usually known as the earliest case of someone drowning.[7] |
Terpander | 7th century BC | The Greek poet and citharode, considered the father of Greek music and lyric poetry, reportedly choked to death on a fig thrown at him during one of his performances.[8] | |
Draco of Athens | ![]() |
c. 620 BC | The Athenian lawmaker was reportedly smothered to death by gifts of cloaks and hats showered upon him by appreciative citizens at a theatre in Aegina, Greece.[9][10] |
Charondas | ![]() |
c. 612 BC | According to Diodorus Siculus, the Greek lawgiver from Sicily issued a law that anyone who brought weapons into the Assembly must be put to death. One day, he arrived at the Assembly seeking help to defeat some brigands in the countryside, but with a knife still attached to his belt. In order to uphold his own law, he committed suicide.[11][12][13] |
Duke Jing of Jin | 581 BC | In 581 BC a shaman warned the ruler that he would not live to see the new wheat harvest. The ruler dismissed him and had the shaman murdered. However, when the Duke was about to eat the wheat, he felt the need to visit the bathroom. Upon arriving in the bathroom, the Duke fell through the hole and drowned.[14] | |
Arrhichion of Phigalia | ![]() |
564 BC | The Greek pankratiast caused his own death during the Olympic finals. Held by his unidentified opponent in a stranglehold and unable to free himself, Arrhichion kicked his opponent, causing him so much pain from a foot/ankle injury that the opponent made the sign of defeat to the umpires, but at the same time broke Arrhichion's neck. Since the opponent had conceded defeat, Arrhichion was proclaimed the victor posthumously.[15][16] |
Sisamnes | ![]() |
525 BC | A corrupt Persian judge was killed and flayed alive for accepting a bribe.[17] |
Milo of Croton | ![]() |
6th century BC | The Olympic champion wrestler's hands reportedly became trapped when he tried to split a tree apart; he was then devoured by wolves (or, in later versions, lions).[18][19] |
Zeuxis | ![]() |
5th century BC | The Greek painter died of laughter while painting an elderly woman.[20][21] |
Pythagoras of Samos | ![]() |
c. 495 BC | Ancient sources disagree on how the Greek philosopher died,[22][23] but one late and probably apocryphal legend reported by both Diogenes Laërtius, a third-century AD biographer of famous philosophers, and Iamblichus, a Neoplatonist philosopher, states that Pythagoras was murdered by his political enemies. Supposedly, he almost managed to outrun them, but he came to a bean field and refused to run through it, as he had prohibited beans as ritually unclean.[23][24] Since cutting through the field would violate his own teachings, Pythagoras simply stopped running and was killed. This story may have been fabricated by Neanthes of Cyzicus, on whom both Diogenes and Iamblichus rely as a source.[23] |
Anacreon | ![]() |
c. 485 BC | The poet, known for works in celebration of wine, choked to death on a grape stone according to Pliny the Elder. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica suggests that "the story has an air of mythical adaptation to the poet's habits".[20]: 104 [25][26] |
Heraclitus of Ephesus | c. 475 BC | According to one account given by Diogenes Laertius, the Greek philosopher was said to have been devoured by dogs after smearing himself with cow manure in an attempt to cure his dropsy.[27][28] | |
Themistocles | c. 459 BC | The Athenian general who won the Battle of Salamis actually died of natural causes in exile,[29][30] but was widely rumored to have committed suicide by drinking a solution of crushed minerals known as bull's blood.[29][30][31][32] The legend is widely retold in classical sources. The early twentieth-century English classicist Percy Gardner proposed that the story about him drinking bull's blood may have been based on an ignorant misunderstanding of a statue showing Themistocles in a heroic pose, holding a cup as an offering to the gods. The comedic playwright Aristophanes references Themistocles drinking bull's blood in his comedy The Knights (performed in 424 BC) as the most heroic way for a man to die.[30][33] | |
Aeschylus | ![]() |
c. 455 BC | According to Valerius Maximus, the eldest of the three great Athenian tragedians was killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle that had mistaken his bald head for a rock suitable for shattering the shell of the reptile. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, adds that Aeschylus had been staying outdoors to avert a prophecy that he would be killed that day "by the fall of a house".[20]: 104 [34][35][36][37] |
Empedocles of Akragas | ![]() |
c. 430 BC | According to Diogenes Laertius, the Pre-Socratic philosopher from Sicily, who, in one of his surviving poems, declared himself to have become a "divine being... no longer mortal",[38] tried to prove he was an immortal god by leaping into Mount Etna, an active volcano.[39][40] The Roman poet Horace also alludes to this legend.[41] |
Sogdianus | 423 BC | The ruler of the Achaemenid Empire was captured by his half-brother Ochus, who had him executed by being suffocated by ash.[42][43] | |
Polydamas of Skotoussa | ![]() |
5th century BC | The Thessalian pankratiast, and victor in the 93rd Olympiad (408 BC), was in a cave with friends when the roof began to crumble down upon them. Believing his immense strength could prevent the cave-in, he held his hands up to the roof, trying to support it as the rocks crashed down around him. This gave enough time for his friends to flee the cave and reach safety, but Polydamas was crushed to death.[44] |
Sophocles | ![]() |
c. 406 BC | A number of "remarkable" legends concerning the death of another of the three great Athenian tragedians are recorded in the late antique Life of Sophocles. According to one legend, he choked to death on an unripe grape. Another says that he died of joy after hearing that his last play had been successful. A third account reports that he died of suffocation, after reading aloud a lengthy monologue from the end of his play Antigone, without pausing to take a breath for punctuation.[36] |
Mithridates | 401 BC | The Persian soldier who embarrassed his king, Artaxerxes II, by boasting of killing his rival, Cyrus the Younger (who was the brother of Artaxerxes II), was executed by scaphism. The king's physician, Ctesias, reported that Mithridates survived the insect torture for 17 days.[45][46] | |
Democritus of Abdera | ![]() |
c. 370 BC | According to Diogenes Laertius, the Greek Atomist philosopher died aged 109; as he was on his deathbed, his sister was greatly worried because she needed to fulfill her religious obligations to the goddess Artemis in the approaching three-day Thesmophoria festival. Democritus told her to place a loaf of warm bread under his nose and was able to survive for the three days of the festival by sniffing it. He died immediately after the festival was over.[47][48] |
Diogenes of Sinope | ![]() |
c. 323 BC | According to 3rd century biographer, Diogenes Laërtius, he died by consuming raw octopus. His contemporaries, however, claimed he died by holding his breath.[49] |
Anaxarchus | ![]() |
320 BC | According to Diogenes Laertius, Anaxarchus gained the enmity of the tyrannical ruler of Cyprus, Nicocreon, for an inappropriate joke he made about tyrants at a banquet in 331 BC. When Anaxarchus visited Cyprus, Nicocreon ordered him to be pounded to death in a mortar. During the torture Anaxarchus said to Nicocreon, "Just pound the bag of Anaxarchus, you do not pound Anaxarchus." Nicocreon then threatened to cut his tongue out; Anaxarchus bit it off and spat it at the ruler's face.[50] |
Antiphanes | c. 310 BC | According to the Suda, the renowned comic poet of the Middle Attic comedy died after being struck by a pear.[51][52] | |
King Wu of Qin | 307 BC | The king and member of the Qin dynasty reportedly challenged his friend Meng Yue to a lifting contest. When Wu tried to lift a giant bronze pot believed to have been cast for Yu the Great, it crushed his leg, inflicting fatal injuries. Meng Yue and his family were sentenced to death.[53] | |
Agathocles of Syracuse | 289 BC | The Greek tyrant of Syracuse was murdered with a poisoned toothpick.[20]: 104 [54] | |
Pyrrhus of Epirus | ![]() |
272 BC | During the Battle of Argos, Pyrrhus was fighting a Macedonian soldier in the street when the elderly mother of the soldier dropped a roof tile onto Pyrrhus' head, breaking his spine and rendering him paralyzed. According to a soldier named Zopyrus, they then proceeded to decapitate the king.[55] |
Philitas of Cos | c. 270 BC | The Greek intellectual is said by Athenaeus to have studied arguments and erroneous word usage so intensely that he wasted away and starved to death.[56] British classicist Alan Cameron speculates that Philitas died from a wasting disease which his contemporaries joked was caused by his pedantry.[57] | |
Zeno of Citium | ![]() |
c. 262 BC | The Greek philosopher from Citium (Kition), Cyprus, tripped and fell as he was leaving the school, breaking his toe. Striking the ground with his fist, he quoted the line from the Niobe, "I come, I come, why dost thou call for me?" He died on the spot through holding his breath.[58] |
Qin Shi Huang | ![]() |
August 210 BC | The first emperor of China, whose artifacts and treasures include the Terracotta Army, died after ingesting several pills of mercury, in the belief that it would grant him immortality.[59][60][61] |
Chrysippus of Soli | ![]() |
c. 206 BC | One ancient account of the death of the third-century BC Greek Stoic philosopher tells that he died laughing at his own joke[62] after he saw a donkey eating his figs; he told a slave to give the donkey neat wine to drink with which to wash them down, and then, "...having laughed too much, he died" (Diogenes Laërtius 7.185).[37][63] |
Hannibal | ![]() |
c. 183-181 BC | According to legend, the Carthaginian general mysteriously died from a wounded finger from his sword while mounting his horse. This event is said to have led to a fever in which he died 3 days later. However, some other stories suggest it was poisoning. The actual cause is still unknown.[64][failed verification] |
Eleazar Avaran | ![]() |
c. 163 BC | The brother of Judas Maccabeus; according to 1 Maccabees 6:46, during the Battle of Beth Zechariah, Eleazar spied an armored war elephant which he believed to be carrying the Seleucid emperor Antiochus V Eupator. After thrusting his spear in battle into its belly, it collapsed and fell on top of Eleazar, killing him instantly.[65] |
Manius Aquillius and Marcus Licinius Crassus | ![]() |
1st century BC | The late Roman Republic-era consul was sent as ambassador to Asia Minor in 90 BC to restore Nicomedes IV of Bithynia to his kingdom after the latter was expelled by Mithridates VI of Pontus. But Aquillius encouraged Nicomedes to raid part of Mithridates' territory, which started the First Mithridatic War. Aquillius was captured and brought to Mithridates, who in 88 BC had him executed by pouring molten gold down his throat. According to one story, Marcus Licinius Crassus, a Roman general and statesman, who was very greedy despite being called "the richest man in Rome," was executed in the same manner by the Parthians after they defeated him in the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, in symbolic mockery of his thirst for wealth. However, it has been disputed as to whether this is how Crassus met his end.[66][67] |
Porcia Catonis | June 43 BC to October 42 BC | The daughter of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis and second wife of Marcus Junius Brutus, according to ancient historians such as Cassius Dio and Appian, killed herself by swallowing hot coals.[68] Modern historians find this tale implausible.[69] | |
Tiberius Claudius Drusus | ![]() |
c. 20 AD | According to Suetonius, the eldest son of the future Roman emperor Claudius died while playing with a pear. Having tossed the pear high in the air, he caught it in his mouth when it came back, but he choked on it, dying of asphyxia.[70][71] |
Tiberius | ![]() |
16 March 37 | The Roman emperor died in Misenum aged 78. According to Tacitus, the emperor appeared to have died and Caligula, who was at Tiberius' villa, was being congratulated on his succession to the empire, when news arrived that the emperor had revived and was recovering his faculties. Those who had moments before recognized Caligula as Augustus fled in fear of the emperor's wrath, while Macro, a prefect of the Praetorian Guard, took advantage of the chaos to have Tiberius smothered with his own bedclothes, definitively killing him.[72] |
Saint Peter | ![]() |
Between 64 and 68 AD | The apostle of Jesus was crucified upside-down in Rome, based on his claim of being unworthy to die in the same way as his Saviour.[73][74] |
Bartholomew the Apostle | ![]() |
69 or 71 AD | St. Bartholomew, an apostle of Jesus Christ, died after either being knocked out and thrown into the sea or being skinned alive and beheaded in Armenia.[75] |
Antipas of Pergamum | ![]() |
68 or 92 AD | Antipas was burned alive inside the brazen bull for supposedly casting out demons who were worshipped in Pergamum.[76] |
Simon the Zealot | ![]() |
1st century AD | According to an ancient tradition, the apostle of Jesus was sawn in half in Persia.[77] |
Saint Lawrence | ![]() |
258 | The deacon was roasted alive on a giant grill during the persecution of Valerian.[78][79] Prudentius tells that he joked with his tormentors, "Turn me over—I'm done on this side".[80] He is now the patron saint of cooks, chefs, and comedians.[81] |
Marcus of Arethusa | ![]() |
362 | The Christian bishop and martyr was hung up in a honey-smeared basket for bees to sting him to death.[20]: 104 |
Cassian of Imola | ![]() |
13 August 363 | Cassian of Imola was sentenced to death by Julian the Apostate and was handed over to his pupils to carry out the deed, which they did by binding him to a stake and stabbing him with a poisoned stylus.[82] |
Valentinian I | ![]() |
17 November 375 | The Roman emperor suffered a stroke which was provoked by yelling at foreign envoys in anger.[83] |
Attila | ![]() |
c. 453 | Attila the Hun reportedly died on his wedding night by choking on his own blood, which flowed into his mouth from a nosebleed.[37][84] |
Middle Ages
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Constans II | ![]() |
15 July 668 | The Byzantine Emperor was assassinated with a bucket according to Theophilus of Edessa.[85] |
Li Bai | ![]() |
30 November 762 | The famous Chinese poet of the 8th century died drunk after embracing the Moon. While riding his boat along the Yangtze River, he saw the reflection of the Moon in the water. When he tried to hug it, he fell off his boat and later drowned.[86] |
Popiel | ![]() |
830 | According to legend, after the wife of the dissolute Polish ruler poisoned his uncles to prevent them from deposing him, a horde of rats and mice swarmed out of the uncles' bodies, which had been cast into lake Gopło, pursued Popiel and his wife to a tower in which they had taken refuge and ate them alive.[87] |
Ragnar Lodbrok | ![]() |
c. 865 | The semi-legendary Viking leader whose exploits are narrated in the Ragnars saga loðbrókar, a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga, is said to have been captured by Ælla of Northumbria, who had him executed by throwing him into a pit of snakes.[88] |
Louis III of France | ![]() |
5 August 882 | The king of West Francia died aged around 18 at Saint-Denis. Whilst mounting his horse to pursue a girl who was running to seek refuge in her father's house, he hit his head on the lintel of a low door and fell, fracturing his skull.[89] |
Basil I | ![]() |
29 August 886 | The Byzantine emperor's belt was entangled between antlers of a deer during a hunt and the animal subsequently dragged him for 16 miles (26 km) through the woods. Because of this accident, Basil contracted fever and he died shortly afterwards.[90][91] |
Sigurd the Mighty of Orkney |
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892 | The second Earl of Orkney strapped the head of his defeated foe Máel Brigte to his horse's saddle. Brigte's teeth rubbed against Sigurd's leg as he rode, causing a fatal infection, according to the Old Norse Heimskringla and Orkneyinga sagas.[91][92] |
Hatto II | ![]() |
18 January 970 | The archbishop of Mainz, like the Polish ruler Popiel, is claimed in legend to have been eaten alive by rodents.[93] |
Abu Nasr al-Jawhari | ![]() |
1003 or 1010 | The Kazakh Turkic scholar from Farab died after a failed aviation test. It is said he used two wooden wings and rope. He leaped off the roof of the Nisābūr Mosque and then died on impact. His death was most likely caused after he had delusions of being a bird. al-Jawhari is said to be the first person killed by an aviation invention.[94] |
Edmund Ironside | ![]() |
30 November 1016 | The English king was allegedly stabbed whilst on a toilet by an assassin hiding underneath.[95][96] |
Béla I of Hungary | ![]() |
11 September 1063 | After the Holy Roman Empire decided to launch a military expedition against Hungary to restore young Solomon to the throne, the Hungarian king was seriously injured when "his throne broke beneath him" in his manor at Dömös.[97] The king—who was "half-dead", according to the Illuminated Chronicle—was taken to the western borders of his kingdom, where he died at the creek Kanizsa on 11 September 1063.[98][99] |
Victims of the White Ship wreck | ![]() |
25 November 1120 | While carrying intoxicated nobles across the English Channel, the ship was crashed into a rock by the also-intoxicated helmsman and began sinking. A lifeboat was launched, but William Adelin jumped into and capsized it. All aboard died.[100] |
Crown Prince Philip of France |
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13 October 1131 | Died while riding through Paris when his horse tripped over a black pig that was running out of a dung heap.[91][101][102] |
Henry I of England | ![]() |
1 December 1135 | While visiting relatives, he supposedly ate too many lampreys against his physician's advice, causing a pain in his gut, and ultimately his death.[37][96][103] |
John II Komnenos | ![]() |
1 April 1143 | Cut himself with a poisoned arrow during a boar hunt, and subsequently died from an infection.[104] |
Pope Adrian IV | ![]() |
1 September 1159 | The only Englishman to serve as Pope reportedly died after choking on a fly while drinking spring water.[91][105][106][107] |
Victims of the Erfurt latrine disaster | ![]() |
26 July 1184 | While Henry VI, the King of Germany, was holding an informal assembly at the Petersburg Citadel in Erfurt, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse. Most of the nobles fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement.[91][108] |
Frederick Barbarossa | ![]() |
10 June 1190 | While leading the German army on the Third Crusade, the Holy Roman Emperor unexpectedly drowned while bathing in the Saleph River.[109] |
Henry I of Castile | ![]() |
6 June 1217 | The 13-year-old king of Castile was killed by a tile that fell from a roof.[110][111] |
Gruffudd ap Llywelyn ap Iorwerth | ![]() |
1 March 1244 | The first-born son of Llywelyn the Great died while attempting to lower himself from the Tower of London in an escape attempt. The rope, made out of sheets and other fabrics, snapped, and his neck was broken in the fall, according to English monk and chronicler, Matthew Paris.[91] |
Al-Musta'sim | 20 February 1258 | The last Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, was executed by his Mongol captors by being rolled up in a rug and then trampled by horses.[112] | |
Edward II of England | ![]() |
21 September 1327 | The English king was rumoured to have been murdered after being deposed and imprisoned by his wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, by having a horn pushed into his anus through which a red-hot iron was inserted, burning out his internal organs without marking his body.[96][113][114][115] However, there is no real academic consensus on the manner of Edward II's death, and it has been plausibly argued that the story is propaganda.[115][116] |
John of Bohemia | 26 August 1346 | After being blind for 10 years, the Bohemian king died in the Battle of Crécy when—at his command—his companions tied their horses' reins to his own and charged. He was slaughtered in the ensuing fight.[117][118] | |
Charles II of Navarre | ![]() |
1 January 1387 | The contemporary chronicler Froissart relates that the king of Navarre, known as "Charles the Bad", suffering from illness in old age, was ordered by his physician to be tightly sewn into a linen sheet soaked in distilled spirits. The highly flammable sheet accidentally caught fire, and Charles later died of his injuries. Froissart considered the horrific death to be God's judgment upon the king.[119][120][121] |
Martin of Aragon | ![]() |
31 May 1410 | The Aragonese king died from a combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing. According to legend, Martin was suffering from indigestion, caused by eating an entire goose, when his favorite jester, Borra, entered the king's bedroom. When Martin asked Borra where he had been, the jester replied with: "Out of the next vineyard, where I saw a young deer hanging by his tail from a tree, as if someone had so punished him for stealing figs." This joke caused the king to die from laughter.[91][122][123] |
Renaissance
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence | ![]() |
18 February 1478 | The 1st Duke of Clarence was allegedly executed by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine, apparently his own choice once he accepted he was to be killed.[91][124] |
Charles VIII of France | ![]() |
7 April 1498 | The French king died as the result of striking his head on the lintel of a door while on his way to watch a game of real tennis.[20]: 105 |
Victims of the 1518 dancing plague | ![]() |
July 1518 | Several people died of either heart attacks, strokes or exhaustion during a dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (Holy Roman Empire).[125][126] |
Robert Pakington | 13 November 1536 | The 47-year-old merchant was killed in London by a wheellock pistol, making his death the first political assassination performed by a firearm.[127] | |
Pietro Aretino | ![]() |
21 October 1556 | The influential Italian author and libertine is said to have died of suffocation from laughing too much at an obscene joke during a meal in Venice. Another version states that he fell from a chair from too much laughter, fracturing his skull.[128] |
Henry II of France | ![]() |
10 July 1559 | On 30 June 1559, a tournament was held near Place des Vosges to celebrate the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis with the French king's longtime enemies, the Habsburgs of Austria, and to celebrate the marriage of his daughter Elisabeth of Valois to King Philip II of Spain. During a jousting match, Henry, wearing the colors of his mistress Diane de Poitiers,[129] was wounded in the eye by a fragment of the splintered lance of Gabriel Montgomery, captain of the King's Scottish Guard.[130] Despite the efforts of royal surgeons Ambroise Paré and Andreas Vesalius, the court doctors ultimately "advocated a wait-and-see strategy";[131] as a result, the king's untreated eye and brain damage led to his death by sepsis ten days later.[132] His death played a significant role in the decline of jousting as a sport, particularly in France.[133] |
Hans Staininger | 1567 | The burgomaster of Braunau (then Bavaria, now Austria), died when he broke his neck by tripping over his own beard.[134] The beard, which was 4.5 feet (1.4 m) long at the time, was usually kept rolled up in a leather pouch.[135] | |
Marco Antonio Bragadin | ![]() |
17 August 1571 | The Venetian Captain-General of Famagusta in Cyprus, was gruesomely killed after the Ottomans took over the city. He was dragged around the walls with sacks of earth and stone on his back; next, he was tied to a chair and hoisted to the yardarm of the Turkish flagship, where he was exposed to the taunts of the sailors. Finally, he was taken to his place of execution in the main square, tied naked to a column, and flayed alive.[136] Bragadin's skin was stuffed with straw and sewn, reinvested with his military insignia, and exhibited riding an ox in a mocking procession along the streets of Famagusta. The macabre trophy was hoisted upon the masthead pennant of the personal galley of the Ottoman commander, Amir al-bahr Mustafa Pasha, to be taken to Constantinople as a gift for Sultan Selim II. Bragadin's skin was stolen in 1580 by a Venetian seaman and brought back to Venice, where it was received as a returning hero.[137] |
Victims of the Black Assize of Oxford 1577 | ![]() |
July 1577 | In Oxford, England, at least 300 people, including Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer Sir Robert Bell and Serjeant Nicholas Barham, died in the aftermath of the trial of Rowland Jenkes, a Catholic bookseller convicted of distributing pamphlets defaming Queen Elizabeth I, at the assize at Oxford. The dead reportedly included no women or children.[138] |
Mary, Queen of Scots | ![]() |
8 February 1587 | The 44-year-old queen of Scotland was told that she was to be executed for plotting the assassination of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. However, when the executioner, only known as Bull, prepared to chop off her head with an axe, the first blow did not kill Mary. It only hit her head. The second blow severed her neck, but the tendon was still left. The executioner later pulled off Mary's head only to reveal that her hair was a wig.[139] |
Andrew Perne | ![]() |
26 April 1589 | The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and Dean of Ely was known for his frequent religious conversions to match the established faith of the time in England. He reportedly died due to having heard the jester of Queen Elizabeth I make a joke about his uncertain spiritual state, referring to him as "one that is neither heaven nor earth, but hangs betwixt both".[140] |
Tycho Brahe | 24 October 1601 | The astronomer contracted a bladder or kidney ailment after attending a banquet in Prague and died eleven days later. According to Johannes Kepler's first-hand account, Brahe had refused to leave the banquet to relieve himself, because it would have been a breach of etiquette.[37][141][142] After he had returned home, he was no longer able to urinate, except eventually in very small quantities and with excruciating pain.[37][143] Though initially ascribed to a kidney stone, and later still to potential mercury poisoning, modern analyses indicate Brahe's death resulted from a fatal case of uremia caused by an inflamed prostate.[144][145] |
Early modern period
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Sir Francis Bacon | ![]() |
9 April 1626 | The English philosopher and statesman died of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken carcass with snow to learn whether it could preserve meat.[37] |
Jörg Jenatsch | ![]() |
24 January 1639 | The Swiss political leader was assassinated by a person who dressed in a bear costume so he could assassinate him with an axe. Other stories say that the axe was the same one that Jenatsch had used to kill a rival.[115] |
Safi of Persia | ![]() |
12 May 1642 | The Safavid ruler of Iran allegedly died due to alcohol intoxication in a drinking contest against a Georgian nobleman, Scedan Chiladze, invited from Mingrelia.[146] |
Thomas Granger | ![]() |
8 September 1642 | Granger was executed for buggery with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. Granger was one of the first people to be executed in the Plymouth Colony and the first Caucasian juvenile to be sentenced to death and executed in the territory of what is now the United States. The mare, the cow and the calves were also executed.[147] |
Arthur Aston | ![]() |
1649 | During the Siege of Drogheda, Arthur Aston was beaten to death by Oliver Cromwell's army with his own wooden leg because they suspected gold coins were concealed inside.[148] |
Thomas Urquhart | ![]() |
1660 | The Scottish aristocrat, polymath, and first translator of François Rabelais's writings into English is said to have died laughing upon hearing that Charles II had taken the throne.[149][150] |
James Betts | 1667 | Died from asphyxiation after being sealed in a cupboard by Elizabeth Spencer, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in an attempt to hide him from her father, John Spencer.[151][152] | |
François Vatel | ![]() |
24 April 1671 | The majordomo of Prince Louis II de Bourbon-Condè, was responsible for a banquet for 2,000 people hosted in honour of King Louis XIV at the Château de Chantilly, where he died. According to a letter by Madame de Sévigné, Vatel was so distraught about the lateness of the seafood delivery and about other mishaps, that he committed suicide with his sword, and his body was discovered when someone came to tell him of the arrival of the fish.[153] |
Molière | ![]() |
17 February 1673[154] | The French playwright suffered a pulmonary hemorrhage caused by tuberculosis while playing the part of a hypochondriac in his own play Le malade imaginaire.[154][155] He disguised his convulsion as part of his performance and finished out the show,[154] which ends with his character dead in a chair. After the show, he was carried in the chair to his house, where he died.[154][155][156] |
Bhai Mati Das Bhai Sati Das Bhai Dayala |
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1675 | The trio are revered as early Sikh martyrs. By order of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Bhai Mati Das was executed by being bound between two pillars and sawn in half,[157] while his younger brother Bhai Sati Das was wrapped in cotton wool soaked in oil and set on fire,[158] and Bhai Dayala was boiled in a cauldron full of water and roasted over a block of charcoal.[159] |
Thomas Otway | ![]() |
14 April 1685 | The English dramatist fell on hard times and was suffering from poverty in his later years, and was driven by starvation to beg for food. A gentleman who recognized him gave him a guinea, with which he hastened to a baker's shop, purchased a roll, and choked to death on the first mouthful.[160] |
Jean-Baptiste Lully | ![]() |
22 March 1687 | The French composer died of a gangrenous abscess after accidentally piercing his foot with a staff while he was vigorously conducting a Te Deum. It was customary at that time to conduct by banging a staff on the floor. He refused to have his leg amputated so he could still dance.[161] |
William III of England | ![]() |
8 March 1702 | The king of England was riding his horse when it stumbled on a molehill. William fell and broke his collarbone, then contracted pneumonia and died several days later. After he died, Jacobites were said to have toasted in the mole's honour, calling it "the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat".[96] |
Hannah Twynnoy | ![]() |
October 1703 | The 33-year-old barmaid of The White Lion was mauled to death by a tiger in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. She was the first person to be killed by a tiger in British history.[162] |
Sarah Grosvenor | 14 September 1742 | The 19-year-old woman was getting an abortion from Dr. John Hallowell. However, on the 14th, she died from the complications of the surgery. Grosvenor was the first case of a surgical abortion.[163] | |
Frederick, Prince of Wales | ![]() |
31 March 1751 | The son of George II of Great Britain and father of George III died of a pulmonary embolism, but was commonly claimed to have been killed by being struck by a cricket ball.[20]: 105 [164] |
Professor Georg Wilhelm Richmann | ![]() |
6 August 1753 | The Russian physicist was killed when a globe of ball lighting which he created in his laboratory struck him in the forehead.[165] |
Henry Hall | 8 December 1755 | The 94-year-old British lighthouse keeper died several days after fighting a fire at Rudyerd's Tower, during which molten lead from the roof fell down his throat. His autopsy revealed that "the diaphragmatic upper mouth of the stomach greatly inflamed and ulcerated, and the tuncia in the lower part of the stomach burnt; and from the great cavity of it took out a great piece of lead ... which weighed exactly seven ounces, five drachms and eighteen grains". The piece of lead is currently in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland.[166][167] | |
Unknown concubine of King Tetui of Mangaia | 1777 | In approximately 1777, a concubine of King Tetui was killed by a falling coconut on the island Mangaia in the Cook Islands.[168] | |
Col. Francis Barber | ![]() |
2 February 1783 | The 32-year-old colonel was killed when a tree fell on top of him as he was riding his horse to dine with George Washington[169] in Newburgh, New York.[170] |
James Otis Jr. | ![]() |
23 May 1783 | The 58-year-old son of famed lawyer James Otis was killed by a lightning strike in Andover, Massachusetts.[171][172] |
Frantisek Kotzwara | ![]() |
2 September 1791 | While in London, the 31-year-old Czech violinist visited a prostitute named Susannah Hill and requested his neck be tied with a noose around a door knob. He died after the sexual intercourse of erotic asphyxiation.[173] |
Samuel Spencer | 20 March 1793 | A former colonel from North Carolina was sleeping on a porch in Anson County while wearing a red cap. Spencer's bobbling head drew the attention of a turkey, which viewed Spencer as another turkey and fatally wounded the 59-year-old with its talons.[174][175] |
19th century
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Thomas Millwood | ![]() |
3 January 1804 | The 32-year-old plasterer was shot and killed by excise officer Francis Smith, who mistook him for the Hammersmith ghost due to his white uniform. Smith was later sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to one year's imprisonment with hard labor, and he received a full pardon later in the year.[176] |
John Cummings | ![]() |
March 1809 | After seeing a circus knife-swallower, seaman John Cummings began actually swallowing knives. On one occasion, he swallowed four knives, and quickly passed three with no ill-health. He later swallowed 14 knives, and after some days with abdominal pain, he passed all of them. He finally swallowed 20 knives and a clasp knife case, but after a few days, he had only passed the case; he died after four years in pain. On autopsy, a knife blade and spring were found in his intestines, and between 30 and 40 fragments of metal, wood, and horn in his stomach.[177] |
Victims of the London Beer Flood | ![]() |
17 October 1814 | At Meux & Co's Horse Shoe Brewery, a 22-foot-tall (6.7 m) wooden vat of fermenting porter burst, causing chain reactions and destroying several large beer barrels. The beer subsequently flooded the nearby slum and killed eight people. Several people also subsequently died from alcohol poisoning as a result of vaporized liquor.[178][179][180] |
William Huskisson | ![]() |
15 September 1830 | The 60-year-old British statesman, financer, and MP was crushed to death by the Stephenson's Rocket after a failed attempt to put the locomotive in reverse.[181] |
Unknown man | 3 April 1838 | A horse keeper was killed when a blood horse bit him in the jugular vein.[182] | |
William Henry Harrison | ![]() |
4 April 1841 | The 9th President of the United States died a month after his inauguration from an illness (possibly pneumonia or enteric fever) that developed after he stood in the rain to deliver his 2-hour-long inaugural address, the longest by any U.S. President. Medical treatments Harrison received in the last week of his life included opium, castor oil and leeches. Harrison remains the U.S. President to have served the shortest term in office and was the first President to die in office.[37][183] |
Unknown slave | 16 August 1841 | A young slave of Pierre de Puerto was fishing in the bayou of New Orleans and fell asleep while the fish line was wrapped around his leg. The next day his body was found on shore, drowned, with the hook of the line in the mouth of a 6-foot (1.8 m) long alligator gar, which was also dead.[184] | |
Jane Goodwin | 22 October 1844 | The 22-year-old woman died from her tight corset in a church pew in Dundee, Scotland.[185] | |
Unknown male | January 1848 | A resident of East Germantown, Indiana, a member of the Sons of Temperance, was found dead in the snow. It was reported that he froze to death while intoxicated.[186] | |
Zachary Taylor | ![]() |
9 July 1850 | The 12th President of the United States died of diarrhea and dysentry 5 days after consuming raw cherries and iced milk at a 4th of July event at the site of the Washington Monument.[37][187][188] Persistent speculation that Taylor was poisoned would lead to the exhumation of some of his remains in 1991, but scientific testing found no evidence of poison.[187][188] |
William Snyder | 11 January 1854 | The 13-year-old died in San Francisco, California, reportedly after a circus clown named Manuel Rays swung him around by his heels.[189] | |
Victims of the 1858 Bradford sweets poisoning | ![]() |
1858 | In Bradford, England, a batch of sweets accidentally poisoned with arsenic trioxide were sold by William Hardaker, colloquially referred to as "Humbug Billy". Around five boxes of sweets were delivered and sold. Around 20 people died and 200 people suffered from the effects of the poison.[190][191] |
George Yugle | 16 March 1860 | A young charcoal burner sustained a serious hip injury while drunk. He repeatedly stated that he was going to die, which Mr. Schardin, the proprietor of a billiard saloon where Yugle was resting, said that it would be impossible for Yugle to do. In response, Yugle made a bet with Schardin, which Schardin accepted, that he would die in 15 minutes. Schardin and others returned to the room 40 minutes later and found Yugle dead.[192] | |
Jim Creighton | ![]() |
18 October 1862 | The 21-year-old American baseball player from Manhattan died from abdominal pain, possibly caused by throwing his own ball which likely gave him a ruptured bladder or a ruptured hernia.[193] |
Julius Peter Garesché | ![]() |
31 December 1862 | The Cuban-born professional soldier was killed on the first day of the Battle of Stones River when a cannon ball decapitated him.[194] |
John Sedgwick | ![]() |
9 May 1864 | In the midst of battle, the Union officer said, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance," before being shot and killed by a Confederate sniper.[100] |
Archduchess Mathilda of Austria | ![]() |
6 June 1867 | The daughter of Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen set her dress on fire while trying to hide a cigarette from her father, who had forbidden her to smoke.[195][196] |
Unknown woman | 1869 | A woman in a village in Lincolnshire, England, became severely ill and later died after consuming her own hair for 12 years.[197] | |
Mary Ward | ![]() |
31 August 1869 | The Irish scientist, naturalist, microscopist, author, and artist was killed by a carriage built by William Parsons' sons. While riding in the carriage, it hit a bend which caused Ward to fly out of the carriage where she was cut, bruised, and bleeding from her ears. She is the first known carriage fatality.[198] |
Two Iranian maids | ![]() |
1870 | In Iran a wealthy woman's house was set ablaze while her cats were still inside. The woman sent two maids to retrieve her cats, who proceeded to kill the two maids.[197] |
Clement Vallandigham | ![]() |
17 June 1871 | The American politician and lawyer, who was defending a man accused of murder, accidentally shot himself while demonstrating how the victim might have done so. His client was acquitted.[199][200] |
Henry Taylor | ![]() |
November 1872 | The pallbearer at Kensal Green Cemetery, in London, was crushed by the coffin he was helping carry after he tripped on a stone. The widow of the man in it reportedly "nearly went into hysterics".[197] |
James "Jim" Cullen | 6 November 1873 | The 25-year-old Irish man became the only man ever lynched in Mapleton, Maine,[201] after he committed a robbery and beat two deputy sheriffs to death with an axe.[202][203][204] | |
James Alfred Dagwell | 9 July 1874 | While in a state of delirium tremens, the 23-year-old member of the Victorian Artillery Corps jumped out of a window and hit a lamp, falling 20 feet (6.1 m). The impact of the fall fractured his skull.[205] | |
Unknown man | 1875 | A factory worker in Manchester found a mouse on her table and screamed. A man rushed over to her and tried to shoo it away, but it tried to hide in his clothes, and when he gasped in surprise the mouse dove into his mouth and he swallowed it. The mouse tore and bit the man's throat and chest, and he later died "in horrible agony".[206] | |
Victims of the Dublin Whiskey Fire | ![]() |
18 June 1875 | At The Liberties, Dublin, Ireland (then part of the United Kingdom), a fire broke out at Laurence Malone's bonded storehouse on the corner of Ardee Street, where 5,000 hogsheads (262,500 imperial gallons or 1,193,000 litres or 315,200 US gallons) of whiskey were being stored. The heat caused the barrels in the storehouse to explode, sending a stream of whiskey flowing through the doors and windows of the burning building. The burning whiskey then flowed along the streets where it quickly demolished a row of small houses. Despite the damage from the fire, all of the resulting 13 fatalities were caused by alcohol poisoning after drinking the undiluted flooded whiskey.[207][208] |
Queen Sunanda Kumariratana | ![]() |
31 May 1880 | The 19-year-old queen consort of King Rama V of Siam died when her boat flipped over. A large crowd formed but none of them could help because touching the queen was a capital offense.[37][209] |
Hague and another female servant | October 1881 | A British servant of one Mr. Birchall was instructed by his master to retrieve a four-chambered pistol.[210] Hague did so, but while examining the gun he shot himself in the jaw which caused instant death. He was discovered by another servant who also shot herself.[211] | |
Sir William Payne-Gallwey, 2nd Baronet | 19 December 1881 | The former British MP died after sustaining severe internal injuries when he fell on a turnip while hunting.[212][213] | |
Joseph Huebner | 1882 | The Austrian immigrant had been drinking whiskey, and accidentally drank a bottle of kerosene, after which he collapsed. The people who found him could not tell if he had died or just passed out; regardless, he was buried and is now said to haunt the house he collapsed in.[214] | |
Louisa Cruikshank | ![]() |
July 1882 | The 18-year-old girl in Brooklyn committed suicide by ingesting Paris green paint, which is arsenic-based. Cruikshank "frequently expressed a wish to die" and ultimately bought the paint at a hardware shop, instead of buying arsenic at a pharmacy, which would have raised questions. The next day, Cruikshank was playing the piano when she fell ill because of the paint. Her last words were reportedly, "Mama I may as well tell you. I have taken Paris Green. I have done what I said I would do."[215][216] |
Mrs. O'Reilly | 30 September 1883 | The 36-year-old servant from the West Clive Hotel in New Zealand was found on the side of a road by a boy carrying milk. It is said that O'Reilly had been walking in the middle of the night in the rain until she could not go on any longer and decided to wait for a man named Hall. O'Reilly died half an hour later.[217] | |
Allan Pinkerton | ![]() |
1 July 1884 | The founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency tripped on the pavement and severely bit his tongue, which became infected with gangrene.[218] |
Samuel Wardell | ![]() |
31 December 1885 | The lamplighter in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York, had attached a 10-pound (4.5 kg) rock to his alarm clock, which would crash to the floor and awaken him. On Christmas Eve, he rearranged his furniture for a party, but forgot to change his room back afterwards. When the alarm mechanism went off the next morning, the rock fell on his head and killed him.[197][219][220] |
George Murichson | 13 May 1886 | The 8-year-old boy from Aroostook County, Maine, died from a hemorrhage after having a live snake pulled out of his mouth. The snake was speculated to have gone down his throat after he had "gone to sleep in some field".[221][222][223] | |
Julian Smith | 23 September 1887 | The patient at the Kew Asylum died after swallowing a silver dinner fork in February 1887. An autopsy revealed that the fork's handle was in Smith's stomach, with the prongs embedded in his liver; part of a needle was also in the body.[224] | |
Unknown Iraqi male | 22 August 1888 | At around 8:30 pm, a shower of meteorites fell "like rain" on a village in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq (then part of the Ottoman Empire). One man died and another was paralyzed. His death is considered the only credible case of death-by-meteorite.[225] | |
Isaack Rabbanovitch | 1891 | In Vilna, Russia (now part of Lithuania), a bear walked into an inn and drank several kegs of vodka. When Rabbanovitch attempted to take the alcohol, he was hugged to death by the intoxicated bear along with his 2 sons and daughter.[197] | |
Three members of the Building family | 21 April 1891 | The 6-person family was traveling from Tipton, Tennessee, to Texas. While camping in Boone County, Arkansas, the mother and 2 of the children died from drinking coffee made with water that had been contaminated with a large centipede. The father and 2 other children survived.[226] | |
Agnes Harley | 7 January 1892 | According to a post-mortem examination by a Dr. Mollison, Harley "died from exhaustion consequent upon having been confined [given birth], and in consequence of certain injuries she had received." Harley's child also died. The inquest subsequently considered whether Harley had died from causes of "maltreatment".[227] | |
Walter Cowle | 1893 | Cowle made a bet with one of his friends that he could fit a whole billiard ball inside his mouth and close his lips around it. However, when he attempted to do so, Cowle choked on the ball. One of his friends tried to hang him upside down and slap him on the back to get it out, but without success. Cowle later died from suffocation.[228] | |
Mary Agnes Lapish | April 1893 | The Australian woman stumbled into a barbed-wire fence, possibly while intoxicated, and was strangled by her fur collar.[229][230] | |
James Wilson | 23 January 1894 | The man in Bloemfontein, South Africa, died when he fell off of his horse. He was buried in the same coffin that he had playfully tried out for size the day before.[231] | |
George Howell | 7 September 1895 | A mechanic from Florida died in a hospital of starvation because he was unable to eat or drink due to an injury caused by a peach pit.[232] | |
Dominick Abbanez | November 1895 | In Columbus, Ohio, an Italian painter called upon a physician named Dr. J. H. Kistler to examine his arm due to an unnatural growth that had appeared. Dr. Kistler claimed that it was most likely a cancerous tumor, although this could not be confirmed. Abbanez died of his mysterious illness soon afterward. The coroner found that the temperature of Abbanez' corpse was 109 °F (43 °C), and the body turned red soon after death. The coroner believed the cause of death to be uremia, but Abbanez' widow refused an autopsy for him.[233] | |
Jeremiah Haralson | ![]() |
1895 | The former United States Congressman from Alabama disappears from the historical record after his 1895 imprisonment for pension fraud in Albany, New York. He was reportedly killed by an unknown animal while coal mining near Denver, Colorado, c. 1916, but there is little or no historical evidence for this.[234][235] |
Isaac Woods | 31 January 1896 | The 55-year-old well digger was working inside a 25-foot (7.6 m) deep well in Randolph County, Georgia, when a layer of dirt and sand spilled into the well, burying him alive.[236] | |
Bridget Driscoll | ![]() |
17 August 1896 | The 44-year-old, the first recorded case of a pedestrian killed in a collision with a motor car in Great Britain,[237][238] was struck on the grounds of the Crystal Palace in London, by a car belonging to the Anglo-French Motor Carriage Company while giving demonstration rides.[237] |
Salomon August Andree, Knut Fraenkel, and Nils Strindberg | ![]() |
October 1897 | The group of men died of exhaustion on the island Kvitoya while trying to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon.[239] |
Louisa Maria Langridge | Spring 1898 | The wife of a horse-keeper died when she moved a bottle of ammonia which burned her face. The doctor who treated her, Dr. Edward Fish, claimed that the bottle exploded because of its close proximity to a hot fire. Langridge died of bronchitis due to inhaling the ammonia vapors.[230] | |
Michael Schwab | ![]() |
29 June 1898 | The German-American labor organizer and supporter of the Haymarket Square Incident died of starvation induced by tuberculosis in Chicago, Illinois.[240] |
Empress Elisabeth of Austria | ![]() |
10 September 1898 | Stabbed with a thin file by Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni while strolling through Geneva with her lady-in-waiting Irma Sztáray. The wound pierced her pericardium and a lung. Her extremely tight corset held the wound closed, so she did not realize what had happened (believing a passerby had struck her), and walked on for some time before collapsing.[241][242] |
Joseph Gril | 29 July 1899 | According to The Anaconda Standard, a saloon keeper named Joseph Gril was electrocuted by 102 volts of electricity and died in his bar in Anaconda, Montana.[243] | |
Unknown Pennsylvania farmer | October 1899 | A unknown man fell from an apple tree and broke 2 of his ribs. A splinter pierced his heart, and he died.[244] |
20th century
[edit]1900–1960
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Victims of the 1900 English beer poisoning | ![]() |
1900 | In the English Midlands, North West England, and Manchester, doctors saw that avid drinkers had numbness in the hands or feet. However, around 41 people succumbed to peripheral neuritis, and people decided to investigate. They discovered the cause to be alcoholic neuropathy caused by non-purified sulphuric acid laced with arsenic. Over 6,000 people died from the poison and most of the victims were paralyzed from the effects.[245][246] |
Jesse William Lazear | ![]() |
25 September 1900 | The 34-year-old American physician was convinced that mosquitoes were carriers for yellow fever. He allowed himself to be bitten by multiple mosquitoes and died days later from the disease.[17][247] |
Victims of the Thanksgiving Day Disaster | ![]() |
29 November 1900 | During the 1900 The Big Game American football match between the California Golden Bears and the Stanford Cardinal in San Francisco, a large crowd of people who did not want to pay the $1 (equivalent to $37 in 2023) admission fee gathered upon the roof of a glass blowing factory to watch for free. The roof collapsed, spilling many spectators onto a furnace. Of the hundreds of people on the roof, at least 100 people fell four stories to the factory floor. 60 to 100 more people fell directly on top of the furnace, the surface temperature of which was estimated to be around 500 °F (260 °C). Fuel pipes were severed as a result of the roof collapse, spraying many victims with scalding hot oil. The fuel also ignited, setting many bodies on fire.[248] Twenty-three people were killed, and over 100 more were injured. The disaster remains the deadliest accident at a sporting event in U.S. history.[249] |
James Doyle Jr. | 30 January 1901 | The lineworker in Smartsville, California, was killed by an electric shock through a telephone receiver after a broken power line came in contact with the telephone wire.[250] | |
Adelbert S. Hay | ![]() |
23 June 1901 | The 24-year-old American consul and politician died after falling 60 feet (18 m) from a window in the New Haven House in New Haven, Connecticut. The San Francisco Call speculated that Hay had been sitting on the window for air and eventually fell asleep, causing him to fall to his death.[251] |
Mary Franks | 12 July 1902 | The woman died from suffocation caused by "matter from her tongue" which went into her throat after a tooth extraction.[252] | |
Jessie Smith | August 1902 | The elderly woman in Te Aroha was found dead behind her house in a tank. She had come out of an asylum before her disappearance.[253] | |
R. Stanton Walker | 25 October 1902 | The 20-year-old was watching an amateur baseball game in Morristown, Ohio, with a friend on either side of him. One of the friends borrowed a knife from the other to sharpen his pencil as he was keeping score, and when he was finished passed the knife to Walker to pass to the other friend. As Walker was holding the knife, a foul ball struck him in the hand and drove the knife into his chest next to his heart. His friends asked if he was hurt and he said "not much", but the wound soon began to bleed heavily and he died within minutes.[254] | |
Unknown Hawaiian male | May 1903 | An unidentified person was beaten to death with a Bible during a healing ceremony gone wrong in Honolulu, Hawai'i.[255][failed verification] He was being treated for malaria when his family summoned a Kahuna, who decided he was possessed by devils and tried to exorcise the demons;[256][failed verification] the Kahuna was charged with manslaughter.[citation needed] | |
Romaine Romania and John Banks | 26 May 1903 | Romania, a 45-year-old native of Belgium, died in Norfolk, Virginia, after taking a large amount of calomel, eating several oranges, and drinking a considerable amount of beer. Romania's head swelled to twice normal size. That same day, barge worker John Banks was electrocuted when the rigging of his vessel came in contact with the wires crossing a bridge belonging to the Norfolk Railway and Light Company.[257] | |
Ed Delahanty | ![]() |
2 July 1903 | The American baseball player for the Phillies died after being removed from a train while drunk, falling off International Bridge, and going over Niagara Falls. Delahanty reportedly downed five shots of whiskey, broke into a fire axe case, attempted to shove over a partition, and allegedly grabbed a woman's ankles and tried to pull her out of her berth. He may also have threatened other passengers with razor blades. The conductor removed him from the train and asked him to calm down because he was still in Canada, to which he allegedly shouted, "I don't care if I'm in Canada or dead!" He later encountered and may have scuffled with Sam Kingston, a local night watchman, after which he went into the river and over the Falls. Kingston's account of the incident was spotty and inconsistent; it is unclear whether Delahanty was intentionally pushed, accidentally fell, or decided to jump.[258] |
Benjamin Taylor A Bell | 1 March 1904 | On 18 February 1904, while taking his habitual shortcut to the Canadian Mining Review offices through an adjacent store, the Canadian journalist walked through the wrong door in the store and fell 10 feet (3.0 m) down an elevator shaft. He died of his injuries 12 days later.[259] | |
John Mortensen | 1 May 1904 | The 19-year-old duck hunter from Wairoa, New Zealand, drowned in about 6 inches (15 cm) of water on the Whare-o-Maraenui reserve in Napier, New Zealand, apparently having fallen while having a seizure.[260] | |
Benjamin and Edwin Coshkey | 24 June 1904 | Two brothers picking cherries near Wabank, Lancaster Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, were electrocuted when they made contact with an exposed wire in the branches.[261] | |
John Ericsen | 4 July 1904 | The 11-year-old boy from Butte, Montana, went missing on 4 July and was found dead 4 days later under a pile of coal in a bin near the North Pacific roundhouse.[262] | |
Melissa M. Tiemann | 7 July 1904 | The 50-year-old resident of Los Angeles fell from a streetcar and struck the back of her head on the ground, driving the teeth of an aluminum comb she was wearing into her skull.[263] | |
Clarence Madison Dally | ![]() |
2 October 1904 | The 39-year-old American glassblower died from radiation on his hands while using a handmade X-ray. Dally is the first person known to have died from X-ray exposure.[264] |
Jane Stanford | ![]() |
28 February 1905 | The founder of Stanford University died mysteriously from strychnine poisoning. The case of her death was rumored as poisoning, but later changed into "natural causes," according to David Starr Jordan. Who or what killed Stanford is still a mystery.[265] |
Charles Persich | March 1905 | The baby from Sydney died from intussuspection, meaning that his bowels had "telescoped".[266] | |
Thomas Melia | 9 December 1905 | An employee of a brewery in Brooklyn died when he was caught in "an avalanche of shifting malt and barley and was suffocated."[267] | |
Mary Ellen Rumble | 19 December 1905 | The daughter of a farmer in Watervale near Murrumburrah in New South Wales was killed when one of a group of horses attempting to escape from a paddock knocked her down, causing her neck to snap.[268] | |
L. R. Davis | 1906 | The 76-year-old inmate of the state insane asylum in Norfolk, Nebraska, was granted a parole. Upon seeing his grandson, who had come to take him home, "he was so filled with joy that he suddenly expired."[269] | |
Archibald Anderson | 4 March 1907 | The 19-year-old was bathing in the Yarra River when he choked on a tooth plate.[270] | |
Jane Hewitt | 1 September 1908 | The woman residing in South Melbourne was found dead on the floor in her nighttime attire, having been unconscious for several days. She died from erysipelas and blood loss caused by a wound to her temple.[271] | |
Thomas Selfridge | ![]() |
17 September 1908 | Thomas Selfridge and Orville Wright were presenting the 1908 Wright Military Flyer to the US Army Signal Corps Division at Fort Myer. The plane made 41⁄2 rounds around the Fort before running into problems and crashing. Selfridge fractured his skull and died three hours later.[272][273] |
Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler | ![]() |
14 November 1908 | The Chief of the German Imperial Military Cabinet suffered a heart attack and died aged 56 after giving a ballet performance to Kaiser Wilhelm Il and other members of a hunting party staying at Donaueschingen Palace. Shortly after ending his recital with a bow, he collapsed and was pronounced dead at the scene.[274][275] The circumstances of his death were covered up by military officials so as not to further inflame public outrage over the Eulenburg affair, a government scandal dealing with accusations of homosexual behavior against members of the Kaiser's cabinet and entourage.[276] |
George Spencer Millet | ![]() |
15 February 1909 | The American teenager who worked as an office boy at an insurance company at the Metropolitan Life Building in New York City, was fleeing six young women stenographers at his workplace intent on giving him kisses for his 15th birthday while carrying a metal ink eraser in his breast pocket. As the women moved in for their kisses, he fell forward, and the eraser's point pierced his heart, killing him.[277][278] |
Peter A. Rees | 17 February 1909 | The former ice dealer in Philadelphia was found dead in his home. According to the newspaper, a woman was arrested and questioned, but later analysis of his body showed that he had died from "cirrhosis of the heart." Other accounts state that Rees was murdered.[279] | |
Unknown servant girl | March 1909 | A young servant girl in Altendorf, near Cologne, Germany, died while writing a love letter. She "was overtaken by a fit, and fell with her head so heavily on the table that death ensued." The last words she had written were, "I shall adore thee to my last hour."[280] | |
Doc Powers | ![]() |
26 April 1909 | The 38-year-old American Major League Baseball player ran into a wall while chasing a foul ball during a Boston Red Sox-Philadelphia Athletics game at Philadelphia's Shibe Park, on April 12, 1909. He died from internal injuries and gangrene two weeks later.[281] |
Benjamin S. Kradwell | ![]() |
14 April 1910 | The 26-year-old drug store owner from Boscobel, Wisconsin (who lived in Racine at the time), died when he fell off a Chicago and North Western train heading for Mountain Home, Idaho, into a creek in Vail, Iowa, under mysterious circumstances.[282] |
Ada Gregory | 3 June 1910 | The 52-year-old widow in Bentleigh, Victoria, who had been suffering from "fits of melancholia", began convulsing after rubbing powder on her teeth and asking her two children to take some medicine, which they did not do. She was believed to have taken strychnine.[283] | |
Patrick Dolan | 22 October 1910 | In Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, the labor unionist fell asleep, waiting for a train. He woke up as it was starting to leave the station. However, when he attempted to board the train, he fell under its wheels and was killed.[284] | |
Mrs. Samuel E. Allender | 23 January 1910 | The 52-year-old wife of Samuel E. Allender, a prominent railway official in St. Louis, Missouri, drowned in a bathtub after suffering an attack of vertigo.[285] | |
George Vedder | 25 February 1911 | The man from Yonkers, New York, killed himself after hallucinating that his dead wife told him to do so. It is said that Vedder broke an "solemn oath" that he would be faithful to his wife. The man was found dead in the Fort Field Reservoir.[286] | |
Jack Daniel | ![]() |
9 October 1911 | The American whiskey distiller from Lynchburg, Tennessee, died from blood poisoning six years after he supposedly kicked his safe out of frustration that he could not remember the combination, breaking his left big toe and leading to an infection and gangrene.[287] |
Franz Reichelt | ![]() |
4 February 1912 | The tailor and inventor leaped from the Eiffel Tower and fell to his death wearing a parachute made from cloth, his own invention. He was asked by friends and authorities to use a dummy for the feat, but declined, saying "I intend to prove the worth of my invention". He was known as the Flying Tailor.[288] |
Ramón Artagaveytia | ![]() |
15 April 1912 | A wealthy Argentinean was a survivor of the sinking of the steamship America in 1871. It took him 41 years to get over his fear of the ocean before he boarded the Titanic, which sank.[17] |
A Swiss couple | ![]() |
December 1912 | A couple visited the Handegg Falls near Meiringen, Switzerland. While they were there the bridge they were standing on broke and they fell 240 feet (73 m) into a whirlpool.[289] |
Mr. & Mrs. Emile Froment-Meurice | ![]() |
25 April 1913 | A famed French goldsmith and his wife were killed when their house, in an aristocratic quarter of Paris, collapsed on them.[290] |
Mrs. Jim Thomason | 6 May 1913 | According to the Washington Telegraph, the wife of Jim Thomason died shortly after being stung by a bee in Columbus, Arkansas. The woman was directing her husband on hiving a swarm of bees when she was suddenly stung and fled into the house, where she fell unconscious and died three days later.[291] | |
Peter T. Graham | 13 May 1913 | A farmer from Stanwood, Iowa, was killed while trying to fix a metal fence. A bolt of lightning struck the fence, electrocuting the man to death.[292] | |
Unknown woman | February 1914 | The middle-aged woman was found dead leaning over a copper with her "feet sprawled out in a curious manner" by a butchering establishment in North Sydney. The woman, who had been dead for 12 hours, had apparently choked while vomiting.[293] | |
Romain Moll | July 1914 | The California rancher fell head-first into a posthole 6 feet (1.8 m) deep and 2 feet (0.61 m) wide. Unable to get out, he eventually suffocated.[294] | |
Julian Carlton | ![]() |
7 October 1914 | The servant to American architect Frank Lloyd Wright committed a mass murder spree on 15 August 1914, at Wright's Taliesin studio, during which he killed seven people with a hatchet and set the studio ablaze. Carlton then attempted suicide by drinking hydrochloric acid. However, this failed to kill him. After nearly being lynched, Carlton was arrested and brought to a jail in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, where, having severely damaged his esophagus, he starved to death 47 days later.[295][296] |
Benjamin F. Steward | 30 May 1915 | The 45-year-old stock buyer attempted to throw part of a horse carcass over a railing into the Iowa River. Part of it caught on him, and he was pulled over as well.[297] | |
Rose Talbot Bullard | ![]() |
22 December 1915 | The physician and medical school professor from Birmingham, Iowa, unknowingly died from blood poisoning after complications from a failed dental infection cure.[298][299] |
George William Edwards | 30 June 1915 | The fuelman in Junee, New South Wales, was killed by opening a truck door that struck him in the forehead. His body was found under a tub.[300] | |
Martin Fisher | 4 February 1916 | Fisher, a farmer from Moran Township, Minnesota, was butchering a hog in a shed when the blade slipped and Fisher stabbed his leg, severing an artery. He died shortly thereafter.[301] | |
William/Martin McClelland | 25 February 1916 | The swagman from Queensland died from inflamed bowels brought on by eating wheat. His cause of death was later identified as a case of acute diarrhea.[302] | |
Grigori Rasputin | ![]() |
30 December [O.S. 17 December] 1916 | The Russian mystic died of three gunshot wounds, one of which was a close-range shot to his forehead. Little is certain about his death beyond this, and the circumstances of his death have been the subject of considerable speculation.[303] According to his murderer himself, Prince Felix Yusupov, Grigori Rasputin consumed tea, cakes, and wine which had been laced with cyanide but he did not appear to be affected by it. He was then shot once in the chest and believed to be dead but, after a while, he leapt up and attacked Yusupov, who freed himself and fled. Rasputin followed and made it into the courtyard before being shot again, and collapsing into a snowbank. The conspirators then wrapped his body and dropped it into the Malaya Nevka River.[37][115][304] |
William John Wallace | 4 February 1917 | The fisherman was talking to two men, leaning on a clothesline. The line split and Wallace fell on his back, dislocating his neck.[305] | |
Sewall Willis Rodgers | 1 August 1918 | The cadet from Brookline, Massachusetts, was riding his motorcycle at Chanute Field in Illinois and was killed when he was hit by an airplane flown by Lieut. Symnesttebedt.[306] | |
Rev. Walter Murray | 1918 | The YMCA worker in France was killed when two shells exploded simultaneously on either side of him. There were no wounds on his body.[307] | |
Pvt. Joseph Mantach | 5 or 6 October 1918 | the 28-year-old soldier from Kenosha, Wisconsin, drowned in Rock River by Camp Grant. He had been critically ill with Spanish flu and had escaped from the hospital in delirium.[308] | |
Arthur Thomas Hunter | 12 December 1918 | The soldier was found dead with his head stuck through a wooden fire escape and his neck dislocated.[309] | |
Victims of the Great Molasses Flood | ![]() |
15 January 1919 | 21 people were killed and 150 injured after a large tank of molasses burst in Boston's North End.[135][310][311][312] |
Ray Chapman | ![]() |
17 August 1920 | On 16 August 1920, while he was up to bat, the 29-year-old Cleveland Indians baseball player was struck in the head by a pitch thrown by New York Yankees' Carl Mays and died 12 hours later.[313] |
Alexander of Greece | ![]() |
25 October 1920 | The 27-year-old Greek king died of sepsis after being bitten by a palace steward's pet Barbary macaque in his garden, while trying to break up a fight between his German shepherd and another monkey.[314] |
Thomas Lynn Bradford | ![]() |
5 February 1921 | In an attempt to ascertain the existence of an afterlife, the spiritualist, committed suicide by sealing his Detroit apartment, blowing out the pilot of his heater, and turning on the gas, dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. Bradford had intended to communicate his findings to fellow spiritualist Ruth Starkweather Doran, but some weeks after his death, The New York Times ran the article "Dead Spiritualist Silent".[citation needed] |
Michael F. Farley | ![]() |
8 October 1921 | The U.S. Representative and Gore–McLemore resolution supporter died of anthrax he contracted from his shaving brush.[100] |
Mrs. W. C. Eckersley | 25 November 1922 | The woman from Glen Innes, New South Wales, was found drowned in a cask of water. It was surmised that she was leaning over the cask when she suddenly fainted and fell into it.[315] | |
George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon | ![]() |
5 April 1923 | The financier of Howard Carter's search for Tutankhamun died after a mosquito bite, which he had cut while shaving, became infected. Some attributed his death to the so-called curse of the pharaohs.[316][317] |
Frank Hayes | ![]() |
4 June 1923 | The 22-year-old jockey from Elmont, New York, died of a heart attack mid-race and collapsed on the horse, which nonetheless crossed the finish line first, still carrying his body.[318][319][320] |
Martha Mansfield | ![]() |
30 November 1923 | While the 24-year-old American film actress was on location in San Antonio, Texas filming the American Civil War drama The Warrens of Virginia, a lit match was carelessly tossed by a crew member, which ignited the hoop skirts and ruffles of her Civil War costume. Mansfield had just finished filming her scenes and retired to a car when her clothing burst into flames. Co-star Wilfred Lytell and a chauffeur were able to extinguish the flames, and Mansfield was rushed to a hospital, where she died the following day from her injuries.[321][322] |
Thornton Jones | 1924 | The lawyer from Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales, woke up to find that he had his throat slit. Motioning for a paper and pencil, he wrote, "I dreamt that I had done it. I awoke to find it true", and died 80 minutes later. He had done it himself while unconscious.[323] An inquest at Bangor delivered a verdict of "suicide while temporarily insane".[324] | |
Calvin Coolidge Jr. | ![]() |
7 July 1924 | The 16-year-old younger son of Calvin Coolidge played tennis with his elder brother at the White House tennis courts and neglected to wear socks. A blister on the third toe of his right foot quickly became infected, and he died just over one week later when sepsis set in.[325] |
Mr. and Mrs. Earl J. Dunn | 13 July 1924 | While attempting to turn around at Grand View in Yellowstone National Park, the Dunns somehow backed their car over a cliff, despite a tree barrier that would normally have made this impossible. The vehicle fell 800 feet (240 m) and then rolled another 200 feet (61 m).[326][327][328] | |
Cora Stallman | ![]() |
1 August 1925 | The 45-year-old former schoolteacher, found partially submerged in a cistern on her sister's farm in Humboldt Township, Coles County, Illinois, died from "unknown causes", according to a jury in her court case. It is said she may have committed suicide, been killed by a strange man, or died of fright.[329] |
Bobby Leach | ![]() |
26 April 1926 | The American stunt performer died after a botched amputation of the infected leg which he had broken after slipping on an orange peel. He had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel 15 years earlier.[330] |
Phillip McClean | 1926 | The 16-year-old and his brother were clubbing a cassowary on the family property in Mossman, Queensland,[331] when it knocked him down, kicked him in the neck, and opened a large cut, leading to death from loss of blood.[332] | |
Harry Houdini | ![]() |
31 October 1926 | The 52-year-old Hungarian-American escape artist, illusionist, and stunt performer reportedly died from a punch from college student J. Gordon Whitehead, which gave him "peritonitis, caused by a ruptured appendix."[37][333] However, other stories claim he was murdered. Who or what killed Houdini is still under speculation.[333] |
Isadora Duncan | ![]() |
14 September 1927 | The American dancer broke her neck in Nice, France, when her long scarf became entangled in the open-spoked wheel and rear axle of the Amilcar CGSS automobile in which she was riding.[334] |
Alfred Loewenstein | ![]() |
4 July 1928 | The 3rd-richest man in the world at the time died whilst flying from England to Belgium on his private Fokker F.VII airplane. It is believed he fell out of the aircraft and into the water where he died.[335] |
Gladys Brockwell | ![]() |
2 July 1929 | The 34-year-old film actress died from peritonitis and internal injuries reportedly from an automobile accident in Calabasas, California. While Thomas Stanley Brennan, a friend of Brockwell, was driving the automobile, it went over a 75-foot (23 m) embankment where she was crushed beneath it. She underwent four blood transfusions until peritonitis set in.[336] |
William Kogut | ![]() |
20 October 1930 | The convicted murderer, a death row inmate at San Quentin in California, reportedly committed suicide using a pipe bomb he made with playing cards and a hollow steel leg from his cot.[337][338][note 1] |
Arnold Bennett | ![]() |
27 March 1931 | The British novelist was dining in Paris with his partner, Dorothy. He drank two glasses of tap water during the meal, scoffing at Dorothy's claims that the water in Paris was not properly treated to be safe to drink. Within two days, he contracted typhoid fever and died two months later.[339][340][341] |
Alfred Green | July 1931 | The 17-year-old died of convulsions while being tickled "during a friendly wrestling match."[342] | |
James Leo McDermott | 26 August 1931 | After the 40-year-old Deputy Sheriff stepped out of his car at an oil station, the vehicle began to roll forwards, and McDermott attempted to hop onto the car's running board to stop it. It carried him forward and slammed him into a hook used to hold air and water hoses, which impaled him just below the heart.[343][344][345] | |
Eben Byers | ![]() |
31 March 1932 | The American socialite and industrialist died after drinking excessive quantities of radium. He had developed persistent pain after a fall in 1927, for which he was prescribed Radithor, a patent medicine that contained 1 microcurie each of isotopes 226Ra and 228Ra. He drank a total of around 1400 doses, which concentrated in his bones, continually irradiating him. By 1931, his bones were reportedly disintegrating and his jaw had been removed; he died the next year.[346] |
Peg Entwistle | ![]() |
16 September 1932 | The 24-year-old film actress committed suicide by jumping off the letter "H" of the Hollywoodland Sign. The following day, a letter arrived for Entwistle offering her a role in a movie about a woman on the verge of suicide.[135] |
Michael Malloy | ![]() |
22 February 1933 | Five people, called the "Murder Trust," planned to kill Malloy for life insurance. Over the course of two months, they added antifreeze, turpentine, horse liniment, and finally rat poison in his alcohol, but Malloy drank it with no problems whatsoever. They then tried feeding him wood alcohol, expired oysters, and then a sandwich made of expired sardines and shrapnel, none of which had the desired effect. The group then tried to freeze him to death, and when that failed they ran him over twice with a taxi, from which Malloy recovered. Finally, they connected a hose to a coal gas jet and placed it in his mouth, which caused his death from carbon monoxide poisoning. Malloy was given nicknames such as "Mike the Durable", "Iron Mike", and "The Irish Rasputin".[347][348] |
Rheta Gardner Wynekoop | ![]() |
21 November 1933 | The 23-year-old was found in the basement surgery of her mother-in-law, Dr. Alice Wynekoop. She had been chloroformed, undressed, and shot in the back.[349] |
Grace Weatherstone | 15 December 1933 | The wife of Mr. Roy Weatherstone from Mayfield Garden was found dead in the water wearing male attire. The cause of her death was found to be falling off some rocks which fractured her skull as she fell into the water.[350] | |
Susan Grace Kelly | 16 January 1935 | The 80-year-old woman in Armidale, New South Wales, was sitting with her daughter when she fell back dead after hearing a loud clap of thunder. Her last words were, "That was very close."[351] | |
Mary Emma Busch James | ![]() |
2 May 1936 | The wife of the Los Angeles barber Robert James died from drowning in a fishing pond after being bound and thrust into a den of rattlesnakes. The Los Angeles Police Department later arrested a 38-year-old night manager of a nearby night club, who said that he was the one who bought the snakes from a Pasadena farm and took them to James's La Crescenta home.[352] |
Fred Clapp | 28 May 1937 | A 77-year-old farmer from Clark County, South Dakota, died after being dragged by a bundle of horses while being tied to the harness.[353] | |
Benjamin Taslor | June 1937 | During a carbuncle removal operation, an electric cautery ignited gases from the patient's lungs. This caused an explosion which killed Taslor and injured two nurses.[354] | |
Vivian Hensley | 10 July 1938 | The 42-year-old dentist died after accidentally swallowing a razor blade for a "sleight-of-hand" trick.[355] | |
Nicholas Comper | 17 June 1939 | The aviator and aircraft designer was attempting to light a firework in Hythe, Kent, when a passerby enquired what he was doing; Comper replied that he was an IRA man planning to blow up the town hall. The passerby knocked down Comper, who hit his head on the curb.[356] | |
Italo Balbo | ![]() |
28 June 1940 | Italo Balbo was the Governor of Italian Libya. While Balbo was flying his personal Savoia-Marchetti SM.79, the Libyan airfield at Tobruk was attacked by a squad of British planes. Balbo was killed by friendly fire from Italian anti-aircraft batteries on the ground.[357] |
Leon Trotsky | ![]() |
21 August 1940 | The famed Russian socialist and revolutionary was murdered in his villa in Mexico by Spanish-born NKVD agent Ramón Mercader with a ice axe.[37][358] |
Sherwood Anderson | ![]() |
8 March 1941 | The American writer died of peritonitis after accidentally swallowing a toothpick.[37][359] |
Maj. Kenneth D. McCullar | ![]() |
12 April 1943 | The 27-year-old member of the 64th Bombardment Squadron was taking off for a night mission in New Guinea when he struck something with his bomber, referred to in reports as a "brush kangaroo" and later found to be a wallaby. The bomber crashed on takeoff, which detonated its load of bombs, killing McCullar and the rest of the bomber's crew.[360] The wallaby also died. |
Clarence Stagemyer | ![]() |
29 September 1943 | The 32-year-old was watching a Cleveland Indians-Washington Senators doubleheader in Griffith Stadium when an errant throw by Senators' third baseman Sherry Robertson struck him in the forehead. Despite appearing uninjured afterwards, he heeded the Senators' team physician's entreaties to go to the hospital, where he died the next day of a fractured skull. Stagemyer was the first fan in Major League Baseball history killed by a ball leaving the field, and the only such fatality to date to have been struck by a thrown ball.[361] |
Thomas Midgley Jr. | ![]() |
2 November 1944 | In 1940, the 51-year-old contracted polio, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.[362][363][364] |
Mildred Roth | 21 May 1945 | The 23-year-old from North Braddock, Pennsylvania, died after locking herself inside a cedar chest while attempting to prank her sister. An autopsy later found that she died from suffocation.[365] | |
Thomas Mantell | ![]() |
7 January 1948 | The P-51 Mustang fighter pilot crashed while in pursuit of an unidentified flying object near Franklin, Kentucky, thus becoming the first person known to have died as a result of a UFO sighting. Officially, the object remains unidentified, though the most likely explanation is that it was a U.S. Navy Skyhook balloon.[366] |
Mary Edith Sutton | ![]() |
30 October 1949 | The 11-year-old girl from Indianapolis, Indiana, suffered burns to her legs and lower body after a jar of flaming gasoline was tossed from a stalled car in front of the girl while she was roller-skating back to her home. She was taken to a nearby hospital where she died from her injuries a few hours later.[367] |
Mary Reeser | ![]() |
2 July 1951 | The 67-year-old woman was found by the police in her St. Petersburg, Florida, home almost totally cremated where she sat, while her apartment was relatively damage-free. Some speculate that she spontaneously combusted.[368] |
Margaret Wise Brown | ![]() |
13 November 1952 | The 42-year-old author of Goodnight Moon was hospitalized for an ovarian cyst. To prove how healthy she was after treatment, she kicked her foot in the air, dislodging a blood clot in her leg. The blood clot quickly travelled to her brain, and she died in emergency surgery.[369][370] |
Joseph L. Rauchut | 30 November 1957 | The 32-year-old Patrolman of the New York City Police Department died during a traffic stop on the Queens side of the Kosciuszko Bridge when a truck struck his parked patrol car, which struck and killed him.[371][372] | |
Gareth Jones | ![]() |
30 November 1958 | The British actor died of a heart attack between scenes of a live television play, Underground on the ITV network. Other members of the cast improvised lines, such as, "I'm sure if So‑and‑so were here he would say...", to compensate for his absence. Coincidentally, his character was scripted to die of a heart attack in a later scene of the play.[373][374] |
1960s
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Clarence Hudson | 18 August 1960 | The 66-year-old department store janitor was electrocuted by a homemade electric chair in his Wenatchee, Washington, apartment. Police reported that he had a wet towel at his feet and his head, and quarters at his temples that were connected by wire to a home-made transformer, which increased the voltage from a wall outlet to an estimated 1,000 volts.[375] | |
John A. Byrnes, Richard Leroy McKinley, and Richard C. Legg | 3 January 1961 | During the testing of an experimental nuclear reactor design, in Arco, Idaho, two soldiers and a sailor were killed, but their deaths were not due to radiation poisoning. While trying to bring the reactor online, Byrnes, an army specialist, was supposed to pull a control rod part way out by hand, but he pulled the rod further than intended. The reactor instantly went prompt critical, which flash-boiled the water around the reactor. The force of the steam expanding lifted the entire reactor into the air about 2.77 metres (9 ft 1 in), in what has been described as a water hammer-like effect. Many components were thrown out of the top, one of which impaled Legg, a navy electrician's mate, lifted him from a catwalk, and penetrated the ceiling, leaving him dangling. While the reactor was airborne the radioactive steam escaped, spraying the room. The steam was so hot that Byrnes instantly died of severe thermal burns. McKinley suffered a head wound, from which he died later that day. The steam left the bodies of all three men radioactive, so they were buried in lead coffins. Officials feared that moving them would risk spreading contamination along public roadways, so a graveyard was established in the desert only 0.5 kilometres (0.31 mi) from the explosion. The graveyard is still monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency. The three remain the only human beings killed by a reactor explosion in the United States.[376][377][378][379][380] | |
Leonard Lamoureaux | 24 October 1965 | The 64-year-old Marine Posse Deputy of the Humboldt County, California, Sheriff's Department sustained fatal internal injuries when his patrol jeep, the parking brake of which had not been set properly, rolled forward and pinned him against a steel gate.[381] | |
Nick Piantanida | ![]() |
29 August 1966 | The skydiver died four months after an attempt to break the record for the highest parachute jump near Joe Foss Field, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; his suit had depressurized, causing brain damage from lack of oxygen.[382][383] |
Echol Cole and Robert Walker | 1 February 1968 | The two Memphis, Tennessee, garbage collectors were crushed to death after the trash compactor of their garbage truck malfunctioned while they were taking refuge inside the back of the truck during a rainstorm. They were not allowed to take shelter inside a building due to segregation laws. As a result of their deaths, sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. During the strike, Martin Luther King Jr., who had come to Memphis to support the striking workers, was assassinated.[384] |
1970s
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Alan Fish | 20 May 1970 | The 14-year-old was struck in the head by a Manny Mota foul ball on 16 May while watching the Los Angeles Dodgers play against the San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium, and was knocked unconscious for a minute. He appeared to recover and the Dodger Stadium infirmary gave him an ice pack, two aspirin and released him to watch the rest of the game, during which he behaved normally. The Giants ended up winning the game 5–4. Afterwards, he began shaking and crying uncontrollably during the bus ride to his nearby home; when he arrived, his parents sought medical attention but had to go to three hospitals, despite his worsening condition, before they found one that would accept him early the next morning. His condition required neurosurgery, but continued to worsen, and after a seizure led to apparent brain death, he was taken off life support two days later; the autopsy showed that part of his fractured skull had become lodged in his brain, causing an intracerebral hemorrhage. He was the first fan in Major League Baseball history to die of injuries caused by a foul ball.[385] | |
Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev | ![]() |
29 June 1971 | The Soviet cosmonauts died when their Soyuz 11 spacecraft depressurized during preparations for re-entry. They are the only reported human deaths outside the Earth's atmosphere.[386] |
Basil Brown | 1974 | The 48-year-old health food advocate from Croydon, England, died from liver damage after he consumed 70 million units of Vitamin A and around 10 US gallons (38 litres) of carrot juice over ten days, turning his skin bright yellow.[387][388][389] | |
Kenyon M. Lassiter | ![]() |
19 April 1974 | The 51-year-old Trooper of the Alabama Department of Public Safety was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver whose life Lassiter had saved months earlier after an automobile accident.[390] |
Deborah Gail Stone | ![]() |
8 July 1974 | The 18-year-old hostess for the America Sings attraction at Disneyland mysteriously died after being crushed between two walls around 11:00 p.m. It is speculated that she either fell backwards or tried to jump from one stage to another.[391][392][393] |
Christine Chubbuck | ![]() |
15 July 1974 | The 29-year-old American reporter killed herself on live television during a broadcast about many violent topics. Chubbuck was the first person to commit suicide on live television.[394] |
Peter Kelly | 27 August 1974 | The British commercial diver died of anoxia due to pure helium being fed through his breathing mask during a bell dive in the Norwegian Sector of the North Sea. The other diver in the bell pulled off his mask before losing consciousness and survived.[395][396] | |
Alex Mitchell | ![]() |
24 March 1975 | After watching the "Kung Fu Kapers" episode of The Goodies, the resident of King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, laughed continuously for 25 minutes and then fell dead on his sofa from heart failure due to what doctors discovered years later, via his granddaughter, was a genetic condition called Long QT syndrome.[397][398][399][400] |
Tina Christopherson | ![]() |
18 February 1977 | The 28-year-old woman from Cambridge, Massachusetts died after drinking 4 US gallons (15 litres) of water a day to combat stomach cancer at the Coral Gables Hospital in Coral Gables, Florida.[401] |
Luciano Re Cecconi | ![]() |
18 January 1977 | The 28-year-old professional footballer for S.S. Lazio and the Italy national football team, was shot while pretending to rob a jeweller as a practical joke.[402][403] |
Tom Pryce and Frederick Jansen van Vuuren | 5 March 1977 | Pryce, a driver in the 1977 South African Grand Prix, struck and killed Van Vuuren at 170 miles per hour (270 km/h) as Van Vuuren ran across the Kyalami racetrack to extinguish a burning car. The fire extinguisher which Van Vuuren was carrying struck Pryce's head and killed him.[404][405][406][407] Renzo Zorzi, the driver of the burning car, was uninjured. | |
George W. Redding | ![]() |
17 August 1977 | The 43-year-old Officer of the California Highway Patrol was responding to a car accident when another car struck a downed telephone line, which wrapped around Redding's ankle and threw him into the air and back to the ground, killing him.[408] |
Kurt Gödel | ![]() |
14 January 1978 | The Austrian-American logician and mathematician developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned and refused to eat food prepared by anyone but his wife.[409] When she became ill and was hospitalized, he starved to death. At the time of his death, he only weighed around 65 pounds (29 kg).[410] |
Georgi Markov | ![]() |
7 September 1978 | The Bulgarian dissident writer was poisoned on a London street via a micro-engineered pellet containing ricin, fired into his leg from an umbrella wielded by an assassin associated with the Bulgarian Secret Service. At the time, this secret police force was affiliated with the KGB. Markov died four days later in hospital. No one was ever charged with the assassination.[115][411] |
Robert Williams | ![]() |
25 January 1979 | The Ford plant worker became the first person known to be killed by a robot[412] when a factory robot's arm struck him in the head.[413] |
John Bowen | 13 December 1979 | The 20-year-old resident of Nashua, New Hampshire, was fatally injured at a halftime show at Shea Stadium when a 40-pound (18 kg) model plane shaped like a lawnmower crashed into the stands. He died four days later.[414][415] |
1980s
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Monica Myers | ![]() |
20 March 1980 | The mayor of Betterton, Maryland, was carrying out maintenance work around the sewage tanks at the town's largest municipal facility. According to the Lawrence Journal-World, she fell 4 feet (1.2 m) from the catwalks into a 15-foot (4.6 m) aeration tank, filled with human waste which a deputy in the town's police department described as having the consistency of "putty". Her body was found floating face down by the town engineer the next day.[416] |
Lourdes Maria da Silva | August 1980 | The resident of Caxias do Sul, Brazil, was walking upstairs carrying a Pyrex glass when she tripped, broke it, and fell on the shards, cutting an artery in her neck. She died on her way to the hospital.[417][418] | |
Azaria Chamberlain | ![]() |
17 August 1980 | The 9-week-old from Australia was dragged off and killed by a wild dingo during a family camping trip to Uluru in the Northern Territory. This was the first recorded instance of a dingo killing a human. Azaria's parents, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, received intense media speculation due to the perceived implausibility of a dingo attack; in a highly-publicized trial, Lindy was convicted of murder and Michael named as an accessory. Their convictions were later overturned after Azaria's matinee jacket was discovered in an area with many dingo lairs nearby.[419][420] |
Boris Sagal | 22 May 1981 | The Ukrainian-American film director died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III in Portland, Oregon, after he walked into the tail rotor blades of a helicopter and was partially decapitated.[421][422] He died five hours later at a hospital in Portland.[421] | |
David Alan Kirwan | ![]() |
21 July 1981 | The 24-year-old tourist from La Cañada Flintridge, California, jumped into the alkaline (pH 9) and scalding (202 °F (94 °C)) Celestine Pool at Yellowstone National Park to save his friend's dog. The dog died within moments and its body dissolved in the hot spring. Kirwan, blinded and burned over his entire body, was airlifted to Salt Lake City and died the next day.[423][424][425][426][427] |
David Grundman | ![]() |
4 February 1982 | While shooting at cacti with his shotgun near Lake Pleasant Regional Park, Arizona, Grundman was crushed when a 4-foot (1.2 m) limb detached and fell on him.[422][428][429] |
Michael Scaglione | 15 April 1982 | Scaglione died after smashing his golf club in anger against a golf cart at a golf course near New Orleans, Louisiana. When the club broke the head rebounded and impaled him in the throat, severing his jugular vein.[430] | |
Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen | ![]() |
23 July 1982 | During the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie, the 53-year-old Morrow, seven-year-old Le, and six-year-old Chen were performing a scene in which their characters are pursued by a helicopter. Heat from special-effects explosions[431] caused the helicopter to fall on them. Morrow and Le were decapitated and Chen was crushed.[432] |
Tennessee Williams | ![]() |
25 February 1983 | The 71-year-old American playwright died from an overdose of Seconal; however, his initial autopsy report stated that he suffocated due to inhaling the plastic cap from a bottle of eye drops.[37][433][434][435] |
Dick Wertheim | ![]() |
15 September 1983 | The 61-year-old tennis linesman died after a ball served by player Stefan Edberg at the US Open struck him in the groin and he fell out of his chair, striking his head on the hardcourt surface.[436][437][438] |
Truls Hellevik | ![]() |
5 November 1983 | The 34-year-old Norwegian diver was explosively dismembered in a diving bell accident on the North Sea Byford Dolphin drilling rig. Three other divers, Edwin Arthur Coward, Roy P. Lucas and Bjørn Giæver Bergersen, and dive tender William Crammond, were also killed. Crammond opened the clamp before Hellevik could close the chamber door. The nine-atmosphere air pressure explosively decompressed, instantly forcing Hellevik's body through a 60-centimetre-diameter (24 in) opening, fragmenting it into numerous pieces. The other tender, Martin Saunders, was severely injured.[439][440] |
Jimmy Ferrozzo | November 1983 | The bouncer at the Condor Club in San Francisco died while engaging in sexual intercourse with his girlfriend, Theresa Hill, on a grand piano that was lowered from the ceiling by a hydraulic motor. He accidentally activated the lifting mechanism which pinned him against the ceiling leading to his suffocation. Hill survived the accident.[441] | |
Reginald Tucker | ![]() |
4 July 1984 | The 29-year-old lawyer, who raced along a Chicago skyscraper corridor without wearing his glasses, crashed through a window and plunged 39 stories to his death, during an early Fourth of July party. Police said portions of the man's body were scattered around the street near the 41-story Prudential Building in the city's downtown area. Several horrified onlookers attending holiday celebrations heard the glass shatter and saw him fall to his death. One witness said it was "like an explosion" when he impacted a car.[442][443] |
Jon-Erik Hexum | ![]() |
18 October 1984 | The 26-year-old American actor died after playing a simulated Russian roulette with a .44 Magnum pistol loaded with blanks. They contained paper wadding and when he pulled the trigger against his temple, the wadding was propelled with a force that broke his skull, causing massive brain bleeding.[444] |
Unknown male | 1984 | An unidentified 25-year-old man was using submersion as an erotic asphyxia method. Naked within a homemade plastic body suit, he tied himself to a boat and was using a homemade diving apparatus for air supply. He died from rebreathing, caused by the faulty apparatus.[445] | |
Jerome Moody | 30 July 1985 | The 31-year-old New Orleans man drowned in a swimming pool. He was attending a party held for lifeguards at a swimming pool inside the New Orleans Recreation Department building who were celebrating an entire summer season where no one drowned, his body being found at the bottom of the deep end after the party ended.[446] | |
Jason Findley | February 1986 | The 17-year-old, from Piscataway, New Jersey, was electrocuted during a thunderstorm when a lightning strike caused an electrical surge to shoot through the wire of a telephone the boy was holding and enter his left ear, causing his heart to stop beating.[447] | |
Victims of the Lake Nyos disaster | ![]() |
21 August 1986 | At Lake Nyos, northwestern Cameroon, a limnic eruption of unknown cause released about 100,000–300,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the lake's bed. The gas cloud initially rose at nearly 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph; 28 m/s) and then, being heavier than air, descended onto nearby villages, suffocating people and livestock within 25 kilometres (16 mi) of the lake, resulting in the death of 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock.[448][449][450] |
Marc Aaronson | 30 April 1987 | The 36-year-old astronomer was crushed to death by a hatch and a revolving telescope dome at Kitt Peak National Observatory.[451][452][453] | |
Franco Brun | 9 June 1987 | The 22-year-old inmate at the Metro Toronto East Detention Centre in Canada died trying to swallow a pocket-size Bible.[454][455] | |
Ivan Lester McGuire | ![]() |
2 April 1988 | The 35-year-old veteran skydiver was filming a jump by an instructor and student from the Franklin County Sports Parachute Center when he jumped from a plane without a parachute. Focused on the filming process, he apparently forgot to put one on, and his camera equipment may have been mistaken for one. The tape was recovered.[456][457] |
Cachy the Poodle, Marta Espina, Edith Solá, unidentified man | 21 October 1988 | A poodle named Cachy, in Caballito, Buenos Aires, fell 13 floors and hit 75-year-old Marta Espina, killing both instantly. In the course of events, 46-year-old Edith Solá came to see the incident and was fatally hit by a bus. An unidentified man who witnessed her death had a heart attack and also died on his way to the hospital.[458][459] | |
Michael Anderson Godwin Sloan | 5 March 1989 | The 28-year-old American criminal from Suffolk, Virginia, was initially given a death sentence by electrocution for the January 12, 1980 death of Molly Royem in West Columbia, South Carolina, before having his sentence reduced to life imprisonment. Godwin died from electrocution when he bit into wires while attempting to fix a broken television set, at the same time sitting on a metal toilet in his prison cell at the Central Correctional Institute in neighboring Columbia, South Carolina.[460][461] |
1990s
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Daniel John O'Brien | 14 January 1990 | The 31-year-old committed suicide by jumping into one of the engines of a British Airways Boeing 747 at Piarco International Airport, Trinidad.[462][463] He is said to have scaled an airport wall in the nude, attacked four security guards and stolen their four-wheel-drive vehicle, driven the vehicle into the jet, then clambered out of the wreckage, smeared grease on his bleeding shoulder and hurled himself into one of the plane's engines.[464] | |
Lori Mae Matthew | 27 October 1991 | A 485-pound (220 kg) umbrella, one of thousands installed in the Tejon Pass of southern California by environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, was swept across a road by strong winds and crushed the 33-year-old against a boulder. The remaining umbrellas were all closed "out of respect".[465] | |
Greg Austin Gingrich | 28 November 1992 | While the 38-year-old was vacationing at the Grand Canyon in Coconino County, Arizona, with his teenaged daughter, he began to play-act losing his balance to frighten her. Gingrich leaped atop a guard wall and began wind-milling his arms in an exaggerated manner, then "comically" fell from the wall on the canyon side onto a short slope where he assumed he would land safely. His daughter, unimpressed with his antics, walked on. Gingrich, however, missed his footing and fell approximately 400 feet (120 m) into the canyon to his death.[466][467] | |
Brandon Lee | ![]() |
31 March 1993 | The 28-year-old film actor, martial artist, and son of Bruce Lee was killed by a squib loaded prop gun while filming The Crow.[468][469][470] |
Garry Hoy | 9 July 1993 | The 38-year-old lawyer from Toronto fell from the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre while demonstrating that its windows were "unbreakable". He threw himself against one, which, true to his assertion, did not break, but instead popped out of its frame.[471][472] | |
Gloria Ramirez | ![]() |
19 February 1994 | The 31-year-old died from kidney failure related to her cervical cancer at the emergency room of Riverside General Hospital in Riverside, California. While treating her, several of the hospital staff became ill, suffering from loss of consciousness, shortness of breath, and muscle spasms. Shortly before dying, she was allegedly covered with an oily sheen, which smelled of fruit and garlic. When drawing her blood with a syringe, nurses noticed it had a smell similar to ammonia and there were unusual particles floating in it.[473] |
Jeremy Brenno | 9 July 1994 | The 16-year-old from Gloversville, New York, was playing golf when he hit a bench out of frustration with his club. This caused the club shaft to break, bounce back, and pierce his heart, killing him.[474][475] | |
Mark Gleeson | 23 January 1996 | The 26-year-old from Headley Down, Hampshire, attempted to cure his snoring by inserting tampons into his nostrils. He died from suffocation, with sleeping pills adding to his breathing difficulties.[476] | |
Karen Wetterhahn | ![]() |
8 June 1997 | The chemistry professor at Dartmouth College died ten months after a few drops of dimethylmercury (an organomercury compound and one of the strongest-known neurotoxins) landed on her protective gloves. Although she had been following the required procedures, it permeated the gloves and her skin within seconds.[477][478][479] |
Alberto Fargo | 1998 | The resident of Lisbon died from falling out of a 5-story window whilst performing a tango. According to witnesses, he was demonstrating to students how to keep their head high by looking at the ceiling, and failed to notice the open window beside him.[480] | |
Jonathan Capewell | 1998 | The 16-year-old from Oldham, England, died from a heart attack brought on by the buildup of butane and propane in his blood after excessive use of deodorant sprays. He was reported to have been obsessed with personal hygiene.[135][481] | |
John Lewis | 12 April 1999 | The 64-year-old businessman from Minsterworth, England, attempted to light a bonfire with gasoline, but inadvertently set his clothes on fire. He then ran to the River Severn, jumped in, and eventually drowned. Although the incident occurred on 12 April 1999, his body was not found until 30 April 1999.[482][483] | |
Valerie Olusanya | 25 April 1999 | At 2:30 am, the electronic musician, better known as Kemistry, was a front-seat passenger in a car travelling on the M3 motorway in Hampshire, behind a van which dislodged a cat's eye in the road. The metal body flew through the windscreen hitting Olusanya in the face, killing her instantly.[484][485][486] | |
Owen Hart | ![]() |
23 May 1999 | The professional wrestler fell to his death during the Over the Edge pay-per-view event. He was supposed to be lowered into the ring from the rafters as part of his Blue Blazer persona's entrance, but the equipment lowering him into the ring malfunctioned, causing him to fall 78 feet (24 m) and land chest-first on the top rope. The impact severed his aorta, causing death within minutes.[487] |
Jon Desborough | 10 June 1999 | The 41-year-old geography and physical education teacher died due to a chest infection a month after being impaled in the eye with the blunt end of a javelin during an athletics session at the Liverpool College in Mossley Hill, Liverpool. It is believed that he had lost his footing while retrieving the javelin. He remained in a coma until his death.[488] | |
Hisashi Ouchi | ![]() |
21 December 1999 | On 30 September 1999, Ouchi and two other technicians, Masato Shinohara and Yutaka Yokokawa, were improperly preparing reactor fuel for the Jōyō reactor at the Tokai Nuclear Power Plant, leading to a criticality accident. The technicians' desire to quicken the process led to numerous safety protocols being bypassed, resulting in 16 kilograms (35 lb) of dissolved enriched uranium being contained in the precipitation tank, as opposed to the safe limit of 2.4 kilograms (5.3 lb). Ouchi, who was holding a funnel through which uranyl nitrate was being poured into the feeder tank, was dosed with approximately seventeen sieverts of radiation and received the highest dose of the three. After being transferred to the hospital, his condition rapidly deteriorated, though doctors were instructed to repeatedly revive him whenever his heart stopped in accordance with the wishes of his family. Attempts at treatment, including an early use of peripheral stem cell transplantation, were carried out over the course of almost 3 months, but they ultimately failed, and he died nearly three months later following a cardiac arrest.[489] Shinohara died of multiple organ failure complicated by infections following numerous attempts at treatment on 27 April 2000[490] while Yokokawa, who received the smallest dose, survived following three months of hospitalization.[491] |
21st century
[edit]2000s
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Bliss Scott | ![]() |
4 June 2000 | The 7-year-old died after touching an African snail, from which she contracted meningoencephalitis caused by Angiostrongylus cantonensis. This is the first reported case of a human fatality linked to the African snail.[492] |
Jimmy Zámbó | ![]() |
2 January 2001 | The famous Hungarian pop-singer died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. After shooting out of the window twice with his Beretta, he allegedly wanted to prove to his wife that there were no more rounds in the pistol, so he removed the magazine, and put the pistol to his own head. However, one bullet was still in the chamber, causing the singer to shoot himself in the head. He died in the hospital a few hours later.[493] |
Bernd Brandes | 9 March 2001 | Voluntarily slaughtered and eaten by Armin Meiwes following an appointment via internet. At Brandes' request, Meiwes first amputated Brandes' penis and they unsuccessfully tried to eat it. Meiwes taped the entire amputation, killing, conserving, and eating Brandes' meat. Meiwes was eventually arrested and sentenced to life in prison.[494][495] Meiwes became a vegetarian during his prison sentence.[496] | |
Unknown male | 27 April 2001 | An unnamed Canadian man was visiting his mother's house in order to attend his father's funeral when, whilst cleaning the kitchen, he tripped over the open dishwasher door and was impaled on knives sticking up out of the cutlery tray, the wounds eventually proving fatal.[497][498] | |
Michael Colombini | ![]() |
29 July 2001 | The six-year-old died during an MRI scan at the Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York, after an oxygen tank was magnetically pulled into the machine and fractured his skull.[499][500][501] |
Gilbert Tinoso | 22 December 2001 | The 38-year-old died in Burbank, California after the spare wheel from an oncoming Mack cement truck in the opposite stretch of the freeway broke loose and struck the cab of his Toyota Tacoma. The other passenger in the Tacoma received minor chest injuries from the crash, and the Mack driver had no injuries.[502][503] | |
Brittanie Cecil | ![]() |
18 March 2002 | The 13-year-old died from her injuries at an NHL game after a deflected puck struck her in the left temple. She was the first and only fan fatality in the league's history.[504] |
Roger Wallace | 18 May 2002 | The 60-year-old auto parts salesman was flying his 5-foot (1.5 m) wingspan remote-control plane in Tucson, Arizona, when he lost sight of it in the bright sun. It struck him in the chest, killing him.[505][506] | |
Virginia Graeme Baker | ![]() |
June 2002 | The 7-year-old was entrapped underwater due to the suction from a hot tub drain and drowned.[507] |
Kyle McGarity | ![]() |
14 December 2002 | After a drunken scuffle, the 25-year-old fell about 15 feet (4.6 m) into a manhole flooded with scalding hot water and filled with steam in Lower Manhattan. McGarity survived the fall without major injuries but was steamed alive, with emergency services unable to recover his body for several hours.[508] |
Jane McDonald | 27 May 2003 | While visiting a friend, the 31-year-old slipped and fell onto an open dishwasher, landing on an upright knife. She was taken to a hospital, where she died of her injuries.[509] | |
Rebecca Longhoffer | 16 August 2003 | The 39-year-old tourist, a mother of four, was electrocuted while crossing Las Vegas Boulevard when she stepped on a cast iron plate that covered electrical wiring and was hidden by a deep rain puddle.[510][511][512] | |
Hitoshi Nikaidoh | ![]() |
16 August 2003 | The 35-year-old surgical resident from Houston, Texas, was killed after his head was trapped in elevator doors at the hospital where he worked. He was partially decapitated as the elevator ascended, and he also sustained injuries to his ribs and spine.[513][514] |
Brian Wells | ![]() |
28 August 2003 | The pizza delivery man from Erie, Pennsylvania, was killed after a collar bomb around his neck exploded as part of a bank robbery scheme.[515] |
Phillip Quinn | 28 November 2004 | The 24-year-old from Kent, Washington, was killed when a lava lamp he was heating on a stove exploded, and a shard pierced his heart.[516][517] | |
Unknown female | 2004 | In an attempt to protect herself from SARS during the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, a 45-year-old woman in Taiwan bathed in 40.5% ethanol. She laid down in the fluid at 11. p.m. and was found dead at 11 a.m. by her family the next day. Her BAC was 1.35% and she most likely absorbed the alcohol through the skin.[518][519] | |
Francis Daniel Brohm | ![]() |
2 September 2004 | 23-year-old Brohm was a passenger in a car driven by a friend, 21-year-old John Hutcherson. Both men had been drinking. Brohm was hanging out the passenger window while vomiting due to carsickness. Hutcherson drove off the road and sideswiped a telephone pole support wire, decapitating Brohm. He continued the final 12 miles (19 km) to his Atlanta home, parked in the driveway, and went to bed. A neighbor found Brohm's headless body in the truck the next morning.[520][521] |
Kenneth Pinyan or Mr. Hands | ![]() |
2 July 2005 | Died from "acute peritonitis due to perforation of the colon"[522] caused by receiving anal penetration from a horse.[523] |
Chandler Hugh Jackson | ![]() |
6 July 2005 | 12-year-old Chandler Jackson was playing at the Dogwood Hill golf club in Cunningham, Kentucky, when he fell on his 9-iron club while retrieving an out of bounds ball. The club broke, with a piece of the shaft piercing his aorta through his chest. He was rushed to hospital in Paducah, Kentucky, but died that night.[475][524] |
Mildred Bowman and Alice Wardle | August 2005 | The two sisters, aged 62 and 68 respectively, died in Benidorm, Spain, after becoming trapped for four days when their fold-up Murphy bed collapsed.[525] | |
Steve Irwin | ![]() |
4 September 2006 | The Australian wildlife expert and television personality was pierced in the chest by a short-tail stingray's barb while filming in shallow water in the Great Barrier Reef.[526][527] |
Alexander Litvinenko | ![]() |
23 November 2006 | The 44-year-old, a naturalised British citizen, former Russian FSB officer, and defector, was assassinated by poisoning with polonium-210, which caused acute and irreversible radiation sickness.[115][528][529] One of just a handful of recorded deaths attributed specifically to polonium exposure,[530] Litvinenko was the first-known fatality from malicious polonium poisoning,[531] and remains the only confirmed such case as of 2024.[530][532] |
Jennifer Strange | ![]() |
12 January 2007 | The 28-year-old mother was participating in a contest sponsored by radio station KDND in Sacramento, California, called "Hold Your Wee For A Wii" in which you would have to drink excessive amounts of water without going to the bathroom. During the contest, Strange vomited and she, along with her family, went back home. Strange died from a headache along with water intoxication.[533] |
Humberto Hernandez | 21 June 2007 | The 24-year-old Oakland, California, resident was struck in the back of the head by an airborne fire hydrant when a passing car struck it, and the water pressure shot it at him with great force.[534][535][536] | |
Abigail Taylor | June 2007 | The 6-year-old girl from Edina, Minnesota, died from medical complications as a result of her evisceration caused by powerful suction from a pool drain at the Minneapolis Golf Club.[537] | |
Lydia Tsekova | 2 February 2008 | The Bulgarian teacher, with her husband Georgi and colleague Nadezhda Lyubenova, poured chemical waste into a drain cover in Sofia. The chemicals reacted with the gases in the sewers and caused an explosion. The drain cover decapitated Tsekova, and the blast injured her husband and Lyubenova.[538][539][verification needed] | |
Francis Pete Tovey | 18 March 2008 | The 81-year-old built a device that consisted of a jigsaw power tool attached to a .22 semi-automatic handgun containing four bullets. He then activated it, which fired multiple shots at his head, killing himself. Tovey built the device after downloading suicide plans on the Internet. Tovey, who originated from England and was living in Burleigh Heads, Australia at the time, left a note stating that he was struggling after pressure from relatives to move from his £450,000 home to a retirement home.[540][541][542][543] | |
Judy Kay Zagorski | 20 March 2008 | The 57-year-old from Pigeon, Michigan, died of blunt force craniocerebral trauma when a 75-pound (34 kg) spotted eagle ray leaped out of the water and knocked her over off the coast of Marathon Key, Florida. The ray also died.[544][545][546][547] | |
Adelir Antônio de Carli | ![]() |
21 April 2008 | The Brazilian Catholic priest and sky diver undertook a cluster balloon flight to raise funds for charity. During the flight, contact was lost and de Carli disappeared. The lower part of his body was found floating in the sea eleven weeks later on 4 July.[548][549][550] |
Isaiah Otieno | 13 May 2008 | The student from Cranbrook, British Columbia, was struck and killed by a helicopter that plunged into a residential street he was walking in. The pilot and two other passengers of the helicopter were also instantly killed.[551] | |
David Phyall | 5 July 2008 | The 50-year-old last resident in a block of flats due to be demolished in Bishopstoke, near Southampton, England, decapitated himself with a chainsaw to highlight the injustice of being forced to move out of it.[552][553] | |
Unknown female | 7 October 2008 | A 43-year-old Irish woman died of an anaphylactic allergic reaction after sexually abusing a German Shepherd while committing bestiality.[554] Its owner, Seán McDonnell, and the woman met in an Internet chat room for bestiality. McDonnell was prosecuted and added to a sex offender list.[555] The dog was later euthanized.[556] | |
Unknown male | 3 March 2009 | A 14-year-old boy from Jiaozhou, Shandong, China, was killed when the pneumatic cylinder in his office chair exploded.[557][558] | |
Diane Durre | 3 April 2009 | The 49-year-old was killed in North Platte, Nebraska, by a falling Taco Bell sign. The sign was knocked over by high winds, and landed on a pickup truck, killing her and injuring her husband, Mark.[559] | |
Mark Fidrych | 13 April 2009 | The 54-year-old former Major League Baseball pitcher of the Detroit Tigers, died while working underneath his dump truck. His clothes became entangled with the power take-off drive shaft, suffocating him.[560] | |
Taylor Mitchell | 28 October 2009 | The 19-year-old Canadian folk singer was killed by a pair of coyotes while hiking in Cape Breton Highlands National Park, in the only known fatal coyote attack on an adult.[561][562][563] | |
Vladimir Likhonos | 2 December 2009 | The 25-year-old student of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute from Konotop was killed when his chewing gum exploded. He had a habit of dipping his chewing gum in citric acid to increase the gum's sour taste. On his work table police found about 100 grams (3.5 oz) of unidentified explosive powder which he used for chemistry studies at home. It resembled citric acid, and it is thought that he confused the two, having accidentally coated his gum in the explosive powder before chewing it. The explosive was found to be four times stronger than TNT, and the explosion was possibly triggered either by reacting with Likhonos's saliva, or the pressure exerted by him chewing on the gum and explosive powder.[564][565][566] |
2010s
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Muraka Jenny Vearncombe | 3 March 2010 | The 42-year-old was struck in the head by a piece of a metal pipe flung by a tractor-pulled lawnmower as she walked to work in Townsville, Australia.[567][568] | |
Gareth Williams | 16 August 2010 | The 31-year-old Welsh mathematician and GCHQ analyst was found dead and naked in a bag that had been padlocked from the outside, in the bath of his home in Central London.[569] The inquest found his death was likely criminal, although a Metropolitan Police investigation later found that it was likely an accident.[570] | |
The 20 passengers and crew of a plane crash | ![]() |
25 August 2010 | 20 passengers and crew of a Let L-410 Turbolet were killed in a crash resulting from an escaped crocodile in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to the sole survivor of the crash, the animal was smuggled aboard by a passenger but escaped mid-flight. Panicked passengers surged forward, unbalancing the plane and causing a loss of control.[571] The crocodile survived the crash, but was promptly killed by a blow from a machete.[572] |
Mike Edwards | 3 September 2010 | The 62-year-old cellist and founding member of the band Electric Light Orchestra died when a large, round bale of hay rolled down a hill and collided with the van he was driving.[573][574][575] | |
Jimi Heselden | 26 September 2010 | The 62-year-old owner of Segway Inc. died after apparently riding a Segway Personal Transport System off a cliff in Thorp Arch, England.[576] The coroner came to the conclusion that Heselden had likely fallen from the cliff with the Segway after "getting into difficulty" reversing to allow a man walking his dog to pass him.[577] | |
Jose Luis Ochoa | 30 January 2011 | The 35-year-old died after being stabbed in the leg at an illegal cockfight in Tulare County, California, by a bird with a knife-like spur strapped to its leg.[578][579] | |
Unknown man and woman | 6 June 2011 | Two unnamed people were killed in an accident on a rural Quebec road when a "flying bear" collided with their SUV. The 200-kilogram (440 lb) black bear was sent airborne by a car in front of the SUV after it had stepped into the path of traffic on Highway 148. The bear passed through the windshield, hitting the driver and the passenger sitting behind her before passing through the rear window. The driver's boyfriend was in the front passenger seat and received injuries to his upper body which were described as "not life-threatening". The bear also died.[580][581] | |
Brian Depledge | 10 September 2011 | The 38-year-old was home alone placing wet laundry on a clothes horse, a type of drying rack, when he accidentally tripped over a small stool and fell backwards into the rack, trapping himself. Authorities state it appears he attempted to free himself, but the struggle only caused the rungs to tighten around his chest and neck even more. A coroner remarked his death was "probably rarer than being struck by lightning or struck by a meteorite".[582][583] | |
Erica Marshall | 10 February 2012 | The 28-year-old British veterinarian in Ocala, Florida, died when the horse she was treating in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber kicked the wall, releasing a spark from its horseshoe, causing a fire and explosion. The horse was also killed and another worker was seriously injured.[584][585] | |
Anthony Hensley | 14 April 2012 | The 37-year-old was killed by a swan while kayaking across a pond at a residential complex in Des Plaines, Illinois. After getting too close to the bird's nest, the swan attacked him, threw him out of the kayak and prevented him from surfacing; he ultimately drowned.[586][587] | |
Elizabeth Nass and Rose Mayr | 21 August 2012 | The 19-year-olds died after more than 20 coal cars (out of 90) from a CSX Transportation freight train derailed in Ellicott City, Maryland, while they were walking alongside the train tracks late at night. Reports said that the two women were found buried in a pile of coal. The derailment was possibly caused by a broken rail according to the National Transportation Safety Board.[588] | |
Ilda Vitor Maciel | 28 September 2012 | The 88-year-old died in a hospital in Barra Mansa, Rio de Janeiro, allegedly as a result of nursing technicians injecting soup through her intravenous drip instead of her feeding tube.[589] | |
Palmerina Pires Ribeiro | October 2012 | The 80-year-old died in a Rio de Janeiro clinic when an untrained nurse injected coffee in her intravenous drip. The nurse reported the incident had occurred because the blood drip and feed drip were directly next to one another.[590] | |
Kendrick Johnson | 10 January 2013 | The 17-year-old was discovered trapped upside down in a rolled-up gym mat in his high school gymnasium. Police originally concluded he had climbed in it to retrieve a shoe and became trapped, but the case was later reopened as a possible homicide.[591][592][593][594][595] The homicide case was dismissed, and Kendrick's parents were accused of fabricating evidence. In 2014, they were sentenced to pay more than US$292,000 in legal fees.[596] The case was reopened again in 2021, but closed again in January 2022, with the Lowndes County Sheriff finding his death to be an accident when re-reviewing some 17 boxes of evidence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's findings.[597][598] | |
James Campbell | 14 January 2013 | When the 68-year-old man from Cantonment, Florida, left his 1995 Chevrolet Van to open a gate from his driveway, his dog stepped on the van's gas pedal and ran him over.[599][600] | |
Takuya Nagaya | 18 January 2013 | The 23-year-old from Japan started to slither on the floor and claimed he had become a snake. He died after his father spent the next two days head-butting and biting him "to drive [out] the snake that had possessed him".[601] | |
Elisa Lam | February 2013 | Lam, from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, was missing for several weeks before being found dead in a large water tank on the roof of the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, after guests complained about low pressure and foul smell of the water.[602] | |
Jeffery Bush | 28 February 2013 | The 37-year-old from the Tampa area was killed while he slept when a giant sinkhole measuring 15 feet (4.6 m) wide and 20 feet (6.1 m) deep opened below and swallowed his entire bedroom. His body was never recovered.[603][604] | |
Roger Mirro | 30 July 2013 | The 56-year-old man in Chicago was crushed by a trash compactor while looking through a dumpster for his phone.[605][606] | |
Unknown Belarusian man | 2013 | An unnamed 60-year-old Belarusian fisherman bled to death after being bitten by a beaver which he had tried to grab in order to have his picture taken with it.[607][608] | |
João Maria de Souza | 2013 | The 45-year-old was crushed in his bed by a cow falling through the roof of his home in Caratinga, Minas Gerais, Brazil. It had climbed on top of the house from a steep hillside behind it. Both the cow and his wife (who was in the bed next to him) were unharmed.[609] | |
Noah Barthe, Connor Barthe | 5 August 2013 | The brothers, aged 4 and 6 respectively, were killed by an African rock python during a sleepover at their friend's apartment in New Brunswick, Canada. The snake had escaped from its inadequate enclosure and moved through ducts that were easily accessible to the reptile, where the snake then fell through the ceiling where the boys slept 3 metres (9.8 ft) away. Though the snake suffocated them, it did not attempt to eat them. However, an African rock python would not constrict unless it planned on eating; therefore, it is likely that the owners of the python also failed to feed their pet. The python was euthanized.[610][611] | |
Roman Pirozek, Jr. | 5 September 2013 | The 19-year-old model airplane enthusiast was partially decapitated by the blade of his radio-controlled helicopter while performing aerobatic maneuvers in Calvert Vaux Park in Brooklyn, New York.[612][613] | |
Denver Lee St. Clair | 21 December 2013 | The 58-year-old was asphyxiated by an "atomic wedgie" administered by his stepson during a fight in Oklahoma. After he had been knocked unconscious, the elastic band from his torn underwear was pulled over his head and stretched around his neck, strangling him. The stepson was sentenced to 30 years in prison.[614][615] | |
J.R.N. | 18 January 2014 | A 52-year-old Brazilian man, identified only as J.R.N., attempted to commit bestiality with a sow in Tapurah, Mato Grosso, but was attacked by the animals and wounded in the genitals. He died from a cardiac arrest. His arms and face were also mutilated by the animals. Initially police believed that the man had been murdered and disposed of at the farm, but this was disproven as numerous pieces of evidence showed that the man had drunk alcohol, used a condom and had been wearing only underwear. The man had worked at the farm for two years.[616][617][618][619] | |
Grant Adams | 9 June 2014 | The 17-year-old had just woken up when he tripped on a wire and fell into a free-standing tanning bed in his bedroom on the morning of June 8, 2014. One of the glass tubes of the bed broke, piercing Grant's neck in two places. He was airlifted from his house in South Shields to the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, where he died the next day.[620] | |
Peng Fan | August 2014 | The chef in Foshan, China, was bitten by a cobra's severed head, which he had cut off 20 minutes earlier while preparing soup.[621][622] | |
Heval Yıldırım | 3 October 2014 | The 13-year-old from Turkey was killed when a sacrificial goat bought for Eid al-Adha jumped off the roof, over a protective fence, and fell onto him. His father had placed it on the roof of the building where he lived because he could not find another suitable place to keep it.[623] | |
Peter Biaksangzuala | 19 October 2014 | The 23-year-old Indian football player from Mizoram state died after sustaining spinal cord injuries while awkwardly landing a somersault, celebrating a goal.[624] | |
Christophe de Margerie | ![]() |
20 October 2014 | The French oil executive was killed when his corporate jet collided during take-off with an airport snowplow reportedly driven by a drunk driver in Moscow.[625][626] |
Gary Anderson | 3 November 2014 | The 58-year-old from New Jersey was delivering drywall to a construction site and leaned his head into the car of a co-worker while having a conversation. As he pulled his head out, a worker accidentally dropped a 1-pound (0.45 kg) tape measure which plummeted 50 stories, or approximately 500 feet (150 m), when it ricocheted off a piece of metal 10 feet (3.0 m) off the ground and smashed into Anderson's head. He was rushed to Jersey City Medical Center where he suffered cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 9:52 a.m. Hard hats were mandatory at the site, and it is unclear why Anderson was not wearing one when he was killed.[627][628] | |
Phillip Hughes | ![]() |
27 November 2014 | The 25-year-old Australian Test and ODI cricketer was killed by a bouncer striking his neck during a cricket match, causing a vertebral artery dissection.[629][630] |
Stephen Whinfrey | January 2015 | The 50-year-old became trapped and asphyxiated when rabbiting near Doncaster, England, after his head became stuck down a rabbit hole.[631] | |
Maxee | 28 February 2015 | The member of American R&B group Brownstone, died after falling backward while holding a wine glass. During the fall, the glass shattered on the ground behind her head, and the shards pierced her neck, causing profuse bleeding.[632] | |
Stephen Woytack | 30 March 2015 | The 74-year-old was decorating his family's grave plot at St. Joseph's Cemetery in Throop, Pennsylvania, for Easter with his wife when the tombstone of his mother-in-law toppled over, pinning him underneath and crushing him to death. The stone had supposedly been dislodged when the previously frozen ground was thawed by the early spring temperatures. Woytack was buried in a plot directly in front of the tombstone that killed him.[633] | |
Randy Llanes | 29 May 2015 | The 47-year-old fisherman from Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, was killed by a swordfish. He had harpooned the fish and jumped into the water to retrieve it, but the swordfish impaled him in the chest.[634][635] | |
Jaylon Rippy | 2 July 2015 | The 5-year-old was killed by a leaping sturgeon while she was boating with her family near Fanning Springs, Florida. Her mother and brother were also injured and needed facial reconstruction surgery.[636] | |
Chelsea Ake-Salvacion | October 2015 | The 24-year-old beauty salon employee in Henderson, Nevada, was suffocated while using a cryotherapy machine set to the wrong level, which eliminated the oxygen in the chamber.[637][638] | |
Ravi Subramanian | 5 December 2015 | The Air India technician was sucked into an aircraft's jet engine.[639][640] | |
V. Kamaraj | 2016 | The 40-year-old Indian bus driver was claimed by local newspapers to have been killed by a meteorite which left a two-foot (60 cm) crater, although officials from NASA oppose that view, saying that the most likely explanation was a land-based explosion. According to a preliminary report by the National College Instrumentation Facility (NCIF) in Trichy, a scanning electron microscope (SEM) study on the evidence of the samples retrieved from the campus in Vellore, from where the blast occurred, showed the "presence of carbonaceous chondrites".[641][642][643][644] | |
Irma Bule | 4 April 2016 | The 29-year-old Indonesian dangdut singer who performed with live snakes died during a concert after being bitten by a king cobra and refusing treatment.[645][646] | |
Lottie Michelle Belk | 6 June 2016 | The 55-year-old was fatally stabbed in the chest by a beach umbrella blown by a strong wind in Virginia Beach, Virginia.[647] Wind speeds at the time reached 20–25 miles per hour (32–40 km/h).[648][649] | |
Lane Graves | 14 June 2016 | The 2-year-old boy from Nebraska was on vacation and playing on the beach at Seven Seas Lagoon around 9 p.m. at Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, just outside of Orlando, Florida. While he was playing, an alligator approached and dragged him under the water. Graves's body was found nearby the next day, intact and apparently drowned.[650][651][652] | |
Anton Yelchin | ![]() |
19 June 2016 | The 27-year-old American actor, known for portraying Pavel Chekov in the Star Trek reboot movie series, was found pinned between his car and a brick wall. His driveway was on an incline and his car was found running and in neutral.[653][654] The manufacturer had recalled the car make in April 2016, for concerns about its gearshift design that could cause rollaway incidents, but the software patch to repair the vehicles did not reach dealers until the week of Yelchin's death.[655] |
Kristopher Moules and Timothy Gilliam Jr. | 18 July 2016 | Moules, a 25-year-old correctional officer, and Gilliam, a 27-year-old out-of-county inmate being housed at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, fell to their deaths after an altercation between them caused them to slam into the exterior of the fifth-floor elevator doors. Despite the elevator having its up-to-date working credentials, the door popped open on impact, causing the men to fall five flights down the shaft to their deaths. The county declared Moules' death a homicide and declared Gilliam's an accident.[656][657] | |
Unknown girl | 26 July 2016 | A seven-year-old girl died after being struck by a stone thrown by an elephant from its enclosure at the zoo in Rabat, Morocco.[658][659] | |
Caleb Schwab | ![]() |
7 August 2016 | The 10-year-old was decapitated when he was ejected from his raft on Verrückt, a 168-foot-tall (51 m) water slide at Schlitterbahn Kansas City.[660] |
Julio Macías González | 26 August 2016 | The 17-year-old from Mexico City died from a cerebrovascular accident caused by embolus formed on a neck hickey.[661][662] | |
Ten people | 21 November 2016 | A powerful southerly change in Melbourne, Australia, resulted in the death of 10 asthmatic people who died from respiratory failure.[663] This was due to a stark 60-kilometre-per-hour (37 mph) wind that distributed ryegrass pollen into the moist air, rupturing them into very fine specks small enough to enter people's lungs.[664] | |
Charlie Holt | 2017 | The 5-year-old was killed at the Sun Dial, a rotating restaurant at the top of Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, when his head was caught in a small space between the rotating and non-rotating sections.[665] | |
Akbar Salubiro | March 2017 | The 25-year-old was killed and swallowed by a reticulated python in West Sulawesi, Indonesia, in the first fully confirmed case of a snake swallowing an adult human.[666] A second case happened there the following year, when another reticulated python killed and swallowed a woman in her garden.[667] | |
Heidi Fay Taylor | 6 April 2017 | The 40-year-old mother was stabbed and shot to death by her 14-year-old adoptive son Donovan Austin Nicholas,[668] who claimed that he was influenced by Jeff the Killer, saying, "It was Jeff. Jeff is inside me."[669][670] | |
Robert Dreyer | 10 May 2017 | The Florida resident drowned on his 89th birthday after he crashed his car into a fire hydrant and was then swallowed by the sinkhole created by the broken water line which had fed the hydrant.[671] | |
Debra Bedard | 2 June 2017 | The 58-year-old died after falling from a golf cart onto shards of wine glasses that had broken in her hands in Calaveras County, California.[672] | |
Rebecca Burger | 18 June 2017 | The 33-year-old French fitness blogger and model died after a whipped-cream charger exploded and struck her in the chest. The injury caused her to go into cardiac arrest as a result of commotio cordis.[673] | |
Karanbir Cheema | July 2017 | The 13-year-old from London, England, died after having a severe allergic reaction to cheese at his school on 28 June 2017. Cheema was severely allergic to wheat, gluten, all dairy products, eggs and all nuts. Reportedly, an unnamed student at the school had thrown a piece of cheese at Cheema, causing the fatal reaction.[674] | |
Jasmine Beever | 7 September 2017 | The 16-year-old from Skegness, England, died of peritonitis brought about by Rapunzel syndrome. She had a long-time habit of chewing and swallowing her own hair (trichophagia) which formed a hairball in her stomach, leading to an infection in her abdomen damaging her vital organs.[675] | |
Elizabeth Isherwood | September 2017 | The 60-year-old walked naked into an airing cupboard at the villa she was renting and shut the door. When she tried to leave, part of the door handle broke off in her hand. She dug into the wall in an attempt to escape, but struck and burst a pipe, which sprayed water into the cupboard and caused her eventual death by hypothermia. She was found several days later.[676] | |
Raildo Matias Santos | 22 October 2017 | The 49-year-old drowned in a bucket of water in Jaguaquara, Brazil. Santos, who was intoxicated, attempted to fetch a 20-litre (4.4 imp gal; 5.3 US gal) bucket of water, tripped, and fell in a kneeling position. He was epileptic.[677][678] | |
Hidr Korkmaz | 12 November 2017 | The 42-year-old Turkish-Dutch drug dealer and informant died when he threw his fishhook into an electrical cable while fishing somewhere in Eastern Europe. Though he was a witness in the case against Dutch criminal Willem Holleeder, he was not considered a crucial asset by authorities, who treated his death as an accident.[679][680] | |
Rajesh Maru | 28 January 2018 | The 32-year-old died at Nair Hospital in Mumbai after carrying a metal oxygen tank into a room housing an MRI scanner. The magnetic field pulled him in with the tank which pinned his hand and released liquid oxygen. He died of pneumothorax from inhaling liquid oxygen.[681][682][683] | |
Ateef Rafiq | 16 March 2018 | The 24-year-old died from cardiac arrest in a movie theater in Birmingham, England, while looking for his dropped mobile phone. His head became wedged under the electronic footrest of a seat.[684] | |
Elaine Herzberg | ![]() |
18 March 2018 | The 49-year-old from Tempe, Arizona, died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber, as she crossed the road, in what was reported to be the first death of a pedestrian struck by a self-driving car on public roads. In response to the fatal accident, Uber suspended self-driving car tests in all U.S. cities.[685][686] |
Kyle Plush | ![]() |
10 April 2018 | The 16-year-old died from asphyxia after becoming trapped in his Honda Odyssey, which was in his school's parking lot in Cincinnati, Ohio. Attempting to reach his tennis equipment, he leaned over the third row of seats into the trunk. When the seats "squashed his chest", he became pinned and later died. During the incident, he called 9-1-1 twice, by using his smartphone's voice assistant. Responding to the calls, the police were not able to find him; he was eventually discovered dead in the vehicle by his father about six hours later.[687] |
Jennifer Riordan | ![]() |
17 April 2018 | The 43-year-old bank executive and businesswoman aboard Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 died after debris from an engine failure destroyed a window near her seat and she was partially blown out through it.[688][689] |
Samen Kondorura | 15 June 2018 | The 40-year-old from the North Toraja Regency of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, was killed after the coffin of his mother fell on him during her funeral. As is tradition, Kondorura and the other pallbearers were carrying the coffin up a bamboo ladder into a temple, when the ladder collapsed beneath them. As everyone fell off, the coffin hit Kondorura in the head. He died on the way to hospital and was buried next to his mother.[690] | |
Hildegard Whiting | 27 July 2018 | The 77-year-old died of asphyxiation from the carbon dioxide vapors produced by four dry ice coolers in a Dippin' Dots delivery car. The deliveryman's wife had borrowed the car to take Whiting home.[691][692] | |
Richard Russell | ![]() |
10 August 2018 | The 29-year-old stole a Bombardier Q400 owned by Horizon Air and operating for Alaska Airlines from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. After an unauthorized takeoff, he flew the plane for just over an hour and performed aerial maneuvers including a barrel roll before intentionally crashing on Ketron Island, Washington, killing himself. No one else was injured.[693] |
Linda Goldbloom | 29 August 2018 | The 79-year-old died four days after being hit by a foul ball at Dodger Stadium. Her death, the second such fatality in Major League Baseball history, was the first in nearly 50 years.[694] | |
Sam Ballard | October 2018 | The 29-year-old from Sydney, Australia, died from angiostrongyliasis after eating a garden slug as a dare eight years earlier.[695] | |
Unknown man | ![]() |
January 2019 | An unknown 54-year-old man from Massachusetts died after eating a bag and a half of black liquorice every day for a few weeks, which caused such low potassium levels in his body that his heart stopped.[696][697][698] Liquorice contains glycyrrhizinic acid, which along with its metabolite glycyrrhetinic acid interferes with the body's ability to retain potassium by mimicking the hormone aldosterone,[699] resulting in excessive excretion of the nutrient in cases of overconsumption, a condition referred to as pseudohyperaldosteronism.[700] |
Salvator Disi | 10 January 2019 | The 62-year-old was decapitated while using a power cart to jump start a helicopter in Hernando County, Florida. Its unexpected up-and-down motion caused the rotor blades to strike him.[701] | |
Margaret Maurer | 5 March 2019 | The 21-year-old Tulane University fourth-year student from Forest Lake, Minnesota, died at a highway rest stop in Mississippi when she was struck by a pair of tires that came loose from a passing tractor-trailer.[702][703][704] | |
Patrick McGuire | April 2019 | The 67-year-old American tourist died from positional asphyxia in Scotland when a 72-kilogram (159 lb) metal garden bench he was sitting on toppled backwards, pinning him against a wall which had knocked him unconscious. It was later found that such benches had a risk of sinking into the grass and becoming unstable and there were no appropriate checks to provide a stable hard surface for the benches.[705] | |
Darren Hickey | 5 April 2019 | The 51-year-old wedding planner from Horwich, England, died after eating a scalding-hot fishcake at a wedding. The cake had burned his throat, restricting his ability to breathe. The pathologist who performed the autopsy called the case "extremely rare" and likened it to those of victims who have inhaled smoke during house fires.[706] Hickey previously received a set of false teeth following a previous event.[707] | |
Marvin Hajos | ![]() |
12 April 2019 | The 75-year-old former car salesman and exotic animal collector living in Florida was attacked and killed by his recently purchased pet cassowary. The large bird repeatedly kicked the man, which punctured the man's skin and severed the brachial artery in his arm. Hajos was declared dead by the time paramedics arrived at the scene, and the cassowary was auctioned off to a different owner.[708][709][710] |
Paul McDonald | 17 April 2019 | The 47-year-old was attacked and killed by a pet deer, said to be an elk, on his property in north-east Victoria, Australia.[711][712] | |
Joemar Jungco | 22 June 2019 | The 18-year-old worker at a meat processing facility in Iloilo City, Philippines, died after half his body from the head down to the waist was pulled into a meat grinder.[713] | |
Elena Struthers-Gardner | July 2019 | The 60-year-old from Broadstone, Dorset, England, was carrying a mason jar-style drinking glass when she collapsed. Its 10-inch (250 mm) stainless steel straw entered her left eye socket and pierced her brain.[714][715][716] | |
Zafer Kuzu | 4 July 2019 | The 24-year-old from Erzurum, Turkey, attempted to escape a community service sentence for inflicting injury by getting himself hospitalized. He asked a friend to shoot him in the back with a shotgun through two pillows to reduce the shot's power. He was killed and the friend arrested.[717] | |
Samuela Cirivakayawa | 8 September 2019 | The 40-year-old Fijian emigrant to Australia was killed while working as an arborist at Lindfield in the north of Sydney. When his two co-workers left briefly to ask a motorist to move their car, Cirivakayawa, then working alone, was sucked through a woodchipper.[718] Although Cirivakayawa's ex-wife in Fiji later suggested the incident may have been a complication of depression,[719] a coronial report has not yet been released to the public. | |
Yulia Sharko | 8 September 2019 | The 21-year-old from Žabinka, Belarus, was celebrating her birthday with friends when she tried to pull her two-year-old daughter out through the window of her car. Her daughter activated the window control button, closing the window and strangling Sharko.[720] | |
Pamela Kreimeyer | 27 October 2019 | The 56-year-old from Marion County, Iowa, was killed during an explosion at a gender reveal party. In an attempt to film a gender reveal worthy of posting online, members of her family filled a steel umbrella stand with gunpowder. Instead of emitting a shower of sparks as intended, the metal pipe failed to contain the overpressure, and the device acted as a pipe bomb instead. Kreimeyer was struck in the head by a metal fragment and was killed instantly.[721] | |
Michael Kosanovich | 7 December 2019 | The 21-year-old was crushed by a 2002 Lexus IS300s, in South Jamaica, Queens, New York City, after its owner started it by remote control. It rolled forward, and he was pinned between two vehicles.[722] Bystanders tried to push them apart but as they did so, the car rolled forward and crushed him again. Kosanovich was taken to hospital with severe trauma to his torso and legs and died of his injuries on 7 December.[723] |
2020s
[edit]Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Sergio Millán | 14 January 2020 | The 59-year-old was alone in his apartment in Torreforta, Tarragona, Spain, when an explosion in a petrochemical plant 3 kilometres (2 mi) away launched a one-ton iron plate into the apartment above him, causing the ceiling to collapse, killing him.[724] | ||
Valentin Didenko, Natalia Monakova and Yuri Alferov | 28 February 2020 | The trio died while celebrating Didenko's wife's birthday in Moscow. During the party, a guest dumped 25 kilograms (55 lb) of dry ice into the sauna pool, which resulted in a large amount of carbon dioxide being released. Didenko, Monakova and Alferov, along with several others jumped into the pool, only to quickly lose consciousness from hypercapnia.[725] The three deaths came as a result of asphyxia due to lack of oxygen. This was all captured on video.[726][727] | ||
Christian Bolok | 26 October 2020 | The lieutenant, who was the police chief of San Jose, Northern Samar, Philippines, died during an anti-gambling raid. He was trying to grab a cockfighting rooster when the razor-sharp metal blade attached to the rooster's leg to kill its opponent cut a gaping hole in his leg and sliced his femoral artery, causing him to bleed to death.[728] | ||
Luke Ramone Harper | 2 April 2021 | The 8-year-old from Ringsend, Dublin, died after inhaling helium from a balloon that he placed over his head. The balloon had been bought for his birthday a week prior.[729] | ||
Unknown man | ![]() |
May 2021 | The body of a 39-year-old man was found wedged inside the hind leg of a papier-mâché statue of a stegosaurus in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Catalonia, Spain. Initial police reports did not suspect foul play. A police representative hypothesised that the individual may have crawled inside headfirst to retrieve a lost mobile phone before his leg became stuck, trapping him inside. Firefighters had to cut the statue apart to extract the body; police observers believed that he may have been trapped in there for "a couple of days". Local media claimed that the family of the victim had reported him missing only hours prior to the discovery. The body was discovered when a man and his son noticed an unusual smell from the statue, and saw the body through a crack in the statue.[730][731] | |
Salman Mirza | June 2021 | The resident of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, died after using epoxy resin as a contraceptive instead of a condom, while intoxicated from using the same resin as an inhalant. The man was found unconscious outside a hotel the following morning, but died of multiple organ failure after being hospitalised.[732][733] | ||
Eleanor Skerritt | 24 July 2021 | The 50-year-old from Margam, Wales, accidentally became stuck in a decking well after apparently slipping or losing her balance while cleaning. Her "loose and ill-fitting" footwear left her "unable to regain her footing" after losing her balance. Her autopsy revealed she died of "positional asphyxia" and "died through misfortune" according to the coroner.[734] | ||
Tony Eyles | 9 September 2021 | The 42-year-old died at a McDonald's drive-through in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, after partially opening his car door to retrieve a dropped payment card. His car rolled forward and collided with the restaurant's structure, pinning him between the car door and the vehicle's frame. Despite attempts to revive the victim, he died on scene.[735][736] | ||
Unknown man | 31 October 2021 | A 30-year-old man was fishing with two friends at a lake in Brasilândia de Minas, Brazil, when the group was attacked by bees. He and his friends jumped into the lake to escape the bees, but the man drowned and was partially eaten by piranhas; his friends survived.[737] | ||
Teddy Balkind | 6 January 2022 | The 16-year-old high school student for St. Luke's School, Connecticut, died after suffering an injury to his neck during a junior varsity ice hockey game. He died after he fell during a game and was accidentally hit by another player, who was unable to stop in time. The other player's skate blade cut Balkind's neck, and he died following an emergency operation.[738][739] | ||
Laila Zahrul Maisaroh | 14 January 2022 | The 20-year-old late pregnant woman from Banjarmasin, Indonesia, was killed instantly when a concrete barrier from an elevated parking lot fell onto her. A car in the parking lot had collided with the barrier.[740][741] | ||
Unknown man | 20 February 2022 | A 28-year-old man in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego, California, is believed to have been using a knife to mix protein powder into a container of water while driving. He lost control and crashed into a parked car. The car's airbag propelled the knife into his neck, fatally injuring him.[742] | ||
Dolores Olive Boschert | 22 May 2022 | The 23-year-old paramedic was exercising alone on a Smith machine at a Planet Fitness gymnasium in St. Charles, Missouri, when she was pinned by a barbell due to unknown circumstances. Another patron found her 30 minutes later and she was pronounced dead at the scene.[743] | ||
Maya Murmu | 20 June 2022 | The 68-year-old woman was trampled by an elephant in Odisha, India. Later, at her funeral, the same elephant came back and attacked her corpse by picking up her body and throwing her in the air.[744] | ||
Klil Kimhi | 21 July 2022 | The 32-year-old fell to his death when a sinkhole opened under a swimming pool he was in at a house party in Israel.[745][746] | ||
Muthukumar | 2 August 2022 | A 54-year-old man in Tamil Nadu, India, died 4 days after falling into a pot of freshly-prepared porridge that was still boiling, suffering 65% burn injuries in the process. The man had lost his balance and leaned against the pot, toppling backwards into it. His wife claimed he suffered from epilepsy which may have triggered the fall.[747][748] | ||
Unknown man | 7 August 2022 | A 65-year-old man was hit in the head by a hammer throw used at a Highland games event in the Netherlands. The thrower lost his balance and the hammer, a metal ball with a stick attached to it, flew over a hedge and struck the man in the head, killing him instantly.[749] | ||
Joseph Smith | 21 January 2023 | Joseph Smith, a 30-year-old man, was shot and killed by his dog after the animal stepped on a loaded rifle in the back seat of his pickup truck, causing the gun to fire through the front passenger seat and hit him in the back. The driver of the truck, who was sitting next to Smith at the time of the accident, was unharmed.[750] | ||
Leandro Mathias de Novaes | 6 February 2023 | The 40-year-old activist for the right to keep and bear arms in Brazil was assisting his mother in the MRI suite of Cura Laboratory in the central region of São Paulo on 16 January while wearing a registered firearm on his waistband. The gun, affected by the magnet, was pulled away from him and subsequently discharged, shooting him in the stomach. He remained in intensive care for 21 days before dying of his injuries.[751][752] | ||
Shivdayal Sharma | 19 April 2023 | The 82-year-old was urinating next to a train track in the region of Alwar, India, when a cow was hit by the Vande Bharat express train. The animal was launched 100 feet (30 m) into the air before landing on Sharma, killing him instantly.[753] | ||
Lynn Ann Fleming | 16 May 2023 | The 68-year-old was a passenger in the front seat of a car travelling on the I-75 in Whitfield County, Georgia, U.S., when a cargo winch bar came through the windshield and impaled her. She died at the scene.[754] | ||
Unknown boy | 26 June 2023 | An 11-year-old boy was killed in Wayne County, Ohio, in a freak accident while riding in a side-by-side, after a dog who was riding in the SSV with him jumped onto the vehicle's accelerator pedal, causing it to accelerate, veer off the road and fly over the edge of an embankment. The boy died at the scene of the accident, while his 12-year-old brother, who was also in the SSV, sustained minor injuries and was admitted to hospital. The driver of the vehicle, an 18-year-old family friend, also survived.[755] | ||
Mikala Jones | 9 July 2023 | The 44-year-old was killed in a surfing accident in North Sipora, Indonesia, after the fin of his surfboard severed his femoral artery.[756] | ||
Giacomo Chiapparini | 6 August 2023 | The 74-year-old died when a shelf in his warehouse in Romano di Lombardia, Italy, broke and crushed him under thousands of wheels of Grana Padano cheese, with each wheel weighing approximately 40 kilograms (88 lb).[757] His body was recovered from the wreckage after 12 hours.[758][759] | ||
Adam Johnson | 28 October 2023 | The 29-year-old member of the Nottingham Panthers professional ice hockey team in England died after his neck was cut by a skate during a game between the Panthers and the Sheffield Steelers.[760] | ||
Dorothy Louise Downey | 27 November 2023 | The 83-year-old woman arrived at her daughter's house in Salem, South Carolina, to visit and assist with a move. As she was walking in the kitchen, Downey broke through a weakened patch of floor, falling 48 ft (15 m) into a hidden well shaft. She was extricated by rescue services, but died from her injuries.[761][762] | ||
Sanjay Shah | 20 January 2024 | The 55-year-old CEO of Vistex was celebrating his company's 25th anniversary at a movie studio stage in India. As part of the celebration, Shah and company president Raju Datla were being lowered from the ceiling to the stage in a cage or basket, when a cable broke and both men fell 20 feet (6.1 m), killing Shah and leaving Datla in critical condition.[763][764] | ||
Yogish | 25 March 2024 | The 24-year-old Bengaluru man died due to a burst colon after his friend blew air into his rectum with an electric high-pressure blow-dryer used for vehicles. The friend was playfully blowing air at him, and when he turned to shield his face, the force of the air was such that it entered his rectum and severely damaged his colon.[765] | ||
Unknown male tourist | 13 April 2024 | A 30-year-old tourist was killed in a freak accident at a church in El Pinell de Brai, Tarragona, Spain, during the festival of Santa Magdalena. The tourist, part of a group from Terra Alta, Catalonia, had climbed the church's tower during the celebrations and was killed instantly when the church bell, which was ringing at the time of the accident, swung forward and hit him.[766][767] | ||
Lucy Morgan | 5 June 2024 | The 6-year-old girl was with her family on vacation in Limerick, Maine, on 1 June when, whilst playing badminton with her family, her brother's aluminum racket shaft broke and pierced her in the skull. She was taken to the hospital where she died from her injuries four days later.[768] | ||
Tony Knight | 7 June 2024 | The 54-year-old British comedian died after he was struck by a large tree branch while attending the Rock&Cars festival in Lavaur, Tarn, France.[769][770] | ||
Andrew Pontious | 14 June 2024 | The 53-year-old Los Angeles County firefighter was killed while spraying water on a burning construction vehicle when one of the vehicle's tires exploded.[771] | ||
Unknown woman | 18 June 2024 | A 22-year-old woman using a treadmill at a gym in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, Indonesia, died after she stumbled off the end of the treadmill and fell through the window behind her, falling three stories to her death.[772] The local police commissioner reported that the gym's safety standards were insufficient, as the glass was not thick enough, while the treadmills were placed too close to the window.[773] | ||
Margerita Lega | 4 July 2024 | The 41-year-old woman from Trentino, Italy, was killed in a freak accident in Calasca-Castiglione, Piedmont, when she was caught by the cables of a cargo cable car and dragged over the edge of a cliff overlooking the Anzasca Valley. After holding on for a few moments, Lega lost her grip and fell 492 feet (150 m) to her death in front of her family, who were visiting the area with her.[774] | ||
Ayres Sasaki | 13 July 2024 | The 35-year-old rock singer from Brazil was electrocuted while performing at a hotel in the city of Salinópolis, Pará. Those watching the performance said that a person hugged him with wet clothes. At the time the contact occurred, he received an electric shock and died before being rescued.[775] | ||
Maga | 15 August 2024 | The 74-year-old woman from Palopo, South Sulawesi, was constricted to death by a 4.5-metre (15 ft) long reticulated python. The python regurgitated her body after being unable to fully swallow her.[776][777] |
Animal deaths
[edit]This section is for the deaths of animals, for whom there are several sources mentioning the deaths as unusual.
Name of animal | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Three cows, three sheep, two sows | 1662 | Cotton Mather writes how one William Potter was hanged for bestiality, as were the animals involved.[778][779] | |
Dog | 1677 | Mary Hicks, a married working-class woman, was brought before the Central Criminal Court of London on the charge of having sex with her dog. When the dog was brought into the court he started "wagging his tail, and making motions as it were to kiss her", which the court took as evidence the charges were true. Mary was subsequently forced to watch the dog be hanged before she was executed herself.[780] | |
Female goat | 1758 | John Blake, a Royal Marine, was convicted of "buggery upon the body of a she-goat" and both were sentenced to death. Blake, however, was pardoned on grounds of being "next to an idiot". Only the goat was put to death.[780][781] | |
Jocko | 1880 | Jocko, a performance monkey from London, England, was found dead after he hanged himself with a makeshift noose made with clothesline. It is believed that Jocko did it as an experiment after watching public hangings with his owner Rockwell Syrock.[782] | |
Jumbo | ![]() |
15 September 1885 | The celebrity elephant was hit by a train in St. Thomas, Ontario. He died shortly thereafter. According to studies, Jumbo was trying to regenerate his bones during his lifetime due to the unsuitable conditions in which he was kept.[783] |
Topsy | ![]() |
4 January 1903 | The elephant was executed by poisoning, electrocution, and strangulation. A 74-second film of the electrocution was recorded and preserved. It may have been the first time death was ever captured in a motion picture film.[784][better source needed] |
Mary the elephant | ![]() |
13 September 1916 | The day after the five-ton cow elephant killed a trainer for the Sparks World Famous Shows circus in Sullivan County, Tennessee, she was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane.[785][786] |
Cow | January 1932 | The Townsville Daily Bulletin, an Australian newspaper, reported an incident where a dairy cow was partially blown up and killed on a farm at Kennedy Creek (near Cardwell, North Queensland). The cow had reputedly picked up a detonator in her mouth while grazing in a paddock. This was only triggered later, when the cow began to chew her cud, at a time when she was in the process of being milked. The cow had its head blown off by the resulting explosion, and the farmer milking the cow was knocked unconscious.[787] | |
Sparrow | 3 July 1936 | In what has been described as the most famous incident of its kind,[788] cricketer Jahangir Khan hit a sparrow with a ball while playing against Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord's. The animal was taxidermied after the incident, and mounted with the ball that killed it before being placed on display at Lord's.[789] | |
Hilda the elephant | 8 September 1938 | Hilda, a 7-year-old 2,500-pound (1,100 kg) female Asian elephant, was butted into a 25-foot (7.6 m) deep moat surrounding the elephant enclosure by her 3,600-pound (1,600 kg) mate, Bill. She survived the fall and was derricked out, but x-rays showed that her back had been broken, and she was euthanized. Bill later fell into the same moat, now filled with 6 feet (1.8 m) of water, and was not seriously hurt.[790] | |
Cow | 22 May 1957 | In New Mexico, approximately 4.5 mi (7.2 km) south of Kirtland Air Force Base, a grazing cow was killed by a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb accidentally jettisoned from a USAF B-36 strategic bomber aircraft. The bomb was not equipped with components necessary for nuclear detonation at the time, but the conventional high explosives in the bomb detonated on impact, killing the cow and causing a crater about 12 ft (3.7 m) deep and 25 ft (7.6 m) wide.[791][792] | |
Swallow | 23 November 1969 | During a Sheffield Shield cricket match between Western Australia and South Australia in the 1969–70 season, a ball bowled by South Australian Greg Chappell struck a swooping swallow. Batsman John Inverarity described the ball to "change direction mid-air" before hitting his wicket. Inverarity was given out and the next batsman was about to take the crease but the swallow was found dead behind the stumps. The umpire signalled the ball dead and Inverarity was called back to bat. He went on to make 89 runs in the innings. The bird is now stuffed and rests inside the Adelaide Oval Museum.[793][failed verification] | |
Seagull | 4 August 1983 | During a Major League Baseball Yankees-Blue Jays game at Toronto's Exhibition Stadium, Yankees right fielder Dave Winfield threw a warm-up ball which hit a seagull, killing it. After the game, Toronto police charged Winfield with causing "unnecessary suffering of an animal". The charges were dropped the following day.[794] | |
Purzel, Amema and Rosi (hippopotami) | 14-15 July 1984 | Three hippopotami were killed by an elephant at the Karlsruhe Zoo in Karlsruhe, West Germany. The elephant used its trunk to open a valve, which sent scalding hot water (55 °C / 150 °F) into their pool. The water generated steam that interfered with their breathing, and the hippos (28-year-old Purzel, 27-year-old Amema and their offspring, 1-year-old Rosi) died of shock.[795] | |
Cocaine Bear | ![]() |
1985 | A 175-kilogram (386 lb) American black bear died in Georgia in 1985 after overdosing on cocaine. The cocaine had been dumped from an airplane piloted by Andrew C. Thornton II, a former narcotics officer turned convicted drug smuggler.[796] It inspired the 2023 film Cocaine Bear.[797] |
Deer | 14 August 1987 | Stefan Johansson hit a roe deer with his McLaren MP4/3 after it wandered onto the circuit during Friday practice for the Austrian Grand Prix. The terrified deer was crossing the track to seek refuge from the noise of the cars when it was struck by Johansson traveling at close to 140 mph (230 km/h), killing it instantly.[798][799] Johansson survived. | |
Olympic doves | 17 September 1988 | During the opening ceremony of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, hundreds of live doves were released as a symbol of world peace. Many of the doves landed on the Olympic cauldron just prior to it being lit. When the cauldron was lit, over a dozen of the doves resting on the rim of the cauldron and flying directly above it were burned alive by the Olympic flame. The death of the birds marked the last time that live doves were used in the ceremonies.[800][801] | |
Goose | 27 March 1999 | On the inaugural ride of the Apollo's Chariot rollercoaster at Busch Gardens, male model Fabio was struck in the face by a goose during the first drop. The goose was killed, while Fabio's nose was bloodied and required stitches.[802] | |
Dove | 24 March 2001 | During a Major League Baseball spring training game, pitcher Randy Johnson threw a fastball just as a bird flew through the pitch's path, killing it instantly.[803][804] | |
Bird | 24 January 2002 | During a Tennis doubles match at the Australian Open, a powerfully struck forehand by French player Michael Llodra hit a small bird that crossed the path of the ball. In response, the players threw down their racquets and knelt down around the bird, in an impromptu funeral. The ceremony had to be ended by a court official, who asked the players to resume the match.[788][805] | |
Pigeon | 29 May 2009 | During a Twenty20 cricket match at Headingley Cricket Ground, Leeds, England, between Yorkshire and Lancashire, Jacques Rudolph of Yorkshire fielded a ball close to the midwicket boundary and threw it to the wicket keeper. The return throw struck and killed a pigeon in flight across the ground.[806][807] | |
Alan the dachshund | 14 January 2013 | Tatler magazine's "office dog" saw a man approaching the revolving doors of Vogue House, London, and walked after the man. As Alan tried to rush through the revolving doors, his neck got caught in it, also getting the worker stuck in the door. Two fire engines rushed to the scene, where they freed the man, but could not free Alan, who died at the scene.[808][809] | |
Kabibe the gorilla | 7 November 2014 | The 15-month-old western lowland gorilla was accidentally crushed by a hydraulic door in her enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo.[810] |
See also
[edit]Lists
[edit]- List of association footballers who died while playing
- List of causes of death by rate
- List of racing cyclists and pacemakers with a cycling-related death
- List of entertainers who died during a performance
- List of inventors killed by their own invention
- List of last words
- Lists of people by cause of death
- List of people who died on the toilet
- List of people executed for witchcraft
- Lists of people who disappeared
- List of political self-immolations
- List of premature obituaries
- List of selfie-related injuries and deaths
- Toilet-related injuries and deaths
- List of deaths due to injuries sustained in boxing
- United States amusement park accidents
- Wheel-well stowaway § List of wheel-well stowaways
Notes
[edit]References
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Terpander was an excellent harper, and while he was singing to his harp at Sparta, and opened his mouth wide, a waggish person that stood by threw a fig into it so unluckily, that he was strangled by it.
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Fatal accidents did occur as in the case of Arrhichion, but they were very rare...
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Milo, the Crotonian, being upon his journey, beheld an oak in a field, which somebody had attempted to cleave with wedges; conscious to himself of his great strength, he came to it, and seizing it with both hands, endeavoured to wrest it asunder; but the tree (the wedges being fallen out) returning to itself, caught him by the hands in the cleft of it, and there detained him to be devoured with wild beasts, after his many and so famous exploits.
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Milo of Croton's death was bizarre, but fitting
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To some of the most distinguished of our race death has come in the strangest possible way, and so grotesquely as to subtract greatly from the dignity of the sorrow it must certainly have occasioned.
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Anacreon, an ancient lyric poet, having outlived the usual standard of life, and yet endeavouring to prolong it by drinking the juice of raisins, was choaked with a stone of one that happened to fall into the liquor in straining it.
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Heracl[t]ius, the Ephesian, fell into a dropsy, and was thereupon advised by the physicians to anoint himself all over with cow‑dung, and so to sit in the warm sun; his servant had left him alone, and the dogs, supposing him to be a wild beast, fell upon him, and killed him.
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Many of history's most important figures have suffered strange deaths that do not seem to befit their noble legacy.
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Polydamus, the famous wrestler, was forced by a tempest into a cave, which being ready to fall into ruins by the violent and sudden incursion of the waters, though others fled at the signs of the danger's approach, yet he alone would remain, as one that could bear up the whole heap and weight of the falling earth with his shoulders; but he found it above all human strength, and so was crushed in pieces by it.
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Drusus Pompeius, the son of Claudius Cæsar, by Herculanilla, to whom the daughter of Sejanus had a few days before been betrothed, being a boy, and playing, he cast up a pear on high, to receive it again in to his mouth; but it fell so full, and descended so far into his throat, that he was choked by it, before any help could be had.
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Attila, King of the Huns, having married a wife in Hungary, and upon his wedding night surcharged himself with meat and drink; as he slept, his nose fell a bleeding, and through his mouth found the way into his throat, by which he was choked before any person was apprehensive of the danger.
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Anno Dom. 830, Popiel the Second, King of Poland, careless of matters of state, gave himself over to all manner of dissoluteness, so that his Lords despised him, and call him the Polonian Sardanapalus. He feared therefore that they would set one of his kinsmen in his stead; so that, by the advice of his wife, whom he loved, he feigned himself sick, and sent for all his uncles, Princes of Pomerania (being twenty in number), to come and see him, whom (lying in his bed) he earnestly prayed, that, if he chanced to die, they would make choice of one of his sons to be King; which they willingly promised, in case the Lords of the kingdom would consent thereto. The Queen enticed them all, one by one, to drink a health to the King: as soon as they had done they took their leave. But they were scarce got out of the King's chamber, before they were seized with intolerable pains, and the corrosions of that poison wherewith the Queen had intermingled their draughts; and, in a short time, they all died. The Queen gave it out as a judgment of God upon them for having conspired the death of the King; and prosecuting this accusation, caused their bodies to be taken out of their graves, and cast into the lake Goplo. But, by a miraculous transformation, an innumerable number of rats and mice did rush out of those bodies; which, gathering together in crowds, went and assaulted the King, as he was with great jollity feasting in his palace. The guards endeavoured to drive them away with weapons and flames, but all in vain. The King, perplexed with this extraordinary danger, fled, with his wife and children, into a fortress that is yet to be seen in that lake of Goplo, over-against a city called Crusphitz, whither he was pursued with such a number of these creatures, that the land and the water were covered with them, and they cried and hissed most fearfully: they entered in at the windows of the fortress, having scaled the walls, and there they devoured the King, his wife, and children, alive, and left nothing of them remaining; by which means all the race of the Poland princes were utterly extinguished, and Pyast, a husbandman, at the last, was elected to succeed.
- ^ Walter, James K. (2011). "Ragnars saga loðbrókar". In Gentry, Francis G.; McConnell, Winder; Müller, Ulrich; Wunderlich, Werner (eds.). The Nibelungen Tradition: An Encyclopedia. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-8153-1785-2 – via Google Books.
- ^ Le Bas, Philippe (1843). L'Univers, histoire et description de tous les peuples – Dictionnaire encyclopédique de la France [The Universe, history and description of all peoples - French Encyclopedic Dictionary] (in French). Vol. 10. p. 339 – via Google Books.
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- ^ Translations of the Orkneyinga saga (chapters 4 and 5), which relates the story, can be read online at Sacred texts Archived 2017-03-29 at the Wayback Machine and Northvegr Archived 2008-05-16 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Wanley, Nathaniel; Johnston, William (1806). "Chapter XXVIII: Of the different and unusual Ways by which some Men have come to their Deaths § 22". The Wonders of the Little World; Or, A General History of Man: Displaying the Various Faculties, Capacities, Powers and Defects of the Human Body and Mind, in Many Thousand Most Interesting Relations of Persons Remarkable for Bodily Perfections or Defects; Collected from the Writings of the Most Approved Historians, Philosophers, and Physicians, of All Ages and Countries - Book I: Which treats of the Perfections, Powers, Capacities, Defects, Imperfections, and Deformities of the Body of Man. Vol. 1 (A new ed.). London. p. 113. ASIN B001F3H1XA. LCCN 07003035. OCLC 847968918. OL 7188480M. Archived from the original on 29 August 2016. Retrieved 23 July 2024 – via Internet Archive.
Anno Dom. 968, Hatto, the second duke of Franconia, surnamed Bonosus, Abbot of Fulden, was chosen Archbishop of Mainz. In his time was a grievious [sic] dearth; and the poor being ready to starve for want of food, he caused great companies of them to be gathered, and put into barns, as if there they should receive corn, and other relief: but he caused the barns to be set on fire, and the poor to be consumed therein; saying withal, that they were the rats that did eat up the fruits of the land. But not long after, an army of rats gathered themselves together (no man can tell from whence) and set upon him so furiously, that into what place soever he retired, they would come and fall upon him; if he climbed on high into chambers, they would ascend the wall, and enter at the windows, and other small chinks and crevices: the more men attempted to do them away, the more furious they seemed, and the more they encreased in their number. The wretched Prelate, seeing he could find no place by land safe for him, resolved to seek some refuge by the waters, and got into a boat, to convey himself to a tower, in the midst of the Rhine, near a little city called Bingen: but the rats threw themselves by infinite heaps into the Rhine, and swam to the foot of the tower; and clambering up the wall, entered therein, and fell upon the Archbishop, gnawing and biting, and throtling [sic] and tearing, and tugging him most miserably, till he died. This tower is yet to be seen, and at this day is called Rats the Tower. It is also remarkable, that while [the] Archbishop was yet alive, and in perfect health, the rats gnawed and razed out his name, written and painted upon many walls.
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- ^ Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, v. 4, p. 129
- ^ Wanley, Nathaniel; Johnston, William (1806). "Chapter XXVIII: Of the different and unusual Ways by which some Men have come to their Deaths § 15". The Wonders of the Little World; Or, A General History of Man: Displaying the Various Faculties, Capacities, Powers and Defects of the Human Body and Mind, in Many Thousand Most Interesting Relations of Persons Remarkable for Bodily Perfections or Defects; Collected from the Writings of the Most Approved Historians, Philosophers, and Physicians, of All Ages and Countries - Book I: Which treats of the Perfections, Powers, Capacities, Defects, Imperfections, and Deformities of the Body of Man. Vol. 1 (A new ed.). London. p. 112. ASIN B001F3H1XA. LCCN 07003035. OCLC 847968918. OL 7188480M. Archived from the original on 29 August 2016. Retrieved 23 July 2024 – via Internet Archive.
Lewis the Seventh, surnamed the Grosse, King of France, would needs have his eldest son Philip crowned King in his life-time, who soon after riding in the suburbs of Paris, his horse, frighted at the sight of a sow, threw him out of his saddle, and he died within a few hours after.
- ^ Hollister 2003, pp. 467–468, 473
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At Anagni Hadrian proclaimed the emperor excommunicate and a few days later, to cool himself down [during the hot weather] he started off for a certain fountain along with his attendants. When he got there he drank deeply and at once (according to the story), a fly entered his mouth, stuck to his throat, and could not be shifted by any device of the doctors: and as a result, the pope died.
, cited in Maxwell-Stuart, P. G. (1997). Chronicle of the Popes: The Reign-by-reign Record of the Papacy from St. Peter to the Present ; with 308 Illustrations, 105 in Color. London: Thames and Hudson. p. 97. ISBN 978-0-50001-798-2. - ^ Wanley, Nathaniel; Johnston, William (1806). "Chapter XXVIII: Of the different and unusual Ways by which some Men have come to their Deaths § 11". The Wonders of the Little World; Or, A General History of Man: Displaying the Various Faculties, Capacities, Powers and Defects of the Human Body and Mind, in Many Thousand Most Interesting Relations of Persons Remarkable for Bodily Perfections or Defects; Collected from the Writings of the Most Approved Historians, Philosophers, and Physicians, of All Ages and Countries - Book I: Which treats of the Perfections, Powers, Capacities, Defects, Imperfections, and Deformities of the Body of Man. Vol. 1 (A new ed.). London. p. 114. ASIN B001F3H1XA. LCCN 07003035. OCLC 847968918. OL 7188480M. Archived from the original on 29 August 2016. Retrieved 24 July 2024 – via Internet Archive.
Pope Adrian IV. drinking a draught of spring-water, to refresh himself when he was thirsty, a fly, falling into the glass as he was drinking, choaked him.
- ^ Oliver, Leslie M. (1945). "Rowley, Foxe, and the Faustus Additions". Modern Language Notes. 60 (6): 392. doi:10.2307/2911382. JSTOR 2911382. OCLC 818888932.
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Frederic the First, Emperor of Germany, bathing himself in the Cydnus, a river of Silesia, of a violent course, the swiftness of the stream tripped up his heels, and, not being able to recover himself, was suddenly drowned.
- ^ Wanley, Nathaniel; Johnston, William (1806). "Chapter XXVIII: Of the different and unusual Ways by which some Men have come to their Deaths § 24". The Wonders of the Little World; Or, A General History of Man: Displaying the Various Faculties, Capacities, Powers and Defects of the Human Body and Mind, in Many Thousand Most Interesting Relations of Persons Remarkable for Bodily Perfections or Defects; Collected from the Writings of the Most Approved Historians, Philosophers, and Physicians, of All Ages and Countries - Book I: Which treats of the Perfections, Powers, Capacities, Defects, Imperfections, and Deformities of the Body of Man. Vol. 1 (A new ed.). London. p. 113. ASIN B001F3H1XA. LCCN 07003035. OCLC 847968918. OL 7188480M. Archived from the original on 29 August 2016. Retrieved 23 July 2024 – via Internet Archive.
Anno Dom. 1217, Henry the First was King of Spain, being yet a child: nor did he long enjoy the kingdom; for, after the second year of his reign, he was taken away by a sad and unexpected accident: for, while at Valentia he was playing in the court-yard of the palace with his equals, it happened that a tile fell from the house upon his head, which so fractured his skull, that he died upon the eleventh day after he received it.
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- ^ Wanley, Nathaniel; Johnston, William (1806). "Chapter XXVIII: Of the different and unusual Ways by which some Men have come to their Deaths § 29". The Wonders of the Little World; Or, A General History of Man: Displaying the Various Faculties, Capacities, Powers and Defects of the Human Body and Mind, in Many Thousand Most Interesting Relations of Persons Remarkable for Bodily Perfections or Defects; Collected from the Writings of the Most Approved Historians, Philosophers, and Physicians, of All Ages and Countries - Book I: Which treats of the Perfections, Powers, Capacities, Defects, Imperfections, and Deformities of the Body of Man. Vol. 1 (A new ed.). London. p. 114. ASIN B001F3H1XA. LCCN 07003035. OCLC 847968918. OL 7188480M. Archived from the original on 29 August 2016. Retrieved 23 July 2024 – via Internet Archive.
Charles II. King of Navarre, by a vicious life in his youth, fell into a paralytic distemper in his old age, that took away the use of his limbs. His physicians directed him to be sewed up in a sheet that had for a considerable time been steeped in strong distilled spirits, to recover the natural heat of his benumbed joints. The surgeon having sewed him up very close, and wanting a knife to cut off the thread, made use of a candle that was at hand to burn it off; but the flame from the thread reaching the sheet, the spirits wherewith it was wet immediately taking fire, burnt so vehemently, that no endeavours could extinguish the flame. Thus the miserable King lost his life in using the means to recover his health.
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In the nineteenth year of Queen Elizabeth, at the assize at Oxford, July 1577, one Rowland Jenk[e]s, a Popish bookseller, for dispersing scandalous pamphlets defamatory to the Queen and State, was arraigned and condemned; but on the sudden there arose such a damp that almost all present were in danger of being smothered. The Jurors died that instant. Soon after died Sir Robert Bell, Lord Chief Baron; Sir Robert de Oly, Sir William Babington; Mr. de Oly, High Sheriff; Mr. Wearnam, Mr. Danvers, Mr. Fettiplace, Mr. Harcourt, Justices; Mr. Kerle, Mr. Nash, Mr. Greenwood, Mr. Foster, Gentlemen of good account; Serjeant Barham, an excellent pleader; three hundred persons presently sickened and died within the town, and two hundred more sickening died in other places; amongst all whom there was neither woman nor child.
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The execution in itself was an unusual one...
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Dr. Andrew Perne (though very facetious, was at last killed with a jest, as I have been credibly informed from excellent hands. He is taxed much for altering his religion four times in twelve years; from the last of King Henry the Eighth, to the first of Queen Elizabeth, a Papist, a Protestant, a Papist, a Protestant; but still Andrew Perne. It happened he was at Court with his pupil Archbishop Whitgift, in a rainy afternoon, when the Queen was resolved to ride abroad, contrary to the mind of the Ladies, who were on horseback, (coaches as yet being not common) to attend her. One Clod, the Queen's jester, was employed by the Courtiers to laugh the Queen out of so inconvenient a journey. "Heaven, saith he, "Madam dissuades you; this heavenly-minded man, Archbishop Whitgift, and earth, dissuades you; your fool Clod, such a lump of Clay as myself, dissuades you; and if neither will prevail with you, here is one that is neither heaven nor earth, but hangs betwixt both, Dr. Perne, and he also dissuades you." Hereupon the Queen and the Courtiers laughed heartily, whilst the Doctor looked sadly; and going over with his Grace to Lambeth, soon died.
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At the time of Tycho's death, in 1601, the blame fell on his failure to relieve himself while drinking profusely at the banquet, supposedly injuring his bladder and making him unable to urinate.
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...in Puritan times, his unusual crime so offended his community that it warranted the harshest of punishments.
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On May 23 of that year, he stood in the doorway of the home at which he was staying and a bolt of lightning took him. Family and friends, shocked by the event, recalled that that was how he wished to go.
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Knud R. Joergensen wrote in 1995 about the 1791 case of composer Franz Kotzwara who enlisted the help of a London prostitute, Susannah Hill, to assist him with his bizarre wish. After paying Hill two shillings, Kotzwara asked her to cut off his genitalia – a request the prostitute refused. Yet, Hill did agree to fulfill Kotzwara's sexual wish of strangling himself with a rope. It was the first documented case of death by sexual strangulation.
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Spencer had a most unusual death, by turkey.
This source incorrectly gives Spencer's age at death as 60. - ^ Baggoley, Martin (9 April 2015). "The Hammersmith Ghost and the Strange Death of Thomas Millwood". Crime Magazine. Retrieved 17 August 2024.
- ^ Goddard, Jonathan Charles (2003). "A seaman's wager". Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 96 (7): 359–360. doi:10.1177/014107680309600718. PMC 539548. PMID 12835457.
- ^ Mikkelson, Barbara; Mikkelson, David (17 January 2007) [Originally published 31 August 2002]. "Did a Beer Flood Kill 9 People?". Fact Check. Snopes. Retrieved 7 August 2024.
The ongoing spate of Internet reports of unusual deaths, both real and fictional, might lead some to believe extraordinary modes of demise are a recent phenomenon. Nothing could be further from the truth — the Grim Reaper has always found incredible methods of ending human life. One such instance took place in 1814 in London.
- ^ ""A real beer tsunami". Remembering the big British beer flood of October, 1814 with brewing historian Martyn Cornell". As It Happens. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 17 October 2014. Retrieved 7 August 2024.
- ^ Johnson, Ben. "The London Beer Flood of 1814". Historic UK. Retrieved 12 August 2024.
A bizarre industrial accident resulted in the release of a beer tsunami onto the streets around Tottenham Court Road... This unique disaster was responsible for the gradual phasing out of wooden fermentation casks to be replaced by lined concrete vats.
- ^ "The Death of William Huskisson". 4 March 2016. Retrieved 17 August 2024.
It is impossible to figure to one's self any event which could produce a greater sensation or be more striking to the imagination than this, happening at such a time and under such circumstances: the eminence of the man, the sudden conversion of a scene of gaiety and splendour into one of horror and dismay; the countless multitudes present, and the effect upon them-crushed to death in sight of his wife and at the feet (as it was) of his great political rival-all calculated to produce a deep and awful impression.
- ^ "Strange Death". The Phenix. Bristol, Rhode Island. 21 April 1838. Page 1, column 1. Retrieved 31 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ Mütter EDU Staff (20 January 2017). "What Killed William Henry Harrison?". Education Blog. College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Retrieved 12 August 2024.
Since today is inauguration day, allow me to shed light on what has to be one of the most unusual inauguration stories: the death of William Henry Harrison.
- ^ "Strange death". Litchfield Enquirer. Litchfield, Connecticut. 2 December 1841. Page 2, column 5. Retrieved 31 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
A negro boy belonging to Pierre de Puerto, in Colcasine, come [sic] to his death on the 16th Aug., in a very strange manner.
- ^ "Strange and Unusual Deaths in the 19th Century". C.A. Asbrey. 4 June 2018. Retrieved 1 August 2024.
In Dundee, Scotland, 22 year old Jane Goodwin died a truly Victorian death – lacing her corsets too tightly.
- ^ "Peculiar Death". Republican Herald. Providence, Rhode Island. 22 January 1848. Page 2, column 3. Retrieved 6 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ a b "Dead President: Zachary Taylor and His Calamitous Chow Down". The Skeleton Key Chronicles. 18 February 2020. Retrieved 12 August 2024.
President's Day mostly comes and goes with little to no fanfare, a paid holiday for a chosen few and maybe a great mattress sale, but this year it got me thinking, have there been any weird or extremely interesting causes of death for any of our former leaders? We all learn about assassinations of presidents in history class but I was looking for something a bit more unusual, and I found it - the death of Zachary Taylor.
- ^ a b Savey, Edward (6 July 2021). "US President Zachary Taylor". ConstitutionUS.com. Retrieved 12 August 2024.
Then you have those remembered for their short stay in the White House and unusual cause of death. The 12th president, Zachary Taylor, belongs to the latter category.
- ^ Bletchly, Rachel (2 November 2012). "Death and dumb: The 13-year-old killed by a circus clown and other truly epic exits". Daily Mirror. Retrieved 3 July 2024.
- ^ Johnson, Ben (8 December 2014). "Dying for a Humbug, the Bradford Sweets Poisoning 1858". Historic UK. Retrieved 12 August 2024.
- ^ Baldwin, Cassidy; Rushton, William. "Halloween Sadism: A Review of Poisoned Halloween Candy". Alabama American College of Emergency Physicians. Retrieved 12 August 2024.
Yet, the historical literature reports only few isolated cases over the last 150 years...
- ^ "A Strange Death". The Hydraulic Press. North San Juan, Nevada County, California. 24 March 1860. Page 3, column 1. Retrieved 21 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
A young man named George Yugle, a charcoal burner and much addicted to drunkenness, died in this place last Friday night, the 16th inst., under peculiar circumstances.
- ^ Schweber, Nate (18 October 2012). "Recalling a New Pitch and a Strange Death". Retrieved 2 August 2024.
Despite the pitch that Creighton introduced, he is best known for his mysterious death.
- ^ Pittard, Homer. "The Strange Death of Peter Julius Garesché". latinamericanstudies.org. Retrieved 27 August 2024.
- ^ Palmer, Alan (1997). Twilight of the Habsburgs. The Life and Times of Emperor Francis Joseph. London: Phoenix Giant. p. 158. ISBN 978-1857998696.
- ^ "Brandunfall der Erzherzogin Mathilde von Österreich" [The Fire Death of Archduchess Mathilda of Austria] (PDF). HessenArchiv aktuelle 9/2020 (in German). Hessisches Landesarchiv. p. 5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 October 2021. Retrieved 24 October 2021.
- ^ a b c d e Clay, Jeremy (25 December 2013). "10 truly bizarre Victorian deaths". BBC News. British Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on 19 May 2018. Retrieved 17 August 2024.
- ^ "Mary Ward 1827-1869". 2 September 2007. Archived from the original on 16 January 2014.
- ^ "Fatal Accident to Mr. Vallandigham". Western Reserve Chronicle. 21 June 1871. p. 2. Archived from the original on 3 November 2013. Retrieved 21 February 2022 – via The American Civil War @ 150.
Here is a newspaper account of the unusual death of Clement Vallandigham, a leader of the Copperhead Democrats during the Civil War.
- ^ "Death of Clement Vallandigham". Archived from the original on 3 November 2015.
- ^ York, Dena Lynn Winslow (1 June 2001). "They Lynched Jim Cullen": Story and Myth on the Northern Maine Frontier. Maine History Journal.
- ^ Dan_nehs (20 November 2020). "A Lynching in Maine: What Happened to James Cullen". Crime and Scandal. New England Historical Society. Retrieved 9 August 2024.
A lynching in Maine is an unusual thing. Throughout New England, lynching was extremely rare.
- ^ "Deputy Sheriff Granville A. Hayden, Aroostook County Sheriff's Office, Maine". The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc. Retrieved 9 August 2024.
- ^ "Deputy Sheriff William Hubbard, Aroostook County Sheriff's Office, Maine". The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc. Retrieved 9 August 2024.
- ^ "STRANGE DEATH IN THE MILITARY BARRACKS". The Argus. Melbourne. 11 July 1874. Page 8, column 1. Retrieved 27 August 2024 – via Trove.
The orderly in charge of the deceased and three other patients, between 2 and 3 o'clock on Thursday morning, took the deceased at his own request into the passage, where the night stool was, and went to get a light to light the gas.
- ^ O'Neal, Eamonn (31 December 2013). "Man dies after swallowing a mouse". Greater Manchester News. Manchester Evening News. Retrieved 18 August 2024.
In 1875, we reported on a very unusual death.
- ^ Ruxton, Dean (3 August 2016). "The night a river of whiskey ran through the streets of Dublin". The Irish Times. Retrieved 28 April 2022.
- ^ Hyland, Adam (18 June 2020). "The Great Whiskey Fire". Firecall official magazine of Dublin Fire, Ambulance, and Emergency Services.
There were 13 deaths, but not one of them was caused by fire itself," Las says. "They were all to do with the madness that took hold. Some of the stories were very sad, but some of them were also bizarre. My favourite is the house where there was a wake going on. The people there put themselves at risk to save the corpse, but they only save him enough to make sure he doesn't burn, before they all run back to get themselves some free whiskey. I like that because it is just so human.
- ^ The Palace Law of Ayutthaya and the Thammasat: Law and Kingship in Siam. Cornell University Press. 1 June 2016. ISBN 978-1-5017-2596-8 – via Google Books.
- ^ Pinheiro, Maria (9 December 2016). "9 of the Strangest Victorian Deaths Reported in the Newspapers". Bizarre. The Lineup. Retrieved 18 August 2024.
While a neighbor rushed to the scene with the police, a servant picked up the gun with the intention of demonstrating what had happened during Hague's self-shooting. Then, in an absurd case of irony, the servant managed to duplicate Hague's fate.
- ^ "The Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald from York, North Yorkshire, England". 15 October 1881. Retrieved 3 August 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ "Death of Sir William Gallway". Northern Echo. 20 December 1881. Retrieved 28 October 2018.
Sir William, so late as Thursday, was out shooting in the parish of Bagby, and in crossing a turnip field fell with his body on to a turnip, sustaining severe internal injuries. All that medical aid could do was done, but with Sir William's failing health he gradually sank, and died, as stated above, about ten o'clock yesterday morning.
- ^ "Andy McSmith's Diary: The enemy within Chequers at Sam Cam's delayed 40th". The Independent. 18 December 2014. Retrieved 28 October 2018.
It was 133 years ago, on 19 December 1881, that the Tory MP Sir William Payne-Gallwey was out shooting in Bagby, North Yorkshire, when he fell over and landed on a turnip. The impact killed the poor man.
- ^ Garcia, Erica Hernandez, Adrian (10 October 2016). "Does the ghost of Joseph Huebner haunt the Huebner-Onion Homestead?". KSAT. Retrieved 14 August 2024.
Huebner, said to be a bit of a drinker, died an unusual death in 1882.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ "SUICIDE BY PARIS GREEN". The New York Times. 25 July 1882.
- ^ "Strange and Unusual Deaths in the 19th Century". C.A. Asbrey. 4 June 2018. Retrieved 1 August 2024.
Death by Paris Green was one of the stranger causes of death in the 19th century.
- ^ "A STRANGE DEATH". Grey River Argus. 2 October 1883. p. 2. Retrieved 27 August 2024 – via Papers Past.
A shocking death is reported from West Clive, six miles from here. Early on Sunday morning a boy going out with milk found a woman lying in a ditch at the side of the road.
- ^ Lanis, Edward Stanley (1949). Allan Pinkerton and the Private Detective Institution. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, Madison. p. 170.
- ^ "A Singular Death". The Representative. Fox Lake, Wisconsin. 13 January 1886. Page 2, column 3. Retrieved 3 August 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
- ^ "Strange and Unusual Deaths in the 19th Century". C.A. Asbrey. 4 June 2018. Retrieved 1 August 2024.
Sam Wardell was a lamplighter who attached a ten pound rock to his alarm clock. When the alarm clock went off, the rock would fall onto the floor. Why a lamplighter had to be up so early is a mystery to me as they lit the gas lamps in the evenings, however, one night he moved his furniture for a party. He failed to move the furniture back. The alarm clock went off, and the rock fell right on his head.
- ^ "That Hissing Snake That was Pulled Out of a Boy's Mouth—The Original Story Confirmed—Further Particulars—A Horrible Fate". Sun-Journal. Lewiston, Maine. 11 May 1886. Page 3, column 3. Retrieved 27 August 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
A strange case which has recently come under the notice of the physicians, is the unhappy fate of the little boy who lived a few miles below Grand Falls... The above case is an actual fact, and so far as we can learn, it is unparalleled.
- ^ "The Aroostook Snake Story". Portland Daily Press. Portland, Maine. 13 May 1886. Page 1, column 9. Retrieved 10 August 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
A short time ago the strange story of a snake being pulled out of the mouth of a boy who lived near Grand Falls, in Aroostook county, was telegraphed the papers. Since then the case, which is believed to be unparalleled, has attracted the attention of physicans, and the story is fully confirmed.
- ^ "A Live Snake in a Boy's Stomach. He Died of Hemorrhage Soon After it Had Been Pulled From His Mouth". The Times and Democrat. Orangeburg, South Carolina. 20 May 1886. Page 5, column 3. Retrieved 10 August 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
The almost incredible story recently printed about the death of a boy near Grand Falls from hemorrhage caused by pulling from his mouth a live snake which had grown to his flesh proves to be literally true.
- ^ "Strange Death of a Lunatic". Morwell Advertiser and Weekly Chronicle. Morwell, Victoria. 1 October 1887. Page 3, column 3. Retrieved 27 August 2024 – via Trove.
- ^ Stubley, Peter (25 April 2020). "First credible evidence emerges of person being killed by meteor". Science. The Independent. Retrieved 21 February 2022.
The odds of being struck and killed by a meteorite are said to be as low as one in 250,000.
- ^ "Mother and Children Poisoned". St Paul Daily Globe. 22 April 1891. Retrieved 14 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
Particulars of a shocking poisoning were received here to-day.
- ^ "THE STRANGE DEATH OF A WOMAN. THE INQUEST ADJOURNED". The Argus. Melbourne. 12 January 1892. Page 6, column 6. Retrieved 27 August 2024 – via Trove.
- ^ Fernando, Gyan C. A. (October 1989). "A Case of Fatal Suffocation during an Attempt to Swallow a Pool Ball". Medicine, Science and the Law. 29 (4): 308–310. doi:10.1177/002580248902900409. PMID 2586274. Retrieved 18 August 2024 – via Sage Journals.
An unusual case of accidental death from suffocation during an attempt to 'swallow' a pool cue ball is presented.
- ^ "THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH AT WEST MELBOURNE. THE BODY IDENTIFIED". The Argus. Melbourne. 18 April 1893. Page 6, column 1. Retrieved 17 August 2024 – via Trove.
- ^ a b Pinheiro, Maria (9 December 2016). "9 of the Strangest Victorian Deaths Reported in the Newspapers". Bizarre. The Lineup. Retrieved 18 August 2024.
- ^ "STRANGE FATALITY". Grahamstown Journal. 25 January 1894. Retrieved 27 August 2024 – via eGGSA Library.
- ^ "A Peculiar Death. A Former Arizonian Starved to Death. A Peach Stone Lodges in His Throat and He Is Unable to Swallow Food". The Arizona Republican. Phoenix, Arizona. 8 September 1895. Page 4, column 3. Retrieved 6 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ "Strange Death of an Italian". Phillipsburg Herald. Phillipsburg, Kansas. 14 November 1895. Page 3, column 1. Retrieved 21 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
There is much excitement in Italian circles here over the strange death of a son of sunny Italy... Director of Safety Williams declined to allow an autopsy, in view of the objections of Mrs. Abbanez, and the real cause of the death is a mystery.
- ^ Lyman, Brian (26 February 2020). "Killed by wild beasts: The strange story of Jeremiah Haralson's 'death'". Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved 14 August 2024.
- ^ Lyman, Brian (26 February 2020). "The lost congressman: Sources for Jeremiah Haralson's remarkable life". Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved 14 August 2024.
The manner of death was bizarre, and it seemed unlikely a man who had worked as a farmer and a civil servant had the money to open a mine, or - at age 70 - had the physical stamina to become a coal miner.
- ^ Blakley, Bennett (5 February 1896). "BURIED ALIVE. Isaac Woods, a Well Digger, Meets a Horrible Death". The Dawson News. Dawson, Georgia. Page 3, column 3. Retrieved 31 July 2024 – via Chronicling America.
News reached the city Friday of a very sudden and unusual death over in the Fourth district of Randolph county.
- ^ a b McFarlane, Andrew (17 August 2010). "How the UK's first fatal car accident unfolded". BBC News. Retrieved 27 August 2013.
Melvyn Harrison, of historical group the Crystal Palace Foundation, says people would have been simply bemused at the sight of these "horseless carriages". "It was such a rare animal to be on the roads and, for her to be killed, people would have thought the story was made up," he says.
- ^ "Fatal crash with self-driving car was a first – like Bridget Driscoll's was 121 years ago with one of the first cars". The Washington Post. 22 March 2018. Retrieved 26 December 2023.
But Driscoll's death was so unusual that the matter landed in Coroners Court for a full-blown inquest.
- ^ "Solomon August Andrée - Sweden". aviation-history.com. Retrieved 17 July 2024.
There was no reason at all why the explorers should have perished when and where they did
- ^ "A Bad Man Is Dead. Passing of Michael Schwab, Anarchist. Died a Painful and Unusual Death—Noted Ex-Anarchist Dies of Starvation, Due to Consumption—The Haymarket Murders Recalled". The Wray Weekly Times. Vol. 1, no. 6. 30 July 1898. Page 2, column 4. Retrieved 17 August 2024 – via Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection.
- ^ De Burgh, Edward Morgan Alborough (1899). Elizabeth, empress of Austria: a memoir. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. p. 310.
- ^ Matray, Maria; Krüger, Answald (1998). L'attentato. La morte dell'Imperatrice Elisabetta e il delitto dell'anarchico Lucheni [The attack. The death of Empress Elisabeth and the crime of the anarchist Lucheni] (in Italian). Trieste: Mgs Press. ISBN 978-8886424561.
- ^ "A Most Unusual Death – Investigation of the Death of Joseph Gril – Shock Was a Light One – Any Healthy Man Should Have Been Able to Have Taken It Without Fatal Results — A Low Voltage Current On". The Anaconda Standard (Morning ed.). Anaconda, Montana. 1 August 1899. Page 7, column 2. Retrieved 21 July 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ "An Unusual Death". The Manning Times. Manning, Clarendon County, South Carolina. 25 October 1899. Page 4, column 4. Retrieved 20 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
A Pennsylvania farmer died in an unusual manner the other day.
- ^ Reynolds, MD, Ernest Septimus (8 January 1901). "AN ACCOUNT of the EPIDEMIC OUTBREAK OF ARSENICAL POISONING occurring in BEER DRINKERS IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND AND THE MIDLAND COUNTINES IN 1900". Medico-Chirurgical Transactions. 84: 409–452. PMC 2036791. PMID 20896969.
[...]if there was any known drug acting as a poison in the beer it was almost certainly arsenic. Improbable as this hypothesis at first seemed, yet it was a valid hypothesis, for it was not known to be untrue, it explained all the facts, and it was easily capable of proof or disproof.
- ^ Crawford, Raymond (1 May 1901). "The Arsenical Beer-Poisoning Epidemic in England". The Sanitarian. 46 (378). New York: 408. Retrieved 13 August 2024 – via ProQuest.
- ^ del Regato, Juan A. (February 2000). Lazear, Jesse William (1866-1900), physician. American National Biography Online. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1200521. Retrieved 11 August 2024.
- ^ Finacom, Steve (19 November 2015). "Big Game horror in 1900 was quickly forgotten". College Sports. The Mercury News. Archived from the original on 25 February 2022. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
- ^ Scott, Sam (1 November 2015). "The Big Game Disaster of 1900". Features. Stanford Magazine. Archived from the original on 25 February 2022. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
And this time the carnage would stagger belief... Jim Rutter, '86, Stanford's volunteer sports archivist... heard of the 1900 disaster only a few years ago, doubting at first something so incredible could be true.
- ^ "SHOCKED TO DEATH". Stockton Record. Vol. XII, no. 97. 31 January 1901. Page 5, column 4. Retrieved 27 August 2024 – via California Digital Newspaper Collection.
By a peculiar accident James Doyle Jr., a lineman, was killed at Smartsville yesterday.
- ^ "Adelbert S. Hay's Death Casts Gloom Over Yale – Secretary of State Collapses When He Reaches the Side of His Dead Son". The San Francisco Call. Vol. 87, no. 24. 23 June 1901. Page 2, columns 3-4. Retrieved 16 July 2024 – via California Digital Newspaper Collection.
Here the mystery becomes intangible.
- ^ "A WOMAN'S STRANGE DEATH". The Bairnsdale Advertiser and Tambo and Omeo Chronicle. Victoria, Australia. 15 July 1902. Page 2, column 6. Retrieved 24 August 2024 – via Trove.
An inquest was held to-day touching the death of Mary Franks, a married woman who died suddenly at a private hospital on Saturday after having a tooth extracted.
- ^ "A STRANGE DEATH". The Northern Advocate. Press Association. 1 September 1902. p. 3. Retrieved 28 August 2024 – via Papers Past.
- ^ Weeks & Gorman 2015, p. 155.
- ^ "Tué a Coups de Bible" [Killed With a Bible.]. Le Petit Parisien. 28 May 1903. Archived from the original on 24 May 2016. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
- ^ "Bible to Drive Out Devils. Hawaiian Sorcerer Beat Patient Over the Head With It and Victim Died". The Sun. 14 May 1903. Page 12, column 1. Retrieved 13 January 2019 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ "CALOMEL KILLED ROMANIA Negro Electrocuted On Norfolk Bridge—A Girl Suicide". The Baltimore Sun. 27 May 1903. Page 8, column 6. Retrieved 28 August 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
Romaine Romania, died today at St. Vincent's Hospital under peculiar circumstances.
- ^ Sowell, Mike (1992). July 2, 1903: The Mysterious Death of Hall-Of-Famer Big Ed Delahanty.
But there were more questions about Delahanty's bizarre and gruesome fate than there were answers.
- ^ Gilbert, Angus D. (1994). "BELL, BENJAMIN TAYLOR A.". Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. 13. University of Toronto/Université Laval. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
The circumstances of his death were somewhat bizarre.
- ^ "Drowned While in a Fit". Colonist. Vol. XLVI, no. 11015. 2 May 1904. p. 4. Retrieved 24 March 2022 – via Papers Past.
A fatality of a very peculiar nature occurred early this morning.
- ^ "BROTHERS ELECTROCUTED Strange Death of Two Men While Picking Cherries". Los Angeles Herald. Vol. XXXI, no. 271. 26 June 1904. Page 3, column 1. Retrieved 28 August 2024 – via California Digital Newspaper Collection.
- ^ "Crushed Under Tons of Coal". The Minneapolis Journal. Minneapolis, Minnesota. 8 July 1904. Page 5, column 6. Retrieved 7 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
John Ericsen, the 11-year-old son of a sectionman in the employ of the Northern Pacific, who has been missing since the Fourth of July, met with a tragic and unusual death, his crushed and mangled body being found today beneath a mass of coal in a bin near the Northern Pacific roundhouse.
- ^ "Aged Los Angeles Woman Killed in Strange Way – Falls From Street Car and Teeth of Heavy Comb Are Driven Into Skull". San Francisco Call. Vol. XCVI, no. 38. 8 July 1904. Page 7, column 5. Retrieved 23 January 2023 – via California Digital Newspaper Collection.
- ^ Sansare, K.; Khanna, V.; Karjodkar, F. (2011). "Early victims of X-rays: a tribute and current perception". Dento Maxillo Facial Radiology. 40 (2): 123–125. doi:10.1259/dmfr/73488299. PMC 3520298. PMID 21239576.
- ^ White, Richard. "Who Killed Jane Stanford?". Stanford Historical Society. Stanford University. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
- ^ "STRANGE DEATH OF A BABY". Stockton Evening and Sunday Record. Stockton, California. 11 March 1905. Page 1, column 6. Retrieved 24 August 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
That affliction is somewhat unusual.
- ^ "Killed by Avalanche of Malt". The Bennington Evening Banner. Bennington, Vermont. 9 December 1905. Page 6, column 3. Retrieved 30 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
Thomas Melia, employed in a Brooklyn brewery, met an unusual death when he was caught beneath an avalanche of shifting malt and barley and was suffocated.
- ^ "GIRL'S STRANGE DEATH". The Argus. Melbourne. 20 December 1905. Page 8, column 4. Retrieved 24 August 2024 – via Trove.
SYDNEY, Tuesday.—Mary Ellen Rumble, the daughter of a farmer at Watervale, in the Murrumburrah district, was killed in a peculiar manner to-day.
- ^ "Dies of Joy When Released". The Commoner. Lincoln, Nebraska. 9 March 1906. Page 12, column 4. Retrieved 2 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
A most remarkable and unusual death took place at the state insane asylum in Norfolk.
- ^ "BATHER'S STRANGE DEATH". The North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times. Tasmania. 5 March 1907. Page 3, column 4. Retrieved 24 August 2024 – via Trove.
- ^ "WOMAN'S STRANGE DEATH. UNCONSCIOUS FOR SEVERAL DAYS". The Age. Melbourne. 8 September 1908. Page 6, column 4. Retrieved 28 August 2024 – via Trove.
The death of a woman named Jane Hewitt, who resided at 130 Park-street, South Melbourne, in remarkable circumstances, has been reported to the Coroner.
- ^ "Fatal Fall of Wright Airship; Lieut. Selfridge Killed and Orville Wright Hurt by Breaking of Propeller. Machine a Total Wreck. Increased Length of New Blade and Added Weight of a Passenger Probable Causes. Cavalry Ride Down Crowd Rumor That the Machine Had Been Tampered with Denied by Army Officers—Not Well Guarded" (PDF). The New York Times. 18 September 1908. Retrieved 22 August 2024.
Falling from a height of 75 feet, Orville Wright and Lieut. Thomas E. Selfridge of the Signal Corps were buried in the wreckage of Wright's aeroplane shortly after 5 o'clock this afternoon. The young army officer died at 8:10 o'clock to-night. Wright is badly hurt, although he probably will recover.
- ^ "1908 -- First Fatality in a Powered Aircraft". Air Force Historical Support Division. Retrieved 22 August 2024.
- ^ Manchester, William (1969). The Arms of Krupp. Michael Joseph. p. 265.
- ^ James, Harold (1989). A German Identity: 1770–1990. New York: Routledge. p. 82.
- ^ Steakley, James D. (1990). "Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eulenburg Affair in Wilhelmin Germany". In Duberman; et al. (eds.). Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past. New York: Meridian, New American Library. p. 20. ISBN 0-452-01067-5. Retrieved 14 June 2023.
Like the bizarre death of Hülsen-Häseler, the entire Eulenburg Affair has been discreetly hushed up in all but the most recent historiography.
- ^ Barbier, Laetitia (18 February 2013). "Morbid Monday: Kissed to Death". Atlas Obscura. Retrieved 3 April 2022.
His gravestone, erected in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, is a monument to bizarre death, with a story so unusual that it needed to be carved in stone for posterity.
- ^ Morton, Ella (3 October 2014). "George Spencer Millet: The Boy Who Was Kissed to Death". Atlas Obscura. Slate Magazine. Retrieved 3 April 2022.
- ^ "AFTER WOMAN IN REES DEATH Girl Said to Have Visited Former Ice Dealer at His Hotel JEWELRY AND MONEY ARE NOT TO BE FOUND". Courier-Post. Camden, New Jersey. 18 February 1909. Page 7, columns 1-2. Retrieved 28 August 2024 – via Newspapers.com.
The arrest of a woman is expected to-day in connection with the death of Peter A. Rees yesterday at Guy's Hotel, Seventh street above Chestnut, Philadelphia, under circumstances which the police declare to be unusual.
- ^ "DIED WHILE WRITING". Evening Express and Evening Mail (Sixth ed.). 17 March 1909. Page 3, column 2. Retrieved 30 August 2024 – via Welsh Newspapers.
A young servant girl of Altendorf, near Cologne, found a tragic and unusual death.
- ^ Merron, Jeff (22 June 2002). "Major leaguers who died in-season". Baseball. ESPN.com. Retrieved 16 July 2024.
- ^ "Met Unusual Death – B. S. Kradwell Falls From Train Near Vail, Iowa, and Meets Death in Creek – Mystery Shrouds Accident – Deceased Was One of the Owners of the Store of the Kradwell Drug Company and He Had Started West for a Long Vacation". The Telegraph-Courier. Kenosha, Wisconsin. 21 April 1910. Page 4, column 4. Retrieved 3 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ "A WIDOW'S STRANGE DEATH". The Advertiser. Adelaide, South Australia. 6 June 1910. Page 9, column 9. Retrieved 31 August 2024 – via Trove.
About 11 o'clock on Friday night the woman's two children were awakened by hearing her moving about.
- ^ "Patrick Dolan is killed". Aberdeen Daily News. 25 October 1910.
- ^ "ST. LOUIS WOMAN DROWNS IN A BATHTUB Prominent Railway Man's Wife Meets With Strange Death". San Francisco Call. Vol. 107, no. 55. 24 January 1910. Page 1, column 5. Retrieved 28 August 2024 – via California Digital Newspaper Collection.
- ^ "Ghost of First Wife Drove Him to Kill Himself - George Vedder Had Broken Oath of Loyalty Made at Her Deathbed. Took Another Bride. It Was Only a Short Distance From Saloon to Reservoir After Haunting Began". The Evening World (Final ed.). New York City, New York. 28 February 1911. Page 1, columns 3-4. Retrieved 13 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ Coen, Cheré Dastugue (30 March 2022). "The Demise of Jasper 'Jack' Daniel". weirdsouth.com. Weird, Wacky, & Wild blog. Retrieved 6 August 2024.
- ^ "L'inventeur Reichelt s'est tué hier" [The inventor Reichelt killed himself yesterday]. Le Petit Journal (in French). 5 February 1912. p. 1.
- ^ "Unusual Death". The Daytona Daily News. Daytona, Florida. 23 December 1912. Page 2, column 4. Retrieved 2 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ "HOUSE IN PARIS FALLS, KILLING MAN AND WIFE Emile Froment-Meurice, Goldsmith, Descendant of Rubens, Meets Strange Death". New-York Tribune. New York City. 26 April 1913. Page 5, column 6. Retrieved 21 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ "Unusual Death of Columbus Woman Mrs. Jim Thomason Dies From Sting of a Bee – Became Unconscious, Remaining So to Time of Her Death, Which Occurred Tuesday". Washington Telegraph. Washington, Arkansas. 9 May 1913. Page 1, column 1. Retrieved 21 July 2024 – via Chronicling America.
- ^ "Farmer Meets Strange Death - Property Assessed Too Low in Marshall County. Veterans to Be Provided For - Series of Accidents Occur Near Melrose—Missing Man Found Demented at Decorah—Pres. Erb on Tour of Inspection". The Oskaloosa Herald. Vol. 57, no. 43. Oskaloosa, Mahaska County, Iowa. 15 May 1913. Page 1, column 7. Retrieved 31 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
While repairing a wire fence near here, Peter Graham a farmer met a strange death.
- ^ "A STRANGE DEATH". The Leader. Orange, New South Wales. 28 February 1914. Page 6, column 5. Retrieved 24 August 2024 – via Trove.
A strange death has been discovered to have taken place at North Sydney.
- ^ "RANCHMAN DIES IN POSTHOLE Californian Falls Into Excavation and Is Suffocated, Being Unable to Extricate Himself". The Lakeland Evening Telegram. Lakeland, Florida. 14 July 1913. Page 6, column 4. Retrieved 22 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
Romain Moll, a wealthy rancher of this county, met an unusual and tragic death.
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Her demise was altogether unexpected, so much so that her family and close friends were so upset by the news last night that it was several hours before they could discuss the case at all.
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Martin Fisher, a well known farmer, living 6 miles south and one mile west, in Moran township, met a peculiar death last Friday while butchering a hog.
- ^ "STRANGE DEATH. RESULT OF EATING WHEAT". The Forbes Advocate. Forbes, New South Wales. 29 February 1916. Page 2, column 3. Retrieved 24 August 2024 – via Trove.
The dead body of a swagman, believed to be William or Martin McClelland, was found near the weir at Bartley's Creek, Parkes, on Friday.
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The story of Rasputin's death is one of the best-known moments of his life. Even people who know almost nothing about the man have heard of how he died, and his bizarre end has long since become part of global popular culture.
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- ^ "STRANGE DEATH BETWEEN SHELLS". The Weekly Iberian. New Iberia, Louisiana. 17 August 1918. Page 4, column 6. ISSN 2381-6600. Retrieved 30 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
Rev. Walter Murray, a Y. M. C. A. worker in France, was killed before Chateau-Thierry recently in a peculiar accident.
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The substance itself gives the entire event an unusual, whimsical quality.
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The King's death took place under the most tragic and unusual circumstances.
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Mrs. W. C. Eckersly, of Glen Elgn (Glen Innes), met her end in peculiarly distressing circumstances on Saturday last.
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The Earl of Carnarvon died peacefully at 2 o'clock this morning. He was conscious almost to the end.
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- ^ "Jockey Dies as He Wins His First Race; Hayes Collapses Passing the Winning Post". The New York Times. 5 June 1923. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
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- ^ "Hollywood actress dies in freak accident while filming in San Antonio back in 1923". News4SA. 30 November 2020. Retrieved 17 November 2021.
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- ^ Shapell, Benjamin; Willen, Sara (6 July 2017). "The Death of Calvin Coolidge Jr". Shapell Manuscript Foundation. Retrieved 4 February 2023.
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According to eye-witnesses, the Dunn party were evidently attempting to turn around, and it is thought that the driver gave the car more momentum than necessary and in some manner that baffled the observers managed to slip between the trees at the brink of the canyon and make the plunge to death.
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The first and only fatal mishap ever recorded from Yellowstone Canyon, occurred Sunday afternoon at 3:30 o'clock, when a Ford coupe in some mysterious manner evidently got out of control of the driver and backed between trees that normally would afford protection…
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This truly strange occurrence not only made a front-page headline in the local newspaper, but also a prominent editorial as well. No one could figure out how it happened.
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The case only got stranger from there.
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His death, 15 years after his famous plunge, was sadly ironic.
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- ^ a b Byrne, Kerry J. (31 October 2022). "'Murder?': Mysteries still surround Harry Houdini's Halloween death". Human Interest. New York Post. Fox News. Retrieved 18 August 2024.
But questions continue to surround the bizarre circumstances of Houdini's death at age 52, including suggestions by some fans that the celebrated performer was murdered.
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Isadora Duncan's bizarre death was a brutal end to a controversial life.
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- ^ United Press; Tribune Service (20 October 1930). "PRISON BOMBER DIES OF BLAST". California Digital Newspaper Collection. Retrieved 7 August 2024.
Butte county slayer rocks San Quentin with odd bomb
- ^ a b Snopes Staff; Mikkelson, Barbara (28 September 2000). "Death by Playing Cards". Fact Check. Snopes. Retrieved 7 August 2024.
As unlikely as this must sound, playing cards have reportedly been used as an instrument of death.
- ^ Pound, Reginald (1953). Arnold Bennett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace.
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- ^ "Lad Tickled to Death". Seward Daily Gateway. INS. 13 July 1931. Page 4, column 3. Retrieved 22 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
Seventeen-year-old Alfred Green's strange death is still being discussed here.
- ^ "Freak Accident Causes Death". Imperial Valley Press. El Centro, California. United Press. 27 August 1931. Page 3, column 2. Retrieved 24 August 2024 – via Chronicling America.
Deputy Sherriff J. L. McDermott died early today from injuries received in a freak accident in which he was impaled upon a hook holding a water hose.
- ^ Stanley, John (2014). "LASD Deputy James McDermott - End of Watch: Aug. 26, 1931, Unusual Accident". Retrieved 23 August 2024 – via Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.
Recent historical research has resulted in the discovery of the story of the extraordinary career and unusual death of Deputy James McDermott.
- ^ "Deputy Sheriff James L. McDermott, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, California". The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc. Retrieved 24 August 2024.
- ^ Winslow, Ron (1 August 1990). "The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off" (PDF). The Wall Street Journal. p. A1. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 February 2017.
Cancer Researcher Unearths A Bizarre Tale of Medicine And Roaring '20s Society
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The arrest of Earle Wynekoop was ordered today by police investigating the mysterious and bizarre death of his pretty 23 year old wife who was murdered on the operating table of her physician mother-in-law.
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- ^ "DEATH FOLLOWS NOISE OF THUNDER". The Barrier Miner. Broken Hill, New South Wales. 16 January 1935. Page 3, column 5. Retrieved 28 August 2024 – via Trove.
SYDNEY. Wednesday--Susan Grace Kelly (80) died under unusual circumstances at Armidale.
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An unusual death was that of Benjamin Taslor of Maryland, reported by Dr. Winford Smith of Johns Hopkins.
- ^ "STRANGE DEATH OF DENTIST Razor Blade Swallowed In Sleight-Of-Hand Trick". The Chronicle. Adelaide, South Australia. 14 July 1938. Page 46, column 3. Retrieved 22 August 2024 – via Trove.
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Comper Swift / between 1924 and his bizarre death in 1939, Nicholas Comper designed and built a series of light aircraft for the private flying market, the most successful of which was the Swift. Richard Riding profiles Comper's life and traces the Swift's continuing career.
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The story of the ice axe is a convoluted one, befitting the extraordinary and macabre story of the Trotsky assassination.
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Maj. Kenneth McCullar, 27, above, of Courtland, Miss., outstanding master of heavy bombardment tactics, was killed in a freak accident.
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Detectives yesterday finished packing the last of several boxes of material salvaged from an apartment at 1200 Cherry Street Northeast, where Mrs. Mary Hardy Reeser, 67, was burned to death in a mystery fire Monday... "This fire is a curious thing," Burgess said, "and I've been deluged by letters and phone calls offering solutions to the problems facing us."
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An incident on the set of a 1958 edition of Armchair Theatre illustrates the perverse extremes of professionalism that television actors were expected to exhibit. The ... cast included ... a young Welsh actor named Gareth Jones. 'During transmission', recalls [Peter] Bowles, 'a little group of us was talking on camera while awaiting the arrival of Gareth Jones's character [...] We could see him coming up towards us, and he was going to arrive on cue, but we saw him drop, we saw him fall. We had no idea what had happened, but he certainly wasn't coming our way. The actors, including me, started making up lines: "I'm sure if So‑and‑so were here he would say..."' Jones had suffered a fatal heart attack—but rather than informing the actors of their colleague's death and ceasing transmission of the play, the producers decided to let them stumble on to the end.
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Police are investigating the weird death yesterday of an elderly man who was electrocuted in a home-made electric chair.
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Marine Posse Deputy Len Lamoureaux died as the result of a freak accident.
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In an odd twist of fate, several months earlier Trooper Lassiter had saved the life of the driver who killed him when he was involved in an automobile accident.
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What happened to Deborah Stone was a freak accident, but it's a cold reminder that not even a name as big as Disney is immune from disaster.
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Shilowich first ran across Chubbuck's story six years ago, in the middle of the night, while he was failing to write another screenplay about an unusual death.
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one of the most bizarre, tragic accidents in the sport's history
- ^ "Officer George W. Redding, California Highway Patrol, California". The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc. Retrieved 24 July 2024.
Officer George Redding was killed in a freak accident after responding to an accident in which a vehicle struck a telephone pole on Highway 273 South near Happy Valley Road.
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A mulher Lourdes Maria da Silva, residente na Rua Tronca 1148, residência de um seu irmão, morreu de forma inacreditável no fim de semana. ("The woman Lourdes Maria da Silva, resident at Rua Tronca 1148, the residence of her brother, died in an unbelievable way over the weekend.")
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...the cry heard that night marked an astonishing and rare human fatality caused by Australia's wild dogs...
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It is a mystery why anyone would dive headfirst into a Yellowstone hot spring merely to save a dog, but that is precisely what happened on July 20, 1981.
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The accident that had just occurred may be the unluckiest in the history of Hollywood production, for a bleak variety of logistical reasons that only came to light afterwards. It was also among the eeriest and most tragic in a whole set of other ways.
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It isn't often we have occasion to employ the term "accidental self-defenestration" in an article, but that phrase certainly applies to the case of Garry Hoy...
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After the bizarre accident police found scorched items of clothing in the garden.
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A businessman drowned in a river after a freak gardening accident, an inquest has heard.
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This is not a common thing. This was just the freakiest of freak accidents that could possibly happen
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Rebecca Longhoffer, a 39-year-old tourist from Louisville, Ky., was electrocuted in what authorities are calling a freak accident about 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Las Vegas Boulevard South near Spring Mountain Road.
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Philip Quinn, 24, was found dead in his trailer home Sunday night by his parents.
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Sooner or later, the Grim Reaper comes for us all, but sometimes his mode of operation almost defies explanation.
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Unfortunately, a 45-year-old woman in Taiwan died due to an unusual effort to ward off the virus.
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The family of a man decapitated in a bizarre car accident is pleading with authorities to free his best friend, who was behind the wheel and apparently didn't notice that his passenger had been beheaded.
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He was a 12-year-old budding superstar athlete in Frisco when he died in a bizarre, befuddling golf club accident in 2005.
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While all traffic fatalities are tragedies to be grieved over, some happen in far more unusual fashion than others. Every now and then a vehicle-caused demise is so wildly at odds with what we expect of our world that it shakes the cobwebs from our heads as it serves to remind us that life can be lost in the blink of an eye and through no fault of anyone's.
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"O carpinteiro Daniel Skwes, que trabalhava na região, foi o primeiro a achar o corpo. Eu ouvi os tiros e corri para ver o que era. Ele estava estendido no chão da garagem", disse aos jornais locais o carpinteiro, que descreveu a cena como "bizarra."
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Bob Bancroft, a retired biologist with the Department of Natural Resources, said this kind of attack is extremely rare...
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As headline writers across the continent tried to marry some unfamiliar words—fatal, coyote, mauling—most people who spend time outdoors found it hard to believe that coyotes had actually killed a human.
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Singer Taylor Mitchell's death was highly unusual ... [D]espite the frequency of coyote encounters, attacks are rarely very serious, and deaths as a result are virtually unheard of.
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A spy whose naked, decomposing body was found inside a padlocked gym bag at his apartment likely died in an accident with no one else involved, British police said Wednesday — a tentative conclusion that is unlikely to calm conspiracy theories around the bizarre case.
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A lone survivor apparently relayed the bizarre tale to investigators.
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Providing an example of cosmic irony for textbooks forevermore, the owner of the Segway company died in a strange Segway-related accident yesterday.
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"I have never seen this type of incident," Sgt Martin King, who had worked in the sheriff's department for more than two decades, told the Bakersfield Californian on Sunday, when the incident happened.
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"I have never seen this type of incident," said Sgt. Martin King, a 24-year veteran who noted the major arteries that could have been severed.
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Two people were killed Monday after a freak series of collisions
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Two Canadians died instantly in a freak accident...
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An equine expert, Erica Marshall, was killed when a horse she was treating in an oxygen chamber became spooked and kicked out, sparking a freak explosion which could be heard 30 miles away.
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...such incidents are very rare, says John Huston of the Abbotsbury Swannery in Dorset, where there are 1,000 swans but no recorded attacks on humans in the colony's 600-year history.
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Though swans may seem serene and are pretty to look at, most people don't realize how strong and aggressive they can be, said Doug Stotz, a senior conservation ecologist with the Field Museum. He said he has heard tales of people being attacked or injured from swans but has never heard of someone dying after a bad encounter.
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Days before they were due back at college, two friends on a midnight stroll across a train trestle in Ellicott City died in a freak accident in which a passing freight train derailed, dumping thousands of tons of coal down from the raised tracks.
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Investigators say that a dog appears to be to blame in the death of a Florida man in a bizarre accident in the man's driveway.
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{{cite news}}
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Even then, it wasn't until the unusual circumstances of her death by drowning were revealed that media interest in Lam's case surged.
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It has an excellent safety record," Richard Hanson, an official of the academy, said of the hobby. "This particular accident is very, very tragic but also very, very unusual.
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Bizarro. Polícia Civil informou que vítima estava embriagada; homem era caseiro do local ("Bizarre. Civil Police reported that the victim was drunk; man was housekeeper of the place")
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J.R.N., de 52 anos, foi encontrado pelo proprietário da fazenda, que resolveu levar outro funcionário até a propriedade e ao chegar no local deparou com a cena inusitada, o funcionário estava sem vida e completamente nu ("J.R.N., 52 years old, was found by the owner of the farm, who decided to take another employee and when he arrived at the place he came across the unusual scene, the employee was lifeless and completely naked")
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Um caso extremamente bizarro e com final trágico foi registrado na cidade de Sorriso-MT ("An extremely bizarre case with a tragic end was recorded in the city of Sorriso-MT")
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Loved ones of dad-to-be Grant Adams have told of their heartache after he was killed in a freak sunbed accident
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The freak accident occurred as an AJD Construction worker was preparing a wall for windows on the 50th floor of one of two partially built residential towers at 70-90 Columbus Drive in Jersey City, according to witnesses and authorities.
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The three elements converged on Monday morning in a freakish accident, when a 58-year-old man died in Jersey City after being struck in the head by the tape measure after it fell some 400 feet.
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NSW assistant coach Geoff Lawson said the incident was the most confronting thing he had seen on a cricket field..."But I've never seen in all my days in the game a consequence like this where somebody's life may be in jeopardy."
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Cricket Australia boss James Sutherland delivered a statement after Clarke. This freak accident is now real life tragedy ... Our grief runs deep and the impact of Phillip's loss is enormous.
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As the tight-knit sportfishing community in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, mourns the bizarre death of Capt. Randy Llanes, who on Friday was impaled by a swordfish that he had speared, more is revealed about the man, the incident, and the type of fish that killed him... The extraordinary incident occurred inside Honokohau Small Boat Harbor. A swordfish measuring between 4 and 6 feet, with a 3-foot bill, had been spotted deep inside the harbor–a rare occasion because swordfish typically roam deep, pelagic waters... This type of incident, as far as we know, is unprecedented.
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The medical examiner says Randy Llanes, 47, a local fisherman, died from internal injuries caused by being struck by the bill of a swordfish. His death was ruled an accident. Llanes jumped into the water with a spear gun on Friday, May 29, after the swordfish was spotted in Honokohau Harbor... While there have been incidents between humans and swordfish in the past, Dr. Rossiter says an incident like this one is rare. "This is very, very unusual," he said. "There have been a couple of cases documented in the past, but almost always it can be attributed to an unfortunate accident or the fish being injured."
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A MAN died after being sucked into a jet engine in a freak accident after a misunderstanding saw the pilot turn on the controls.
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That is the only explanation authorities have for the bizarre demise of the 40-year-old, who was last seen relaxing in the grounds of a small engineering college in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu at noon on Saturday, when an explosion was heard... Alternative explanations such as leftover explosives from construction, or a terror attack, were swiftly ruled out by police after no chemical traces were found by forensics teams, leaving authorities with no option but to declare the most unusual of deaths... The unprecedented death has raised doubts among some scientists, who have advised caution until lab testing is carried out on rock fragments.
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The bizarre death of a singer in Indonesia became international headlines in recent days.
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According to Tom Gill, Captain of the Virginia Beach Lifesaving Service, this is the first time he has ever heard of someone being killed by an umbrella in the Resort City. Gill says he has heard of people being injured by an umbrella that gets loose, but considers Belk's death, a freak accident.
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Demings said there had been no other recent reports of similar alligator attacks on the lake. "Disney has operated here now for 45 years and they've never had this type of thing happen here before," he said.
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Wiley said it's very rare for people to be attacked by alligators.
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In Florida, alligators may be a common sight, but attacks are rare.
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County officials, state police, and a special engineering firm are investigating what went wrong. They are calling it a freak accident.
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The zoo statement said the enclosure met international standards and said "this kind of accident is rare, unpredictable and unusual"... Phyllis Lee, scientific director of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, says that targeted throwing of stones and branches by elephants is very unusual.
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Julio Macias Gonzalez, who was 17, reportedly died after the suction from a hickey his girlfriend gave him caused a blood clot, which traveled to his brain and caused a stroke, the Huffington Post reported, citing Mexican outlets... according to Robert Glatter, an emergency room physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. "It's possible this could happen, but it's very rare, and parents should be reassured it's not something that happens in a routine way," he said.
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A 17-year-old boy in Mexico City has reportedly died after a hickey he received from his girlfriend caused a stroke... This is at least the second reported incident of a hickey causing a stroke...
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Emergency operations manager at Ambulance Victoria, Michael Stephenson, told the court that before the incident thunderstorm asthma was "not a term I had ever heard of, not a term I'd heard anyone in the organisation use ever."
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The scale of the event "can be fairly described as unprecedented globally, both in terms of demands on first-line responders and the public health system, and in the nature and extent of the impact on individuals", [Coroner Paresa Spanos] said, although thunderstorm asthma was a known phenomenon among public health researchers and doctors.
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Reports of humans being killed by pythons are extremely rare.
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No one who spoke with ABC News for this story said they had ever seen anything quite like it.
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"This is probably the first time I've heard of something like this happen, where somebody hits a fire hydrant and drowns," said Lt. Channing Taylor, commander of the Highway Patrol's Brevard County office.
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Co-workers of Debra Bedard of San Jose, Calif., expressed condolences after she died in a freak golf cart accident in an olive orchard Friday night.
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The freak accident and resulting injury caused Burger to go into cardiac arrest, according to the French newspaper 20 Minutes.
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A man identified as Raildo Matias Santos, 49, "Bigode" died in an unusual way at Entroncamento de Jaguaquara this Sunday (22)
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Raildo Matias Santos, 49, died in an unusual way at Entroncamento de Jaguaquara this Sunday (22)
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A man has died after being sucked into an MRI machine in a freak accident at a Mumbai hospital.
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Sources quoted in the Birmingham Mail described how the "freak" accident happened after Rafiq bent down to retrieve a phone, dropped between Gold Class seats, at the end of a movie.
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Jennifer Riordan, a banking executive with Wells Fargo, suffered fatal injuries as a result of the bizarre incident on Southwest flight 1380.
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- ^ "1 dead, 1 in critical condition from dry ice in Seattle car". ABC News. 31 July 2018. Retrieved 1 February 2022.
In a bizarre incident linked to dry ice, one woman died and another is in critical condition in Washington state, authorities said.
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- ^ "'Just a broken guy': Suicidal plane crashes exceedingly rare". USA Today. 11 August 2018. Retrieved 30 June 2023.
[T]he event was "very unusual... It's not like we get this every day."
- ^ "A baseball killed a woman at Dodger Stadium, MLB's first foul-ball death in nearly 50 years". The Washington Post. 28 August 2018.
- ^ Emerson, Sarah (5 November 2018). "Why an Australian Man Died 8 Years After Eating a Slug". Vice. Retrieved 1 February 2022.
The strange and tragic death of a 29-year-old Australian man last week has underscored the seriousness of a rare parasitic infection called "rat lungworm disease".
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A 21-year-old woman was killed at a highway rest stop in Mississippi on Tuesday when she was struck by a pair of tires that came loose from a passing tractor-trailer, authorities said.
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A college student was killed at a Mississippi rest stop on Tuesday when two tires came loose from a passing tractor trailer and struck the 21-year-old woman.
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The Florida man killed in a bizarre attack earlier this year by a cassowary, one of the world's deadliest birds, suffered deep puncture wounds and slashing cuts from the animal's sharp talons that severed a major artery in his arm, according to a newly released autopsy.
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- ^ "Deer kills man, injures woman near Wangaratta in north-east Victoria". ABC News. 17 April 2019. Retrieved 22 April 2019.
Steve Garlick, the chairman of the deer management committee at the Australian Deer Association, said it was very unusual for a deer to kill a person.
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Mr Howlett said that deer can become a danger to humans in domesticated scenarios. It's not an everyday occurrence, but it's not unheard of for deer to kill people in that situation... "
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Medical workers "had never seen an injury like that", said Detective Inspector Wayne Seymour of Dorset Police.
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Yulia was reaching inside the family car when the freak accident happened in Belarus.
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Porque, ¿qué probabilidades había de que se produjera una explosión en la planta petroquímica de IQOXE? ¿Y de que una chapa de hierro (conocida como una plancha) de una tonelada volara tres kilómetros y matara a alguien?... "Es un caso inverosímil" –tanto como que es el único fallecido que no trabajaba en la planta–, reconocía Pau Ricomà, alcalde de Tarragona. Pero, sin duda, es "la principal hipótesis" que mantiene la investigación. Surrealista, sí, pero cierto. ("Because how likely was there to be an explosion at the IQOXE petrochemical plant, and that a one-ton sheet of iron (known as a plate) would fly three kilometers and kill someone?... "It is an implausible case" – as much as he is the only deceased who did not work at the plant – acknowledged Pau Ricomà, mayor of Tarragona. But, without a doubt, it is "the main hypothesis" that maintains the research. Surreal, yes, but true.")
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The coroner said she was reluctant to make any recommendations in the case as it would suggest the accident might have been predictable. "This case could not have been predicted. It was so unusual and so unfortunate," she remarked.
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As of now, a number of questions regarding the bizarre and tragic incident remain unanswered.
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In a bizarre turn of events, an Indian man died after using epoxy resin in lieu of a condom during intercourse with his former fiancée. His family is now asking for police to conduct a more thorough investigation into their son's death.
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A bizarre accident occurred at a McDonald's in Vancouver that resulted in the death of a customer
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The Vancouver Police Department confirmed Tuesday that a Canadian man was crushed to death by his own car in a McDonald's drive-thru last week.
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A bizarre turn of events has led to the death of a 30-year-old man in Brazil.
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Police said the freak accident happened around 2:50 a.m. when no one else was in the gym.
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Bizarre animal stories are heard often, but none are quite like the latest vicious and deadly elephant attack of a 68-year-old woman in India.
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MDA paramedic Uri Damari said: "This is a very unusual incident. When I got to the scene I saw a pit that had opened at the bottom of the empty pool. People who were at the site told me that the pit opened suddenly and within a few seconds all the water from the pool was pulled in."
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Upon witnessing the freak accident, bystanders rush in to try and extricate Muthuswamy (sic) but to no avail.
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The freak accident occurred on January 16 while the gun-loving lawyer, named Leandro Mathias de Novaes, was taking his mother to get scanned at the Laboratorio Cura in São Paulo, Jam Press reported.
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A pensioner was killed in a freak accident when he was struck by a flying cow launched 100ft into the air by an express train.
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A woman died in a freak accident after she was impaled by a pipe that went through a windshield.
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Surfing pro Mikala Jones died in a freak surfing accident Sunday morning.
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He was working alone and no one saw the freak accident or was able to help him.
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The Panthers said on Sunday they were 'devastated' Johnson had died following a 'freak accident'.
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An 83-year-old Oconee County, South Carolina, woman died Sunday afternoon from injuries secondary to a fall in an apparent freak accident, officials said Monday. "I have not had a death like this occur in my 31-year career as Oconee County coroner," coroner Karl Addis said.
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Private firm Vistex CEO Sanjay Singh dies in freak accident during the company's silver jubilee celebrations at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad.
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In an unusual incident, a 24-year-old Bengaluru man lost his life to a prank that was supposed to be fun and harmless.
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New Jersey native Lucy Morgan was on a family vacation in Maine on June 1 when the incident — which her father later dubbed a "freak accident" — occurred, according to a news release from Maine State Police.
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UK comedian Tony Knight, also known as the Dog Listener, has died after a freak accident at a festival in France.
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"We are beyond devastated that his life was taken by a freak accident ... an accident that we are all still trying to comprehend," his family said
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In the niche world of vehicle safety engineers, it was a known risk — rare but lethal. To firefighters across California, the threat was essentially unheard of until highlighted by Pontious' death... "There was no knowledge that these kinds of big tires could blow in such a way that could kill someone," said David Pontious, 55. "It was just a freak accident."
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A young woman has died in a freak accident during her workout at a gym in Indonesia.
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Deaths by large constrictors are considered rare, but several people in Indonesia have been killed by pythons in recent years — including two other women since June.
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The result of his private endeavours was nothing less than an evolutionary breakthrough. Alas, it was almost instantly annulled by what the Liverpool Echo called "one of the most novel suicides of the century".
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I heard of a queer accident the other day, which fell to the lot of a Kennedy Creek farmer.
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One of the more freakish accidents in zoo annals occurred at the menagerie in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.
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The incident that most called the attention of spectators of the first official training for the Austrian Grand pix was, perhaps, the most unexpected documented in the history of Formula 1.
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Works cited
[edit]- Barber, Richard; Barker, Juliet (1989). Tournaments: Jousts, Chivalry and Pageants in the Middle Ages. Boydell. pp. 134, 139. ISBN 978-0-85115-470-1.
- Baumgartner, Frederic J (1988). Henry II, King of France, 1547–1559. Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822307952.
Laërtius, Diogenes (1925). . Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Vol. 2:7. Translated by Hicks, Robert Drew (Two volume ed.). Loeb Classical Library. § 1–160.
- Hollister, C. Warren (2003). Frost, Amanda Clark (ed.). Henry I. New Haven, US and London, UK: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-3000-9829-7.
- Weeks, David; Gorman, Robert (2015). "15: Fans". Death at the Ballpark: More Than 2,000 Game-Related Fatalities of Players, Other Personnel and Spectators in Amateur and Professional Baseball, 1862–2014 (2nd ed.). McFarland. ISBN 9780786479320. Retrieved 30 September 2022.
- Wellman, Kathleen (2013). Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France. Yale University Press.
Further reading
[edit]- Bellamy, John G (2008). Strange Inhuman Deaths. History Press. ISBN 978-0-7509-3864-8.
- Daws, Nick (2005). Daft Deaths and Famous Last Words. Lagoon Books. ISBN 978-1-9047-9715-9.
- Dreher, Dale (12 March 2012). Death by Misadventure: 210 Dumb Ways to Die. ASIN B007JYWNV4.
- Dunning, John (February 1997). Strange Deaths. True Crime. ISBN 978-185958498-9.
- Powell, Michael (2008). Curious Events in History. Sterling Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4027-6307-6.
- Sieveking, Paul; Simmons, Ian; Stevenson, Val (2000). Strange Deaths: More Than 375 Freakish Fatalities. New York: Barnes & Noble Books. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-7607-1947-3. Retrieved 4 January 2022 – via Google Books.
- Sieveking, Paul (1998). The Fortean Times Book of More Strange Deaths. John Brown. ISBN 978-1-902212-02-9.
- Sieveking, Paul (2011). The Fortean Times Book of Strange Deaths. Russell Blackman. ISBN 978-1-907779-97-8.
- Southwell, David; Twist, Sean (2007). Mysterious Deaths and Disappearances. The Rosen Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-4042-1081-3.
- Winterbotham, Russell R. (1929). Curious and Unusual Deaths. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius.
External links
[edit]- "Curious and Unusual Deaths Pictures". Discovery Channel. Discovery Communications. Archived from the original on 16 September 2013. Retrieved 7 August 2024.
- "Freakish Fatalities Articles". Snopes. Retrieved 7 August 2024.