Death is enevitable and everyone has to die someday. But some deaths occur in such a way that they are recorded. Below is a list of such weird deaths in 19th, 20th and 21st century.
19th century
* 1830: William Huskisson, statesman and financier, was crushed to death by the world's first mechanically powered passenger train (Stephenson's Rocket), at its public opening.
* 1834: David Douglas, Scottish botanist, fell into a pit trap accompanied by a bull. He was gored and possibly crushed.[18]
* 1868: Matthew Vassar, brewer and founder of Vassar College, died in mid-speech while delivering his farewell address to the College Board of Trustees.
* 1884: Allan Pinkerton, detective, died of gangrene resulting from having bitten his tongue after stumbling on the sidewalk.[19]
* 1897: the three polar explorers Salomon August Andrée, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg died in October 1897 at Kvitöya (White Island) , NE of Svalbard where they had arrived after a failed attempt to reach the North Pole in a balloon. Their deaths were probably due not just to exhaustion after having had to march and lug their sleds for hundreds of miles across the pack ice, but also to trichinosis after eating insufficiently cooked meat of polar bears.
* 1899: French president Félix Faure died of a stroke while receiving oral sex in his office.
20th century
* A number of performers have died of natural causes during public performances, including:
o 1943: Critic Alexander Woollcott suffered a fatal heart attack during an on-air discussion about Adolf Hitler.[20]
o 1958: Gareth Jones, actor, collapsed and died while in make-up between scenes of a live television play, Underground, at the studios of Associated British Corporation in Manchester. Director Ted Kotcheff continued the play to its conclusion, improvising around Jones's absence.
o 1960: Baritone Leonard Warren collapsed on the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera of a major stroke during a performance of La forza del destino. According to legend, the last line he sang was "Morir? Tremenda cosa." ("To die? A tremendous thing.") However, witnesses say he was just past that aria and his actual last line was "Gioia, o gioia!" (Joy, oh joy!)
o 1971: Jerome Irving Rodale, an American pioneer of organic farming, died of a heart attack while being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show. According to urban legend, when he appeared to fall asleep, Cavett quipped "Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?"[21], which Cavett has recently stated in a May 2007 New York Times article was incorrect - the initial reaction to Rodale was fellow guest Pete Hamill noticing something was wrong, and saying in a low voice to Cavett, "This looks bad."[22] The show was never broadcast.
o 1984: English comedian Tommy Cooper collapsed from a massive heart attack live in front of the audience midway through his act at Her Majesty's theatre. At first the audience assumed he was joking, and started applauding.
o 1987: Dick Shawn, a comedian who starred in the 1968 movie The Producers, died of a heart attack while portraying a politician. Just before he died, he announced, "if elected, I will not lay down on the job,".
* A number of performers have died from unnatural causes during a practice or public performance, including:
o 1925: Zishe (Siegmund) Breitbart, a circus strongman and Jewish folklore hero, died as a result of a demonstration in which he drove a spike through five one-inch thick oak boards using only his bare hands. He accidentally pierced his knee. The spike was rusted and caused an infection which led to fatal blood poisoning. He was the subject of the Werner Herzog film, Invincible.
o 1972: Leslie Harvey, guitarist of Stone the Crows was electrocuted on stage by a live microphone.
o 1976: Keith Relf, former singer for British rhythm and blues band The Yardbirds, died while practicing his electric guitar—he was electrocuted because the guitar was not properly grounded.[23]
o 1999: Owen Hart, a professional wrestler for WWE died during a Pay-Per-View event when performing a stunt. It was planned to have Owen come down from the rafters of the Kemper Arena on a safety harness tied to a rope to make his ring entrance. The safety latch was released and Owen dropped 78 feet, bouncing chest-first off the top rope resulting in a severed aorta, which caused his lungs to fill with blood. The PPV continued even after he was pronounced dead.
* 1911: Jack Daniel, founder of the Tennessee whiskey distillery, died of blood poisoning six years after receiving a toe injury when he kicked his safe in anger at being unable to remember its combination.[24]
* 1912: Tailor Franz Reichelt fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he'd told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy.
* 1916: Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic, was poisoned while dining with a political enemy, and supposedly he was given enough poison to kill three men his size. When he did not die, one assassin sneaked up behind him and shot him in the head, and while checking Grigori's pulse the mystic grabbed him by the neck and strangled him. He proceeded to run away, while the other assassins chased. They caught up to him after he was finally felled by three shots during the chase. The pursuers bludgeoned him, then threw him into a frozen river. When his body washed ashore, an autopsy showed the cause of death to be drowning. There is now some doubt about the credibility of this account, though.
* 1920: Baseball player Ray Chapman was killed when he was hit in the head by a pitch.
* 1923: George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon became the first to die from the alleged King Tut's Curse after a mosquito bite on his face became seriously infected.
* 1923: Frank Hayes, jockey, suffered a heart attack during a horse race. The horse, Sweet Kiss, went on to finish first, making Hayes the only deceased jockey to win a race.
* 1927: J.G. Parry-Thomas, a Welsh racing driver, was decapitated by his car's drive chain which, under stress, snapped and whipped into the cockpit. He was attempting to break his own Land speed record which he had set the previous year. Despite being killed in the attempt, he succeeded in setting a new record of 171 mph.[25]
* 1927: Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of accidental strangulation and broken neck when one of the long scarves she was known for caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger.[26]
* 1928: Alexander Bogdanov, a Russian physician, died following one of his experiments, in which the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis, L. I. Koldomasov, was given to him in a transfusion.[27]
* 1933: Michael Malloy, a homeless man, was murdered by gassing after surviving multiple poisonings, intentional exposure and being struck by a car. Malloy was murdered by five men in a plot to collect on life insurance policies they had purchased.[28]
* 1935: Baseball player Len Koenecke was bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher by the crew of an aircraft he had chartered, after provoking a fight with the pilot while the plane was in the air.
* 1941: Sherwood Anderson, writer, swallowed a toothpick at a party and then died of peritonitis.[29]
* 1944: Inventor and chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr., accidentally strangled himself with the cord of a pulley-operated mechanical bed of his own design.
* 1945: Scientist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide onto a sphere of plutonium while working on the Manhattan Project. This caused the plutonium to come to criticality; Daghlian died of radiation poisoning, becoming the first person to die in a criticality accident.
* 1945: Anton Webern, the Austrian composer, was accidentally shot dead by an American Army soldier on 15 Sept. 1945, during the Allied occupation of Austria. Despite the curfew in effect, he stepped outside the house to enjoy a cigar without disturbing his sleeping grandchildren.
* 1956: Artist Nina Hamnett died from complications after falling out her apartment window and being impaled on the fence forty feet below.
* 1960: In the Nedelin disaster, over 100 Soviet missile technicians and officials died when a switch was turned on unintentionally igniting the rocket, including Red Army Marshal Nedelin who was seated in a deck chair just 40 meters away overseeing launch preparations. The events were filmed by automatic cameras.
* 1961: On March 23, Soviet cosmonaut trainee Valentin Bondarenko died from shock after suffering third-degree burns over much of his body, due to a flash fire in the pure oxygen environment of a training simulator. This incident was not revealed outside of the Soviet Union until the 1980s.
* 1966: Fritz Wunderlich, a German tenor singer, died from a fall in a staircase.
* 1967: In an incident similar to the death of Bondarenko, a flash fire began in the pure oxygen environment during a training exercise inside the unlaunched Apollo 1 spacecraft, killing Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee. The door to the capsule was unable to be opened during the fire because of its particular design. Had the Soviet Union revealed the earlier death of Valentin Bondarenko, this incident could likely have been avoided.
* 1963: On June 11th Thích Qu?ng Ð?c, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, sat down in the middle of a busy intersection in Saigon, covered himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire burning himself to death. Ð?c was protesting President Ngô Ðình Di?m's administration for oppressing the Buddhist religion.
* 1967: Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die during a space mission after the parachute of his capsule failed to deploy following re-entry.
* 1967: On Dec. 17 Harold Holt, Prime Minister of Australia, went for a swim at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, Australia. He was never seen again. Rumors and theories include suicide, kidnapping by submarine, and shark attack; the true cause remains unknown.
* 1973: Péter Vályi, finance minister of Hungary fell into a blast furnace (some sources say a pit of molten iron) on a visit to a steelworks factory at Miskolc.[30][31][32]
* 1973: Bruce Lee, a martial arts actor, is thought to have died by a severe allergic reaction to Equagesic. His brain had swollen about 13%. His autopsy was written as "death by misadventure."
* 1974: Christine Chubbuck, an American television news reporter, committed suicide during a live broadcast on July 15. At 9:38 AM, 8 minutes into her talk show, on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, she drew out a revolver and shot herself in the head.
* 1974: Austrian Formula One driver Helmut Koinigg died in a crash in the 1974 United States Grand Prix at the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Race Course in Watkins Glen, New York. On approaching a corner, a suspension failure sent Koinigg's car crashing head-on into the outer Armco barrier. The bottom rail gave way but the top rail did not. Helmut Koinigg was decapitated and died instantly, in what was only his second Formula One race.
* 1975: On 24 March 1975 Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King's Lynn literally died laughing while watching an episode of The Goodies. According to his wife, who was a witness, Mitchell was unable to stop laughing while watching a sketch in the episode "Kung Fu Kapers" in which Tim Brooke-Taylor, dressed as a kilted Scotsman, used a set of bagpipes to defend himself from a psychopathic black pudding in a demonstration of the Lancashire martial art of Ecky-thump. After twenty-five minutes of continuous laughter Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and expired from heart failure.
* 1975: The legendary Japanese kabuki actor Bando Mitsugoro VIII died of severe poisoning when he ate four fugu livers (also known as pufferfish). The liver is considered one of the most (if not most) poisonous part of the fish, but Mitsugoro claimed to be immune to the poison. The fugu chef felt he could not refuse Mitsugoro and lost his license as a result.
* 1976: The British rock singer Keith Relf died from electric shock suffered while playing his electric guitar,which was not properly grounded. The story that he died from playing the guitar in the bathtub is not true, but it seems his body was found in the bathtub, where he had gone after receiving the shock.
* 1977: Tom Pryce, a Formula One driver, and a 19-year-old track marshal Jansen Van Vuuren both died at the 1977 South African Grand Prix after Van Vuuren ran across the track beyond a blind brow to attend to another car which had caught fire and was struck by Pryce's car at approximately 170mph. Pryce was struck in the face by the marshal's fire extinguisher and was killed instantly.[33]
* 1978: Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was assassinated by poisoning in London by an unknown assailant who jabbed him in the calf with a specially modified umbrella that fired a metal pellet with a small cavity full of ricin poison.
* 1978: Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox in 1978, ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild, when a researcher at the laboratory Parker worked at accidentally released some virus into the air of the building. She is believed to be the last smallpox fatality in history.
* 1979: Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford Motor Co. plant, was the first known man to be killed by a robot.
* 1981: A 25-year-old Dutch woman studying in Paris, Renée Hartevelt, was killed, raped, and eaten by a classmate, Issei Sagawa, when he invited her to dinner for a literary conversation. The killer was declared unfit to stand trial and extradited back to Japan, where he was released from custody within fifteen months.
* 1981: Carl McCunn, in March 1981, paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake near the Coleen River in Alaska to photograph wildlife, but had not arranged for the pilot to pick him up again in August. Rather than starve, McCunn shot himself in the head. His body was found in February 1982.
* 1981: Boris Sagal, a motion picture-director, died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III when he walked into the tail-rotor blade of a helicopter and was decapitated.
* 1982: Vic Morrow, actor, was decapitated by a helicopter blade during filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie, along with two child actors, Myca Dinh Le (decapitated) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (crushed).
* 1982: Vladimir Smirnov, an Olympic champion fencer, died of brain damage nine days after his opponent's foil snapped during a match, penetrated his mask, pierced his eyeball and entered his brain.
* 1983: A diver on the Byford Dolphin oil exploration rig was violently dismembered and pulled through a narrowly opened hatch when the decompression chamber was accidentally opened, causing explosive decompression.
* 1983: Sergei Chalibashvili, a professional diver, died after a diving accident during World University Games. When he attempted a three-and-a-half reverse somersault in the tuck position, he smashed his head on the board and was knocked unconscious. He died after being in a coma for a week.
* 1983: Author Tennessee Williams died at the age of 71 after he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. His brother Dakin and some friends believed he was murdered. The police report, however, suggested his use of drugs and alcohol contributed to his death. Many prescription drugs were found in the room. Williams' lack of gag response may have been due to drugs and alcohol effects.
* 1984: An unidentified man died of presumed natural causes in the unfinished Tokyo apartment building in which he had been squatting for 11 years. His decomposed remains were discovered 20 years later, on June 1, 2004[34], with a newspaper dated February 20, 1984 by his side.[35]
* 1984: Jim Fixx, who wrote "The Complete Book of Running" and lectured about how running and a healthy diet would promote longevity, dropped dead from a heart attack while running. An autopsy revealed he had 3 massively blocked heart arteries.
* 1984: Jon-Erik Hexum, an American television actor, died after he shot himself in the head with a prop gun during a break in filming. Hexum apparently did not realize that blanks use paper or plastic wadding to seal gun powder into the shell, and that this wadding is propelled out of the barrel of the gun with enough force to cause severe injury or death if the weapon is fired at point-blank range.
* 1986: While on the air giving a traffic report, the helicopter that Jane Dornacker was riding in stalled and crashed into the Hudson River, killing her. This was the second helicopter crash she had been in that year.
* 1987: Budd Dwyer, a Republican politician, committed suicide during a televised press conference. Facing a potential 55-year jail sentence for alleged involvement in a conspiracy, Dwyer shot himself in the mouth with a revolver.
* 1990: Joseph W. Burrus, aged 32, an aspiring magician, decided to perform the "buried alive" illusion in a plastic box covered with cement. The cement crushed the box and he died of asphyxia.[36]
* 1990: George Allen, an American football coach, died a month after some of his players gave him a Gatorade Shower following a victory (as it is tradition in American Football). Some argue this resulted in pneumonia.
* 1993: Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, was shot and killed by a prop .44 Magnum gun while filming the movie The Crow. A cartridge with only a primer and a bullet was fired in the pistol prior to the scene Brandon was in; this caused a squib load, in which the primer provided enough force to push the bullet out of the cartridge and into the barrel of the revolver, where it became stuck. The malfunction went unnoticed by the crew, and the same gun was used again later to shoot the death scene, having been re-loaded with blanks. However, the squib load was still lodged in the barrel, and was propelled by the blank cartridge's explosion out of the barrel and into Lee's body. Although the bullet was traveling much slower than a normally fired bullet would be, the bullet's large size and the nearly point-blank firing distance made it powerful enough to severely wound Lee. It was not instantly recognized by the crew or other actors; they believed he was still acting. Interestingly, the incident was almost an exact replica of a scene in his father Bruce Lee's last film Game of Death, during the filming of which Bruce Lee also died. Even more bizarrely yet; the plot of Game of Death revolved around Bruce Lee's character, a kung-fu actor, faking his own death - by pretending to have been hit by an accidentally fired real bullet while filming a scene where hundreds of blanks were fired at him.
* 1993: Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through the glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in order to prove the glass was "unbreakable."
* 1993:Tatiana Nikolayeva, the famous Soviet Russian concert pianist, suffered a stroke during a concert in San Francisco, while playing 24 preludes and fugues bu Dmitry Shostakovich, stopping sharp in the middle of one of the pieces. She was taken to hospital but died nine days later without regaining consciousness. The work she was playing had been dedicated to her by the composer about forty years earlier.
* 1994: Stephen Milligan, a British politician who was at the time the Member for Eastleigh in the House of Commons, died in an apparent case of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Milligan was also believed to have been engaging in acts of self-bondage and cross-dressing at the time of his death.
* 1996: Sharon Lopatka, an internet entrepreneur from Maryland allegedly solicited a man via the Internet to torture and kill her for the purpose of sexual gratification. Her killer, Robert Fredrick Glass, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the homicide.
* 1998: Daniel V. Jones was a former hotel maintenance worker in Long Beach, California who shot himself through the chin on the Los Angeles expressway on live television. His suicide was apparently caused by his resentment against his HMO for inadequately treating him when he was diagnosed with cancer and HIV.
* 1998: Tom and Eileen Lonergan were stranded while scuba diving with a group of divers off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The group's boat accidentally abandoned them due to an incorrect head count taken by the dive boat crew. The couple was left to fend for themselves in shark-infested waters. Their bodies were never recovered. The incident is depicted in the film Open Water and an episode of 20/20.
* 1999: Popular British TV entertainer Rod Hull died following a fall from the roof of his home at Winchelsea, near Rye. He was attempting to adjust the TV aerial in order to get a better picture of the Inter Milan v Manchester United Champions League Quarter Final, 2nd Leg.
* 1999: Drum and Bass producer and DJ Kemistry died in a car accident where a loose cat's eye was thrown through her windscreen by another vehicle.
21st century
* 2001: Renowned Hungarian singer Jimmy Zámbó died from a gunshot wound in the head on New Year's Day. He reportedly was annoyed by the neighborhood poultry making noise, for which he fired several shots out the window. On the request of his guests to stop shooting, he wanted to show the gun was empty, he removed the magazine and pulled the trigger while aiming at his temple. The cartridge left in the chamber discharged and killed him. [37]
* 2001: Bernd-Jürgen Brandes was stabbed repeatedly in the neck and then eaten by Armin Meiwes. Before the killing, both men dined on Brandes' severed penis. Brandes had answered an internet advertisement by Meiwes looking for someone for this purpose. Brandes explicitly stated in his will that he wished to be killed and eaten. This is referred to in the songs "Eaten" by Swedish Death Metal band Bloodbath and "Mein Teil" ("My Part") by German NDH band Rammstein, as well as album and song "Eat Me, Drink Me" by Marilyn Manson.[38]
* 2002: Brittanie Cecil, an American 13-year-old hockey fan, died two days after being struck in the head by a hockey puck at a game between the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Calgary Flames at Nationwide Arena.
* 2002: Richard Sumner, an artist suffering from schizophrenia, went into Clocaenog Forest, Denbighshire, Wales, and committed suicide by handcuffing himself to a tree and throwing the keys away. His skeleton was discovered three years later by a hiker walking her dog. [39]
* 2003: Brian Douglas Wells, a pizza delivery man in Erie, PA, was killed by a time bomb which was fastened around his neck. He was apprehended by the police after robbing a bank, and claimed he had been forced to do it by three people who had put the bomb around his neck and would kill him if he refused. The bomb later exploded, killing him. In 2007, police alleged Wells was involved in the robbery plot along with two other conspirators.[40]
* 2003: Brandon Vedas died of a drug overdose while engaged in an Internet chat, as shown on his webcam.
* 2003: Timothy Treadwell, an American environmentalist who had lived in the wilderness among bears for thirteen summers in a remote region in Alaska, was killed and partially consumed by a bear, along with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard. The incident is described in Werner Herzog's documentary film Grizzly Man.[41]
* 2005: Kenneth Pinyan of Seattle died of acute peritonitis after submitting to anal intercourse with a stallion. Pinyan had done this before, and he delayed his visit to the hospital for several hours out of reluctance for official cognizance. The case led to the criminalization of bestiality in Washington.[42] His story was recounted in the 2007 documentary film Zoo.
* 2005: 28-year-old South Korean, Lee Seung Seop, collapsed of fatigue and died after playing Starcraft for almost 50 consecutive hours in an Internet cafe.[43]
* 2005: Gerry Marshall, a British Saloon Car racing driver, died of a heart attack at the wheel of an IROC Chevrolet Camaro at Silverstone racing circuit. Marshall managed to bring the car to a halt before expiring, and stopped close to the BRDC suite he frequented in his earlier career. Marshall is notable for holding the record for most race wins in a career, 623.
* 2006: Steve Irwin, a television personality and naturalist known as The Crocodile Hunter, died when his heart was impaled by a short-tail stingray barb while filming a documentary entitled "Ocean's Deadliest" in Queensland's Great Barrier Reef. The stingray was not the creature being filmed.[44]
* 2006: Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB operative and Russian expatriate who had been investigating the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, was intentionally poisoned with polonium-210, an extremely rare radioactive metalloid.[45]
* 2006: Cheryl Sarate, a 16 year old student in the Philippines, died of severe burns suffered when her costume caught fire during a college beauty pageant.
* 2006: Megan Meier, a 13 year-old girl with ADHD and other disorders from Missouri committed suicide after being harassed by a boy she made friends with over Myspace, which turned out to be a fake profile made by the mother of a friend of Meier's.
* 2007: Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman from Sacramento, died of water intoxication while trying to win a Wii console in a KDND 107.9 "The End" radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest, which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating. She placed second in the contest. [46] [47]
* 2007: Carol Anne Gotbaum, 45, while in police custody, was shackled to a bench and left alone in an airport holding room, where she reportedly strangled herself by moving the handcuffs to the front of her neck. [48]
* 2007: Kevin Whitrick, a 42-year-old man committed suicide by hanging himself live on a webcam during an internet chat session.[49]
* 2007: Surinder Singh Bajwa, the Deputy Mayor of Delhi, India, was kicked by a Rhesus Macaque monkey at his home and fell from a first floor balcony, suffering serious head injuries. He later died from his injuries. [50]
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