Morbid as it may seem but eventually all of us will come to pass yet there are some who did go the unique or bizarre way. These are just some of these unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history and noted as being unusual by multiple sources.
Ancient Times
Menes
Menes, Egyptian pharaoh and unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt was carried off and then killed by a hippopotamus.
Date of Death: c. 3200 BC
Empedocles of Akragas
Empedocles of Akragas was a Pre-Socratic philosopher from the island of Sicily, who, in one of his surviving poems, declares himself to have become a "divine being... no longer mortal". According to Diogenes Laërtius, he tried to prove he was an immortal god by leaping into Mount Etna, an active volcano. This legend is also alluded to by the Roman poet Horace.
Date of Death: c. 430 BC
Sophocles
A number of "remarkable" legends concerning the death of Sophocles, 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
Date of Death: c. 406 BC
Mithridates
Mithridates, a 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.
Date of Death: 401 BC
Democritus of Abdera
According to Diogenes Laërtius, the Greek Atomist philosopher Democritus of Abdera died at the age of 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.
Date of Death: c 370 BC
Antiphanes
Antiphanes was a renowned comic poet of the Middle Attic comedy. The Suda claims he died after being struck by a pear.
Date of Death: c. 310 BC
Agathocles of Syracuse
Agathocles, a Greek tyrant of Syracuse, was murdered with a poisoned toothpick.
Date of Death: 289 BC
Philitas of Cos
Philitas of Cos, a Greek intellectual, is said by Athenaeus to have studied arguments and erroneous word usage so intensely, that he wasted away and starved to death. British classicist Alan Cameron speculates that Philitas died from a wasting disease which his contemporaries joked was caused by his pedantry.
Date of Death: c 270 BC
Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium was a Greek philosopher from Citium (Kition), Cyprus. As he was leaving the school, he tripped and fell, 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 while holding his breath.
Date of Death: c. 262 BC
Qin Shi Huang
Qin Shi Huang, 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 eternal life.
Date of Death: August 210 BC
Chrysippus of Soli
One ancient account of the death of Chrysippus, a third-century BC Greek Stoic philosopher, tells that he died of laughter 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).
Date of Death: c. 206 BC
Middle Ages
John II Komnenos
Cut himself with a poisoned arrow during a boar hunt, and subsequently died from an infection.
Date of Death: April 1, 1143
Victims of the Erfurt Latrine disaster
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.
Date of Death: July 26, 1184
Henry I of Castile
Henry I, king of Castile, was killed by a tile that fell from a roof.
Date of Death: June 6, 1217
Al-Musta'sim
Al-Musta'sim, the last Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, was executed by his Mongol captors by being rolled up in a rug and then trampled by horses.
Date of Death: February 20, 1258
Edward II of England
Edward II of England was rumored 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. 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.
Date of Death: September 21, 1327
John of Bohemia
John of Bohemia, after being blind for 10 years, 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.
Date of Death: August 26, 1346
Charles II of Navarre
The contemporary chronicler Froissart relates that King Charles II 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.
Date of Death: January 1, 1387
Martha Mansfield
While American film actress Martha Mansfield, 24, 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.
Date of Death: November 30, 1923
Thornton Jones
Thornton Jones, a lawyer in 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. An inquest at Bangor delivered a verdict of "suicide while temporarily insane".
Date of Death: 1924
Calvin Coolidge Jr.
Calvin Coolidge Jr., 16, the 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 resulted which quickly became infected, and he died just over one week later when sepsis set in.
Date of Death: July 7, 1924
Bobby Leach
Bobby Leach, an 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 fifteen years earlier.
Date of Death: April 26, 1926
Phillip McClean
Phillip McClean, 16, and his brother were clubbing a cassowary on the family property in Mossman, Queensland, when it knocked him down, kicked him in the neck, and opened a large cut, leading to death from loss of blood.
Date of Death: 1926
1970s
Luciano Re Cecconi
Re Cecconi, a 28-year-old professional footballer for S.S. Lazio and the Italy national football team, was shot while pretending to rob a jeweler as a practical joke.
Date of Death: January 18, 1977
1980s
Jon-Erik Hexum
Jon-Erik Hexum, 26, an 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.
Date of Death: October 18, 1984
An Unidentified Male
An unidentified man, 25, was using submersion as an erotic asphyxia method. With 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.
The term Aqua-eroticum was first introduced in 1984 by Sivaloganathan to describe the unusual autoerotic death of a man using submersion as an asphyxia method. This was the first case of that kind, and since then, no other case of autoerotic submersion has been reported, nor other autoerotic fatality in open water. Here we report the case of a 25-year-old man, nude under a homemade plastic body suit, overdressed for the season with winter clothes and restrained by complex bondage. He was submerged, tied underwater to a boat, and was using a homemade diving apparatus for air supply. Death was ruled as accidental autoerotic asphyxia from rebreathing, caused by the faulty air-supply device.
Date of Death: 1984
Michael Godwin
Michael Godwin, 28, an American criminal convicted of murder, was initially given a death sentence by electrocution before being 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 South Carolina.
Date of Death: March 1989
1990s
Jonathan Capewell
Jonathan Capewell, 16, 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.
Date of Death: 1998
John Lewis
John Lewis, 64, a 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
Date of Death: April 12, 1999
Owen Hart
Professional wrestler Owen Hart 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.
Date of Death: May 23, 1999
Hisashi Ouchi
On 30 September 1999, Hisashi 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, at the wishes of his family. Attempts at treatment, including early use of peripheral stem cell transplantation, were carried out over the course of almost 3 months, but they ultimately failed, and he died on 21 December 1999, following an unrecoverable cardiac arrest. Of the other two, Shinohara died of multiple organ failure complicated by infections following numerous attempts at treatment on 27 April 2000, while Yokokawa, who received the smallest dose, survived following three months of hospitalization.
Date of Death: December 21, 1999
Mildred Bowman and Alice Wardle
Two sisters, Mildred Bowman, 62, and Alice Wardle, 68, died in Benidorm, Spain, after becoming trapped for four days when their fold-up Murphy bed collapsed.
Date of Death: August 2005
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