Lists of unusual deaths | ||
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Antiquity | ||
Middle Ages | Renaissance | Early modern period |
19th century | 20th century | 21st century |
Animal deaths |
This list of unusual deaths includes unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout the 20th century, noted as being unusual by multiple sources.
Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
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Victims of the 1900 English beer poisoning | 1900 | In the English Midlands and North West England, over 6,000 were poisoned and 70 people died after drinking beer which used non-purified sulphuric acid laced with arsenic as an ingredient. Most survivors were paralyzed. [1] [2] | |
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. [3] [ verification needed ] [4] | |
Victims of the Thanksgiving Day Disaster | 29 November 1900 | During the 1900 Big Game between the California Golden Bears and the Stanford Cardinal American football teams, a large crowd of people who did not want to pay the $1 (equivalent to $37in 2023) admission fee gathered upon the roof of a glass blowing factory to watch for free. The roof then collapsed, severing fuel pipes and causing at least 100 people to fall four stories to the factory floor. 60 to 100 more people fell directly on top of a furnace, the surface temperature of which was estimated to be around 500 °F (260 °C). 23 people were killed, and over 100 more were injured. The disaster remains the deadliest accident at a sporting event in U.S. history. [5] [6] [7] | |
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. [8] [9] | |
R. Stanton Walker | 25 October 1902 | The 20-year-old was watching an amateur baseball game in Morristown, Ohio when a foul ball struck him in the hand, driving a knife he was passing to one of his friends into his chest. 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. [10] [11] | |
Ed Delahanty | 2 July 1903 | The 35-year-old American baseball player for the Phillies died after being removed from a train due to drunken horseplay, falling off International Bridge below Niagara Falls. Sam Kingston, a local night watchman, was the last to see him alive, reportedly scuffling with him. Kingston's account of the incident was spotty and inconsistent; it is unclear whether Delahanty was intentionally pushed, accidentally fell, or decided to jump. [12] [13] [ verification needed ] | |
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. [14] [15] | |
Archibald Anderson | 4 March 1907 | The 19-year-old was bathing in the Yarra River when a tooth plate fell out and got lodged in his throat, choking him to death. [16] [17] | |
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, becoming the first person to die in the crash of a powered aircraft. [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] | |
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. [23] [24] 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. [25] | |
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. [26] [27] [ failed verification ] | |
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 12 April 1909. He died from internal injuries and gangrene two weeks later. [28] [29] | |
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. [30] [31] | |
Franz Reichelt | 4 February 1912 | The 33-year-old 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". [32] [33] [34] | |
Mr. & Mrs. Emile Froment-Meurice | 25 April 1913 | The famed French goldsmith and his wife were killed when their house, in an aristocratic quarter of Paris, collapsed on them. [35] [36] [37] | |
Emily Davison | 8 June 1913 | On 4 June 1913, the 40-year-old suffragette from London was mortally injured at the Epsom Derby when she ran onto the racetrack wearing a suffragette flag and was run over by Anmer, George V's horse, which jockey Herbert Jones was riding. [38] [39] She suffered a fractured skull, a concussion, and internal injuries and died in the Epsom Cottage Hospital 4 days later. [40] | |
Grigori Rasputin | 30 December [ O.S. 17 December] 1916 | The 47-year-old 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. [41] [42] [ page needed ] 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. [41] [43] [44] [45] | |
Gustav Kobbé | 27 July 1918 | The 61-year-old author and music critic was sailing in Great South Bay, New York, when he noticed a low-flying seaplane heading toward him. Kobbé attempted to get into the water, but the plane crashed into the mast of Kobbé's boat, splitting his head open. [46] [47] [ unreliable source? ] | |
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. [48] [49] [50] [51] | |
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 the New York Yankees' Carl Mays and died 12 hours later. [52] [53] | |
Dan Andersson | 16 September 1920 | The 32-year-old Swedish poet died from hydrogen cyanide left in his Hotel Hellman room by a lice, flea, and bed bug extermination. [47] [ unreliable source? ] | |
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. [41] [54] | |
Thomas Lynn Bradford | 5 February 1921 | In an attempt to ascertain the existence of an afterlife, the 48-year-old 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. In the week following his death, two fellow spiritualists claimed to have communicated with his ghost. [55] [56] | |
Michael F. Farley | 8 October 1921 | The 58-year-old U.S. Representative and Gore–McLemore resolution supporter died of anthrax he contracted from his shaving brush. [57] [ unreliable source? ] [58] | |
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. [59] [60] | |
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. [61] [62] [63] | |
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. Co-star Wilfred Lytell and a chauffeur were able to extinguish the flames and rush her to a hospital, where she died the following day from her injuries. [64] [65] | |
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). [66] [67] [68] | |
Thornton Jones | 1 August 1924 | The lawyer from Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales, slit his own throat while he was having a nightmare. [69] [70] An inquest at Bangor delivered a verdict of "suicide while temporarily insane". [71] [ failed verification ] | |
Phillip McClean | April 1926 | The 16-year-old 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. [72] [ verification needed ] [73] [74] | |
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. [75] [76] | |
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." [45] [77] However, other stories claim he was murdered. Who or what killed Houdini is still under speculation. [77] | |
Dr. J. S. F. Barnet | 29 August 1927 | The 32-year-old physician in Armidale, Australia, was shocked to death in his bed by an excessive quantity of electrical power from a medical device. Barnet had picked up a telephone beside his bed to answer a call at the moment the device's current came on. [78] | |
Isadora Duncan | 14 September 1927 | The 50-year-old 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. [79] [80] [81] | |
Alfred Loewenstein | 4 July 1928 | The 51-year-old financier and third-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. [82] [83] | |
William Kogut | 20 October 1930 | The 26-year-old 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. [84] [85] [note 1] | |
Arnold Bennett | 27 March 1931 | The 63-year-old British novelist was dining in Paris with his partner, Dorothy Cheston Bennett. 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. [86] [87] [88] [ page needed ][ verification needed ] | |
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 he 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. [89] [90] [91] | |
Eben Byers | 31 March 1932 | The 51-year-old American socialite and industrialist died after drinking excessive quantities of Radithor, a patent medicine that contained 2 microcuries of radium. 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. [92] [93] [94] | |
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". [95] [96] [ page needed ] [97] | |
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." [98] [99] | |
Catherine Steyer | 20 January 1937 | The 33-year-old hatcheck girl was accidentally electrocuted by a homemade booby trap, consisting of powered wires hidden within drapes, that her fiance had installed after her apartment was broken into a few months prior. Falling onto one wire, with another dangling above her arm, she completed the circuit each time the dangling wire touched her; she died slowly from the repeating doses of electricity. [100] [101] | |
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. [102] [103] | |
Benjamin Taylor | 2 June 1937 | During a carbuncle removal operation, an electric cautery ignited gases from the patient's lungs. This caused an explosion which killed Taylor and injured two nurses. [104] [105] | |
Nicholas Comper | 17 June 1939 | The 42-year-old aviator and aircraft designer was attempting to light a firework in Hythe, Kent, when a passerby enquired what he was doing; he 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. [106] [107] | |
Italo Balbo | 28 June 1940 | The 44-year-old governor of Italian Libya was flying his personal Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 when the Libyan airfield at Tobruk was attacked by a squad of British planes. He was killed by friendly fire from Italian anti-aircraft batteries on the ground. [108] [109] | |
Leon Trotsky | 21 August 1940 | The 60-year-old Russian socialist and revolutionary was murdered in his villa in Mexico by Spanish-born NKVD agent Ramón Mercader with an ice axe. [45] [110] [111] | |
Sherwood Anderson | 8 March 1941 | The 64-year-old American writer died of peritonitis after accidentally swallowing a toothpick. [45] [47] [ unreliable source? ] [112] [ unreliable source? ] | |
Jack Budlong | 5 August 1941 | The friend of Errol Flynn was working as an extra on the film They Died with Their Boots On , starring Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Budlong insisted on using a real saber rather than a prop one. While filming a cavalry charge, Budlong's horse was frightened by the sounds of simulated explosions and threw Budlong, causing him to impale himself with the sword. [113] [114] [115] | |
Rolf Mützelburg | 11 September 1942 | The 29-year-old commander of German submarine U-203 died during a World War II patrol southwest of the Azores when he dove from the sub's conning tower to swim in the ocean. The boat lurched suddenly, and Mützelburg's head and shoulder struck the sub. [116] [ self-published source? ] [117] | |
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" or "baby 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. [118] [119] | |
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. [120] | |
Victims of the Balvano train disaster | 3 March 1944 | On the evening of 2 March 1944, a freight train departed from Naples to Potenza, Italy. On board were hundreds of stowaway passengers who travelled to trade for commodities with Allied servicemen due to shortages caused by World War II and the Italian Civil War. At around midnight on 3 March, the heavy train came to a stop inside the Armi tunnel in the town of Balvano due to its inability to climb over an incline. Due to a combination of carbon monoxide produced by poor-quality coal used on the locomotives and the lack of ventilation inside the tunnel, at least 517 people (most of whom were stowaway passengers) died as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. The disaster remains the deadliest train accident in Italian history. [121] [122] | |
Thomas Midgley Jr. | 2 November 1944 | In 1940, the 51-year-old contracted polio, which left him severely disabled, leading him to devise 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. [123] [124] | |
Louis Slotin | 30 May 1946 | The 35-year-old Canadian physicist and Manhattan Project scientist died as the result of an accident while performing an experiment called "tickling the dragon's tail" with a plutonium core which came to be known as the "demon core". His screwdriver slipped, exposing him to a fatal dose of radiation. Slotin died 9 days later; the other people in the room observing the experiment survived. [125] [126] | |
Thomas Mantell | 7 January 1948 | The 25-year-old 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. [127] [128] [129] [130] | |
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. [131] [132] | |
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. [47] [ unreliable source? ] [133] | |
Gareth Jones | 30 November 1958 | The 33-year-old 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. [134] [135] |
Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
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Alan Stacey | 19 June 1960 | The 26-year-old British racing driver died in a crash during the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix when a bird struck him in the face. 22-year-old British driver Chris Bristow was killed during the same race. [136] [137] [ unreliable source? ] [138] | |
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 partway 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-lined coffins. The three remain the only human beings killed by a reactor explosion in the United States. [139] [140] [141] [142] | |
Victor Prather | 4 May 1961 | The 34-year-old U.S. Navy flight surgeon drowned at the end of the record-setting Strato-Lab V balloon flight when he slipped from the rescue sling during recovery operations in the Gulf of Mexico and his pressure suit filled with water. [143] [144] | |
Joseph A. Walker and Carl Cross | 8 June 1966 | Astronaut and NASA test pilot Walker, flying a Lockheed F-104N Starfighter, and North American Aviation test pilot Cross, co-piloting a North American XB-70 Valkyrie bomber, were killed in a mid-air collision during a publicity photo shoot of multiple aircraft with General Electric engines flying in formation near Edwards Air Force Base. With the Valkyrie in a spin, pilot Alvin S. White ejected and survived, but centrifugal force prevented Cross' ejection seat from retracting into the escape capsule. [145] [146] | |
Nick Piantanida | 29 August 1966 | The 34-year-old 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. [147] [ verification needed ] [148] [149] | |
Jayne Mansfield | 29 June 1967 | The 34-year-old American actress and Playboy model died when the driver of her 1966 Buick Electra 225 crashed into a tractor which had abruptly stopped. Her lover and the driver also died, but her children, including Mariska Hargitay, who was 3 years old at the time, survived. Many people speculated that the accident was the result of a Satanic curse. [150] [151] | |
Harold Holt | 17 December 1967 | The 59-year-old Prime Minister of Australia disappeared, presumed drowned, while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria. [152] [153] [154] [155] He was "simply one of the number of ordinary Australians who drown each year through poor judgment or bad luck"; [156] his drowning has been described as "not unusual", [157] and as "an ordinary death, a shockingly banal one that still befalls dozens every summer." [153] Holt's disappearance gave rise to a variety of unfounded conspiracy theories. [153] | |
Albert Dekker | 5 May 1968 | The 62-year-old American actor and politician was found dead kneeling naked in his bathtub with a noose wrapped around his neck, a dirty hypodermic needle in each arm, a scarf over his eyes, a ball in his mouth secured to his head with wire, his wrists in handcuffs, and leather belts and thongs around his torso, one of them tied to a rope around Dekker's ankles. There were vulgar phrases and drawings in lipstick all over his body. His death was ruled an accidental case of erotic asphyxiation. [158] [159] |
Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
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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. [160] | |
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. [161] [162] | |
John Dimmer | 5 July 1974 | While working in saturation aboard oil platform Sedco 135F in the British Sector of the North Sea, the 27-year-old British commercial diver suffered a pneumothorax during decompression. The diving supervisor recognized Dimmer's condition, but the onshore physician consulted by the platform incorrectly diagnosed Dimmer as suffering from pneumonia. As a result, decompression continued, and Dimmer's pneumothorax proved fatal. [163] [164] | |
Deborah Gail Stone | 8 July 1974 | The 18-year-old hostess for the America Sings attraction at Disneyland 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. [165] [166] | |
Christine Chubbuck | 15 July 1974 | The 29-year-old American news anchor from Hudson, Ohio, killed herself on live television at the start of Suncoast Digest, a local newscast for WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, after reading some of the area's breaking news headlines. Chubbuck was the first person to commit suicide on live television. [167] [168] | |
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. [169] [170] | |
Roger Baldwin and Peter Holmes | 9 September 1975 | After a bell dive while working in saturation aboard the semi-submersible drill rig Waage Drill II in the North Sea, British commercial divers Baldwin, 24, and Holmes, 29, died of hyperthermia due to a large amount of helium being pumped into the diving chamber complex in response to an apparent pressure leak. The supervisor had mistakenly been monitoring the pressure in the diving bell rather than in the chamber complex. [171] [172] [173] [174] | |
Mark Frechette | 27 September 1975 | The 27-year-old American-Canadian film actor, known for playing the lead role in the 1970 film Zabriskie Point , died while in prison for bank robbery when a barbell fell on his neck while he was weightlifting. [175] [176] | |
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. [177] [178] | |
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. [179] [ verification needed ] [180] [ page needed ] [181] [ verification needed ] Renzo Zorzi, the driver of the burning car, was uninjured.[ citation needed ] | |
Kurt Gödel | 14 January 1978 | The 71-year-old logician and mathematician developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned and refused to eat food prepared by anyone but his wife. When she became ill and was hospitalized, he starved to death. [182] [183] At the time of his death, he only weighed around 65 pounds (29 kg). [184] [ failed verification ] | |
Georgi Markov | 11 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. Markov died four days later in hospital. No one was ever charged with the assassination. [44] [185] | |
Robert Williams | 25 January 1979 | The Ford plant worker became the first person known to be killed by a robot [58] [186] [ verification needed ] when a factory robot's arm struck him in the head. [187] [ verification needed ] |
Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
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Lourdes Maria da Silva | 3 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. [188] [189] | |
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. [190] [191] [192] | |
John Bjornstad, Forrest Cole, and Nick Mullon | 19 March 1981, 1 April 1981, and 11 April 1995 | At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, five workers suffered anoxia due to pure nitrogen atmosphere in the aft engine compartment of Space Shuttle Columbia during a countdown demonstration test for the STS-1 mission. 51-year-old John Bjornstad died at the scene; 50-year-old Forrest Cole went into a coma and died two weeks later, and Nick Mullon died 14 years later from complications of injuries sustained. [193] [194] [195] | |
Boris Sagal | 22 May 1981 | The 57-year-old 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. [196] [197] [198] | |
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. [199] [200] | |
William Holden | 12 November 1981 | The 63-year-old American actor slipped on a rug in his apartment while intoxicated, gashed his head open on a bedside table and bled to death without calling for help. His body was discovered four days later. [201] [202] | |
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 caused the helicopter to fall on them. [203] [ failed verification ] Morrow and Le were decapitated and Chen was crushed. [202] [204] [205] | |
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. [206] [207] [208] | |
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, 35-year-old Edwin Arthur Coward, 38-year-old Roy P. Lucas and 29-year-old Bjørn Giæver Bergersen, and 32-year-old 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. [209] [210] | |
Jimmy Ferrozzo | 23 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. [211] [212] | |
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. [213] [214] | |
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. [202] [215] [216] [ verification needed ] | |
Jason Findley | 21 May 1985 | 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. [217] [218] | |
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. [219] [220] [221] | |
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. [222] [223] | |
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. [224] [225] [ unreliable source? ] | |
Ivan Lester McGuire | 2 April 1988 | The 35-year-old veteran skydiver was recording 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 recording process, he apparently forgot to put one on, and his camera equipment may have been mistaken by others in the plane for one. The tape from his helmet camera was partially recovered. [226] [227] [228] | |
Clarabelle Lansing | 28 April 1988 | On Aloha Airlines Flight 243 from Hilo to Honolulu, Hawaii, the 58-year-old flight attendant was blown out of the Boeing 737-209 30,000 feet (9,100 m) above the Pacific Ocean when the plane experienced explosive decompression due to metal fatigue. [229] [230] | |
3 people and Cachy the poodle | 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. [231] [232] |
Name of person | Image | Date of death | Details |
---|---|---|---|
Daniel John O'Brien | 14 January 1990 | The 31-year-old tourist committed suicide by jumping into one of the engines of a British Airways Boeing 747 at Piarco International Airport, Trinidad. [233] He is said to have scaled an airport wall in the nude, stolen a vehicle from four security guards, and smeared himself with grease before hurling himself into one of the plane's engines. [234] | |
Bo Díaz | 23 November 1990 | The 37-year-old Venezuelan professional baseball catcher was crushed to death by a satellite dish he was attempting to adjust on the roof of his home in Baruta, Caracas. [235] [236] | |
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. 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. [237] [238] | |
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 . [202] [239] [240] [241] | |
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. [242] [243] | |
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. [244] [245] [246] | |
Jeremy T. 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's shaft to break and pierce Brenno's heart, killing him. [247] [248] | |
Jack Nance | 30 December 1996 | The 53-year-old American actor was punched in the head during an altercation with two men outside a Winchell's Donuts store in South Pasadena, California. A friend found Nance on the bathroom floor of his apartment the following morning, having died from a subdural hematoma. [202] [249] | |
Karen Wetterhahn | 8 June 1997 | The 48-year-old 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. [250] [251] [252] | |
Jonathan Capewell | 29 July 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. [49] [253] [254] | |
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. His body was not found until 30 April 1999. [255] [256] | |
Valerie Olusanya | 25 April 1999 | The 35-year-old 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. [257] [258] [259] | |
Owen Hart | 23 May 1999 | The 34-year-old 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. [260] [261] | |
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. [262] [263] |
The Darwin Awards are a rhetorical tongue-in-cheek honor that originated in Usenet newsgroup discussions around 1985. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool by dying or becoming sterilized by their own actions.
These are a series of incomplete lists of unusual deaths, unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history, noted as being unusual by multiple sources.
A mining accident is an accident that occurs during the process of mining minerals or metals. Thousands of miners die from mining accidents each year, especially from underground coal mining, although accidents also occur in hard rock mining. Coal mining is considered much more hazardous than hard rock mining due to flat-lying rock strata, generally incompetent rock, the presence of methane gas, and coal dust. Most of the deaths these days occur in developing countries, and rural parts of developed countries where safety measures are not practiced as fully. A mining disaster is an incident where there are five or more fatalities.
Final Destination is an American horror franchise that includes six films, nine novels, and two comic books. It is based on an unproduced spec script by Jeffrey Reddick, originally written for The X-Files television series and was distributed by New Line Cinema. All of its six films are set around the premise of a small group of people who escape impending death after one individual has a sudden premonition and warns them about a major disaster that is about to occur. After avoiding their foretold deaths seen in the visions, the survivors are later killed one by one in bizarre accidents caused by an unseen force by creating complicated chains of cause and effect, resembling Rube Goldberg machines, and then read omens in order to again avert their deaths.
Fatal dog attacks in the United States cause the deaths of thirty to fifty people each year. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were 468 deaths in the United States from being bitten or struck by a dog between 2011 and 2021. This is an average of 43 deaths annually, ranging from a low of 31 deaths in 2016 and a high of 81 deaths in 2021. Dogs killed more males than females during the tracking decade. Children between the ages of one to four are most often the victims, accounting for 29.4% of the fatalities from dog attacks in 2022; those under the age of seventeen accounted for 56.7% of all fatalities that year.
Johnny Strange, nicknamed "the man with ears of steel", is an English world record breaking performance artist, producer, street performer and bestselling author based in London, England. He is known for performing daredevil stunts with a comedic twist.
Fatality statistics in the Western Australian mining industry captures the number of people killed in the industry in the Australian state of Western Australia. During the period 2000-2012 (inclusive), a total of 52 fatalities occurred. In 2006, the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia commissioned a taxonomic study to analyse the 306 mining fatalities which occurred between 1970 and 2006. The Department of Mines and Petroleum, later renamed the Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety, the governing authority for the industry in the state, has published statistics for fatalities in mining dating back to 1943 and intends to publish statistics dating back to 1886, though early records are not expected to be exhaustive.
The following events occurred in September 1903:
The following events occurred in April 1904:
[...]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.
Unusual in arsenic poisoning, but especially prominent in this epidemic, were cardiovascular aspects.
Hardly does any great national festival pass without leaving a record of disaster and death... It it true they seldom occur upon a scale of such magnitude or under circumstances so direful as that which fell upon the spectators of the football match from the roof of the glass works...
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.
The scene in San Francisco after the game had to be as strange as any in the city's history.
By a peculiar accident James Doyle Jr., a lineman employed by the Bay Counties Power Company at Smartsville, lost his life to-day.
By a peculiar accident James Doyle Jr., a lineman, was killed at Smartsville yesterday.
This is the story of the bizarre death of 1903 of Hall of Famer Ed Delahanty.
But there were more questions about Delahanty's bizarre and gruesome fate than there were answers.[ page needed ]
SYDNEY, Tuesday.—Mary Ellen Rumble, the daughter of a farmer at Watervale, in the Murrumburrah district, was killed in a peculiar manner to-day.
It is a singular thing that Selfridge designed the propeller of the Baldwin airship, which was considered a marvel for efficiency, and yet met his death by the breaking of a propeller.
Events took a bizarre twist on September 17, 1908 when Selfridge, a member of the aeronautical board that was appraising a Wright machine in U.S. army acceptance trials, was killed.
Ironically, his death was attributed to a lengthened propeller that fractured upon striking a bracing wire during a turn — a modification inadequately tested by the Wrights, ultimately claiming Selfridge's life.
But the idea of navigating in three dimensions, and of course the newness of flight, made this a novel and high profile event.
Like the bizarre death of Hülsen-Häseler, the entire Eulenburg Affair has been discreetly hushed up in all but the most recent historiography.
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.
They were wrong, but reporters could not have been expected to imagine that Powers was fatally ill with a rare disorder none of them likely had ever heard of.
Animé de la foi prodigieuse des inventeurs, François Reichelt, que tous les malheureux essais de son appareil avec des mannequins auraient dû mettre à l'abri d'une aussi folle audace, osa — calme et souriant — faire cette chose inouïe : sauter de 60 mètres de haut, dans le vide...[Driven by the prodigious faith of inventors, François Reichelt, whom all the unfortunate tests of his device with dummies should have protected from such crazy audacity, dared – calm and smiling – to do this unheard-of thing: to jump from a height of 60 meters, into the void...]
It seems incredible that any man should venture on such a hazardous attempt and repeat it on so large a scale after failure.
When in 1912 Franz Reichelt invited the cameras of the main newsreel companies to gather under the Eiffel Tower to witness how his batwing-inspired costumes would allow him to descend comfortably to earth with no risk, what motivated the companies was attraction... In this case, attraction to the unusual is accommodated as news...
Emile Froment-Meurice and his wife, prominent members of Paris society, were killed in an extraordinary accident this evening.
Unusual, almost unique, the collapse of the house in the rue d'Anjou, Paris, on Friday evening [April 25] has naturally aroused widespread comment in the city., cited in "100, 75, 50 Years Ago". Opinion. The New York Times. 26 April 2013. Retrieved 27 November 2024.
However, a return train ticket to London later found in her purse gave the idea that her plight might have been just a freak accident.
Whether it was or was not intentional – a debate that will never reach an end, however her return ticket and future holiday plans would point to it being a freak accident – Davison being trampled by the King's horse at the Epsom Derby whilst wearing a suffragette-coloured scarf brought attention to the cause...
Following the shocking events of Derby day, the WSPU leadership was quick to hail Davison as a martyr for the women's cause.
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.
Many of history's most important figures have suffered strange deaths that do not seem to befit their noble legacy.
The substance itself gives the entire event an unusual, whimsical quality.
BBC Future looks at a design defect that created a bizarre – and deadly – flood.
This bizarre and terrifying event, known as the Great Molasses Flood, claimed 21 lives, with victims ranging in age from 10 to 78.
He remains the only player in baseball history to die as a result of a play on the field.
Michael Sowell, author of "The Pitch That Killed" and Jeremy Feador, the Cleveland Indians' Team Historian reflect on this singular baseball tragedy.
The King's death took place under the most tragic and unusual circumstances.
...Bradford's legacy is nothing more than a bizarre and somewhat tragic story that has faded into the abyss of time.
Though the circumstances of Bradford's suicide seemed mundane enough to the police investigators, his reason for committing suicide was, well, out of this world.
A remarkable fatality occurred at Glen Elgin, near Glen Innes, on Saturday morning when Mrs. W. C. Eckersley, a well-known and respected resident of the district, was drowned.
Mrs. W. C. Eckersly, of Glen Elgn (Glen Innes), met her end in peculiarly distressing circumstances on Saturday last.
He died a victim of his almost fanatic enthusiasm and worship of horsemanship.
In the weird and wonderful history of horse racing, Frank Hayes holds a unique place.
We know many movies were filmed in Texas, but you don't hear too many stories of accidents or deaths occurring while filming a movie. But that wasn't the case 100 years ago on November 29th, 1923 where one woman would be the victim of the craziest and saddest filming accidents in cinema history.
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...
This truly strange occurrence not only made a front-page headline in the local newspaper, but also a prominent editorial as well.
The extraordinary suggestion that he had cut his throat whilst asleep was made at an inquest at Bangor on Thornton Jones, a solicitor.
In 1924 British newspapers reported the bizarre case of a man who apparently committed suicide while asleep.
The last person known to have been killed by a cassowary was 16-year-old Phillip McLean, whose throat was punctured on his Queensland ranch in 1926.
Most cassowary-human encounters don't end in death, but the possibility exists.
His death, 15 years after his famous plunge, was sadly ironic.
An image supposedly showing stunt performer Bobby Leach sitting on a purpose-built barrel next to Niagara Falls is frequently circulated on social media along with a seemingly ironic story about his death.
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.
Dr. J. S. F. Barnet died in strange circumstances at his home in Barney-street to-day, apparently as the result of receiving an excessive charge of energy from an electrical therapeutic apparatus.
According to dispatches from Nice, Miss Duncan was hurled in an extraordinary manner from an open automobile in which she was riding and instantly killed by the force of her fall to the stone pavement.
Autograph material of Isadora Duncan is extremely rare on the market," explained Westwood-Brookes. "And she has always remained one of the great legends of early twentieth-century dance, fuelled by the bizarre way in which she was killed.
Isadora Duncan's bizarre death was a brutal end to a controversial life.
As unlikely as this must sound, playing cards have reportedly been used as an instrument of death.
A freak accident was blamed today for the death of J. L. McDermott, 40, deputy sheriff.
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.
This makes his bizarre accidental death while servicing his car at a gas station just north of downtown Los Angeles a greater tragedy.
Many deaths had been attributed to radium poisoning, but only one previously to poisoning contracted in this manner.
What happened next led ultimately to his gruesome death 4 years later and to his place as a central character in a bizarre episode in U.S. medicine.
His bizarre death was the result of his addiction to a quack cure, radium-laced water.
For as murders go, the slaying of Mike Malloy was an extraordinary inept, hapless, bumbling comedy of errors and human endurance.
Susan Grace Kelly (80) died under unusual circumstances at Armidale.
Her fiance, George Anton, 33, also of Brooklyn, owner of a radio store, who with Joseph Freitag, grocer living in Miss Styer's three-story red brick four-family house, discovered the body, explained the bizarre mystery to puzzled police.
The friend who provided the bizarre man-trap, police said, was one of those who found the body.
Clark County authorities today investigated the weird death of Fred Clapp, 77-year-old farmer, while being dragged by his team of horses.
What is believed to be one of the most unusual deaths in medical history occurred here yesterday when anesthetic gasses in the lungs of a Johns Hopkin Hospital patient exploded, killing the sick person instantly.
An unusual death was that of Benjamin Taslor of Maryland, reported by Dr. Winford Smith of Johns Hopkins.
[B]etween 1924 and his bizarre death in 1939, Nicholas Comper designed and built a series of light aircraft...
No matter what your political orientation, if you believe – or ever did believe – in the potential betterment of humanity, then you've got something to learn from the strange and tragic story of Leon Trotsky.
The story of the ice axe is a convoluted one, befitting the extraordinary and macabre story of the Trotsky assassination.
In a bizarre and morbid twist of fate, an extra named Jack Budlong was impaled by his own sword during the film's cavalry charge scene—the charge also took the lives of two other stuntmen.
Three men were killed during the filming... The third, actor Jack Budlong, insisted on using a real saber to lead a cavalry charge under artillery fire. When an explosive charge sent him flying off his horse, he landed on his sword, impaling himself. No stranger to freak accidents himself, director Raoul Walsh had lost an eye in a car accident while shooting In Old Arizona in 1929.
Kptlt. Rolf Mützelburg died on 11 September 1942 in a freak accident.
Mützelburg himself had died in a freak accident a few months earlier.
It is truly ironical that McCullar should meet his death while still practically on the ground.
Maj. Kenneth McCullar, 27, above, of Courtland, Miss., outstanding master of heavy bombardment tactics, was killed in a freak accident.
An accident near Balvano in southern Italy in March 1944 caused death of 520 people making it the worst ever train disaster in the country. It is also regarded as one of the moret [sic] unusual rail accidents of the century.
A freak wartime train accident which killed more than 600 Italians is to be finally commemorated amid claims that it was covered up by British and American authorities...
[Midgley]'s death was itself memorably unusual.
In the cruelest of ironies, Midgley's final invention directly caused his demise.
...it was Slotin's bizarre death that woke me to physics... Slotin tragically died from radiation poisoning one week after his incident in 1946 at the age of 35.[ self-published source ]
Mantell's death was sensational fodder for sensational media.
For over 58 years the case had been written about in about every book and mentioned on numerous TV shows, and had finally been written off as a mistaken balloon, with the pilot killed in either a freak accident or misgauging his ability to fly at certain altitudes without oxygen.
It's the strange saga of U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Thomas P. [sic] Mantell, who lost his life in 1948...
One of these bizarre cases was the death of Thomas Mantell, a captain of the US Air Force.
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.
Because of the inexplicable and strange circumstances of her case, it is suspected that Reeser was a victim of spontaneous combustion.
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.
...death seems almost certainly to have been due to a freak accident.
Stacey, a popular driver who had graduated to F1 with Lotus from club racing, was killed in a freak accident on the Burnenville right-hander, part of the old Spa track.[ self-published source ]
Not only had he swerved around the "rag doll" that was the mortally injured Chris Barstow but also team-mate Stacey had been killed in a freak accident.
The accident was unprecedented.
But just a few short hours later, the ordinary became extraordinary... one of the most bizarre stories never told to the American public.
...SL-1 is the only fatal nuclear reactor incident in American history...See summary: "Sample text for Library of Congress control number 2008013842". Archived from the original on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 30 October 2024.
It remains the only fatal reactor incident in American history.
The SL-1 accident was the first fatal nuclear accident in the United States.
A freak accident took the life of a Navy officer Thursday minutes after he and another "sub-Astronaut" returned from a record flight more than 21 miles into the atmosphere aboard a 411-foot balloon.
However, in an instant, the triumph of that mission would turn to tragedy as one of the crewmembers drowned in a freak accident during recovery.
The reason for XB70's final mission was unusual, perhaps, but not unique.
One of the most bizarre accidents in aviation history was happening, an accident so remarkable it compares to the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937, the collision of two 747 Jumbo Jets on the island of Tenerife in 1977 and the crash of the Concorde in Paris in 2000.
It is a reaction to the parade of schemers and oddballs who have long approached the company for help in breaking Kittinger's record. The most troublesome proved to be a charismatic but ill-disciplined jumper named Nick Piantanida...
It's easy to dismiss Nick Piantanida's story when you first hear it... It sounds inherently crackpot, like something from the Darwin Awards.
In the freak accident, the couple's Buick smashed into the back of a truck, hidden by a cloud of insecticide dust that seeped out from the trailer it was hauling.
It is Holt's misfortune, and our own, that he is now better remembered for the unusual circumstances of his death than for his life.
It was an ordinary death, a shockingly banal one that still befalls dozens every summer. That it happened to a prime minister, swimming alone in dangerous conditions without bodyguards, made it extraordinary.
Standing in the shadow of his record-breaking predecessor, all that most people know about Holt is the unusual manner of his demise.
The third Prime Minister to die in office, Harold Holt is widely remembered for the unusual circumstances of his death while swimming off the Victorian coast in December 1967.
The death was labelled "an indicated suicide...quite an unusual one."
However, rumors about his unusual death nearly overshadowed his entire acting career.
Indeed, in the whole history of space flight, there has only been one fatal accident in space itself: that resulting in the deaths of the three Soyuz 11 cosmonauts in June 1971.
However, of the roughly 550 people who have so far ventured into space, only three have actually died there.
Apart from one extraordinary incident in which a medical practitioner misdiagnosed pneumothorax as pneumonia and persisted in this opinion despite other well-informed advice to the contrary...
Strangely [the physician] failed to diagnose and prescribe the proper treatment even after diving expert Al Krasberg... correctly indicated to the doctor that Dimmer was suffering from a burst lung (pneumothorax).
Miss Stone, of 1633 Avalon St., Santa Ana, was the first employe to be killed in an accident at Disneyland during its 19-year history.
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.
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.
And it seems odd that such an unusual story is suddenly getting film adaptations after so many years of being largely forgotten...
While Mitchell had expired from heart failure, what felled him was not a classic heart attack, but rather the result of an unusual inheritable heart rhythm disorder...
Mrs Corke said: "My granddad died one of the most famous strange deaths."
This is the first time in North Sea diving operations that hyperthermia has been found to be a hazard to divers.
This accident has been described at some length because, more than any other single incident, it has been picked up by the media and by others as epitomizing the way in which diving takes its practitioners close to, and sometimes across, the threshold of the known and the familiar.
This double fatality was unusual in that it was not on an actual dive that the two divers met their deaths, but in what should have been the relevant [sic] comfort of a safe, warm and reasonably comfortable chamber complex following a perfectly successful bell dive from saturation, breathing oxy/helium.
...in some cases the fatalities occur... in a totally unforeseen manner. A good example of the latter type of fatality, well illustrating the fact that the divers are operating at the limits of modern underwater and medical technology, was provided in September 1975 when two experienced, competent divers... died in a decompression chamber aboard the drilling rig 'Waage II' from what was subsequently discovered to have been hyperthermia, i.e. overheating, a problem which no one had ever encountered before.
He was the apparent victim of a bizarre accident in a recreation room at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk...
Two years later, while serving out his sentence, he died in an apparent freak accident while weightlifting, choked to death by a bar that fell on his throat.
Gödel's demise was fraught with Pyrrhic irony.
...[Gödel] developed a paranoia that he was being poisoned and, as a result, starving himself to death (an altogether odd end for one of the greatest logicians the world has ever known).
One of the most dramatic incidents involving the reported use of a biological weapon, which occurred in 1978 and can only be described as bizarre, was the Markov case.
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.]
O trânsito matou quatro pessoas, ocorreram dois homicídios e uma morte estranha.[Traffic killed four people, there were two homicides and one strange death.]
A spokesman for the Melbourne zoo said yesterday no one at the zoo had ever heard of a dingo killing a human before.
...the cry heard that night marked an astonishing and rare human fatality caused by Australia's wild dogs...
It seems fitting, for such an historic and unusual case, that the NT Government had to create legislation to allow it to hold the Commission of Inquiry into the conviction of the Chamberlains...
A space shuttle worker was killed Thursday, apparently by suffocation, and four others were hospitalized in a freak accident...
It was the first launch pad fatality since a Jan 27, 1967 flash fire killed three Apollo 1 astronauts during a pre-launch test.
Accidents involving shuttle workers at NASA are rare but not unheard of.
Her father, Boris Sagal, was a prominent television director who died in 1981 in a freak accident when a helicopter blade hit his head during shooting of the mini-series "World War III."
...Sagal suffered further personal tragedy when her father was killed in a freak accident on the set of "World War III" (NBC, 1982), getting nearly decapitated after walking into the tail rotor blade of a helicopter.
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.
Twenty-two scalding deaths have been recorded in connection with Yellowstone's hot springs since 1870, all of them known or believed to have involved people who inadvertently fell into the springs through accident or carelessness—save one.
In a hand-printed will that contained numerous spelling errors, Morrow—who died July 23 in the freak accident—named three people as beneficiaries.
Em Hollywood, apenas John Landis teve experiência semelhante -com Vic Morrow, morto num acidente bizarro no cenário de "No Limite da Realidade" (1983).[In Hollywood, only John Landis has had a similar experience -with Vic Morrow, killed in a bizarre accident on the set of "Twilight Zone" (1983).]
Dick Wertheim, 61, of Lexington, Mass., had been "unresponsive" since the freak accident Sept. 10, said Flushing Hospital and medical Center spokesman Donald Rodda.
Parts of him were found scattered about the rig. One part was even found lying on the derrick, 10 m above the chambers!(subscription required)
Only one of the group of six made it out alive, albeit with critical injuries, when the freak accident took place on 5 November 1983, while they were 'saturation diving'.
The rising piano at the Condor Club played a crucial role in a bizarre death in 1983 and also gave a cocktail its name.
Some San Francisco stories seem too strange to be true.
Reggie Tucker, the bright kid who "had it all" — captain of the CC debate team, honors graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan law school and a rising star in Chicago's legal community — was dead at 29 because of an almost unbelievable accident.
The body of actor Jon-Erik Hexum, who shot himself in a freak accident on the set of the television series "Cover Up", was taken Friday to an San Francisco hospital so his vital organs could be removed for donation, officials said.
It's a bizarre case," said Dr. Marius Lombardi, a forensic investigator with the Medical Examiner's office in Newark, which also handles Union County cases. "We've never seen anything like this.
Officials of New Jersey Bell Telephone Company said telephone-related accidents are not rare, but such fatal accidents are very unusual.
The explosion of Lake Nyos, one of the strangest natural disasters in recorded history, isn't unique.
Persons not employed in the coal mining trade are unlikely to encounter deadly masses of carbon dioxide, yet such clouds have been known to form in the open air and at a cost dear in human life.
Most importantly, it does not help our present reputation that some very unusual stories are associated with astronomers of the past... In the strange death and near-death department... Marc Aaronson (1950–1987) was crushed to death in the dome of the 4-m telescope at Kitt Peak.
A prisoner who died when he choked on a Bible shoved down his throat baffled a medical specialist who at first suspected murder because he couldn't believe someone could do that to themselves.
Ivan Lester McGuire, 35, of Durham died in the bizarre accident Saturday.
Take a look at some bizarre incidents...
I think this is a very unusual circumstance that is not related to any other accidents we have had.
The bizarre incident happened about 20 minutes into the flight from Hilo International Airport to Honolulu, at 24,000 feet with 95 passengers and crew members on board.
Hace tres décadas atrás, un insólito y trágico suceso tuvo lugar en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires.[Three decades ago, an unusual and tragic event took place in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires.]
Airports Authority chief Winston Suite said the bizarre death Sunday night was an apparent suicide.
Bo Diaz, former major-league catcher who died in a freak accident at home, was laid to rest Saturday in a ceremony attended by President Carlos Andres Perez.
Alcohol and the world's most frightening drop-off is a lethal combination whose tragic outcome few of us find surprising. Far more shocking, however, is this sort of outcome stemming from a practical joke.
Hollywood was aghast yesterday over the sudden and bizarre death of 27-year-old actor Brandon Lee, who was filming in Wilmington, N.C.
Referring to the bizarre death of Brandon Lee, he said: 'This latest tragedy is almost too much.
The accident that had just occurred may be the unluckiest in the history of Hollywood production... It was also among the eeriest and most tragic in a whole set of other ways.
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...
Freak accidents are named as such due to the nature of their occurrence. But this story really takes a toll when it comes to setting a precedent.
"The whole thing sounds strange to me," says Brian S. Schwartz, a clinical toxicologist who teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
The mystery fumes that felled emergency room attendants as they treated a dying cancer patient in February were most likely the result of a bizarre chain of chemical reactions in the patient's blood that produced a potentially lethal gas, officials announced Thursday.
That surreal night would throw Riverside General Hospital into newspapers and tv news broadcasts for weeks...
Surprisingly, however, this particular story is true: the life of a teenage boy was indeed ended by the very club he used on a bench as a way of venting his displeasure over a bad shot.
A freak accident landed Kingsboro Golf Course in Gloversville, N.Y., on the list when 16-year-old Jeremy T. Brenno was so frustrated after missing a shot at the sixth hole that he hit a bench with his club back in 1994.
..."an unusual situation"...
The accident seemed so improbable as to be impossible.
By an exquisite irony, she became a victim of a heavy metal poison.
Sue Rogers of the British Aerosol Manufacturing Association said she had never heard of a similar incident. "It is extraordinarily unusual and terribly tragic," she said.
Jonathan's death is believed to be the first by accidental inhalation in the country.
After the bizarre accident police found scorched items of clothing in the garden.
A businessman drowned in a river after a freak gardening accident, an inquest has heard.
Recording a verdict of accidental death, [the coroner] said: "The chance of a Cat's-eye being thrown in the air must have been minute in the extreme. It was a tragic accident."
It's 15 years ago to the day that drum 'n' bass DJ Kemistry died in a freak accident.
It is one of the only times an incident of this nature has ever been recorded, and is the only time it has resulted in a fatality.
Yet the combination of Hart's status, the unusual nature of his death, and wrestling's white-hot popularity at perhaps the peak of its late-90s boom produced a wholly distinct context for the proceedings.
A hero teacher, who is a former member of Moseley RUFC, told pupils not to look at him after he was speared in the eye with a javelin in a freak accident yesterday.
A teacher injured by a javelin in a freak accident at a leading independent school died in hospital yesterday.