Strange

Eagle With Tortoise
Photo Source: Two Photos From Stock.xching Combined

There are a lot of strange ways to die. Some of them are no one's fault, but the person that died because they took chances that they shouldn't have. Others are just fate and could happen to any one of us. Throughout history there has been a long list of these types of deaths. If we go back to 456 B.C. and look at how Aeschylus, a Greek playwright died, we realize that being bald can be dangerous. An eagle flew over his head from a distance and seeing it believed that it was a rock and dropped a tortoise on it, trying to crack the shell. This killed Aeschylus, but the tortoise survived. Strange, very strange. This leads me to tell the story again about a Sergeant Major in the Army that I knew. He had just purchased a new Cadillac and was being pursued by seagulls who were trying to drop clams on it to break them. Birds can be strange.

There is a story that an ancient Greek philosopher named Chrysippus died because he laughed so hard while watching a drunk donkey try and eat a fig. It is possible to laugh one's self into a heart attack, especially if the heart is weak to start with. This is no laughing matter. He was not the only one to die laughing. The same thing happened to Martin I of Aragon in 1410. His laughing brought on indigestion and ultimately death. In 1660 Thomas Urquhart of Scotland was said to have died laughing when he heard that Charles II had taken the throne.

In 260 the Roman emperor Valerian was defeated in battle by the Persians. He had been captured and was used as a foot stool by King Shapur I. He was humiliated at every turn for a long period of time. When King Shapur I got tired of this game, he had Valerian skinned and his skin stuffed with straw and preserved, so that he could keep this as a trophy.

Sometimes the dead have their revenge on the living. In 892, Sigurd the Mighty strapped the head of a dead foe to his leg and displayed it to his enemies as he rode through them on his horse. He should have checked his enemy's teeth first. It seems that they contained some sort of infection that he caught. Yes you guessed it, the infection killed him.

Carpet
Photo Source: Stock.xching

Here is the tale of a thoughtful person. He was Hulagu Khan and the year was 1258. He had captured Al-Musta'sim during a battle between the Mongols and what are now the Iraqis. He did not want to spill royal blood, so he had Al-Musta'sim wrapped in a carpet, put out into the field and let horses trample him to death. What a nice guy.

Here is a guy that knew how to die. When George Plantagenet who was the Duke of Clarence, found out that he was going to be executed in 1478, he made a last request and it was honored. He chose his own way to die and that was being drowned in a barrel of Malmsey wine.

Then there is disgusting. In 1514 there was a peasant leader of a revolt that failed in Hungary. The was sentenced to be put upon a red hot iron throne, a red hot crown put on his head and a red hot scepter put into his hand. Before he could die he was taken off the throne and fed to his fellow conspirators who had been starved for over a week.

Tycho Brahe
Graphic Source: Public Domain

This is a story about Tycho Brahe the famous astronomer. It is said that when he died in 1601 it was because etiquette dictated that he could not leave the table he was at during a banquet and eventually his bladder caused him to become fatally ill. Some say this isn't true and that he was poisoned.

In 1673 Mollere, the famous French playwright and actor died from a bout of coughing while playing the part of a hypochondriac in a play.

Georg Wilhelm Richmann, in 1753, became the first person in history to electrocute himself while performing an electrical experiment.

Sorry it was an accident. In 1794 a British ship decided to fire a salute at John Kendrick, an American sea captain and explorer. The problem was that they forgot that the canon had a canon ball in it and when it was fired, it killed Kendrick.

In 1830 William Huskisson was the very first person killed by a mechanically powered passenger train when he attended its public opening.

Baseball can be dangerous even he you are not hit by the ball. In 1862 Jim Creighton swung his bat so hard that he ruptured his bladder and died.

In 1918 Gustav Kobbe had decided that it was a nice day to go out on his sailboat. He could not have known that a seaplane would land on top of it killing him.

In 1927 J.G. Parry-Thomas was attempting to break the world speed record for cars. He had set it the year before. The chain drive in his car snapped and cut off his head, but the car crossed the finish line and set a new record even though he was dead at the time.

In 1932 a dejected actress named Peg Entwistle leapt to her death from the Hollywood Sign. She was depressed because she couldn't get a role in anything. The day after her death a letter arrived offering her the lead role in a play about a woman that was so depressed that she commits suicide.

Marcus Garvey decided that in 1940 he would prepare and read his own obituary out loud. While he was doing this, he died.

In 1959 Nine ski hikers in the Dyatlov Pass, in the Ural Mountains fled from their camp in the middle of the night. Some were so scared that they ran out in their underwear even though the temperature was below freezing. Six of them died from the cold, but the other three died very strangely. One had a fatal skull fracture and the other two had major chest fractures as if hit by a car. One was missing her tongue. The clothing contained high levels of radiation. The Soviet investigators were only able to say that a compelling unknown force had caused their deaths and closed the area for years after the incident.

You know how those Bond movies have all those strange gadgets for killing people? One was used to kill Georgi Markov who was assassinated in London in 1978 with a trick umbrella that fired a pellet filled with the deadly poison ricin into his leg.

In 1979 Robert Williams was the first person known to be killed by a robot. He worked at an automated Ford assembly plant.

In 1981 an American photographer named Carl McCunn paid a bush pilot to drop him at a remote lake in Alaska. The problem was that he forgot to tell him to pick him up again, or so the story goes. He began to starve and shot himself.

Lastly, Jeff Dailey, age 19, died while playing a video game. He achieved the score of 16,660 in Berzerk and then suffered a heart attack. A year later another boy, age 18 died after getting high scores in the same game. It is said that they were both alcohol free and drug free.