Death: We’re fascinated by it; you’re fascinated by it. Why kid ourselves
here? We gave you a whole bunch of strange deaths, and you clearly wanted more - So here
you are. Even stranger and freakier deaths that you’re guaranteed to never forget.
As much as it might seem morbid to admit it,
sometimes, death can be pretty funny. Just make sure it isn’t too funny - Or
you might join the deceased by laughing yourself to death! Yes, that’s right,
laughing yourself to death is a thing that can happen in some rare circumstances. And a few of
the circumstances we were able to track down had some incredibly strange things in common.
Take, for example, the alleged death of Chrysippus of Soli, an Ancient Greek Stoic
philosopher who died in 206 BC. According to one account of the famed thinker’s demise,
he met his end by laughing himself to death after seeing a donkey eating figs. He remarked to a
nearby slave that someone should fetch the donkey wine to wash the figs down,
and was apparently so amused by his own joke at the fig-eating donkey’s expense,
he literally died as a result. Who would have thought a donkey eating figs was so funny?
Apparently, the Spanish King Martin the Humane, also succumbed to this comical fate in 1410.
While he may have been called Martin the Humane, he could have also been called Martin The Hungry,
because his death story starts with him eating an entire cooked goose and getting
severe indigestion. Reminds us of our uncles at Thanksgiving. Given that modern antacid hadn’t
been invented yet, the royal court decided that laughter was the best medicine, and so
rather than a medic, they sent the King’s favorite jester, Borra, into his bedroom to cheer him up.
This would be the worst mistake of King Martin’s life.
He asked Borra where he’d been, expecting one of the jester’s classic witty retorts,
and Borra allegedly replied, “Out of the next vineyard, where I saw a young deer hanging by
his tail from a tree, as if someone had so punished him for stealing figs.” And so the
magic combination was unleashed - Beasts and figs. The King laughed so hard he died right there,
in his bedroom. Martin the Humane’s goose was well and truly cooked.
In defense of the world’s fig-hungry mammals, there have been plenty of other reasons people
have died from laughter throughout history. Another example from the Ancient World is
the Greek painter Zeuxis, famous for his brilliant still-life works and also for
his weird death. He was commissioned to paint a portrait of Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love,
by an old woman… Who also insisted on modeling for the painting. This caused
Zeuxis to laugh himself to death, presumably also murdering the poor old woman’s self-esteem.
There are two stories about the 1556 death of Pietro Aretino, and both involve him dying from
laughter. This Italian author, painter, and all-around weirdo was told a dirty joke at a
party, and depending on who’s telling the story, either laughed so hard he died or fell off his
chair from laughing so hard and fractured his skull. The Scottish aristocrat Thomas Urquhart
was also believed to have died laughing in 1660 when he heard Charles II had taken the throne,
and over 300 years later, a British man named Alex Mitchell would suffer the same fate after laughing
for 25 continuous minutes at a sitcom episode, leading to him experiencing heart failure.
The moral of all this? Enjoy every laugh, cause it may be the one that kills you!
Moving swiftly on, let’s look at some cutting-edge weird deaths of the 2020s.
We may be in a new decade, but bizarre deaths never change!
This next one involved a huge statue of a stegosaurus. Yep, you heard that right. An unknown
Catalonian man was found dead in the leg of a huge papier-mâché Stegasaurus in 2021 after having been
trapped in there for several days. Nobody knows for sure exactly how he got in there, with the
leading theory being that he somehow lost his cell phone in the dinosaur and climbed in to retrieve
it. This unfortunate man was eventually discovered when someone caught the smell of rot while walking
past the Stegosaurus. Yeah, everything about this one is just straight-up weird.
Next comes a story that’s as bizarre as it is cringeworthy: The death of Salman Mirza,
an Indian man who thought he’d found two excellent uses for epoxy resin, when, in fact, he’d bought
himself one embarrassing ticket onto Strangest Ways People Have Died #2. After first getting
high off the fumes of the resin, he decided to use it as a contraceptive rather than springing
for a condom. We don’t know how he exactly used epoxy resin as a contraceptive - and honestly,
we’re happy to not investigate that one any further- but as a result of his poor
choice of contraceptive, Salman Mirza died of multiple organ failure the next morning.
Obviously, when you do something weird, gross, and dangerous like that, there’s a good chance
you might die. But you’re equally likely to have an incredibly strange death during
a completely mundane situation. Such was the case with 42-year-old Tony Eyles of Vancouver,
who was going through a McDonalds drive-thru when he accidentally dropped his credit card out of the
window of his car. He opened the door and leaned out to retrieve the card in a moment of panic,
but his car moved forward as he took his foot of the break, wedging him between his car door
and the McDonalds building. Mr. Eyles was sadly crushed, and all attempts to revive him failed.
It’s not dissimilar to another, far more famous rolling-car death incident. In 2016,
beloved actor Anton Yelchin’s SUV malfunctioned when he got out of the car to check his mail. It
rolled forward, crushing Yelchin against his stone gate and fatally injuring him.
Sometimes, it feels like fate itself is working against you. Out of the frying pan and into the
fire, as they say. This was the case for an unknown Brazilian man in October 2021,
when he and his two friends were out fishing. They were suddenly attacked by an angry swarm of bees,
causing them to jump into the water to escape. The unknown man’s two friends survived the incident,
but he wasn’t so lucky. He drowned and was then eaten by piranhas. Yeah,
we don’t know what to say about that craziness, either.
You’ll often find that the craziest deaths of all happen to unknown people. After all,
if a death is sufficiently weird and embarrassing, the deceased’s family may not
want to release the details. This was the case for a 28-year-old fitness enthusiast from San Diego,
California. He was so eager to keep getting those gains that while driving, presumably to the gym,
he felt the need to stir a protein mix with a knife. This incredibly poor decision to stir
while driving led to him losing control of his vehicle, resulting in a five-car pileup.
The only one who was killed was the 28-year-old man,
whose airbag deployed and stuck the blade of his mixing knife into his neck. The moral here:
Invest in a shake mixer, it might save your life one day.
To continue our trend of The Unknowns dying in incredibly bizarre fashions,
we have the 2022 death of an unknown 65-year-old man at the Highland Games - No,
not one hosted in Scotland, in the Netherlands this time. One of the many excessively manly
sports at the games is the Hammer Throw, which is exactly as dangerous as it sounds. One of
the comptetitors let go of the hammer at the wrong time, causing it to fly off course and
strike the head of our unfortunate protagonist, killing him instantly. Scotland would be proud.
When you’re an Unknown whom fate has designs against, you’re not even safe
in a hospital. One 83-year-old woman had a depressingly slapstick death earlier in 2023,
when she was discharged from the hospital on a stretcher. The butterfingers of the
techs handling her caused her to tumble out of the stretcher and land face-first
in the hospital loading dock, where the stretcher also fell, crushing her to death.
Life works against some Unknowns. In 1888, an unknown Iraqi man was killed during a
meteor shower that paralyzed another man. He’s the only widely accepted case of human death
by a meteorite, which is kind of like being sniped by the universe itself. Less than two
decades later, in 1903, a Hawaiian man died in a calamitous botched exorcism. When his
family believed that the man was possessed by a demon, they called over a Kahuna,
a local medical and spiritual figure, who beat the unfortunate man to death with a
bible. We’ve heard of bible thumpers, but that homicidal Kahuna took it to a whole new level.
The late 2000s were a particularly gruesome time for unknown people dying in bizarre ways.
For example, in 2008, a 43-year-old Irish woman died from an anaphylactic allergic reaction after
being made to have sex with a German Shepherd as part of a bizarre sex game. The owner of the dog
was prosecuted and put on the sex offenders registry, and the dog was sadly euthanized.
Then, in 2009, a 14-year-old boy in China was killed in a bizarre freak accident.
While sitting on a swiveling office chair, the pneumatic gas cylinder within the chair exploded,
killing him. This is still significantly less insane than a death that occurred in Canada,
where an unknown man was killed by a 440-pound black bear being rocketed through the windshield
of his car, killing both him and the bear. How did such a thing happen? The
bear had been trying to cross the highway when it was struck by a fast-moving SUV,
causing it to take air and facilitating the fatal collision. How un-bear-able.
But an animal doesn’t need to be a 440-pound apex predator to give you a bad time, as one unknown
60-year-old Belarusian fisherman discovered. While out fishing, he saw a beaver and was so delighted
that he tried to grab it to take a photo. The photo was never taken, though, as the beaver
defensively bit him with its big, wood-chomping teeth, causing him to bleed to death out on the
river. Un-beaver-lievable. Okay, that one was more of a stretch. Sorry, let’s move on.
Sometimes, a tragic death of an unknown person by an animal can happen even in a
controlled environment. This happened in a Moroccan zoo in 2016, when an irritated
elephant threw a stone at the head of a seven-year-old girl, killing her instantly.
But occasionally, it’s the things we love most that do us in. An Unknown
54-year-old man from Massachusetts loved black licorice - Hey, c’mon, don’t judge,
it’s an underrated candy. But this man loved it so much that he ate a bag and
a half of black licorice every single day for several weeks. The glycyrrhizinic acid in the
licorice confused the body into thinking it was producing excess Aldosterone, which in turn made
the body lower its Potassium levels to such an extent that the man’s heart simply stopped. It’s
enough to give all of us licorice lovers some pause before chowing down on the potentially
dangerous candy - Though, of course, only if you’re eating a frankly crazy amount of it.
But let’s return to the strange deaths that have the deceased’s names attached to them,
which can still be just as weird, if not even weirder, like 13-year-old William Snyder from
San Francisco, California, who died in a coulrophobe’s worst nightmare back in
1854. While attending a circus, a clown grabbed Snyder and swung him around by
his ankles until he died. And you thought Pennywise and Art the Clown were scary!
Death truly can strike at any time,
even when you’re happy and comfortable. Just ask Klil Kimhi - Except you can’t,
because this 32-year-old man died in Israel in 2022. He was having a pool party at his house,
probably having the time of his life, when a sinkhole opened up underneath the pool and
slurped him down to his death in a subterranean watery grave. RIP, Klil, you partied hardy.
Happiness tainted by death would also be an accurate description of the fate of Norbert Tóth,
a 53-year-old Hungarian association soccer manager. He experienced the highlight of
his soccer career in 2023 when he entered the game and managed to score a respectable goal.
The sheer excitement of the moment caused Norbert to experience a heart attack right
there on the pitch. At the very least, you can say that he died doing what he loved.
We all know that frequently eating at Denny’s is a ticket to an early grave,
but this has never been more literal than for Lillian and Lloyd Curtis,
an elderly couple who were crushed by a falling Denny’s sign while exiting the restaurant in
early 2023. Their adult daughter was also in the car when the Denny’s sign tumbled down onto them,
but she survived the incident - Likely with some lifelong trauma around Denny’s.
Most deaths involving guns are just horrible and tragic, but some also have an added element
of the peculiar on top. Take the case of Joseph Austin Smith, a 30-year-old hunter from Wichita,
Kansas, who died in 2023 as a result of improper rifle etiquette. He was sitting in the passenger
seat of a car, with the rifle loaded and cocked, sitting in the back seat. The lit match for this
powder keg was Smith’s dog, who climbed into the car and accidentally fired the rifle,
sending a round through Smith’s back and killing him instantly.
Brazilian lawyer and gun rights activist Leandro Mathias de Novaes also suffered a weird,
gun-related death in 2023 when he went to a Sao Paolo hospital to support his elderly
mother as she got an MRI. Anyone who knows what the “M” in MRI stands for will feel a
sense of dread when we tell you that Leandro was, against the advice of hospital staff,
storing a handgun in his waistband. When the MRI machine was turned on,
the powerful magnet ripped the gun from his waistband, causing it to discharge
into Leandro’s stomach. He’d to his injury sometime later.
Ever had a wine and cheese party? It’s the most fancy, decadent time you can have on a reasonable
budget. Little did you know, when you do this, you were playing with fire - Both of these items
caused incredibly strange deaths just a few months ago, as of the making of this video!
Giacomo Chiapparini, a 74-year-old Italian cheese mogul, suffered an
unfortunate fate in his Lombardy-based cheese warehouse. A shelf collapsed,
crushing him with thousands of 40-kilogram wheels of delicious Grana Padano cheese,
killing him instantly. His corpse was recovered from the wrecked warehouse over 12 hours later,
revealing the truth of his death that was - unlike the cheese itself - very unsavory.
And now, it’s wine time! In September 2023, an unnamed worker at a Ca’di Rajo winery in
San Polo di Piave, Treviso, Italy, fell to his death in a massive wine processing
tank after he was intoxicated by the carbon dioxide rising out of
it. Massive amounts of CO2 are created as a byproduct of the wine fermentation process,
a fact which sadly triggered the fermentation process of this one extremely unlucky worker.
To round us off, we’ve got a uniquely modern death from a uniquely modern dumb phenomenon:
The Gender Reveal Party. They’ve caused wildfires, they’ve polluted streams, and in one case in 2019,
they killed 56-year-old Pamela Kreimeyer in Iowa. The family wanted to reveal the gender
of their upcoming baby by filling a steel umbrella stand with blue-tinted gunpowder,
which they hoped would fire out a spout of colored flames. Instead,
it turned the stand into a pipe bomb - Exploding outwards into a cascade of
deadly metal shrapnel, a piece of which flew straight into poor Pamela’s head.
Because of her family’s obsession with making a goofy explosive stunt, she would
never live to see the grandchild that stunt was designed to celebrate. What a terrible waste.
Now watch “Dumbest Ways to Die - Florida Edition”. Or check out this video instead!