You know the routine by now. Ten more people have shuffled off their mortal coil in strange and unexpected ways and we are here to raise a quizzical eyebrow as we take a look at their final moments.
10. One Last Drink
We start off with the unique execution method of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence. As a member of the Royal House of Plantagenet, George was the brother of two English kings, Edward IV and Richard III, and was embroiled in the complex web of intrigues and conflicts known as the War of the Roses. We don’t have time to get into that whole kettle of fish. Suffice to say that George eventually found himself convicted of treason against his brother, Edward IV, and sentenced to death.
His execution was private and no official records were made of it, so there is no definitive source for what happened, but rumors soon swirled that George had been killed by drowning. On its own, this wasn’t particularly noteworthy – after all, drowning was an execution method used at the time. But instead of using water, George Plantagenet was supposedly drowned in a large vat of malmsey wine.
Why? Well, there are two versions of the story. One said that this was a request from George himself, because it was his favorite wine. The other said it was a final insult from the king, to mock him for his heavy drinking.
9. When Carrots Kill
You can have too much of a good thing. That is one lesson that English scientist and health food advocate Basil Brown learned the hard way. Back in 1974, he was all about the health benefits of carrots. After all, they are a great source of vitamin A, and they also contain antioxidants and minerals. To this day, they are touted as a great food choice, but it is possible that Brown might have overdone it just a bit.
He drank around a gallon of carrot juice per day. And even though Brown was a 48-year-old man in good physical condition, this killed him in 10 days due to the gigantic intake of vitamin A that destroyed his liver. At his autopsy, he suffered from carotenemia, which basically means that his skin turned yellow, and the pathologist recorded his cause of death as cirrhosis of the liver, calling the damage indistinguishable from alcohol poisoning.
8. The Late Night Swim
We know that, technically, it is not possible for someone to die of irony but, if it were, then Jerome Moody might be the strongest example. He died by drowning… while attending a party for lifeguards.
In 1985, the New Orleans Recreation Department threw a party where over half of the 200 attendees were lifeguards, while there were also four additional lifeguards on duty. Despite this, nobody noticed when 31-year-old Jerome Moody fell into the deep end of the pool and thrashed around in a fit of panic and desperation while everyone around him got their groove on.
Moody himself was not a lifeguard but came as a guest. His body was not spotted until the end of the party when the people started heading out but, unsurprisingly, by then it was already too late. And just to put the cherry on top of this irony sundae, the party had been held to celebrate the city’s first swimming season on record without a drowning.
7. The Dead Olympian
As far as we know, Arrhichion of Phigalia has the distinction of being the only athlete to win the Olympic Games… as a corpse.
Back in the mid-6th century BC, Arrhichion was one of the most celebrated wrestlers of his time. At the Olympic Games from 564 BC, he competed in pankration, a violent submission sport where holds, chokes, and kicks were all allowed in order to defeat your opponent, sort of like the ancient predecessor to modern MMA.
Anyway, Arrhichion had already won this event in the past, so he was coming in as the favorite, but during the match, his opponent gained the upper hand when he put Arrhichion in a chokehold, steadily squeezing the life out of him. At that point, everyone thought that the match was a foregone conclusion.
According to Greek writer Philostratus the Younger, Arrhichion’s trainer shouted at him “What a noble epitaph you’ll receive if you do not submit—’He was never defeated at Olympia.’” Obviously, the trainer expected a noble death in loss for his wrestler, but he got more than he bargained for. Inspired by his words, Arrhichion used one last burst of strength to deliver a powerful kick to his opponent’s foot and then trap the ankle in his knee, as Arrhichion used the weight of his own body to apply pressure.
This broke the opponent’s ankle and he immediately submitted in a spasm of pain. Arrhichion had won the match, but then he slumped over dead. Some say he broke his own neck during his final move; others that he simply suffocated in the chokehold. Either way, he was crowned the victor.
6. Mortal Manure Mayhem
We’re staying in ancient Greece, but traveling to the city of Ephesus to see how one of its most prominent philosophers, Heraclitus, met his end.
We’re not going to go over his works, but we will mention that Heraclitus was sometimes known as the “dark philosopher” because he was always cryptic and hard to understand, even by philosophy standards. He enjoyed speaking in riddles, reasoning that if someone wasn’t smart enough to decipher what he truly meant, they probably were not worth speaking to, anyway.
This mentality came back to bite him circa 475 BC, when an aging Heraclitus started suffering from dropsy, which is the old-timey word for edema. He turned to doctors for help but, of course, he couldn’t simply ask them for something to treat his dropsy. Instead, he asked them if they could make a drought out of rainy weather. When they had no idea what the hell he was going on about, Heraclitus decided that he could figure out a treatment for himself.
And here is what he came up with – being buried in cow manure and then drying out in the sun. Heraclitus thought that the excessive heat would cause the edema to evaporate but, as a side effect, he became trapped in the hardened manure. Some accounts say that this alone caused his death, but Neanthes of Cyzicus gave an extra gory ending to his tale, claiming that a pack of wild dogs came along and ate the helpless philosopher, trapped under a mound of manure.
5. The Worst Carpet Ride in the World
There once was a time when the Abbasid Caliphate was one of the most powerful empires on the planet, representing the height of the Islamic Golden Age. However, by the 13th century, that golden age had dawned and the Abbasid Dynasty was a shell of its former self, one that was desperate to survive as it encountered its greatest threat ever – the merciless wrath of the Mongol hordes.
The last Abbasid caliph, Al-Musta’sim, still acted like he was the big power in the region and dismissed or ignored all demands that came from the Mongolian leader, Hülegü Khan. Big mistake! In 1258, the Khan launched the 13-day Siege of Baghdad, which saw the complete destruction of the city which, up until that point, was one of the great cultural and scientific centers of the world.
Buildings were razed to the ground and people were put to the sword, but the fate of the final caliph of the Abbasid Dynasty is a bit more uncertain. Several sources mentioned that the Mongolians didn’t like to spill noble blood, so Al-Musta’sim might have been hanged or suffocated, but the most popular account claims that the Khan had something more gruesome in mind for him. Therefore, the caliph was wrapped up in a carpet and trampled to death by being run over by the Mongolian cavalry.
4. The Hunter Becomes the Hunted
One of Britain’s most famous explorers met his end at his own hands when he accidentally shot himself in the chest. John Hanning Speke was best known for his expeditions to find the source of the Nile. During the 19th century, he was one of the many adventurers who risked life and limb in order to explore Africa, but his demise came back in England while climbing over a small wall.
It was September 15, 1864, and Speke was in Neston Park in Wiltshire doing a bit of hunting with his cousin and a gamekeeper. But we will let The Times give a contemporary account:
“After about two hours’ shooting, it would appear… that the unfortunate deceased was getting over a low stone wall, when by some mischance his gun exploded while the muzzle of it was pointed at his chest. The consequence was that the charge entering his body passed completely through, severing the main artery of the chest, lacerating the lungs, and passing close to the heart… Shortly afterward he breathed his last.”
3. Wish Granted
James Otis Jr. was an important figure during the onset of the American Revolution, best known for being credited with the line “taxation without representation is tyranny,” which was later modified to “no taxation without representation” and became the slogan that best encapsulated the grievances of the colonists.
Otis would have almost certainly become one of the Founding Fathers, if his career would not have been derailed by mental illness. But unfortunately, in the early 1770s, his behavior became increasingly erratic, and his condition was likely exacerbated by a severe beating he took in 1769 from a British tax collector that left him with severe head trauma.
All of this, however, has nothing to do with his death, because James Otis Jr. died suddenly on May 23, 1783, when he was struck by lightning. This alone might not be incredibly unusual, but the weird part was that Otis really, really wanted to be killed by lightning. According to his sister and his friends, he mentioned to them multiple times how he hoped that this would be how he met his demise. One day, he got his wish while standing in the doorway of a friend’s house, telling a story, and although there were several people around him, he was the only one hit.
2. The Bucket Is Mightier than the Sword
If you were an assassin looking to murder a king, what would be your weapon of choice – dagger, poison, maybe a fall that makes it look like an accident? None of those? How about a silver bucket?
Yes, that was the instrument of death used to snuff the life out of Constans II, Emperor of the Byzantine Empire between 641 and 668 AD. This is how the assassination happened, according to 8th-century scholar Theophilus of Edessa:
“When Constans was in the bath, one of his attendants took a bucket, mixed in it mallow and soap, and put this on Constans’s head. While the latter’s eyes were filled with the mallow and soap, so that he could not open them, the attendant took the bucket and struck Constans on the head with it, so killing him. He rushed out of the bath to escape and no one heard any more of him. The servants remained outside waiting for the king to come out, but when they had been sitting a long time and it was getting late and he still had not come out, they entered the bath and found him unconscious. They brought him out and he lived for that day, but then died having reigned for twenty-seven years.”
1. The Blood Eagle
We end with the most gruesome fate on this list, but also the most controversial since historians still debate whether or not this unbelievably brutal execution method was ever actually put into practice. We are talking, of course, about the notorious blood eagle.
If it was real, then this method represented the worst ritual killing that the Vikings could come up with. Even for them, this was so extreme that only two instances of the blood eagle are known in Norse sagas, which aren’t exactly irrefutable historical sources to begin with. The best-detailed one was the death of King Aella of Northumbria in 867 AD. The previous year, he defeated the Viking invader Ragnar Hairy-Breeches and had him executed by throwing him down into a pit filled with vipers. This prompted Ragnar’s sons to invade again at the head of the Great Heathen Army in order to enact revenge…which they did by submitting King Aella to the dreaded blood eagle.
First, he was restrained and placed face down on the ground. Then, his ribs were severed from the spine with an ax, one by one, and then the skin and bones on his back were pulled to the sides. In some accounts, for added agony, the victim also had salt poured onto the wounds during this process. As a final flourish, his lungs were pulled out of the body and spread out, so that the last gasps of air that went in and out of the lungs made them look like fluttering wings.