Note: This post contains sometimes graphic descriptions of deaths.
Recently, Reddit user u/Mairon3791 asked, “What’s an actual cause of death so extremely rare that it’s hard to believe it’s possible?” I was led down a-many rabbit holes of real deaths I cannot even fathom. Here’s everything people shared:
1.“In 1988, a dog fell from a building in Buenos Aires, Argentina, landed in a woman’s head, killing her and the dog instantaneously. Then, another lady, completely confused, watching the event unfolding from the middle of a road, was run over by a bus; then shortly after that, an older man died from a heart attack out of the commotion of seeing both deaths. This happened in under a couple of minutes.”
2.“I heard that a sinkhole formed under some man’s bedroom and took him with it. It was so deep that they couldn’t find him. Definitely a unique death situation.”
3.“My mother-in-law used to be a surgeon. She told me about a patient they had back in the ’90s. He died because of holding in a sneeze. Turns out he had an aneurysm in his brain that popped at that moment.”
4.“Innocent people have gone to jail for murder because the real explanation for why someone died was so rare and infrequent that courts didn’t believe those explanations as plausible. Two cases off the top of my head: Lindy Chamberlain (a dingo actually did eat her baby) and Kathleen Folbigg (had four children die from a rare genetic mutation).
Similarly, “Patricia Stallings was wrongfully convicted of murder after the death of her son in 1989. Because testing seemed to indicate an elevated level of ethylene glycol in Ryan’s blood, authorities suspected antifreeze poisoning, and they arrested Stallings the next day.
She was convicted in 1991. In jail, she had another baby, diagnosed with methylmalonic acidemia (MMA), a rare genetic disorder that can mimic antifreeze poisoning.”
Fairfax Media / Fairfax Media via Getty Images
5.“Laughing to death. Fifty-year-old Alex Mitchell could not stop laughing for a continuous 25-minute period—almost the entire length of a TV show called Kung Fu Kapers and suffered a fatal heart attack as a result of the strain placed on his heart. Alex’s widow later sent The Goodies, who were staring in that show, a letter thanking them for making his final moments so pleasant.”
Doctors initially believed Mitchell suffered a heart attack from the laughter, but in 2012, his granddaughter suffered a near-fatal cardiac arrest, too. Doctors diagnosed her with Long QT Syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder, which doctors think could have also caused Mitchell’s death.
Evening Standard / Getty Images
6.“Drowning in the desert. A guy got caught in a box canyon during a flash flood. The water was quickly reabsorbed into the dry desert soil and left a drowned man in the middle of the desert.”
7.“Guy’s beard was so long that when he tried to flee a house fire, he tripped over it and broke his neck, falling down the stairs. Dude was a mayor, too. Hans something or other.”
8.“Fatal familial insomnia (FFI): you can’t sleep, and you don’t sleep until you die, and it runs in the family.”
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On a similar note, since FFI is a prion disease (as is “mad cow disease”), “Prion diseases. For some random reason, a protein gets folded the wrong way and totally fucks you up. It’s not alive; you can’t kill it or fight it with drugs or antibiotics. Your immune system is helpless against it. It causes more proteins to become misfolded and spread through your body. Even after you die, your corpse is a hazard because the misfolded proteins are still there, waiting.”
Janiecbros / Getty Images
9.“I used to work with a man who had an older relative come to the hospital with symptoms suggesting a stroke, and he died later that evening. I don’t remember all the details, but everyone thought the family might be sitting on a big fat lawsuit until the labs all came back. The relative had a type of leukemia that is diagnosed about 10 times a year in the US, and they’ve never come up with a chemotherapy protocol for it because nobody has ever lived long enough for them to do so.”
10.According to legend, “Greek philosopher Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a turtle on his head, mistaking his bald pate for a rock.”
11.“That one guy who died after getting stuck face-first in an extremely claustrophobic cave. They could get to him but couldn’t get him out. Just left his body in the cave and cemented the thing shut. Nutty Putty Cave.”
Here’s the Salt Lake Tribune’s retelling of the attempted rescue of John Edwards Jones at Nutty Putty Cave.
Alana Valko
12.“Beaver bites. I always think about that guy in Belarus.”
In 2013, a fisherman in Belarus was trying to take a photo of a beaver when it bit him on his thigh, severing an artery, and killed him.
Viktor Drachev / AFP via Getty Images
13.“Some rich lady in the early days of automobiles was known for always wearing long scarfs, and one day it got caught in her wheels and snapped her neck.”
14.“[Drinking too much water]… A woman named Jennifer Strange died of water intoxication while she was trying to win a Wii. A radio station had a contest called ‘Hold Your Wee for a Wii,’ where you had to drink as much water as possible without going to the bathroom. She drank nearly two gallons of water and ended up dying. The radio station’s parent company paid over $16M to her family in damages.”
15.“Every year, a small handful of people still have polio on their death certificates. Post-polio syndrome can develop decades after a person is first exposed to polio, and it’s occasionally severe enough to kill someone.”
16.“When I was an emergency call taker, we had an accident where the guy carrying his plate back to the kitchen slipped, fell, and cut his own throat with a broken plate shard. He bled out before services were able to get there.”
And lastly:
17.“This woman was getting a drink and had a metal straw in her cup. She slipped, and the metal straw punctured her eye and went through her brain. Crazy way to go out.”
Have any other weird and strange deaths to share? Let us know in the comments!
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