Rest in Peculiarity – 39 Strangest Deaths From History – Part 2

In 2005, two sisters named Mildred Bowman (62) and Alice Wardle (68) were killed in Benidorm, Spain after becoming trapped for 4 days when their fold-up bed collapsed.

2. In 1854, a 13-year-old teenager named William Snyder died in San Francisco, California, when a circus clown swung him around by his heels.

3. In early 1903, a person was beaten to death with a Bible during a healing ceremony gone wrong in Honolulu. The victim was being treated for malaria when his family summoned a Kahuna who decided he was possessed by devils and tried to exorcise the demons; the Kahuna was brought up on a charge of manslaughter.

4. In 1135, King Henry I of England died of diarrhea because his doctor advised him to take a laxative after he ate too many eels.

5. In 1346, a blind king named John of Bohemia fought and eventually died in a battle where he apparently just flailed his sword around like a mad man. When his advisors objected to the idea, he just replied: "take me to the place where the noise of the battle is the loudest."

In 2013, a 23-year-old man named Takuya Nagaya from Japan started to slither on the floor and claimed he had become a snake. Takuya died after his father spent the next two days head-butting and biting him “to drive [out] the snake that had possessed him.”

7. In 1258, Al-Musta'sim, the last Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, was executed by his Mongol captors by being rolled up in a rug and then trampled by horses.

8. In 2013, a man named Roger Mirro was crushed by a trash compactor after he went looking through a dumpster for his phone.

9. In 2009, a 25-year-old supermarket employee named Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada from Council Bluffs, Iowa fell into the 18-inch gap between a cooler and a wall and become trapped. His body was not discovered for almost 10 years until the cooler was finally moved.

10. A Greek lawgiver named Charondas from Sicily issued a law that anyone who brought weapons into the Assembly must be put to death. One day, he arrived at the Assembly after hunting in the countryside with a knife still attached to his belt. In order to uphold his own law, he committed suicide.

In 1941, an American writer named Sherwood Anderson died after an accidentally swallowed toothpick had damaged his gastrointestinal tract, causing an infection that led to peritonitis.

12. In 1867, Archduchess Mathilda of Austria, daughter of Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen, died at the age of 18 in Schloss Hetzendorf. She had put on a gauze dress to go to the theatre. Before leaving for the theatre, she wanted to smoke a cigarette but shortly thereafter her father, who had forbidden smoking, approached her, and she hid the cigarette behind her dress, immediately setting light to its very flammable material and giving her second and third-degree burns.

13. In 2016, a 55-year-old woman named Lottie Michelle Belk was fatally stabbed in the chest by a beach umbrella blown by a strong wind. Wind speeds at the time reached 20–25 miles per hour.

14. In 2007, a 24-year-old Oakland resident named Humberto Hernandez was killed after being struck in the face by an airborne fire hydrant while walking. A passing car had struck the fire hydrant and the water pressure shot the hydrant at Hernandez with enough force to kill him.

15. In 2014, an Indian association football player named Peter Biaksangzuala died after sustaining spinal cord injuries while awkwardly landing a somersault celebrating a goal.

In 2015, a 50-year-old man named Stephen Whinfrey became trapped and asphyxiated when rabbiting near Doncaster, England, after his head became stuck down a rabbit hole.

17. In 2013, a 14-year old teenager named Miguel Martinez from Lubbock, Texas was impaled through the chest by the horn of a bull statue while playing hide-and-seek at night in front of the National Ranching Heritage Center.

18. In 2017, a 25-year-old man named Akbar Salubiro was killed and swallowed by a reticulated python in Indonesia, in the first fully confirmed case of a snake swallowing an adult human.

19. In 1988, a veteran sky-diver named Ivan Lester McGuire was filming a jump by an instructor and student from the McGuire Franklin County Sports Parachute Center when he jumped from a plane without a parachute. Focused on the filming process, McGuire apparently forgot to put on a parachute, and his camera equipment may have been mistaken for a chute. The tape was recovered.

20. In 2018, a 49-year-old woman named Elaine Herzberg, in Tempe, Arizona, died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber, as she crossed the road, in what was reported to be the first death of a pedestrian struck by a self-driving car on public roads. In response to the fatal accident, Uber suspended self-driving car tests in all U.S. cities.

In 2013, a 60-year-old Belarusian fisherman bled to death after being bitten by a beaver which he had tried to grab in order to have his picture taken with it.

22. In 2017, an 89-year-old man named Robert Dreyer drowned on his birthday after crashing his car into a fire hydrant. Dreyer successfully stepped out of his car but was swallowed by a sinkhole likely created as a result of the destruction of the fire hydrant and subsequent water pressure.

23. In 2014, a 13-year-old teenager named Heval Yildirim of Turkey was killed when a sacrificial goat bought for Eid al-Adha jumped off the roof over a protective fence and fell onto him. Yildirim's father placed the goat on the roof of the building where he lived because he could not find another suitable place to keep it.

24. In 2012, a British veterinarian named Erica Marshall in Ocala, Florida, died when the horse she was treating in a hyperbaric chamber kicked the wall, released a spark from its horseshoes and triggered an explosion.

25. In 2018, a 43-year-old woman named Jennifer Riordan, a passenger aboard Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, died after debris from an engine failure struck and destroyed the window she was sitting next to. She was partially sucked out through the window, but was pulled back into the aircraft and was given CPR until an emergency landing was made. She died upon arrival at the hospital with her cause of death determined to be blunt trauma to the head, neck, and torso.