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

In 163 BC, Eleazar Avaran was the brother of Judas Maccabeus. According to 1 Maccabees 6:46, in battle, he thrust his spear into the belly of a king's war elephant, which collapsed and fell on top of Eleazar, killing him instantly.

27. In 2017, a 31-year-old man named Arslan Valeev died in Saint Petersburg, Russia, after enticing a pet black mamba to bite him live on webcam in an apparent suicide.

28. In 2018, a 29-year-old man named Sam Ballard died from angiostrongyliasis (infection with larvae of worms of the genus Angiostrongylus) after eating a garden slug as a dare eight years earlier.

29. In 2017, a 33-year-old fitness blogger and model named Rebecca Burger died after a pressurized canister of whipped cream exploded and struck her in the chest.

30. In 1977, Tina Christopherson died when she fanatically drank 4 US gallons (15 liters) of water a day to combat stomach cancer.

In 2018, a 79-year-old woman named Linda Goldbloom died after being hit by a foul ball at Dodger Stadium. Goldbloom's death was the first in nearly 50 years directly attributed to a foul ball.

32. In 42 BC, Porcia Catonis, the daughter of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis and second wife of Marcus Junius Brutus, according to ancient historians such as Cassius Dio and Appian killed herself by swallowing hot coals.

33. In 2016, a 10-year old boy named Caleb Schwab was decapitated when he was ejected from his raft on Verrückt, a 168-foot-tall (51 m) water slide.

34. In 2018, a 32-year-old man named Rajesh Maru died at Nair Hospital in Mumbai (India) after carrying a metal oxygen tank into a room housing an MRI scanner; the machine's magnetic field pulled Maru in, pinning his hand and breaching the tank, releasing liquid oxygen. A hospital employee had asked Maru to transport the tank, as Maru's hospitalized relative would need it during her scan. An autopsy showed that Maru died instantly from pneumothorax brought on by exposure to very high levels of leaked oxygen. Conflicting reports state two or three hospital employees were arrested for negligence. The Maharashtra state government compensated Maru's family 500,000 rupees.

35. In 2017, a 58-year-old woman named Debra Bedard died after falling from a golf cart onto shards of wine glasses that had broken in her hands in Calaveras County, California.

In 2016, a 7-year-old girl died after being struck by a stone thrown by an elephant from its enclosure at the zoo at Rabat, Morocco.

37. In 2019, a 51-year-old wedding planner named Darren Hickey, from Horwich, England died after eating a scalding-hot fishcake at a wedding. The cause of death was ruled to be asphyxiation. The pathologist who performed Hickey’s autopsy called the case "extremely rare" and likened Hickey's symptoms to those of victims who have inhaled smoke during house fires.

38. In 1872, a pallbearer named Henry Taylor was crushed to death under a coffin at a funeral. It was midway through the ceremony when he tripped on a stone and stumbled while carrying the coffin, the other bearers let go, and the coffin fell on him.

39. In 2018, a high-school student named Kyle Plush at the age of 16, died after becoming trapped in his Honda Odyssey, which was in his school's parking lot in Cincinnati, Ohio. Attempting to reach his tennis equipment, Plush leaned over the third row of seats into the trunk. When the row of seats "squashed his chest", Plush became pinned and later died. During the incident, the teen called 9-1-1 twice, by using Apple iPhone's Siri voice-activation. Responding to the 9-1-1 calls, police were not able to find Plush; he was eventually discovered in the vehicle by his father about 6 hours later.