Not All Of Us Will Die Normally

Not to be morbid, but we all know that sooner or later we are going to die. Most of us will die from a disease or heart attack, but there are those who will die in very bizarre ways. History is full of these types of deaths.

When you think of cannon balls, you most likely think of times past, after all no one fires cannon balls anymore, or do they? Last year a man was arrested for killing his wife. He did it by firing a cannon ball into their mobile home while she was in it. The death took place in Mexico. Others were inside the mobile home, but they were unharmed.

I think most of us are familiar with contests which are conducted to see who can eat or drink the most. A beer drinking contest was run in Spain two years ago. The champ was declared. He had drank 12.5 pints of beer in 20 minutes, but his victory didn’t last long. When the contest ended he dropped dead. These eating contests can be dangerous. In 2012 a hot dog eating contest took place in a Mid-Western state. It was the 4th of July so why not? Six people took part in the contest. Mr. Walter Eagle Tail, began to choke and scared authorities had him transferred to the local hospital, but that is where he died.

I think most of us are familiar with baseball, but most of us are not familiar with a baseball player named James Creighton Jr. That is because he died in 1862. He was considered to be baseball’s first superstar. His team was the Excelsior of Brooklyn. Creighton was a pitcher. In October of 1862 he was playing in a game and got up to bat. He hit a home run, but he had swung the bat so hard he ruptured himself and it was later determined his bladder was ruptured which killed him. Whoever would have thought you could kill yourself by batting a ball.

A lawyer was representing a defendant during a trial in 1871. It was a murder case and the lawyer was trying to prove the deceased actually shot himself by accident. While he was demonstrating this theory in the court room, the gun which was loaded went off shooting the lawyer by accident and fatally wounding him. The good news for the defendant was this convinced the jury to drop the charges.

A bizarre disaster in 1919 took place in Boston. A large storage tank which was 15 feet high and 160 feet wide burst. It was filled to the top with molasses. The tank had held two million gallons of the heavy and sticky stuff. The molasses traveled through the streets of the city’s northern end at 35 miles per hour. A young man named Pasquale Lantosca died, he was either drowned in the stuff or crushed. No one is sure.

It is even more of a shame when a young person dies. A teenager was minding his own business in Haryana and Punjab, Northern India. A monkey somehow got on the roof of a building in the city and decided to throw a brick off the roof. The brick hit the teenager in the head. He was rushed to the hospital but died. Β 

In the old days racing car drivers knew there was a chance of serious injury or worse when they went into a race, but no one expected this to happen. The year was 1927 and J.G. Parry-Thomas a Welsh racing driver was driving his car around the track when his engine’s drive chain snapped. Unfortunately for him the chain somehow whipped around the driver’s head and cut it off. I imagine this was not a very pleasant sight for any onlookers.

Talk about being unlucky. In 2007 a man named Humberto Hernandez was walking down the street minding his own business. A car got into an accident near him and hit a fire hydrant. Water pressure launched the hydrant like a rocket and sent it sailing through the air. Unfortunately for Hernandez it hit him in the face and killed him.

A Finnish female movie star was at a party with the cast and crew of her last movie in 1939. Her name was Sirkka Sari. They were at a hotel. She went up to the roof with one of the men. There was a chimney several feet high on the roof. A ladder was on the side of the chimney. She thought the chimney was a second balcony and climbed up the ladder, fell inside the chimney into the furnace for the boiler and died instantly. A stand-in was used to end the movie using long distance shots.

Marcus Garvey was a black political leader. He was reading the newspaper and found it had mistakenly published his obituary. While he was reading it he suffered two massive strokes and died.

When the movie named “A Fish Called Wanda” was released in Denmark, a man named Ole Bentzen couldn’t wait to see it. A particular scene in the movie made him laugh so much, he laughed himself to death. He had laughed so hard his heartbeat rose to somewhere between 250 to 500 per minute causing a heart attack.
Death is tragic and even in that tragedy there can be irony.