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This is a list of unusual deaths. This list includes unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history, noted as being unusual by multiple sources. Some of the deaths are mythological or are considered to be unsubstantiated by contemporary researchers. Oxford Dictionaries defines the word "unusual" as "not habitually or commonly occurring or done" and "remarkable or interesting because different from or better than others."

Some other articles also cover deaths that might be considered unusual or ironic, including List of entertainers who died during a performance, List of inventors killed by their own inventions, List of association footballers who died while playing, List of professional cyclists who died during a race and the List of political self-immolations.

Antiquity

• c. 620 BC: Draco, Athenian law-maker, was smothered to death by gifts of cloaks and hats showered upon him by appreciative citizens at a theatre on Aegina.
• 564 BC: Arrhichion of Phigalia, Greek pankratiast, caused his own death during the Olympic finals. Held by his unidentified opponent in a stranglehold and unable to free himself, Arrichion's trainer shouted "What a fine funeral if you do not submit at Olympia!" Arrichion then kicked his opponent with his right foot while casting his body to the left, causing his opponent so much pain that he made the sign of defeat to the umpires, while at the same time breaking Arrichion's own neck as the other fighter was still strangleholding him. Since the opponent had conceded defeat, Arrichion was proclaimed victor posthumously.
• 455 BC: Aeschylus, the great Athenian author of tragedies. Valerius Maximus wrote that he was killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle that had mistaken his head for a rock suitable for shattering the shell of the reptile. Pliny, in his Naturalis Historiæ, adds that Aeschylus had been staying outdoors to avert a prophecy that he would be killed by a falling object.
• 401 BC: Mithridates, a soldier who embarrassed his king, Artaxerxes II, by boasting of killing his rival, Cyrus the Younger, was executed by scaphism. The king's physician, Ctesias, reported that he survived the insect torture for 17 days.
• 270 BC: Philitas of Cos, Greek intellectual, is said by Athenaeus to have studied arguments and erroneous word usage so intensely that he wasted away and starved to death. British classicist Alan Cameron speculates that Philitas died from a wasting disease which his contemporaries joked was caused by his pedantry.
• 210 BC: Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, died after ingesting several pills of mercury in the belief that it would grant him eternal life. His eunuch courtiers concealed the death while they plotted the succession and used carts of fish to disguise the smell of the corpse. He was then buried in a fantastic tomb which is still being excavated. His artifacts and treasures include the famous Terracotta Army which was created for him to rule from his grave.
• 206 BC: One ancient account of the death of Chrysippus, the 3rd century BC Greek Stoic philosopher, tells that he died of laughter after he saw a donkey eating his figs; he told a slave to give the donkey neat wine to drink to wash them down with, and then, '...having laughed too much, he died' (Diogenes Laertius 7.185).
• 212 AD: Lucius Fabius Cilo, a Roman senator of the 2nd century, "...choked...by a single hair in a draught of milk".
• 258 AD: The Christian clergyman Saint Lawrence was roasted alive on a giant grill during the persecution of Valerian. Prudentius tells that he joked with his tormentors, "Turn me over — I'm done on this side". He is now the patron saint of cooks and firefighters.
• 336 AD: Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, is said to have died of sudden diarrhea followed by copious hemorrhaging and anal expulsion of the intestines while he walked across the imperial forum in Constantinople. He may have been poisoned.
• 415 AD: Hypatia of Alexandria, Greek mathematician, philosopher and intellectual, often called the last librarian of the Library of Alexandria, though it was destroyed long before her time, was murdered by a Christian mob that ripped off her skin with sharp seashells. Various types of shells have been named, including clams, oysters and abalones. Other sources claim tiles or pottery shards were used.

• Greek intellectual Philitas of Cos, said to have studied arguments and erroneous word usage so intensely that he wasted away and starved to death.
• Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China who sought immortality but died an untimely death which was concealed by his courtiers using smelly fish.
• The martyrdom of Saint Lawrence by Titian. This painting so impressed Philip II that he commissioned another one for his basilica in El Escorial.
• Hypatia painted by Charles William Mitchell in 1885.

Middle Ages

• 762: Li Po (Li Bai), Chinese poet and courtier, supposedly tried to kiss the reflection of the Moon beside the boat in which he was travelling, fell overboard and drowned.
• 892: Sigurd the Mighty of Orkney strapped the head of his defeated foe, Máel Brigte, to his horse's saddle. The teeth of the head grazed against his leg as he rode, causing a fatal infection.
• 1063: Béla I of Hungary died when his wooden throne collapsed upon him.
• 1131: Crown Prince Philip of France died while riding through Paris, when his horse tripped over a black pig running out of a dung heap.
• 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.
• 1327: Edward II of England, after being deposed and imprisoned by his wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, was rumoured to have been murdered by having a horn pushed into his anus through which a red-hot iron was inserted, burning out his internal organs without marking his body. However there is no real academic consensus on the manner of Edward II's death and it has been plausibly argued that the story is propaganda.
• 1387: Charles II of Navarre, after having been wrapped in bandages soaked in brandy in an attempt to cure an illness, was burned alive when a servant accidentally set the bandages on fire.
• 1410: Martin of Aragon died from a combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing.
• 1478: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, was executed by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine at his own request.

Renaissance

• 1518: In the Dancing Plague of 1518 a woman (and eventually a league of 400 people) uncontrollably danced for a month causing dozens of participants to die of heat stroke and exhaustion. The reason for this occurrence is still unclear.
• 1552: Henry Pert, a native of Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, England, died when he stretched his bow to its full extent and the arrow got lodged. While he was leaning over to look at it, the arrow released.
• 1556: Pietro Aretino, an Italian poet, satirist and pornographer, is said to have died by suffocation caused by uncontrollable laughter.
• 1567: Hans Steininger, the burgomaster of Braunau, Austria, died when he broke his neck by tripping over his own beard. The beard, which was 4.5 feet (1.4 m) long at the time, was usually kept rolled up in a leather pouch.
• 1601: Tycho Brahe died from complications of a burst bladder after refusing to leave a dinner table to relieve himself because it would have been a breach of etiquette.
• 1660: Thomas Urquhart, the Scottish aristocrat, polymath and first translator of François Rabelais's writings into English, is said to have died laughing upon hearing that Charles II had taken the throne.
• 1667: James Betts died from asphyxiation after being sealed in a cupboard by Elizabeth Spencer, at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in an attempt to hide him from her father, John Spencer.

• Pietro Aretino, who died from uncontrollable laughter.

18th century

• 1701: Hannah Twynnoy was killed by a tiger in Great Britain. Oral history suggests that, despite warnings, she continued to bother a tiger kept in a menagerie which broke free and killed her.

• 1755: Henry Hall died from injuries he sustained after molten lead fell into his throat while he was looking up at a burning lighthouse.

• 1762: Crown Prince Sado, then-heir to King Yeongjo of Joseon, was ordered to be sealed alive in a rice chest after his father decided he was unfit to succeed him.

• 1771: Adolf Frederick, King of Sweden, died of digestion problems on 12 February 1771 after having consumed a meal of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, topped off with 14 servings of his favourite dessert: hetvägg served in a bowl of hot milk. He is thus remembered by Swedish schoolchildren as "the king who ate himself to death."

• 1782: Mrs Fitzherbert died from laughter. On a Wednesday evening she had seen Mr. Bannister at The Beggar's Opera, and laughed with the rest of the audience upon his comical entrance. She was unable to stop laughing, and had to leave the theater. She continued laughing until her death on Friday morning.
• 1783: James Otis, Jr., the American Revolutionary, "often mentioned to friends and relatives that ... he hoped his death would come from a bolt of lightning." His hope was fulfilled on 23 May 1783 when lightning struck the chimney of a friend's house in whose doorway he was standing.

• 1794: John Kendrick, an American sea captain and explorer, was killed in the Hawaiian Islands when a fellow trading ship mistakenly used a loaded cannon to fire a salute to Kendrick's vessel.

19th century

• 1816: Gouverneur Morris, an American statesman, died after sticking a piece of whale bone through his urinary tract to relieve a blockage.
• 1830: William Huskisson, statesman and financier, was run over by a locomotive (Stephenson's Rocket), at the public opening of the world's first mechanically powered railway to offer a scheduled passenger service, a railway which he had himself done much to promote.
• 1834: David Douglas, Scottish botanist, fell into a pit trap where he was trampled by a wild bull.
• 1870: In Iran, the house of a rich eccentric woman with many cats caught fire. The cats were trapped behind a door. When two maids went to open the door, they were attacked and so severely injured by the cats that they later died.
• 1871, Clement Vallandigham, a lawyer and Ohio politician defending a man on a charge of murder, accidentally shot himself demonstrating how the victim might have shot himself while in the process of drawing a weapon when standing from a kneeling position. Though the defendant, Thomas McGehan, was ultimately cleared, Vallandigham died from his wound.
• 1891, in Vilnius, Lithuania, a bear that had been taught to drink alcohol killed Isaack Rabbanovitch and his 3 children over a barrel of Isaack's vodka.
• 1893, Wesley Parsons died after laughing uncontrollably at a joke in Laurel, Indiana.

• Clement Vallandigham - died after demonstrating how a victim might have accidentally shot himself

20th century

1920s

• 1920: Ray "Chappie" Chapman, shortstop for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, was killed when a submarine ball thrown by Carl Mays hit him in the temple. Chapman collapsed at the plate, and died about 12 hours later. He remains the only major league baseball player killed by a pitched ball.
• 1920: Dan Andersson, a Swedish author, died of cyanide poisoning while staying at Hotel Hellman in Stockholm. The hotel staff had failed to clear the room after using hydrogen cyanide against bed bugs.
• 1920: Alexander I, King of the Hellenes, was taking a walk in the Royal Gardens, when his dog was attacked by a monkey. The King attempted to defend his dog, receiving bites from both the monkey and its mate. The diseased animals' bites caused sepsis and Alexander died three weeks later.
• 1923: Frank Hayes, a jockey at Belmont Park, New York, died of a heart attack during his first race. His mount finished first with his body still attached to the saddle, and he was only discovered to be dead when the horse's owner went to congratulate him.
• 1923: George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, died allegedly because of the so-called King Tut's Curse after a mosquito bite on his face, which he cut while shaving, became seriously infected with erysipelas, leading to blood poisoning and eventually pneumonia.

• 1925: Zishe (Siegmund) Breitbart, a circus strongman and Jewish folklore hero, died after demonstrating he could drive a spike through five one-inch (2.54 cm) thick oak boards using only his bare hands. He accidentally pierced his knee and the rusted spike caused an infection which led to fatal blood poisoning.
• 1926: Phillip McClean, 16, from Queensland, Australia, became the only person documented to have been killed by a cassowary. After encountering the bird on their family property near Mossman in April, McClean and his brother decided to kill it with clubs. When McClean struck the bird it knocked him down, then kicked him in the neck, opening a 1.25 cm (0.5 in) long cut in one of his main blood vessels. Though the boy managed to get back on his feet and run away, he collapsed a short while later and died from the haemorrhage.
• 1926: Harry Houdini, the famous American escape artist, was punched in the stomach by an amateur boxer. Though this had been done with Houdini's permission, complications from this injury may have caused him to die days later, on 31 October 1926. It was later determined that Houdini died of a ruptured appendix, though it is contested as to whether or not the punches actually caused the appendicitis.
• 1927: Isadora Duncan, dancer, died of a broken neck when her long scarf caught on the wheel of a car in which she was a passenger.

1930s

• 1930: William Kogut, an inmate on death row at San Quentin, committed suicide with a pipe bomb created from several packs of playing cards and the hollow leg from his cot. At the time, the red ink in playing cards contained flammable nitrocellulose, which when wet can create an explosive mixture. Kogut used the heater in his cell to activate the bomb.
• 1932: Eben Byers, an American golfer and industrialist, died from multiple cancers caused by drinking more than 1400 bottles of a radioactive "health potion" called Radithor.

• 1933: Michael Malloy, a homeless man, was murdered by five men in a plot to collect on life insurance policies they had purchased. After surviving multiple poisonings, intentional exposure, and being struck by a car, Malloy succumbed to gassing.

1940s

• 1941: Sherwood Anderson, writer, died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick at a party.
• 1944: Inventor and chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr. accidentally strangled himself with the cord of a pulley-operated mechanical bed of his own design.
• 1945: Scientist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. accidentally dropped a brick of tungsten carbide onto a sphere of plutonium (known as the Demon core) while working on the Manhattan Project. This caused the plutonium to come to criticality; Daghlian died of radiation poisoning, becoming the first person to die in a criticality accident.
• 1946: Louis Slotin, chemist and physicist, died of radiation poisoning after being exposed to lethal amounts of ionizing radiation from the same core that killed Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. The core went critical after a screwdriver he was using to separate the halves of the spherical beryllium reflector slipped.

1950s

• 1958: Gareth Jones, actor, collapsed and died between scenes of a live television play, Underground, at the studios of Associated British Corporation in Manchester. Director Ted Kotcheff continued the play to its conclusion, improvising around Jones' absence. Coincidentally, Jones' character was to have a heart-attack, which is what Jones suffered and died of.

1960s

• 1960: In the Nedelin catastrophe, more than 100 Soviet rocket technicians and officials died when a switch was accidentally turned on, causing the second stage engines of a rocket to ignite, directly above the fully fueled first stage. The casualties included Red Army Marshal Nedelin, who was sitting just 40 meters (130 ft) away overseeing launch preparations.
• 1960: Inejiro Asanuma, 61, the head of the Japanese Socialist Party, was stabbed to death with a wakizashi sword by extreme rightist Otoya Yamaguchi during a televised political rally.
• 1960: Alan Stacey, Formula One race driver, died in a crash during the Belgian Grand Prix when a bird flew into his face, causing him to lose control.
• 1961: U.S. Army Specialists John A. Byrnes and Richard Leroy McKinley and Navy Electrician's Mate Richard C. Legg were killed by a water hammer explosion during maintenance on the SL-1 nuclear reactor in Idaho.
• 1961: Valentin Bondarenko, a Soviet cosmonaut trainee, died after suffering third-degree burns from a flash fire in the pure oxygen environment of a training simulator.
• 1966: Worth Bingham, son of Barry Bingham, Sr., died when a surfboard, lying atop the back of his convertible, hit a parked car, swung around, and broke his neck.

• 1966: Skydiver Nick Piantanida died from the effects of uncontrolled decompression four months after an attempt to break the world record for the highest parachute jump. During his third attempt, his face mask came loose (or he possibly opened it by mistake), causing loss of air pressure and irreversible brain damage.
• 1967: Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee, NASA astronauts, died when a flash fire began in their pure oxygen environment during a training exercise inside the Apollo 1 spacecraft. The spacecraft's escape hatch could not be opened because it was designed to seal shut under pressure.
• 1967: Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die during a space mission after the parachute of his capsule failed to deploy following re-entry.

1970s

• 1971: Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev, Soviet cosmonauts, died when their Soyuz-11 spacecraft depressurized during preparations for reentry. These are the only known human deaths outside the Earth's atmosphere.
• 1974: Basil Brown, a 48-year-old health food advocate from Croydon, drank himself to death with carrot juice.
• 1974: Christine Chubbuck, an American television news reporter, committed suicide during a live broadcast on 15 July. Eight minutes into her talk show on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, she shot herself in the head with a revolver.

• 1977: Tom Pryce, a Formula One driver at the 1977 South African Grand Prix, was killed when he was struck in the face by a track marshal's fire extinguisher. The marshal, Frederik Jansen van Vuuren, was running across the track to attend to Pryce's team-mate's burning car when he was struck and killed by Pryce's car. Van Vuuren himself was torn in half as the car ploughed into him at a speed exceeding 270 km/h (170 mph).
• 1978: Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, was assassinated in London with a specially modified umbrella that fired a metal pellet with a small cavity full of ricin into his thigh.
• 1978: Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox in 1978, ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild, when a researcher at the laboratory where Parker worked accidentally released some virus into the air of the building. Parker is the last known smallpox fatality.
• 1978: Kurt Gödel, the Austrian/American logician and mathematician, died of starvation when his wife was hospitalized. Gödel suffered from extreme paranoia and refused to eat food prepared by anyone else.
• 1979: Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford Motor Co. plant, was the first known human to be killed by a robot, after the arm of a one-ton factory robot hit him in the head.
• 1979: John Bowen, a 20-year-old from Nashua, New Hampshire, was attending a New York Jets football game at Shea Stadium on 9 December. During a half-time show event featuring custom-made remote control flying machines, a 40-pound model plane shaped like a lawnmower accidentally dove into the stands, striking Bowen and another spectator, causing severe head injuries. Bowen died in the hospital four days later.

1980s

• 1980: 70 year old mayor Monica Meyers of Betterton , Maryland died when she was checking the sewage tanks , she slipped on a catwalk and fell into the 25 foot tank and drowned.

• 1981: David Allen Kirwan, a 24-year-old, died from third-degree burns after attempting to rescue a friend's dog from the 200°F (93°C) water in Celestine Pool, a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park on 20 July 1981.
• 1981: Boris Sagal, a film director, died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III when he walked into the tail rotor blade of a helicopter and was nearly decapitated.
• 1981: Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker, was killed by a malfunctioning robot he was working on at a Kawasaki plant in Japan. The robot's arm pushed him into a grinding machine, killing him.
• 1982: Actor Vic Morrow and child-actor Myca Dinh Le (age 7) were decapitated by a rotating helicopter blade, and child-actress Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6) was crushed by a helicopter during filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
• 1982: David Grundman was killed near Lake Pleasant, Arizona, while shooting at cacti with his shotgun. After he fired several shots at a 26 ft (8 m) tall Saguaro Cactus from extremely close range, a 4 ft (1.2 m) limb of the cactus detached and fell on him, crushing him.

• 1983: Four divers and a tender were killed on the Byford Dolphin semi-submersible, when a decompression chamber explosively decompressed from 9 atm to 1 atm in a fraction of a second. The diver nearest the chamber opening was torn apart before his remains were ejected through a 24 inch (60 cm) opening. The other divers' remains showed signs of boiled blood, unusually strong rigor mortis, large amounts of gas in the blood vessels, and scattered hemorrhages in the soft tissues.
• 1983: Sergei Chalibashvili, a professional diver, died as a result of a diving accident during the 1983 Summer Universiade in Edmonton, Alberta. When he attempted a three-and-a-half reverse somersault in the tuck position from the ten-meter platform, he struck his head on the platform and was knocked unconscious. He died after being in a coma for a week.
• 1983: American author Tennessee Williams died when he choked on an eyedrop bottle-cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye.
• 1983: Jimmy Lee Gray, during his execution in a Mississippi gas chamber, died bashing his head against a metal pole behind the chair he was strapped into. The poisonous gas had failed to kill him but left him in agony and gasping for eight minutes.
• 1983: Dick Wertheim was an American tennis linesman who died from blunt cranial trauma at a match at the 1983 US Open. A serve from Stefan Edberg hit his groin, causing him to fall and hit his head on the pavement.
• 1986: More than 1,700 were killed after a limnic eruption from Lake Nyos in Cameroon released approximately 100,000,000 cubic metres (3,500,000,000 cubic feet) of carbon dioxide that quickly descended on the lake and killed oxygen-dependent life within a 25 kilometres (16 mi) radius, including three villages. The same phenomenon is also blamed for the deaths of 37 near Lake Monoun in 1984.
• 1989: Patsy Ann Campbell of Portage, Indiana, died when the Psoralen she was taking to cure her psoriasis caused an over sensitivity to light and a 25-minute session in a tanning booth led to burns over 80% of her body.

1990s

• 1991: Edward Juchniewicz, a 76-year-old man from Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, was killed when the unattended ambulance stretcher he was strapped to rolled down a grade and overturned.
• 1993: Garry Hoy, a 38-year-old lawyer in Toronto, fell to his death on 9 July 1993, after he threw himself against a window on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in an attempt to prove to a group of visitors that the glass was "unbreakable," a demonstration he had done many times before. The glass did not break, but popped out of the window frame.
• 1993: Michael A. Shingledecker, Jr. was killed when he and a friend were struck by a pickup truck while lying flat on the yellow dividing line of a two-lane highway in Polk, Pennsylvania. They were copying a daredevil stunt from the movie The Program. Marco Birkhimer died in a similar accident while performing the same stunt in Route 206 of Bordentown, New Jersey.
• 1994: Jennifer Jones, a 15-year-old student, died at her Palm Beach, Florida, home after attempting to inhale freon gas from the air-conditioning unit.
• 1994: Gloria Ramirez was admitted to a hospital in Riverside, California, with symptoms originally thought to be related to her cervical cancer. Before she died Ramirez's body released mysterious toxic fumes that made several hospital employees very ill. Scientists still don't agree on any of the theories as to what could've caused this.
• 1995: A 39-year-old man committed suicide in Canberra, Australia, by shooting himself three times with a pump action shotgun. The first shot passed through his chest, but missed all of the vital organs. He reloaded and shot away his throat and part of his jaw. Breathing through the throat wound, he again reloaded, held the gun against his chest with his hands and operated the trigger with his toes. This shot entered the thoracic cavity and demolished the heart, killing him.
• 1995: Joe Buddy Caine, 35, died in Anniston, Alabama, when he and a friend got drunk and played catch with a rattlesnake. The snake bit them both, but Caine was the only fatality.
• 1996: Sharon Lopatka, from Maryland, was killed by Robert Glass who claimed that she had solicited him to torture and kill her for the purpose of sexual gratification.
• 1997: Karen Wetterhahn, a professor of chemistry at Dartmouth College, died of mercury poisoning ten months after a few drops of dimethylmercury landed on her protective gloves. Although Wetterhahn had been following the required procedures for handling the chemical, it still permeated her gloves and skin within seconds. As a result of her death, regulations were altered.
• 1998: 16 year-old Jonathan Capewell of Oldham, Greater Manchester, died of accidental poisoning by methane and butane, after obsessive use of aerosol deodorants.
• 1999: Jon Desborough, a physical education teacher at Liverpool College, died when he slipped and fell onto the blunt end of a javelin he was retrieving. The javelin passed through his eye socket and into his brain, causing severe brain damage and putting him into a coma. He died a month later.

21st century

2000s

• 2001: Bernd-Jürgen Brandes, from Germany, was voluntarily stabbed repeatedly and then partly eaten by Armin Meiwes (who was later called the Cannibal of Rotenburg). Brandes had answered an internet advertisement by Meiwes looking for someone for this purpose. Brandes explicitly stated in his will that he wished to be killed and eaten.
• 2001: Michael Colombini, a 6-year-old American boy from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, was struck and killed at Westchester Regional Medical Centre by an oxygen tank when it was pulled into the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine while he underwent a test. He had begun to experience breathing difficulties while in the MRI and when an anaesthesiologist brought a portable oxygen canister into the magnetic field, it was pulled from his hands and struck the boy in the head.
• 2002: Brittanie Cecil, a 13-year-old American, was struck in the head by a hockey puck shot by Espen Knutsen and deflected into the crowd at an NHL hockey game in Columbus, Ohio. She died two days later in the hospital.
• 2003: Brian Douglas Wells, an American pizza delivery man in Erie, Pennsylvania, was killed when a time bomb fastened around his neck exploded. At the time of his death he had been apprehended by the police for robbing a bank. Wells told police that three people had locked the bomb around his neck and would not release it had he refused to commit the robbery.
• 2004: An unidentified Taiwanese woman died of alcohol intoxication after immersion for twelve hours in a bathtub filled with 40% ethanol. Her blood alcohol content was 1.35%. It was believed that she had immersed herself as a response to the SARS epidemic.
• 2005: Kenneth Pinyan from Seattle, Washington, died of acute peritonitis after receiving anal intercourse from a stallion. The case led to the criminalization of bestiality in Washington state.
• 2005: Lee Seung Seop, a 28-year-old from South Korea, collapsed of fatigue and died after playing the videogame StarCraft online for almost 50 consecutive hours.
• 2006: An unidentified airline mechanic was sucked into the engine of a Boeing 737-500 at El Paso International Airport while performing routine maintenance on the tarmac.

• 2006: Steve Irwin, an Australian television personality and naturalist known as the Crocodile Hunter, died when his heart was impaled by a stingray barb while filming a documentary in Queensland's Great Barrier Reef.
• 2006: Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian State Security Service and later a dissident and writer, died from acute radiation syndrome after being poisoned with polonium-210.
• 2007: Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman from Sacramento, California, died of water intoxication while trying to win a Nintendo Wii console in a KDND 107.9 "The End" radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest, which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating.
• 2007: Humberto Hernandez, a 24-year-old Oakland, California resident, 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.
• 2007: Pam Weaver was killed by her ten month old camel when it knocked her to the ground and straddled her. A camel expert confirmed the attack was sexual in nature.
• 2008: David Phyall, 50, the last resident in a block of flats due to be demolished in Bishopstoke, near Southampton, Hampshire, England, decapitated himself with a chainsaw to highlight the injustice of being forced to move out.

• 2009: Taylor Mitchell, a Canadian folk singer, was attacked and killed by three coyotes, the only recorded adult person to have been killed by this species.

2010s

• 2010: Jimi Heselden, British owner of the Segway motorized scooter company, was killed when he accidentally drove off a cliff on a Segway at his estate at Thorp Arch near Boston Spa.
• 2010: Mike Edwards, British founding member and cellist for the band ELO, died when a large round bale of hay rolled down the hill and smashed his car while he was out driving.
• 2011: Jose Luis Ochoa, 35, died after being stabbed in the leg at a cockfight in Tulare County, California U.S., by one of the birds that had a knife attached to its limb.
• 2012: Erica Marshall, a 28-year-old British veterinarian 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.
• 2012: Edward Archbold, 32, a man of West Palm Beach, Florida, died after winning a cockroach eating contest. The cause of death was determined to be accidental choking due to "arthropod body parts."
• 2014: Denver St. Clair, 58, a man of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, died when his step son allegedly gave him an "atomic wedgie", in which the elastic band of his underwear was pulled over his head and around his neck, asphyxiating him.

See also

• Darwin Awards
• Death from laughter
• Execution by elephant
• List of causes of death by rate
• List of inventors killed by their own inventions
• List of people who disappeared mysteriously
• Spontaneous human combustion
• 1000 Ways to Die
• Toilet-related injuries and deaths

• History

References

1. "Definition of unusual in English". Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved 26 October 2013.
2. Ursula Hoff (1938). "Meditation in Solitude". Journal of the Warburg Institute. 1 (44). The Warburg Institute: 292–294. doi:10.2307/749994. JSTOR 749994Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
3. Suidas. "Δράκων", Suda On Line, Adler number delta, 1495.
4. Bruce Felton, Mark Fowler (1985). "Most Unusual Death". Felton & Fowler's Best, Worst, and Most Unusual. Random House. p. 161. ISBN 9780517462973Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
5. Brett Matlock, Jesse Matlock (2011). "The Salt Lake Loonie". University of Regina Press: 81Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
6. EN Gardiner (1906). "The Journal of Hellenic Studies". Nature. 124 (3117): 121. Bibcode:1929Natur.124..121. doi:10.1038/124121a0. Fatal accidents did occur as in the case of Arrhichion, but they were very rare... {{cite journal}}: Check |bibcode= length (help)
7. J. C. McKeown (2013), A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Cradle of Western Civilization, Oxford University Press, p. 136, ISBN 9780199982103, The unusual nature of Aeschylus's death...
8. La tortue d'Eschyle et autres morts stupides de l'Histoire, Editions Les Arènes, 2012, ISBN 9782352042211
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Further reading

• Russell Robert Winterbotham (1929). "Curious and Unusual Deaths". Haldeman-Julius, Girard, KansasTemplate:Inconsistent citations {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Michael Powell (5 August 2008). "Curious Events in History". Sterling Publishing Company, Inc. ISBN 9781402763076Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Nick Daws Daft Deaths and Famous Last Words
• Tracey Turner, Dreadful Fates
• Dale Dreher, ebook Death by Misadventure: 210 Dumb Ways to Die.
• David Southwell and Sean Twist (1 September 2007). "Mysterious Deaths and Disappearances". The Rosen Publishing Group. ISBN 9781404210813Template:Inconsistent citations {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• John Dunning Strange Deaths (true crime)
• Strange Deaths: More Than 375 Freakish Fatalities. 1 January 2000. ISBN 9780760719473Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Bellamy, John G (1 December 2008). Strange Inhuman Deaths. ISBN 9780750938648Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• The Fortean Times Book of Strange Deaths. 2011. ISBN 9781907779978Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• The Fortean Times Book of More Strange Deaths. October 1998. ISBN 9781902212029Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)

External links

• Curious and Unusual Deaths Pictures. Discovery Channel.
• Freakish Fatalities Snopes.com

• Use dmy dates from August 2013
• Death-related lists
• Lists of people by cause of death
• Lists of things considered unusual
• Deaths by cause