From a man who trips up on his beard and breaks his neck, to a lawyer who accidentally shoots himself during a courtroom demonstration to a jury, there seems to be no end to the strange ways people can die.
While these scenarios may sound like they came straight out of a Final Destination–type horror flick, both of them were real events, according to www.neatorama.com.
The website lists what it calls 30 of the strangest deaths in history, some of them so crazy they’re probably true.
But who would be interested in these weird deaths?
A lot of people, according to Thom Beers, creator of the TV show 1,000 Ways to Die.
Now in its fourth season on SpikeTV, the show is based on true stories, but the names of the people involved have been changed and actors portray the events described.
Beers says he was inspired by his own preoccupation with strange, ironic deaths.
“I’ve been fascinated by morbid deaths my whole life. I grew up, I’m talking 40 years ago, [when] the National Enquirer used to be this terrible rag, worse than it is today. It would have pictures of people that fell out of a building and landed 20 stories or 50 stories squashed on the pavement,” he says.
“And you’d see the picture of the guy on the pavement, and it was like, ‘Oh my God,’ this is the grossest thing ever. But I loved it. So like, you know, you’d have to have this really twisted kind of curiosity, morbid curiosity about that. And I think everybody does.”
That morbid curiosity seems to be working for Beers’ brainchild.
1,000 Ways to Die was the second-highest rated original series in the history of the channel, and also the most watched show on SpikeTV’s Video-on-Demand service, according to the network.
Angela Sumegi, a Carleton University professor who teaches a course on religions and the afterlife, agrees most people seem to have a certain fascination with death.
“The phrase is ‘morbid fascination’ with weird deaths, but I think all that means is it’s going with something gruesome. The element of fascination is kind of the same. We get kind of jaded,” she says.
“And the mind easily gets accustomed to something. And then when there’s something that the mind is not accustomed to, then it jumps there.”
Beers says he finds gruesome, interesting stories about death everyday, just by doing a Google search on the phrase ‘stupid deaths.’
He described a recent death in the news, where a doctor tried to get into her estranged boyfriend’s house by sliding down his chimney.
Her boyfriend left, but she was trapped in the chimney and was found dead three days later.
“You can’t make this shit up!” he said.
“You kind of go, look, there are guys who fall off airplanes and break their noses, but you can fall three feet and die. That kind of sense of fate, you know, when your number’s up, it’s up.”
Still, Beers says there’s a lesson to be learned from all of these morbid ways of offing ourselves.
After 200 of his own near-death experiences, he called these strange deaths “cautionary tales.”
“With me, I’ve crashed two different airplanes, hit a hippopotamus off the Zambezi river, been bitten by a coral snake – literally, the dumbest things in the world and I can’t believe I’m still alive,” he said.
“We’re trying to tell young people, look guys, there’s a million things that can kill you. And the only way you can avoid it is: don’t be fucking stupid.”
This story appeared in the January 2011 edition of the Charlatan magazine. For more stories from this issue, please see: