12 historical figures who died on the chamber pot

For every dramatic kind of death, there are dozens of people who ended up passing away on, or beside, a toilet.

The king’s final trip upstairs

Elvis Presley’s final hours were nowhere near as glamorous as the image people usually have of him. His fiancée, Ginger Alden, found him collapsed on the bathroom floor at Graceland on August 16, 1977. He was very close to the toilet. 

The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll was only 42 when he died, and was supposed to leave for another tour that very day. His health had badly declined over the last few years. His official cause of death was ruled to be cardiac arrhythmia, or an abnormal heartbeat.

Behind a locked bathroom door

It was clear to Judy Garland’s husband, Mickey Deans, that something was wrong when the bathroom door wouldn’t open. The date was June 22, 1969, and 47-year-old Garland was living in London. He eventually managed to get inside and found Garland dead in the bathroom.

She was allegedly slumped around the toilet area. It was an incredibly sad way to go, especially for someone who had been world famous since childhood. A coroner ruled that her death was an accident, caused by her taking too many barbiturates.

A hotel room in Paris

George Dyer was famous, but not in the usual movie-star sense. No, anyone familiar with Francis Bacon’s paintings has probably seen his face, as Dyer was Bacon’s lover. He appeared quite a few times in Bacon’s work. The pair were in Paris for a major Bacon exhibition in October 1971 when Dyer suddenly died in their hotel room at the Hôtel des Saint-Pères. 

He was found sitting on the toilet after taking a lethal mixture of alcohol and drugs. He was 38. Bacon decided to go ahead with the exhibition opening just two days later. Dyer’s death supposedly broke him.

Easter Sunday at home

Evelyn Waugh was an English novelist who was famous for writing a few satirical books about British society. It’s only fitting that his death was like something from a story. He had just returned from Easter Mass on April 10, 1966, and was at his home in Somerset, England.

He went to the downstairs lavatory at some point and collapsed there. He was 62. There were later claims that he somehow drowned in the toilet, but these were all just exaggerations. It seems that he suffered a fatal heart problem while using the bathroom.

Murder inside Swift Hall

Unlike some of the other entries on this list, Ioan Petru Culianu’s death wasn’t an accident. The Romanian-born professor was teaching at the University of Chicago, and he’d become well-known for his work on religion and history.

Culianu walked into a restroom inside Swift Hall on May 21, 1991. Someone entered and shot him in the back of the head while he was using the toilet. The killer was never found. But since Culianu had also been openly critical of political developments in Romania, the killer’s motivations were pretty telling.

Eldin’s final scene

Fans of Murphy Brown knew Robert Pastorelli as Eldin, the housepainter who never managed to finish painting Murphy’s home. But his real life ended up much darker than the sitcom. An assistant entered Pastorelli’s Hollywood Hills house on March 8, 2004, and found the 49-year-old actor slumped on a toilet. 

He still had a syringe in his arm. An autopsy ruled that Pastorelli had died of an accidental heroin overdose.

The prison cell

Jorge Rafael Videla once ruled Argentina as the head of a military dictatorship. But he died in a way that was far less impressive. He was being held in prison and was serving sentences for crimes committed during the country’s Dirty War. 

Prison staff at Marcos Paz found him sitting on the toilet in his cell on May 17, 2013. He had no pulse. His death didn’t come as a huge shock, however, as he’d already been in poor health. He had recently suffered injuries after falling in the shower, and it was that fall that led to his death.

Missing at Glastonbury

Christopher Shale was just missing. That’s what people thought at first, as the senior British Conservative Party figure had been attending the Glastonbury Festival in June 2011. He was last seen heading toward the toilets in the VIP area. Officials searched for him for hours.

The truth came to light the next morning when his body was discovered inside a locked portable toilet. There were rumors that the 56-year-old businessman had been involved in drugs, but the coroner rejected those claims. He had died naturally from heart disease.

An ancient ruler and a pit

Let’s rewind the clock to a time when ‘toilet’ had a much looser meaning. Duke Jing of Jin, a Chinese ruler, became seriously ill in 581 BC, with a condition that doctors said couldn’t be cured. Duke Jing wanted to eat some newly harvested grain one day. 

But first, he went to use the privy, an early kind of toilet. He fell into the toilet pit and died there. Yes, actually into it. It’s one of the oldest recorded toilet-related deaths, and by far one of the strangest, too.

The bathroom in Seoul

Former South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan died on November 23, 2021, and his days as the country’s leader were decades behind him. He was once an army general and had taken power after a 1979 coup. He ruled for much of the 1980s. 

Fast forward to that fateful day, and his family found him after he collapsed in a bathroom at his Seoul home. He was 90 years old. He wasn’t actually sitting on the toilet at the time, but he was very close to it.

The man with the giant colon

‘The Balloon Man’ was the stage name of a sideshow man, known only as J.W. He had something called congenital megacolon and an enormously swollen abdomen, but he used these to his advantage. He appeared in 19th-century Philadelphia shows as the Balloon Man.

That is, until 1892. He was trying to use the bathroom when he passed away. He was 29. An autopsy later revealed that his colon measured around eight feet when died, and it was preserved afterward in the city’s Mütter Museum collection. You can still see it today.

The comedian’s last room

Comedian Lenny Bruce might’ve spent years getting arrested for words he said onstage, but his final scene was much quieter. He was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home on August 3, 1966. The 40-year-old had taken a fatal dose of morphine. 

Rumor had it that Bruce was found sitting on the toilet, with his pants around his ankles, although later police photographs showed him on the floor. It appears that his body had been moved. He died as one of America’s most famous, and often prosecuted, stand-up comics.

Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.