Death itself can be pretty strange, but some people’s last moments involved circumstances so specific and strange that they almost don’t seem believable.
David Grundman
You wouldn’t think a cactus could fight back. But that’s what seemed to happen with David Grundman in February 1982, when the 27-year-old man was out near Lake Pleasant, Arizona. He was shooting with his friends at a huge saguaro.
Grundman eventually hit the cactus with enough bullets that one of its heavy arms snapped off and dropped directly onto him. To put that in perspective, a saguaro can weigh several tons when fully grown, so it wasn’t like a branch just fell over. Grundman was crushed and killed.
Jon-Erik Hexum
Actor Jon-Erik Hexum was on the set for the TV series Cover Up in October 1984, and he got bored. So, he decided to start fooling around with a prop revolver. The gun contained blanks and seemed harmless enough. But no.
Hexum held the .44 Magnum against his temple and pulled the trigger as a joke. The blast didn’t fire a bullet, yes, but the force of the gun alone was enough to shatter part of his skull and push bone fragments into his brain. He was declared brain dead six days later. Blank rounds can be deadly, clearly.
Anton Yelchin
Anton Yelchin was a 27-year-old up-and-coming actor who, for just a few moments, decided to step away from his Jeep. That decision cost him his life. He got out of his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee outside his Los Angeles home on June 19, 2016.
The vehicle rolled backward down the steep driveway and pinned him against a brick mailbox pillar and security fence. He died from blunt traumatic asphyxia. In other words, he had been crushed to death by the car and was left unable to breathe.
Owen Hart
May 23, 1999, ended up being a fateful day for WWF wrestler Owen Hart. He was preparing to enter the ring at the wrestling company’s Over the Edge event in Kansas City, playing the role of his Blue Blazer character. He was supposed to descend from the arena ceiling in a harness.
But the quick-release mechanism opened while Hart was still around 78 feet above the ring. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happened next. Yes, Hart fell and suffered fatal internal injuries, while thousands of fans watched on. He died only minutes later.
Timothy Treadwell
Most people would try their best to stay away from wild brown bears, but not Timothy Treadwell. No, he deliberately stayed close to them in Alaska, and he spent 13 summers living around them in Katmai National Park and Preserve. He filmed the animals and became comfortable in their territory. Too comfortable, in fact.
In October 2003, Treadwell and his companion, Amie Huguenard, were attacked and killed by a bear near their campsite. The worst part was that one of his cameras was running during the attack. The lens cap was still on, so it didn’t get any video footage, but the entire audio of his death was recorded.
Keith Relf
Keith Relf was pretty used to playing the electric guitar. He’d spent years singing and playing with the rock band the Yardbirds after all. But it was a guitar that ended up killing him in May 1976. Relf was at home in England, apparently practicing in a basement or home studio, when he received a fatal electric shock from his guitar setup.Â
He was just 33 at the time. There’s an internet rumor that he was playing in a bathtub, but that’s completely made up. The real version of him being killed by his own instrument is odd enough, without adding anything to it.
Jennifer Strange
In January 2007, 28-year-old Jennifer Strange entered Sacramento radio station KDND’s ‘Hold Your Wee for a Wii’ contest. Participants had to keep drinking water without using the bathroom, just to win a Nintendo Wii. Strange ended up drinking large amounts over several rounds.
It got to the point where she had to leave the station due to a severe headache. She died later that day. The autopsy revealed that she died from acute water intoxication. She’d essentially died from diluting her own body with too much water. KDND later shut down.
Deborah Gail Stone
Disneyland’s America Sings attraction had been open for only a few days on July 8, 1974. 18-year-old employee Deborah Gail Stone was killed that same day inside it. It was a rotating theater that involved moving sections of the audience around a central group of stages.Â
Stone became trapped between a rotating wall and a stationary part of the building during one of those moments. The machinery crushed her. The saddest part was that she’d recently graduated from high school. Her Disneyland job was meant to be something for the summer, nothing too serious. But it was serious, although not in the way that she expected.
Michael Anderson Godwin
Michael Anderson Godwin was a criminal on death row. That’s the weirdest part. He’d been sentenced to death in South Carolina’s electric chair, although it was later reduced to life in prison. But it seems that death was determined to claim him.
Godwin was sitting naked on a steel toilet in his cell at Central Correctional Institution in March 1989. He was working on a pair of earphones that connected to his television. Prison officials said he bit into a live electrical wire, and a current passed through him while he was in contact with the metal toilet. It killed him almost immediately.
Karel Soucek
For a stuntman like Karel Soucek, you’d think that going over Niagara Falls in a barrel would be what killed him. But no. The Canadian stuntman managed to survive that feat in July 1984. His death came about six months later, when he tried another barrel stunt inside Houston’s Astrodome. It was supposed to be a much safer stunt.Â
Soucek was dropped roughly 180 feet toward a tank of water below, but the barrel missed the center. It slammed into the rim of the tank instead. Soucek was badly injured. He died in the hospital the next day, on January 20, 1985.
John Bowen
One thing to know about John Bowen’s death is that it wasn’t a real lawnmower flying over Shea Stadium. No, during halftime at a New York Jets game on December 9, 1979, a radio-controlled model aircraft flew around the stadium. It was designed to look like a lawnmower.
The 40-pound craft went out of control and flew into the stands, striking 20-year-old John Bowen of New Hampshire in the head. He suffered serious injuries and died six days later. He wasn’t killed by a flying lawnmower, but it sure looked like one.
Boris Sagal
Director Boris Sagal had just arrived by helicopter at Timberline Lodge on Oregon’s Mount Hood on May 22, 1981. He was there to work on the TV show World War III. Sagal stepped out of the helicopter and made a decision that cost him his life. He turned the wrong way.
Sagal turned towards the rear of the helicopter where the tail rotor was still spinning. He walked directly into it. The blades caused catastrophic head injuries, as you can probably imagine, and Sagal was rushed to a Portland hospital. He died several hours later at the age of 58.
Jerome Moody
A party full of lifeguards seems like the least likely place for someone to drown. That’s exactly what happened to 31-year-old Jerome Moody, though. He was at a New Orleans Recreation Department gathering in 1985, where nearly 100 certified lifeguards were celebrating the end of the swimming season.Â
They were allegedly celebrating a summer free of drownings, and four people were assigned to watch the pool. But somehow, Moody went under the water without anyone noticing. It was only later, when the pool was being cleared, that his body was found. 100 lifeguards, and not one of them noticed.
Robert Williams
Let’s turn the clock back to 1979, a time when robots still seemed completely futuristic. It was on January 25 that year that 25-year-old Robert Williams was working at Ford’s Michigan Casting Center in Flat Rock. He entered a storage area because the automated parts system wasn’t moving fast enough.Â
The one-ton automated transfer vehicle machine continued operating while he was getting parts and struck him in the head. Williams was killed instantly. It was actually listed as the first human death caused by a robot, all the way back during the late ‘70s.
Colin Scott
23-year-old Colin Scott and his sister were in Yellowstone’s Norris Geyser Basin on June 7, 2016. The pair left the boardwalk and were looking for a hot spring they could soak in. Bad idea. Scott leaned down near one pool to test the temperature and slipped.
He fell into the scalding water. Rangers actually found his body later that day, but they couldn’t retrieve it due to lightning strikes, so they came back the next morning. There was barely anything to recover. The hot water had broken down his remains into nothing.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
15 historical figures that cheated death
There are people who have been closer to death than anyone should ever be and, miraculously, these 15 people lived to tell about it.
