Bizarre Deaths in History

Steve Irwin (1962 – 2006)

Stephen Robert Irwin, known simply as Steve Irwin and

nicknamed “The Crocodile Hunter”, was an iconic Australian television personality,
wildlife expert, and conservationist. He achieved world-wide fame from the television
program The Crocodile Hunter, an internationally broadcast wildlife documentary series
co-hosted with his wife Terri Irwin. Together, they also co-owned and operated
Australia Zoo, founded by his parents in Beerwah, Queensland. He died in 2006 after
his chest was fatally pierced by a stingray barb whilst filming in Australia’s Great
Barrier Reef. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship MV Steve Irwin was named
in his honour, christened by his wife Terri, who said “If Steve were alive, he’d be
aboard with them!”

Death

On 4 September 2006, Irwin was fatally pierced in the chest by a stingray spine while
snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, at Batt Reef, which is located off the coast of Port
Douglas in Queensland. Irwin was in the area filming his own documentary, Ocean’s
Deadliest, but weather had stalled filming. Irwin decided to take the opportunity to film
some shallow water shots for a segment in the television program his daughter Bindi
Irwin was hosting, when, according to his friend and colleague, John Stainton, he swam
too close to one of the stingrays. “He came on top of the stingray and the stingray’s barb
went up and into his chest and put a hole into his heart,” said Stainton, who was on
board Irwin’s boat the Croc One. The events were caught on camera, and a copy of the
footage was handed to the Queensland Police. After reviewing the footage of the
incident and speaking to the cameraman who recorded it, marine documentary
filmmaker and former spearfisherman Ben Cropp speculated that the stingray “felt
threatened because Steve was alongside and there was the cameraman ahead”. In such a
case, the stingray responds to danger by automatically flexing the serrated spine on its
tail in an upward motion. Cropp said Irwin had accidentally boxed the animal in. “It
stopped and twisted and threw up its tail with the spike, and it caught him in the chest.
It’s a defensive thing. It’s like being stabbed with a dirty dagger.” The stinging of Irwin
by the bull ray was “a one-in-a-million thing,” Cropp told Time magazine. “I have
swum with many rays, and I have only had one do that to me…
Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626)

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban KC was an English

philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist, and author. He served both as Attorney
General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in
disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as
philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific revolution. Indeed, his
dedication may have brought him into a rare historical group of scientists who were
killed by their own experiments. His most celebrated works include The New Atlantis.
His works established and popularized an inductive methodology for scientific inquiry,
often called the Baconian method or simply, the scientific method. His demand for a
planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical
and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of
proper methodology today. Bacon was knighted in 1603, created Baron Verulam in
1618, and Viscount St Alban in 1621. Without heirs, both peerages became extinct upon
his death.

Death

In April 1626, Sir Francis Bacon came to Highgate near London, and died at the empty
Arundel mansion. A famous and influential account of the circumstances of his death
was given by John Aubrey in his Brief Lives. Aubrey has been criticized for his evident
credulousness in this and other works; on the other hand, he knew Thomas Hobbes, the
philosopher and friend of Bacon. Aubrey’s vivid account, which portrays Bacon as a
martyr to experimental scientific method, has him journeying to Highgate through the
snow with the King’s physician when he is suddenly inspired by the possibility of using
the snow to preserve meat. “They were resolved they would try the experiment
presently. They alighted out of the coach and went into a poor woman’s house at the
bottom of Highgate hill, and bought a fowl, and made the woman exenterate it”. After
stuffing the fowl with snow, he happened to contract a fatal case of pneumonia. He then
attempted to extend his fading lifespan by consuming the fowl that had caused his
illness. Some people, including Aubrey, consider these two contiguous, possibly
coincidental events as related and causative of his death: “The Snow so chilled him that
he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his Lodging … but went
to the Earle of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where they put him into … a damp bed that
had not been layn-in … which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 days as I remember
Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation”.

Gregori Rasputin (1869 – 1916)

 Rasputin was born a peasant in the small village of
Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River in the Tobolsk guberniya in Siberia. The date of his
birth remained in doubt for some time and was estimated sometime between 1863 and
1873. Recently, new documents surfaced revealing Rasputin’s birth date as January 10,
1869 O.S. When he was around the age of eighteen, he spent three months in the
Verkhoturye Monastery, possibly a penance for theft. His experience there, combined
with a reported vision of the Mother of God on his return, turned him towards the life of
a religious mystic and wanderer. It also appears that he came into contact with the
banned Christian sect known as the khlysty, whose impassioned services, ending in
physical exhaustion, led to rumors that religious and sexual ecstasy were combined in
these rituals. Suspicions that Rasputin was one of the Khlysts threatened his reputation
right to the end of his life. Indeed, Alexander Guchkov charged him with being a
member of this illegal and orgiastic sect. The Tsar perceived the very real threat of a
scandal and ordered his own investigations, but he did not, in the end, remove Rasputin
from his position of influence; quite the contrary, he fired his minister of the interior for
a “lack of control over the press”. He pronounced the affair to be a private one closed to
debate. Shortly after leaving the monastery, Rasputin visited a holy man named
Makariy, whose hut was nearby. Makariy had an enormous influence on Rasputin, who
would model himself after him. Rasputin married Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina in
1889, and they had three children, named Dmitri, Varvara, and Maria. Rasputin also had
another child with another woman. In 1901, he left his home in Pokrovskoye as a
strannik and, during the time of his journeying, travelled to Greece and Jerusalem. In
1903, Rasputin arrived in Saint Petersburg, where he gradually gained a reputation as a
starets with healing and prophetic powers.

Murder

The legends recounting the death of Rasputin are perhaps even more bizarre than his
strange life. According to Greg King’s 1996 book The Man Who Killed Rasputin, a
previous attempt on Rasputin’s life had been made and had failed: Rasputin was visiting
his wife and children in his hometown, Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River, in Siberia.
On June 29, 1914, he had either just received a telegram or was just exiting church,
when he was attacked suddenly by Khionia Guseva, a former prostitute who had
become a disciple of the monk Iliodor, once a friend of Rasputin’s but now absolutely
disgusted with his behavior and disrespectful talk about the royal family. Iliodor had
appealed to women who had been harmed by Rasputin, and together they formed a
survivors’ support group. The murder of Rasputin has become legend, some of it
invented by the very men who killed him, which is why it becomes difficult to discern
exactly what happened. It is, however, generally agreed that, on December 16, 1916,
having decided that Rasputin’s influence over the Tsaritsa had made him a far-too-
dangerous threat to the empire, a group of nobles, led by Prince Felix Yusupov and the
Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (one of the few Romanov family members to escape the
annihilation of the family during the Red Terror), apparently lured Rasputin to the
Yusupovs’ Moika Palace, where they served him cakes and red wine laced with a
massive amount of cyanide. According to legend, Rasputin was unaffected, although
Vasily Maklakov had supplied enough poison to kill five men. Conversely, Maria’s
account asserts that, if her father did eat or drink poison, it was not in the cakes or wine,
because, after the attack by Guseva, he had hyperacidity, and avoided anything with
sugar. In fact, she expressed doubt that he was poisoned at all.

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632 – 1687)

Lully was an Italian-born French composer who worked most

of his life as the appointed musician in the court of Louis XIV of France. While
conducting the Te Deum in honor of Louis XIV’s recent recovery from sickness, Lully
was so deeply engrossed on keeping the tempo by banging his long staff against the
floor that he struck his toe so hard that the would developed into an abscess. He refused
to have his toe amputated even if the wound had turned gangrenous and had spread,
leading to his death two months after the incident.

Biography

Lully had little education, musical or otherwise, but he had a very natural talent to play
the guitar and violin and to dance. In 1646, he was discovered by the Duke of Guise and
taken to France by him, where he entered the services of Mademoiselle de Montpensier
as a scullery-boy. With the help of this lady, his musical talents were cultivated. He
studied the theory of music under Nicolas Métru. A scurrilous poem on his patroness
resulted in his dismissal. He came into Louis XIV’s service in late 1652, early 1653 as a
dancer. He composed some music for the Ballet de la Nuit, which pleased the king
immensely. He was appointed as the composer of instrumental music to the king and
conducted the royal string orchestra of the French court. He tired of the lack of
discipline of the Grande Bande and, with the King’s permission, formed his own Petits
Violons. Lully composed many ballets for the King during the 1650s and 1660s, in
which the King and Lully himself danced. He also had tremendous success composing
the music for the comedies of Molière, including Le Mariage forcé, L’Amour médecin,
and Le Bourgeois gentil homme. It was when he met Molière that together they created
the Comedie-Ballet. Louis XIV’s interest in ballet waned as he aged, and his dancing
ability declined and so Lully pursued opera. He bought the privilege for opera from
Pierre Perrin and, with the backing of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the king, created a new
privilege which essentially gave Lully complete control of all music performed in
France until his death.

Sherwood Anderson (1876 – 1941)

Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, the third of seven

children of Erwin M. and Emma S. Anderson. After Erwin’s business failed, the family
was forced to move frequently, finally settling down at Clyde, Ohio, in 1884. Family
difficulties led Erwin to begin drinking heavily; he died in 1895. Partly as a result of
these misfortunes, young Sherwood found various odd jobs to help his family, which
earned him the nickname “Jobby”. He left school at age 14. Anderson moved to
Chicago near his brother Karl’s home and worked as a manual laborer until near the
turn of the century, when he enlisted in the United States Army. He was called up but
did not see action in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. After the war, in 1900, he
enrolled at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Eventually he secured a job as a
copywriter in Chicago and became more successful. In 1904, he married Cornelia Lane,
the daughter of a wealthy Ohio family. He fathered three children while living in
Cleveland, Ohio, and later Elyria, Ohio, where he managed a mail-order business and
paint manufacturing firms. In November 1912 he suffered a mental breakdown and
disappeared for four days. Soon after, he left his position as president of the Anderson
Manufacturing Co. in Elyria, Ohio, and left his wife and three small children to pursue
the writer’s life of creativity. Anderson described the entire episode as “escaping from
his materialistic existence,” which garnered praise from many young writers, who used
his “courage” as an example.Anderson moved back to Chicago, working again for a
publishing and advertising company. In 1916, he divorced Lane and married Tennessee
Mitchell.

Death

Anderson died in Panama at the age of 64. The cause of death was peritonitis after he
accidentally swallowed a piece of a toothpick embedded in a martini olive at a party. He
was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, “Life, Not
Death, is the Great Adventure”. Anderson’s final home, known as Ripshin, still stands
in Troutdale, Virginia, and may be toured by appointment.
George Allen (1918 – 1990)

Allen was an American Football coach, who was showered by

some of his Long Beach State players with an ice cold bucket of Gatorade in celebration
of their season-ending win over the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on November 17,
1990. Afterwards, he even granted media interviews for some time under the cold
weather with a piercing wind and boarded the bus back to Long Beach State still in his
drenched clothing. Since then, he acknowledged that he had not been feeling completely
well. He finally succumbed to pneumonia on December 31, 1990. Allen was born in
Detroit, Michigan, where his father, Earl Raymond Allen, was recorded in the 1920 and
1930 U.S. census records for Wayne County, Michigan as working as a chauffeur to a
private family. He earned varsity letters in football, track and basketball at Lake Shore
High School in St. Clair Shores. Allen went to Alma College and later at Marquette
University, where he was sent as an officer trainee in the U.S. Navy’s World War II V-
12 program. He graduated with a B.S. in education from Eastern Michigan
University.He attended the University of Michigan where he earned his M.S. in
Physical Education in 1947.

Death

Allens’s death may have been indirectly caused by a Gatorade shower. Allen died on
December 31, 1990 from ventricular fibrillation in his home in Palos Verdes Estates,
California at the age of 72. Shortly before his death, Allen noted that he had not been
completely healthy since some of his Long Beach State players dumped a Gatorade
bucket on him following a season-ending victory over the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas on November 17, 1990. The sports editor of the Long Beach State’s newspaper,
the Daily Forty-Niner, was on the field that day and remembers that the temperature
was in the fifties with a biting wind. Coach Allen stayed on the field for media
interviews for quite a while in his drenched clothing, and boarded the bus back to Long
Beach State soaking wet. However, he had promised a winning season to a football
program on the verge of collapse, and in his final game delivered on his promise. His
players gleefully hoisted him on their shoulders as photographers snapped away, and
Allen went out a winner. Allen said his season at Long Beach State was the most
rewarding of his entire career. After his death, the soccer and multipurpose field area on
the lower end of campus was dedicated in his honor, George Allen Field. A youth
baseball field in Palos Verdes Estates is also named after him.

Alexander Litvinenko (1962 – 2006)

 Alexander Litvinenko was born the son of physician
Walter Litvinenko in the Russian city of Voronezh. He graduated from secondary
school in 1980 in Nalchik and was then drafted into the Internal Troops of the Ministry
of Internal Affairs as a Private. After a year of service, he matriculated in the Kirov
Higher Command School in Vladikavkaz. After graduation in 1985, Litvinenko became
a platoon commander in an Internal Troops regiment that guarded valuables in transit
and in 1988 moved to the KGB. Litvinenko was a former officer of the Russian State
Security Services, who fled his country to the United Kingdom where he was granted
political asylum in 2000. Litvinenko was hospitalized on November 1, 2001 when his
health unexpectedly deteriorated. It was later discovered that he had been poisoned with
significant amounts of the rare and extremely toxic radioactive element polonium-210.
He died three weeks later, thus becoming the first known casualty of deliberate
radiation poisoning. His murder marked the start of a new era of nuclear terrorism.

Jack Daniel (1850 – 1911)

Jack Daniel’s grandfather was among the first of those who

sailed from the tiny harbor in Cardigan, Ceredigion, Wales to the New World in the
United States in approximately 1807. Daniel was born in Lynchburg, Tennessee, to
Calaway Daniel and wife Lucinda Cook, daughter of James Watson Cook and wife
Mary Riddle. He was born in September, although seemingly no one knows the exact
date. If the 1850 date is correct,then there is a contradiction with his mothers year of
death and he may have become a licensed distiller at the age of 16, as the distillery
claims a founding date of 1866. Other records list his birth date as September 5, 1846,
and in his 2004 biography Blood & Whiskey: The Life and Times of Jack Daniel author
Peter Krass maintains that land and deed records show the distillery was actually not
founded until 1875. Daniel was one of thirteen children of Welsh descent. His paternal
grandfather Joseph Daniel, born in England in 1756 and died at Franklin County,
Tennessee in 1814, was originally from Wales; he came to America and married
Elizabeth Callaway, who was born in Scotland in 1762 and also came to America,
having died at Ridgeville, Moore County, Tennessee, in 1853. Since Jack Daniel never
married and did not have any children, he took his favorite nephew, Lem Motlow, under
his wing. Motlow had a head for numbers and was soon doing all the distillery’s
bookkeeping. In 1907, due to failing health, Jack Daniel gave the distillery to his
nephew. Jack later died from blood poisoning at Lynchburg in 1911.