The Nosey Parker Blog originally appears at torontosun.com
Stupid ways to die? Been there, done that. The only problem is that about two-thirds of the Stupid Death things you've seen before are either terribly misrepresented or entirely fictitious.
This is the only place where you can guarantee the facts are true or, if I like the story but there's only an 85% chance of validity, I'll tell you.
For example, anything you've ever seen on the Internet about 20 Unusual Murders from FBI reports is totally made up. The author should write fiction, because some of the stories are very good, but none of them ever happened.
Also, any weird death story with any of the following names is completely false: Helena and Harold Simms, Megan Fri ( or Fry), Debby Mills-Newbroughton.
Debby Mills-Newbroughton is my favourite, by the way. She's 99, about to turn 100 the next day, crossing the road in her wheelchair to attend her daughter's 75th birthday party when she's struck and killed by a truck — delivering her 100th birthday cake. Nice touch, the cake, but all totally made up.
"Robert Hershey of Hershey Chocolate fame drowned when he fell into a vat of chocolate." Who the hell is "Robert" Hershey? The guy who created the Hershey Chocolate empire was named Milton Snavely (for real) Hershey . He died in 1945 without children and the Hershey complex has been operated as a giant charitable foundation ever since (tell that to the people of Smiths Falls). No Robert Hershey — at least none connected to Hershey Chocolate.
And Catherine the Great being crushed to death while having a stallion lowered onto her for sex? Nope. Never happened. Catherine, immensely overweight, died of a stroke alone in her bed in November 1796. She had many lovers — and rewarded them lavishly — but none was a horse. That was a story made up by her enemies.
However, if you're into death by stallion, check out Kenneth Pinyan (sometimes known as "Mr. Hands") below. Pinyan's story is all true.
I'm not trying to drain all salaciousness out of Stupid Death stories: I just want them to be true. And, believe me, many of the true ones are almost beyond belief.
For a variety of reasons, I'm going to list some of the ones I've confirmed (and find interesting) below in chronological order. This is not a complete list, of course. Consider it Part One. We'll come back to Stupid Ways To Die again in a couple of months — It's an endlessly fascinating topic.
1159 — Pope Adrian IV, the only English pope (born Nicholas Breakspeake). chocked to death on a fly he swallowed in his wine. There's some suggestion it might have been tonsillitis ... but I vote for the fly in the wine.
1673 — French playwright-actor Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) had a choking fit (he did suffer from tuberculosis) during a performance of his last play, Le Malade imaginaire (The Hypocondriac) and died.
1751 — Prince Frederick, the eldest son of Britain's George II and thus heir to the throne, was killed by a cricket ball. Frederick — a leading patron of what had recently become England's most popular sport — took a ball in the chest and later died of a lung abscess created by the impact. Frederick's son became George III, the guy who lost half of North America in the Revolutionary War.
1760 — Nine years after his son was cricketed to death, George II died of injuries he sustained when he fell off his toilet — apparently straining with constipation (but who the hell can ever — I mean EVER — confirm or deny that. We know his servants heard great cries of industry and anguish, followed by a mighty crash and rushed in to find their monarch on the floor in mortal distress. He died shortly thereafter, but can we really say constipation killed him?)
1814 — Nine people died in the Great London Beer Flood when 1.5-million litres of beer burst out of a Merx & Company Brewery storage facility.
1862 — Jim Creighton, at age 21, was probably the first professional baseball player — a "ringer" before pro baseball leagues were formed — and he definitely pitched the first recorded shutout. But his greatest claim to fame was as a hitter. In October 1862, while a member of the Excelcior of Brooklyn team, Creighton swung too hard at a pitch and ruptured an internal organ — either bladder or spleen (no autopsy was done) — and died a few days later at his parents' house.
1884 — Allan Pinkerton, the Scottish chief of Abraham Lincoln's Civil War spy service and later founder of the Pinkerton detective agency, died from biting his tongue. He slipped on a Chicago sidewalk, chopped his flapper, which became inflamed, and died of infectious complications.
1912 — Franz Reichelt, a Paris tailor, wanted to test his "coat parachute" from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Authorities approved Reichalt's test — with a dummy — but once at the top Reichelt impulsively decided to test his invention himself. It didn't work.
1919 — The Boston Molasses Disaster took 21 lives when a storage tank containing 8.7 million litres of molasses exploded.
1923 — Supposedly, a horse named Swiss Kiss won a race at New York's Belmont Park even though jockey Frank Hayes died in the saddle during the home stretch. This one sounds pretty good and seems to have provenance — but I have never been able to find a contemporary newspaper account of a pretty amazing event, so I don't think it really happened.
1926 — Bobby Leach. an Englishman who was the second person to survive going over Niagara Falls (after Annie Taylor) in 1911, died when he slipped on an orange peel. Leach, who made a very good living on the vaudeville circuit recounting his exploits, was on tour in New Zealand when he took his pratfall. Gangrene set in after Leach broke his leg and the limb was amputated — but he died anyway.
1957 — King Haakon VII of Norway — a truly amazing guy who took his adopted country through independence from Sweden in 1905 as an "elected" monarch and led his country's internal resistance to the occupying Nazis in World War II — died when he slipped on a bar of soap in his bathtub.
1983 — Playwright Tennessee Williams chocked to death when he swallowed the cap of an eyedrop bottle.
1986 — An armoured car guard was crushed to death by $50,000 worth of quarters. (I admit — I have not confirmed this one, so I'm a sucker for a good story too).
1993 — Garry Hoy, a lawyer with the Toronto law firm of Holden Day Wilson, was demonstrating at a party how strong the windows of the TD Centre were. He ran at a window once ... and then again, at which point the windows gave way and ... Hoy fell 24 floors to his death.
1998 — Bishops University student Kevin MacKie died when he pulled a Coca-Cola machine on himself while trying to dislodge a can in Lennoxville, Que. His family sued Coke for $1 million.
2005 — Kenneth Pinyan (known as Mr. Hands in his "other" life) died of acute perontinitis after suffering a perforated colon while having anal sex with an Arabian stallion at a farm in Enumclaw, Washington. This was a regular practice for Pinyan, who had a friend videotape the encounters and post them on the Internet. Pinyan held off going to the hospital until it was too late because he was afraid of losing his security clearance as an engineer at the aerospace company Boeing. The death was ruled accidental. Police wanted to charge the videographer, James Michael Tait, with cruelty to animals but prosecutors decided there was no evidence of injury to the horse. Washington state enacted a whole new set of animal protection laws after this case.
2009 — According to two media reports, a 28-year-old Russian man named Sergey Tuganov bet two women in Moscow he could have non-stop sex with them for 12 hours. The bet was 1,000 rubles (by my approximation). The women accepted, Tuganov downed a bottle of Viagara, performed for 12 hours, collected the bet — and promptly dropped dead of a heart attack.
Now my problems with this story are multiple, but the main one hinges on source. The story ran in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the largest tabloid newspaper in Russia and the successor to the old Soviet Pravda, on March 10. But the story had already run on the website of Los Angeles television station KTLA in February with multiple typos in the body copy.
I think someone gullible at Pravda picked up on a bogus item on the KTLA website and ran with it because it was catchy and had a Russian connection. Once a Russian story appears on a fairly reputable Russian website it becomes real.
Don't believe everything you read — even if it seems properly sourced.
This is the only place where you can guarantee the facts are true or, if I like the story but there's only an 85% chance of validity, I'll tell you.
For example, anything you've ever seen on the Internet about 20 Unusual Murders from FBI reports is totally made up. The author should write fiction, because some of the stories are very good, but none of them ever happened.
Also, any weird death story with any of the following names is completely false: Helena and Harold Simms, Megan Fri ( or Fry), Debby Mills-Newbroughton.
Debby Mills-Newbroughton is my favourite, by the way. She's 99, about to turn 100 the next day, crossing the road in her wheelchair to attend her daughter's 75th birthday party when she's struck and killed by a truck — delivering her 100th birthday cake. Nice touch, the cake, but all totally made up.
"Robert Hershey of Hershey Chocolate fame drowned when he fell into a vat of chocolate." Who the hell is "Robert" Hershey? The guy who created the Hershey Chocolate empire was named Milton Snavely (for real) Hershey . He died in 1945 without children and the Hershey complex has been operated as a giant charitable foundation ever since (tell that to the people of Smiths Falls). No Robert Hershey — at least none connected to Hershey Chocolate.
And Catherine the Great being crushed to death while having a stallion lowered onto her for sex? Nope. Never happened. Catherine, immensely overweight, died of a stroke alone in her bed in November 1796. She had many lovers — and rewarded them lavishly — but none was a horse. That was a story made up by her enemies.
However, if you're into death by stallion, check out Kenneth Pinyan (sometimes known as "Mr. Hands") below. Pinyan's story is all true.
I'm not trying to drain all salaciousness out of Stupid Death stories: I just want them to be true. And, believe me, many of the true ones are almost beyond belief.
For a variety of reasons, I'm going to list some of the ones I've confirmed (and find interesting) below in chronological order. This is not a complete list, of course. Consider it Part One. We'll come back to Stupid Ways To Die again in a couple of months — It's an endlessly fascinating topic.
1159 — Pope Adrian IV, the only English pope (born Nicholas Breakspeake). chocked to death on a fly he swallowed in his wine. There's some suggestion it might have been tonsillitis ... but I vote for the fly in the wine.
1673 — French playwright-actor Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) had a choking fit (he did suffer from tuberculosis) during a performance of his last play, Le Malade imaginaire (The Hypocondriac) and died.
1751 — Prince Frederick, the eldest son of Britain's George II and thus heir to the throne, was killed by a cricket ball. Frederick — a leading patron of what had recently become England's most popular sport — took a ball in the chest and later died of a lung abscess created by the impact. Frederick's son became George III, the guy who lost half of North America in the Revolutionary War.
1760 — Nine years after his son was cricketed to death, George II died of injuries he sustained when he fell off his toilet — apparently straining with constipation (but who the hell can ever — I mean EVER — confirm or deny that. We know his servants heard great cries of industry and anguish, followed by a mighty crash and rushed in to find their monarch on the floor in mortal distress. He died shortly thereafter, but can we really say constipation killed him?)
1814 — Nine people died in the Great London Beer Flood when 1.5-million litres of beer burst out of a Merx & Company Brewery storage facility.
1862 — Jim Creighton, at age 21, was probably the first professional baseball player — a "ringer" before pro baseball leagues were formed — and he definitely pitched the first recorded shutout. But his greatest claim to fame was as a hitter. In October 1862, while a member of the Excelcior of Brooklyn team, Creighton swung too hard at a pitch and ruptured an internal organ — either bladder or spleen (no autopsy was done) — and died a few days later at his parents' house.
1884 — Allan Pinkerton, the Scottish chief of Abraham Lincoln's Civil War spy service and later founder of the Pinkerton detective agency, died from biting his tongue. He slipped on a Chicago sidewalk, chopped his flapper, which became inflamed, and died of infectious complications.
1912 — Franz Reichelt, a Paris tailor, wanted to test his "coat parachute" from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Authorities approved Reichalt's test — with a dummy — but once at the top Reichelt impulsively decided to test his invention himself. It didn't work.
1919 — The Boston Molasses Disaster took 21 lives when a storage tank containing 8.7 million litres of molasses exploded.
1923 — Supposedly, a horse named Swiss Kiss won a race at New York's Belmont Park even though jockey Frank Hayes died in the saddle during the home stretch. This one sounds pretty good and seems to have provenance — but I have never been able to find a contemporary newspaper account of a pretty amazing event, so I don't think it really happened.
1926 — Bobby Leach. an Englishman who was the second person to survive going over Niagara Falls (after Annie Taylor) in 1911, died when he slipped on an orange peel. Leach, who made a very good living on the vaudeville circuit recounting his exploits, was on tour in New Zealand when he took his pratfall. Gangrene set in after Leach broke his leg and the limb was amputated — but he died anyway.
1957 — King Haakon VII of Norway — a truly amazing guy who took his adopted country through independence from Sweden in 1905 as an "elected" monarch and led his country's internal resistance to the occupying Nazis in World War II — died when he slipped on a bar of soap in his bathtub.
1983 — Playwright Tennessee Williams chocked to death when he swallowed the cap of an eyedrop bottle.
1986 — An armoured car guard was crushed to death by $50,000 worth of quarters. (I admit — I have not confirmed this one, so I'm a sucker for a good story too).
1993 — Garry Hoy, a lawyer with the Toronto law firm of Holden Day Wilson, was demonstrating at a party how strong the windows of the TD Centre were. He ran at a window once ... and then again, at which point the windows gave way and ... Hoy fell 24 floors to his death.
1998 — Bishops University student Kevin MacKie died when he pulled a Coca-Cola machine on himself while trying to dislodge a can in Lennoxville, Que. His family sued Coke for $1 million.
2005 — Kenneth Pinyan (known as Mr. Hands in his "other" life) died of acute perontinitis after suffering a perforated colon while having anal sex with an Arabian stallion at a farm in Enumclaw, Washington. This was a regular practice for Pinyan, who had a friend videotape the encounters and post them on the Internet. Pinyan held off going to the hospital until it was too late because he was afraid of losing his security clearance as an engineer at the aerospace company Boeing. The death was ruled accidental. Police wanted to charge the videographer, James Michael Tait, with cruelty to animals but prosecutors decided there was no evidence of injury to the horse. Washington state enacted a whole new set of animal protection laws after this case.
2009 — According to two media reports, a 28-year-old Russian man named Sergey Tuganov bet two women in Moscow he could have non-stop sex with them for 12 hours. The bet was 1,000 rubles (by my approximation). The women accepted, Tuganov downed a bottle of Viagara, performed for 12 hours, collected the bet — and promptly dropped dead of a heart attack.
Now my problems with this story are multiple, but the main one hinges on source. The story ran in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the largest tabloid newspaper in Russia and the successor to the old Soviet Pravda, on March 10. But the story had already run on the website of Los Angeles television station KTLA in February with multiple typos in the body copy.
I think someone gullible at Pravda picked up on a bogus item on the KTLA website and ran with it because it was catchy and had a Russian connection. Once a Russian story appears on a fairly reputable Russian website it becomes real.
Don't believe everything you read — even if it seems properly sourced.
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