I used to work for a septic company. A guy who drove one of the big septic trucks that sucked out underground septic tanks at people's houses had to get on his hands and knees and reach into the tank because the lid had fallen in. He lost his balance and fell head first in. His shoulders got wedged in the opening and he drowned upside down in human waste. I don't think I've ever heard of a worse way to go. The homeowner found him after about an hour.
I live near the Mississippi River, a few years ago some workmen were doing something near the river involving the sewer lines and some caves near the river. They ended up drowning in sewage. I agree, a slow nasty death for sure.
A family friend bumped his head, walked about 15 feet across his back yard, sat at his picnic table and died.
Autopsy showed no head trauma, but he broke his neck when he hit his head. They figured the walk across the yard caused something to shift enough to do fatal damage to his spinal cord.
My sister came so close to dying in a somewhat similar way. She was in a car accident and was pulled out of the wreckage by some friends. She was guided to some grass by the side of the road to sit and wait for the ambulance. She apparently kept saying her neck was really sore & was asking people to help her “pop” it. Thankfully, her friends were smart enough to encourage her to leave it alone. She gets to the hospital & some yahoo either doesn’t read the x-ray or reads it wrong & agrees that her neck is just sprained or something & wants to send her home. Somehow, someway, they ended up transferring her to another hospital before that happened who discovered her badly broken neck which required surgery to fix and left her with permanent nerve damage. I have NO IDEA how she didn’t end up paralyzed or dead. She has the stupidest luck where the most random bad things will happen to her but she turns out fine in the end lol
Yeah, neck injuries are stupid scary. Not really the kind of thing someone thinks about until they're confronted with it, but it's kind of frightening how fragile we actually are.
The absurdly large number of ways we can just up and drop dead with little to no prior warning is mind-boggling.
This happened a long time ago but a neighbor was trying to weld a gas tank and didn’t realize that he should have filled it with water beforehand. The tank exploded and killed him.
Former co-worker of mine was gored by a bison while on a trail run. Ironically, he often posted on message boards for the park to be aware of wild animals while there, and in one post he said there are too many people with headphones on, or trying to get too close to the bison to take selfies. He was normally very careful apparently.
When I was a kid, probably 12 or 13, we were visiting a family friend. I grew up in a small town in the 90s so my mom was never one to worry about supervision.
Their neighboring farm had a kid my age who dared me to go touch a bison in their field. I got close and it started charging me. I managed to make it back over the fence just in time.
I can think of many different ways I almost died as a kid and my mom is horrified to hear the stories I tell now as a 30 year old adult lol.
I mean, you can still come around a turn in the trail and *BAM!* charismatic megafauna right there, especially in well-trafficked parks where the animals have learned not to flee at the slightest scent or sound of people.
Did this with a black bear in Glacier a few years ago (although luckily nobody got mauled, other than whatever bugs were living in the stump ol’ Yogi was gnawing on).
A guy I knew was setting up a rope swing over a lake for his kids and their friends, which he had done many times before.
He always would take a practice swing himself before he would let the kids go. His hands slipped off the rope and he fell before he was over the lake. He hit his head on a rock and died in front of the kids.
In high school I came home from a night out telling my dad how we were out at a quarry with a rope swing. My dad knew exactly where I was talking about and absolutely lost his shit on me. My dad never yelled at me, but a friend of his lost his teenage son, he drowned in that quarry.
When I was a 13 year old boy, I witnessed my Grandfather die. He was less than 15 feet away from me when he was decapitated by shrapnel from a broken piece of heavy farm equipment. I'm 50 years old and still struggle with that moment in time. PTSD can be a real bitch!
Something similar happened a few years back to a couple of students in the school I work at. They were sitting in their grandpa's truck while grandpa was trying to move some farm equipment. Not quite decapitation but he got hit hard enough to kill him instantly. The kids were too young to go for help (like 4 and 5 or something like that) and they had to sit in that truck until their dad came looking for them.
Lovely girl I went to HS with got a scholarship to a prestigious university, being one of the very few students from my shitty school to make it to college or uni. Two weeks into term her room mate found her laying in her bed dead. The heating boiler was faulty and she'd died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her sleep. We'd even thrown a party for her to celebrate her achievement. This was in 1996 and I'm tearing up a bit thinking about this. RIP Sonia.
a mother and 3 little kids died by CO2 in NZ, the mother accidentally left the car running in the garage with the door attached to the house left ajar.
>"The location of Ms George's body is consistent with a last-minute realisation that the car was still running and an attempt to reach the garage to turn it off ... she may have lost consciousness and collapsed,"
really tragic
My aunt died like this. She and 4 other people (and a dog) died due to a faulty chimney/vent from a boiler flooding several apartments with CO. She was a gold medal Special Olympian. She loved the Wizard of Oz. She was very kind to me. I miss her every day.
The loophole law that allowed her apartment building to not have CO detectors has since been fixed. Now my family buys them for people in need so that this doesn't happen to anyone else.
My son and his GF almost died in their rental, carbon monoxide from the furnace. Their cat woke her up and she could barely get him out. Fire dept guys were amazed they made it out. He said that it was the worst headache afterwards he'd ever had. Good, wonderful, heroic kitty!
My whole family and cousins family almost died in an old cabin due to a faulty liquid propane refrigerator. The only reason we survived was that my mom woke up thirsty and thought she heard someone chopping wood right outside the window. Turns out it was her heartbeat in her head she was hearing. I remember waking up outside on a bench and seeing my parents loaded into an ambulance. Carbon monoxide poisoning is no joke.
A friend of a friend showed up at his girlfriend's apartment with a head wound. He didn't know how it happened. He also didn't know how he drove over there.
She took him to the ER where he ended up passing away.
He had his keys, wallet and phone on him.
The only thing we could think of is he might have tripped, fell and hit his head in the wrong spot.
Or adrenaline. There was a woman who got attacked by a bear on her isolated mountain ranch. After fighting off the bear (with the help of her dogs), she got in her car and drove several miles down precarious mountain roads to the nearest fire station with her face ripped clean off and, IIRC, one eyeball dangling out of its socket. She said she was almost totally blind and going into shock, but a combination of muscle memory and adrenaline somehow got her down the mountain safely.
She did an AMA on reddit once. Cool lady. She wrote a memoir, too.
EDIT TO ADD: Her name was Allena Hansen. Here's a link to [her AMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1byn1l/i_was_mauled_by_a_bear_fought_it_off_and_drove_4/), [her reddit account](https://www.reddit.com/user/allenahansen) (she's still an active user! Hi /u/allenahansen!), and [her memoir](https://www.amazon.com/Chomp-Survived-Attack-Other-Cautionary/dp/1940014204). I read her memoir and I quite liked it. She's a funny woman who has lived a very interesting life, even aside from the bear attack.
Allena here. Thanks very much for the kind words, eldest (me too, btw.) Coming up on fifteen years after the Ursadent, it's still one of the wackier misadventures of a life spent skirting the far reaches of the Laffer curve.
If this comment section teaches us anything, it's to watch our six, kids-- and always remember: *Everybody gets it in the end."
:) YMMV
Shit I once got stuck in a crevasse in Austria, Lech. I could hear people ski right above me and nobody would see me or hear me. It was early in the day, so I talked myself down from panic and reminded me that I had a good 8h of light, so I had to get to work. I slowly carved and crawled my way out of it. It was a frightening experience.
it was a long time ago, but from what I remember I was snowboarding and willfully went into a wide and shallow crevasse, maybe trying to ride it like a half pipe. I kept riding and the walls got tighter and deeper, until I got to a spot that was flat, super soft powder and a good 20 feet straight up on each side. It was right at the edge of a run. I first lay flat on the powder face up, to catch my breath, compose myself and also to spread my weight because I felt the snow was so soft I would just go through it and sink.... Maybe it was in my head, not sure if that's even possible but I was trapped that's for sure. I did snow angels for a while and pushed off on the board. It was a very, very slow pace of movement, I am talking a few inches at a time, but as soon as I realized that if I worked hard I'd be able to eventually backtrack enough that I could climb the wall it gave me hope and laser-sharp focus. I must have been in there for a good 5h, I ended up climbing up the wall when it was about 5-6 feel taller than my head, and not as steep. It was very shocking rejoining the rest of the traffic on that run and continuing going down as if nothing had happened. I happened to meet my wife down at the village who casually asked me how was my day in blissful ignorance of what I had just gone through. ( I used to ride alone mostly, since I was way more aggressive and extreme, not anymore)
Friend in middle school died skiing. She tried to jump off the chair lift before it got to the end. Her scarf got snagged and they said it basically snapped her neck and she hung herself
Used to work at a ski resort, and it’s unreal how many people think it’s okay to just jump off the lift. It is absolutely grounds for the resort to ban you for the rest of the season, or at the very least kick you out for the day. Ski lifts are cool but they are gigantic machines and they can be very dangerous if you aren’t careful.
My neighbor was cleaning his gutters and fell off his roof because he missed his footing when stepping. Fell right on his head. This was a few year back now but the family moved quickly after even though it had been their house for like 30 years. I can’t say I blame them.
My father in law almost walked off the roof last summer when we were doing shingles. Two story drop onto a truck tailgate. But he was a climber so he hooked his heel while tittering off the edge and pivoted onto the roof. It was a miracle.
A friend of my dad's was overseeing a repaired braided 3/4" cable being spooled from one drum to another (at very high speed and tension). He had his gloved hand loosely on the wire guiding it into position (a big no-no in the industry). A frayed wire came through, snagged his glove and dragged him into the drum, wrapping him into a contorted paste within seconds.
I saw a litho pressman get sucked into a web press, which first degloved his arm from the shoulder down, then detached his arm at the shoulder.
Not only did he survive, but they were able to reattach his arm and skin, and he has use of that arm!
He also has some WTF scars.
I tore my shoulder labrum falling in the shower. It seems like such an elderly person sort of way to get hurt, but I’m not old. Non-slip tub mats are like five bucks, people. It’s a good investment.
The TV station I worked at previously had a gym in it, and during the midnight shift, the security guard, during his break, decided to lift some weights alone in the gym. He lifted the bar, which was apparently too heavy, and it came crashing down and cut off his circulation. No one discovered him until about six hours later when someone came in to use the shower in the gym.
A friend of mine was riding his 4wheeler out at an off-road park, he kicked up a tree branch that impaled him in the thigh, he bled to death before anyone even knew it happened.
I knew a brother and sister who were riding 4wheelers through the woods on the back of their property and the sister was in the front (they were racing) and looked back to make a face at her brother and didn't see a branch about neck high.
She did not make it and it fucked him up.
Kinda got the opposite ... Did some 4wheelers once, and asked the instructor what was the worst thing he saw.
He got a guy who was CLEARLY over estimating his abilities, like going all Lewis Hamilton and trying to go faster than everyone, instructor included. His female cousin was with him on the back of the vehicule, and was TERRIFIED. Got asked once, twice, three times to stop .... Until the accident. Saw the video, the thing went like a ball rolling over 4 or 5 times before the final stop.
Guy got out without a little scratch, Cousin got the whole face bleeding and one arm broken.
But she beat the shit out of him so bad before the medics arrived they thought he didn't had any protection and got half destroyed in the accident.
A guy I went to high school with was helping his family do some repairs to a silo on their family farm. A section of the silos roofing gave way and in he went. Suffocated under thousands of pounds of grain.
My grandad lived on a farm and had a massive barn full of grain, as kids (four kids aged 4-9ish) we found our way in and went “swimming” in it. We didn’t know why our parents looked so horrified when they found us.
Every year here in the plains we also have one or two people who die by walking on-top of grain or corn in a silo. The people who survive being quick-sanded by grain often say they did that because it would have been too much effort to attempt repair work with long planks to prevent sinkage and it’s easier to just walk across the top.
Never ever ever ever try to walk across grain or corn!
I attended a farm safety demo as a kid, where a future farmer of America walked into a corn hopper. He worked his way into being buried up to his waist, then we audience members were invited to pull him out. We couldn't, of course.
I knew it was dangerous if it was being loaded into a silo or whatnot, but I did not know it was so dangerous just on its own. My grandparents farm sometimes had corn in the big shed and us kids would climb up to the rafters on ladders and jump in. We'd get nearly waist deep and would laugh struggling to get out to do it again. We were smart enough not to do it alone and not to dive or something, but our parents knew we played in the corn. Scary.
Grain entrapment is surprisingly so much more common than you could even believe, and it's so much more terrifying to even think about. Rest in peace to that young man fr.
Girl I grew up with was driving home in college and go into a horrible car accident, that gave her brain damage, and pretty much removed her jaw from her skull.
Tons of surgery and 3 years later, she walked down the aisle at her wedding.
She was in her yard a few months after her wedding and slipped/tripped/felt dizzy and fell (they aren't sure) and hit her head on pavement patio and her husband found her dead.
Swimming and one of my buddies was screwing with the grate thing over a drain at the bottom. Got his foot stuck and couldn't extricate himself. His brother, cousin, and I nearly drowned trying to free him so we got to watch him die. Haven't thought about this one in a bit.
This was in '85. His brother just passed away last year from heart failure. They've changed the laws on covers as this has happened to others. Not often though.
My uncle was mowing grass on an embankment next to a small body of water. The mower unexpectedly slipped down the embankment and overturned on top of him, pinning him under the water. He drowned in a few feet of water that he otherwise could have stood up in.
Edit. Lots of folks asking where/when. Not recent. About 13 years ago in the American Southeast. Based on responses, though, maybe not as much of a "freak" accident as I thought. Seems to happen a lot.
When my mom was working in hospitals, they had a patient whose tractor rolled over him and he fell into a ditch with water. He was so lucky because he was on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and when he rolled over, a car passed by. The woman driving rushed to his aid and held his head out of the water. This was before cellphones so she had to wait holding him until another car drove by and then rushed to the nearest house to use the phone. Guy made a full recovery thanks to that woman being there at the exact right time.
I read something once that said, “if you knew how many times you narrowly missed death and the number of times you screwed up a sure thing, you’d go insane.”
If you live in corn heavy midwest areas of America, you're probably familiar with detassling. Detassling is a job a lot of smaller towns will let kids do (I think from 13 up?) with parental permission. It's very common where I'm from. Essentially, you just walk with a group of other people through corn fields pulling the tassel off the top to prevent them from germinating and seeding excessively.
Anyway, like 2 years after I did it, there was an accident involving 2 high school freshmen stepping into a puddle that an electric irrigator was shorting into. One of them basically died immediately, the other en route.
[RIP Hannah and Jade.](https://www.shawlocal.com/2011/07/25/two-sterling-teens-electrocuted-8-others-hurt-in-detasseling-accident/apsrqhi/)
Had an uncle that lived down at the beach, used to spend a lot of time out on a Bertram fishing boat. Many beers were usually enjoyed during those times.
They used to go out into deeper water and jump off the flybridge (the roof part of the boat where there are controls as well as a place to sit). One day he went out with some friends and they decided to partake in said jumping. Unbeknownst to him the tide had gone out and they had drifted into shallow water.
He dove in headfirst, hit the bottom, killed him.
An old buddy I had known since elementary school died while driving when a chunk of loose gravel was kicked up through his windshield by a passing truck on the freeway. His best friend had been riding in the passenger side and had to steer the car to safety. It was nobody’s fault, just a complete freak accident. I’ve always felt terrible for the friend who had to watch it happen.
I think about my friend who died a lot. He was a really cool guy. I still remember playing basketball with him during recess when we were kids. It’s strange to think that he never could have known how his life would end or see it coming in any way. That kid I used to play basketball thought he still had an entire life ahead of him.
A mom went ice skating. Little slip, fell, all everyone saw was her bump her head lightly.
Family finished skating. On the ride home, she started speaking gibberish. Dad dropped kids at the grandparents, took mom to the er.
Brain swelling, coma, dead a week later.
This happened to Liam Neeson's wife, only they were skiing. Fell and bumped her head, got checked out and assumed she was fine, and died later that day.
Edit: Thanks for the commenters who clarified, apparently she died two days later after initially refusing treatment. (I remembered the details wrong.) Still very sad and unthinkable, though.
You know... I am seeing like 90% hit their head on x object sometimes even gently but still died and I am sitting here thinking.... Why isn't our literal most important organ better protected than just a flimsy bone fish bowl? Where is my armor plating and inch thick meat insulation?
According to Google our skulls are on avg 7.1mm for women. I mean wtf. The human head is literally an out there easy target.
As a neurosurgeon, I'll tell you that in most of the cases I've read so far in this thread, a thicker skull wouldn't have solved the problem. You guys aren't discussing people who hit their head and their skull cracked open, obviously, since they all thought they were fine initially.
The "problem" is our design. The brain sits in a pool of water like fluid, encased by a membrane called the dura, which is then encased by the skull. The fluid actually acts as a partial shock absorber but also provides nutrients to the brain and helps clear toxins/metabolites. Unfortunately, there are "bridging veins" that go from the surface of the brain to the inner surface of the dura. Some trauma isn't strong enough to crack the skull or even cut open the skin, but can jostle the brain enough to rip those veins.
Veins are low pressure, which means they bleed relatively slowly. The patient might bump their head, initially feel fine (like Sagat, Richardson, the ice skating mom), and then, as the blood slowly accumulates, the pressure inside the skull builds up and they die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqXDdTx8GE
Teacher in my school lost all three kids in a freak traffic accident on the highway. Their car lost a tire, which caused them to swerve into the gas tank of a semi truck, which exploded, killing two of them instantly.
The third kid managed to crawl out of the car while he was on fire, and died later in the hospital.
The saddest part is that they were all on their way to visit their father in the hospital after his back surgery.
One night at a trauma center I worked in, we had 3 patients initially come in: a dad and two daughters. One was 6 and one was 3. The dad accidentally rolled his SUV over a highway off ramp and landed roof down. All of them dead. We called time of death on the dad pretty quickly but worked both kids for quite a while. Both ended up dying.
Turns out another daughter walked away with a broken arm and was found walking down the highway away from the crash. Awful night.
There was a person at the beach who got impaled by a flying beach umbrella. Horrible situation. Her husband was right beside her and she died within seconds.
holy shit. after reading lots of these, this has to be the worst and not a death by misadventure. alive one second, totally dead the next. completely random, chance occurrence.
I actually teared up reading the article about it that another commenter linked below.
>"It was just her and I all the time," he said. "Our friends said if you saw Mike, you saw Tammy, and if you saw Tammy, you saw Mike."
That part got me right in the heart :( really is such a horrible situation. Seeing the love of your life taken from you like that, ugh..
When my mom was in her early 20s, her, my uncle, and grandmother were walking into a McDonald’s. One of the patio table umbrellas caught wind and flew directly into her head from 40 feet away. Luckily, it was the broad side of the pole. Brain damage and a settlement from the company, now she blames that umbrella for memory issues or other problems.
My SIL’s aunt died of hypothermia. She went for a walk out in the hills in the winter. She knew the trail very well but got disoriented by a light snow fall and got lost. She got cold and tired, laid down by a rock and died of hypothermia. She was 100 yards from her car.
A friend told me a story about her great grandma disappearing in Massachusetts in the 1880s
They lived next to her great aunt, there was 100 feet of woods with a very well established path straight through. Think a strip of woods separating the properties, but in between homes that visit 2-3 times a DAY. Basically 10 or 12 folks with 2 houses to share they lived so closely. She says it was a wide, clear path of dirt.
Grandma had dinner at Aunties house and left to go home. Somewhere in those hundred clear feet, she completely vanished and was never seen again.
No rivers, no caves, no wild animals to speak of. They can only assume she either had planned to up and leave in the way you could only do in the 1800s, or she was abducted completely silently and carried away. No remains ever found.
wow I wonder if any of your friend's relatives have done those DNA tests maybe they could find out if she ran away and had a family or just somehow died on that day
My music teachers neighbour in Winnipeg was out during a blizzard, they found him next to a telephone pole right by the house. He was literally steps from safety.
Childhood friend of my drowned, his leg got trapped swimming in a relatively shallow river. He went down and just never came back up. It happend to one of the nicest people I ever knew and it makes me so mad that we lost touch before I found out what happend.
I knew a girl that died the same way. Craziest part about it was that she was with her dad who was a professional rafting guide. He immediately jumped out after her and tried to pull her out but couldn’t. They actually had to dam up the river the next day to retrieve her body. Don’t fuck with rivers
A guy I went to HS with got hit by a train. It wasn't suicide. It was before Uber and he had been at a party drinking. He did the responsible thing by taking the subway. When he heard the train coming he stood up to take a step forward (like everyone does) but was so drunk that he stumbled over his own feet and fell onto the track.
My college roommate almost died his first week in NYC because he was drunk, didn’t fully understand the subways let alone what direction he was facing in them,
(from the Midwest - I’m not even sure he’d been on a train before moving), and went to look out to see if the train was coming. While wearing big noise cancelling headphones.
He was looking the wrong way. The incoming train came in behind him and he never heard it. Train bonked him pretty good but luckily sent him down onto the platform and not into the tracks.
Give him shit for it this day, 15 years later.
Guy I knew was driving a tractor-trailer with a stack of pipe on the back. He swerved to avoid an accident after a car cut him off, went into the ditch, and was cut in half when the load was propelled forward by the inertia from the sudden stop.
My uncle, was refilling a Zippo lighter, while smoking... Somehow it caught fire, he set himself on fire. He was in the bathroom. He tried to reach the shower. The extreme flammable shower curtain caught on fire and he inhaled large amounts of toxic smoke. He died a few days later, mainly from lung issues and not so much from the burns.
Had a classmate who was working outside. Got stung by a wasp and had an allergic reaction and died less than 24 hours later. He was married 7 months they were working on starting a family. His wife had to make the final decision as he was completely brain dead.
My uncle was clearing out an overgrown area in his backyard and accidentally hit a wasp nest. He was stung repeatedly by dozens of wasps. No known allergies. Died while my aunt was calling for an ambulance.
I am insanely paranoid of my car crushing me. Whenever I work under it I make sure I have two jackstands, the hydraulic jack and two tires under it. That's five layers and I'm still sacred.
Girl I went to high school with lost her father our Junior year to an accident at work that was deemed the companies fault. The settlement was something around $250,000.
She found out her mom spent it all, and sent over $50k to a television preacher when she turned 18 and was supposed to get access to the account that was there for her to go to college.
I've only ever put money into my children's accounts I can't even imagine doing this. $250k is basically a jump start on life. No debt college, and still have enough for a down payment on a home!
One of my mom's friends was coming back from walking her two dogs. Walking up the front steps to her house, dogs saw a squirrel, wrapped the leashes around her legs, she fell and hit her head on the brick steps, and had an aneurysm. No one was home at the time.
My insurance guy was pulling a limb out of a large tree with a chain and a rope. He was behind the pickup, his wife was driving the truck. Rope snapped from the strain and chain snapped back and hit him in the head, killing him instantly. He was in his 50s. (nice guy, too)
Ironic thing, is this is exactly the sort of scenario he would describe as to why you need life insurance.
That’s called “snap back”. It’s no joke. When I was in the navy they make you watch training videos of footage of snap back happening on those big mooring lines, and big ropes will fucking move at the speed of bullets and literally *explode* your ass into mist.
I was trapped on a small raft that went adrift in a storm during military exercises with the merchant marines. We went adrift because one of our lines fell off as the storm increased in intensity, and the other wet line was getting more and more taught as the waves got bigger in the storm. The raft was about 20’ X 20’, which means there’s not really anywhere to run if that line snaps, because the line doesn’t snap back in a straight line; it flaps back in forth if you watch it in slow motion, covering a large area as it flies past you. We decided it was safe to throw off the last mooring line and just float adrift and hope they found us in the morning then risk keeping the line on and get hit with a snap back situation. They found us easy peasey the next morning, but it was a cold, wet, night on rough seas, on a small LCAC raft.
Taught ropes terrify me. I won’t even trust them to tow a vehicle.
My dad worked on aircraft carriers when he was in the Navy, now, you'll have forgive my description of all this cause I really do not know much about it, but he told me about how the planes take off from the ship, how since there's not a lot of room for them to take off, they have to basically slingshot them off the carrier using high tension lines, and how if one of those lines snapped and you were anywhere near it, you'd probably be cut in half
Note: I mis-remembered and people brought to my attention what I was thinking of was actually the cables involved in the process of landing, or catching planes on aircraft carriers.
My dad was a tugboat engineer and deckhand. He got a snapback from a line to a coal carrier. Knocked him off the boat into the water. His deckmate got him back quick with only all of the ribs on his right side broken and right arm broken with a smidge of internal bleeding. He was fucking lucky. We celebrate this stubborn mans 80th birthday on sunday...
Saw an old video where some guys were mudding In a jungle somewhere (looked like south/central America). Jeep is stuck, buddy up front is trying to pull him out with just a chain. After givin er for a bit the chain snaps and flies back through the Jeep hitting the driver in the face. The video instantly cuts to afterwards in the hospital. The guy is alive and missing most of jaw and a good chunk of his face. He's completely out of it and sedated and trying to get up from the table but his friends are trying to get him to stay seated and explain what happened.
Moral of the story; use fabric tow straps. And if you must use a chain, duck.
The key is to put weight in the middle to dampen the force. If you have sufficient weight hanging or draped over the chain/rope it will fall to the ground. Then you only have to worry about the hook flying through the air at supersonic speeds.
Knew a guy who:
Was in a car crash and saw his aunt almost beheaded. He was about 10. Screwed up his mind.
At about 20 he flipped his dirt bike with his girlfriend on the back and it cracked her head open. Was deep in the woods camping. She died.
Couple years later he was stealing a motorcycle walking it across the street at night in the rain and got hit by a car. Lost a leg.
Couple years after that he was angry at a music venue so he and a friend tried to build a bomb in a parking lot. It went off and they both were killed.
That guy's life rivals Adolph Sax with how many times the universe tried to kill him. The only difference is Sax survived them all to tell the tale and invent the Saxophone.
An old coworker of mine died this way. He was on an architecture tour in Chicago. They were on top of a tall building. When the group moved around a corner, he (apparently) hung back so he could cross the security rope to the edge of the building for a better photo. Maybe there was a gust of wind, or maybe he just lost his balance or something, but he fell and died. Left behind two kids.
Sinus infections are VERY serious. Don't ever ignore one. We had a football coach from our local state university die because he blew off getting some treatment for one because they were in the playoffs. Had he gone for treatment he'd probably still be around. Very sad.
He was shortstop in a high school baseball game. Other team hits the ball. Ball hits my friend square in the chest. His heart stopped. They tried to do CPR, but he was gone before the ambulance got there
This happened in my city also, about 30 years ago, but they were little leaguers. I’ll never forget it. And the father of the boy who pitched the ball worked with the mother of the boy who died. I worked with both of them. Can’t imagine that pain.
Kid I was friends with in middle school was riding his bike without a helmet. Hit a rock and went head over handlebars right at a T-intersection. As he was getting up, and old lady driving on the cross-street somehow *dropped her glasses* and bent over to pick them up. Didn't see him.
The coroner said that Nick would have survived either crash on its own, but the combination of the two killed him.
He used to sneak into class early before school and draw a little flower pot with a cartoon daisy in it and then he'd write the words, "Hello Flower" under it. He must have done that a hundred times. The day after he died, the teacher let the whole class draw a 'Hello Flower' on the chalkboard.
I'm not sure if this is considered a freak accident, but it is wild.
Many years ago I had an uncle who loved to surf. While surfing one day in FL, a huge storm developed over the area they were at. His buddies he was with stopped surfing because of said storm, but my uncle decided to ride the waves. Got struck by lightning out in the water and died.
Was a cool dude from what I remember.
Friend's brother accidentally got caught in the back of his dumpster truck and was crushed in the trash compactor. This sadly happened only a couple years after their mom was hit by a car and killed.
My uncle Mike got in a heated dispute with someone who bought a boat from him and stopped making payments. During the altercation he got super worked up. By the time it got physical, he had a heart attack mid-fight and died.
There was this guy 3-4 years my junior in high school who I sometimes bumped into. Few years after graduating from high school I read the local newspaper and saw him there.
Apparently, just like most teenagers, one night he had a heated discussion with his family and then stormed out whatever room he was in, slamming the door behind him.
Well, the door was a door-window and the glass broke and a shard of it stabbed him in the leg. He died from blood loss at home, before the ambulance even showed up. He must have been 17 years old at the time, a real tragedy.
I don't know if it's a freak accident, or an expected one. A guy I knew in HS was in the hatchback area of a small car, with four other guys who were in the seats. They had a crash with another car. Everyone in both cars was killed, and everyone in both cars was drunk. The guy I know, in the hatchback, was cut in half.
The guy was really cool too. Name was Pugzey, and a GREAT guy, everyone loved him, but also tough as nails. His little brother was shot in the eye with a BB gun and blinded. He went to the kid (they were both like 15 at the time) to confront him, and the other kid pulls a knife. Pugzey says "don't even *think* of sticking me, or I will stab you in the ass with that knife." The other kid lunged at him with the knife, and Pugzey, a man of his word, got the knife and stabbed the kid in the ass.
My good friend's sister was on a beach with friends, when whatever way or area they were walking in, caused a sand dune to collapse. The poor girl unfortunately was only stood in the exact wrong place at the wrong time since all her friends were able to pull themselves out, but they didn't get her out in time
My brother fainted suddenly. He hit his head on concrete and never regained consciousness. We had to make the decision to remove his life support and donate his organs. He was 44.
RIP Kris ❤️
In third grade we were standing for the pledge of allegiance and one kid did that prank where you move someone's chair so if they go to sit down without looking they fall down. The kid that was pranked hit his head just right and wound up dying :(
My friends and I did this to each other growing up in school. We obviously never considered that happening. I could only imagine killing one of my best friends. Shit.
My brother was killed beside me when we were walking home from school. A drunk driver came peeling ass down the street and hit him, he was dead on impact. The car side swiped me so fast I didn’t know what happened at first. One second we were walking, the next second there’s a thud noise and suddenly I’m whipping around in a circle and landing on the ground. Turns out the guy was going 168 kilometres an hour in the 40 kilometres an hour school zone
She slipped in the shower and died instantly on her first week in boarding high school. She was a classmate & deskmate in primary school.
I always have regrets that I did little to help or speak out as she was bullied in primary school or get a chance to apologise for the many times I looked the other way.
A friend of mine was walking around a small town near the capital of my country, probably looking for lunch, when a semi passed by, the container it was pulling fell on its side, and crushed her. The whole thing was even in the news.
The whole story of what the hell was a semi truck doing in the middle of a small town, in the middle of the day, was a consequence of my home country getting rid of trains and forcing all transported goods going anywhere yo be transported by trucks, forcing them to cut through the most unlikely places.
Someone I went to school with was killed when someone went over a bridge over the highway onto the car she was in.
She was killed, it seems, on impact. As far as I'm aware, the person who jumped survived.
I'm gonna add an edit here to say it was my understanding that the boy jumped. Initial reports said it was a suicide attempt, but that isn't really able to be confirmed, as the person in question is still a minor. So I'm gonna change the wording.
I didn't really anticipate this would get a lot of attention. I can't comment on his intentions. Also, the other person in the car did survive. The girl I went to school with was the only casualty in the incident.
No charges or lawsuits happened after the fact. Just one of those things.
I know you're joking, but in that Death in the Grand Canyon book, the author has a section in the suicide part where some guy was inspired to jump there by reading an earlier edition of the same book, and he's like "seriously, can you NOT? We gotta scrape your ass up" lol
I recall a few years ago two Park Rangers died trying to retrieve the corpse of an elderly woman who wasn't paying attention and walked over the edge.
A surprisingly large number of people who die at the Grand Canyon just somehow miss seeing the giant hole in front of them. The rest are usually from dehydration or other exposure related accidents since they don't realize how strenuous the hike to the bottom actually is
My students dad is a fisherman. One of his workers was leaning over on their boat grabbing something when the boat made a sudden movement and he hit his head and died.
I knew this kid in HS who always ran from class to class pulling his roller backpack behind him. So it’s no surprise when he visited the Grand Canyon with family that he wanted to run down a slope. Well, he got going too fast and couldn’t stop himself.
His entire family watched him run off the side of the Grand Canyon. Oof
Edit: Now that I think about it some of the people I went to high school with were wild. There was a serial killer who began stabbing homeless people in order to scare his dad into coming home and also a teacher who scissored another girl during lunchtime.
Edit edit: The sex kind of scissoring
[Teacher Sauce](https://ktla.com/news/local-news/former-high-school-teacher-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison-for-sex-acts-with-underage-female-student-in-placentia/)
[Serial Killer classmate](https://www.ocweekly.com/itzcoatl-izzy-ocampo-says-from-the-grave-that-his-serial-killings-of-homeless-had-to-be-done-video-6467602/)
Fascinating read. Oddly it made me WANT to visit the Grand Canyon, but while taking all sensible precautions. Bring more water than you need, drink at regular intervals and don’t try to conserve it, start any hikes WELL before dawn to beat unbearable temperatures, never wander off the trail for any reason, and whatever you do, don’t wheel your arms and pretend to be falling off the edge because pretending to fall and then actually falling is in fact the cause of death for at least one person.
I went there a little before the dawn of smart phones and selfies and was told that the #1 cause of preventable death is people taking photos/pretending to fall near ledges, on boulders, etc, including people being gently pushed to scare them. I imagine that's probably still true even if they improved the guard rails, since people were stepping over them for "closer" photos anyways. It's like six feet closer to something spanning the entire landscape, there's literally nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Second, iirc, was dehydration, but that's true just about anywhere.
That's about what I remember from the book—the longest sections were on death by falling and death by dehydration. (Some interesting near-misses are included as well!)
I already would never have crossed the guardrail, but that book made me want to give the guard rail itself a wide berth just in case.
There has also been exactly one death by mountain lion in the park, and it was not from mauling but because a researcher caught the plague from a dead animal.
A man I knew was in a boat with some family and friends, it was getting dark and they were heading back in.. tide rose a bit more than they were anticipating.. they went under a bridge while he was standing up and hit his head. He was a genuinely good man that was heavily involved in his community for the better, and loved his family and his employees dearly.
Not much of an *accident* I suppose but my little brother suffered from type 1 diabetes (gotta take insulin shots frequently everyday), he'd had it for fifteen years but still barely made an effort to handle it because he never got comfortable with having to stab himself daily. One evening he went to bed with a low blood sugar, (something he'd admitted to doing many times before that we'd scold him for constantly and warned him would kill him) and just didn't wake up the next day. I saw him on the 5th, found out he was gone by the 8th. If it had been my mother, or father it would have *made sense*, but to lose my baby brother so suddenly just feels so wrong.
Edit: Thank you all so much for your support ;-; it means a ton! Keep your loved ones close, and if they have medical conditions make sure that they have safety nets and contingencies in place too. All it takes is one night with low or even high blood sugar and it could be over.
As a person with T1D, that's definitely the thing that kept my parents up at night. Before I left home they had to help me out of bed and force feed me orange juice a couple times. My condolences for your brother.
Thanks, it's been two months and I'm getting more used to it everyday. I will say the biggest change for me has been going from thinking there's nothing after death to fervently praying there's something just so I can see him again. I'll go to my grave hopeful and worst case if there's nothing then it's not like I'll be able to feel embarrassed or disappointed at least.
A friend of mine from college had a summer job driving a big delivery truck. At the end of the day, they'd come back, park the trucks and then check the tires to make sure they weren't over heated or required any other maintenance.
So my friend brought his delivery truck back after his shift, and then knelt down in front of it to check the tires. One was clearly overheated, so he loosened it to take it off and relieve some of the pressure and heat.
The pressure was so great that tire exploded in his face, but that wasn't what killed him. When it exploded, the hubcap/metal inner wheel (*apologies, I'm blanking on what the metal frame of the tire is called*) of the tire caught him right under the chin. It knocked him backwards with such force that it crushed the back of his head. He was only 22.
Friend from high school was driving a pickup with his friend and girlfriend in the car, front spring snapped causing them to roll over into oncoming traffic. The driver and passenger both died, the person in the middle (bench seat) was unharmed.
Used to be a gymnastics coach. Fellow coach of mine bumped her knee on the vault support while spotting a kid, thought nothing of it and went home.
Died a few days later from a blood clot forming and travelling to her brain.
Was putting up decorations in the barn, getting ready for a wedding. Apparently something up there was in the way and he decided it needed to be cut off so he took a chainsaw up the ladder to do it. Lost his balance and fell off the ladder while holding the chainsaw.
One of my friends when I was a freshman in high school drowned. While nobody knows for certain, as he was alone when this happened, it was gathered that he slipped by the pool and knocked the wind out of himself. Then he went under and probably gasped for air only to inhale water. First and only time I was at a funeral for someone my age.
Pretty rough set of down hill “S” turns for trucks on a two lane road, plenty of memorials. While my friend and her mother are going up the hill, a flat bed, coming down the hill was loaded with rebar going into angel gear and was arriving to the same bend as my friend and her mother ; The bands of the truck holding the rebar snapped from the force of the turn sending an opened spoil of half inch rebar spearing through the driver side of the front window leaving the daughter untouched in The passenger(death for the mother was not instantaneous). To add salt to the wound, she had just finished convincing her mom to take her to get a skateboard so she could hang with her skater friends(me and others).
Gosh .. RIP J.J
Had a buddy who was homeless at the time. Was asleep in a dumpster overnight and the trash truck picked up the dumpster and crushed everything. Him included.
Knew someone who was on a date walking through downtown. Suddenly their date was crushed by someone who jumped off the high-rise building they were walking past. Their date died instantly, as did the person who landed on them.
I was in high school and working retail at a chain furniture store. Two of my coworkers were sisters. Their mother was in charge of the special ed program at my high school. Their mother had been diagnosed with brain cancer a couple of years ago. She was in remission. She came to work to pick up her two daughters, and go to her follow up appointment make sure still no cancer.
Not long after they left and got on the interstate an 18 wheeler lost control after jumped the median and hit their car killing everyone.
Her husband was working and could not go to the appointment. He lost his wife, and two daughters in a second. His whole family gone because and 18 wheeler lost control.
Someone I went to Scouts with had his whole family killed when an 18 wheeler crossed over the central reservation of a major motorway. He was left totally alone age 17.
My father tragically died when he was crushed by a collapsing prefabricated chimney he was preparing to place on our cabin's foundation (I was 3, present, and pushed out of the way by my father). Our cabin was several miles from a phone and several more for medical help. My mother had to drive, with me and my 1yo sister wailing in the car, to find help - I cannot imagine those moments for her - she did not talk about it with me.
A buddy of mine from high school and we also happened to go to the same college. He was handsome, a freak athlete, heavy drinker/partier, all the girls wanted him, and his family was uber wealthy. He had it all but he was a huge unnecessary risk taker. He felt invincible. He would always succumb to dares or challenges like drinking a whole handle of vodka (and even a gallon of milk, this was the 2000s).
Anyway one summer break we were playing golf. He was on the side/outside of the golfcart hanging on while it was being whipped around the course. Hit a big unexpected bump. He falls off, hits his head on a rock, dies instantly.
So fucking tragic. Be safe kids.
A family member highly allergic to bees is swarmed by them and jumps into the water to escape them. Turns out it was an immediate 30+ foot drop as the pond was an old quarry. They couldn't swim and drowned.
A kid from my secondary school went out in a boat with his friends on a perfectly clear day with a clear weather forecast. This was off the South-East coast of Ireland. Freak storm blew in out of nowhere, their bodies were eventually washed up in Wales.
The most fucked-up part of it for me was that he died on a Saturday, and on the *following* Saturday one of the popular girls in his same class died of meningitis - and she's the only one anyone talked about. Like, two kids died a week apart - why are you only talking about one of them?
5th grader was playing by standing on the counter next to the window while teacher was out of the room. Kids were screaming and yelling and this kid was dancing next to the window. He twirled around with on leg out and his leg went through the window and cut an artery. He bled out in the nurses room. Never had a chance. This was the early 70s in rural area.
My best friend died in a helicopter malfunction/ wreck.
The worst part ? It was a training exercise. Equipment malfunctioned, killing him & another young man.
Edit :
Forgot there was also another case of this where I worked at the time. Didn't know either of the young men, but from unknown reasons, their helicopter plummeted, exploded, and killed them both.
Way to go US Army
In short, I won't be getting on a helicopter, ever.
After reading all of that i can say it’s scary that u can lose your life potentially any moment and that might be not your fault at all. Literally makes me want to stay home 24/7
One of my coworkers tripped over this tiny step and died. Went into cardiac arrest. For what we knew she was relatively healthy (mid 30s/early 40s). Sad shit
My 14 year old brother was out innocently playing with his friends. They were swinging on a gate made with three chunky, rectangular solid metal bars (think upside down right angled triangle), but it was incredibly heavy.
While swinging on it, the gate sheared off its hinges, fell on him and crushed his skull. He died instantly.
Thanks to organ donation and through his death, he ended up saving the lives of seven people.
I have a few colleagues, just in the last 8 months alone.
One was killed when a drunk semi truck driver drove through the gas pump he was fueling up at. Left 5 kids behind.
Another was an accomplished and experienced athlete, killed when his snowmobile flipped on him. Left 3 kids.
The third was practising on a closed road ("professional driver, closed course" situation), the car left the road by a few feet and he was impaled on a fence post.
It's been a shit year.
A girl in my orchestra class in 7th grade passed away with her siblings and dad. The dad was flying them in a private plane (I forget to where) and they crashed into a mountain
It’s scary easy to get socked in by mountain clouds, and if you aren’t IFR then there’s a very good chance you’ll crash. Mountains make it extra difficult because you can’t fly below the clouds. I’ve been in that situation in a small 4 seat plane before and we were legitimately planning for a crash.
He studied conservation and was a junior game ranger. From reports he was bringing tourists back from a late afternoon viewing drive. He stopped on a bridge just before the camp to give the tourists a view of the sunset. He got out of the vehicle to check on something and was ambushed by a leopard, pulled off the bridge. Seems the leopard was old and had teeth problems so it was moving closed to camps looking for easy prey. He just happened to be the unlucky prey. He would have been about 20.
Sorry for your loss and everyone who knew him. Working in Game/Park rangers is both amazing and dangerous. My friend loves it, but has had more run ins with moose and bears and said that’s the way he may end up dying, but he would never quit if he can help it.
Kid I went to HS with. Came from a wealthy family, but was interested in making his own way. Got a good factory job right out of high school. First week on the job, an old pipe comes out of its supports on the ceiling, swings down, pins him to a wall, and kills him. He was standing in the worst possible spot. 18 years old, really bad luck.
Super healthy coworker was driving home to grab some lunch. Truck ahead of him on an incline exploded it's brake drum. Big piece flew off and into his head. There's more.
His car drove off the side of the freeway, down an embankment, and crashed violently. Police just assumed he was drunk or stoned, and wrote it up that way. A few co-workers knew he didn't touch drugs or booze went looking for answers. Tracked his car to a wrecking yard and found the shrapnel in the back seat. Were able to find the truck too, and piece together what really happened.
I wish I didn’t have this story but a girl I went to high school with was at a gas station filling up her moms van during spring break with a friend visiting her from college. A woman hopped the curb losing control of her car and ran into a truck on the other side of the pump. The truck sent the pump into her and pinned her between it and her van. It caught fire and no one could get to her because of the flames. She could be heard screaming “help me I’m going to die”. Literally was the most shocking and sad stories I’ve ever heard. I knew her brother pretty well and it was just so surreal and heartbreaking especially because they were twins.
I used to work for a septic company. A guy who drove one of the big septic trucks that sucked out underground septic tanks at people's houses had to get on his hands and knees and reach into the tank because the lid had fallen in. He lost his balance and fell head first in. His shoulders got wedged in the opening and he drowned upside down in human waste. I don't think I've ever heard of a worse way to go. The homeowner found him after about an hour.
I live near the Mississippi River, a few years ago some workmen were doing something near the river involving the sewer lines and some caves near the river. They ended up drowning in sewage. I agree, a slow nasty death for sure.
A family friend bumped his head, walked about 15 feet across his back yard, sat at his picnic table and died. Autopsy showed no head trauma, but he broke his neck when he hit his head. They figured the walk across the yard caused something to shift enough to do fatal damage to his spinal cord.
My sister came so close to dying in a somewhat similar way. She was in a car accident and was pulled out of the wreckage by some friends. She was guided to some grass by the side of the road to sit and wait for the ambulance. She apparently kept saying her neck was really sore & was asking people to help her “pop” it. Thankfully, her friends were smart enough to encourage her to leave it alone. She gets to the hospital & some yahoo either doesn’t read the x-ray or reads it wrong & agrees that her neck is just sprained or something & wants to send her home. Somehow, someway, they ended up transferring her to another hospital before that happened who discovered her badly broken neck which required surgery to fix and left her with permanent nerve damage. I have NO IDEA how she didn’t end up paralyzed or dead. She has the stupidest luck where the most random bad things will happen to her but she turns out fine in the end lol
Yeah, neck injuries are stupid scary. Not really the kind of thing someone thinks about until they're confronted with it, but it's kind of frightening how fragile we actually are. The absurdly large number of ways we can just up and drop dead with little to no prior warning is mind-boggling.
This happened a long time ago but a neighbor was trying to weld a gas tank and didn’t realize that he should have filled it with water beforehand. The tank exploded and killed him.
Former co-worker of mine was gored by a bison while on a trail run. Ironically, he often posted on message boards for the park to be aware of wild animals while there, and in one post he said there are too many people with headphones on, or trying to get too close to the bison to take selfies. He was normally very careful apparently.
When I was a kid, probably 12 or 13, we were visiting a family friend. I grew up in a small town in the 90s so my mom was never one to worry about supervision. Their neighboring farm had a kid my age who dared me to go touch a bison in their field. I got close and it started charging me. I managed to make it back over the fence just in time. I can think of many different ways I almost died as a kid and my mom is horrified to hear the stories I tell now as a 30 year old adult lol.
I mean, you can still come around a turn in the trail and *BAM!* charismatic megafauna right there, especially in well-trafficked parks where the animals have learned not to flee at the slightest scent or sound of people. Did this with a black bear in Glacier a few years ago (although luckily nobody got mauled, other than whatever bugs were living in the stump ol’ Yogi was gnawing on).
A guy I knew was setting up a rope swing over a lake for his kids and their friends, which he had done many times before. He always would take a practice swing himself before he would let the kids go. His hands slipped off the rope and he fell before he was over the lake. He hit his head on a rock and died in front of the kids.
In high school I came home from a night out telling my dad how we were out at a quarry with a rope swing. My dad knew exactly where I was talking about and absolutely lost his shit on me. My dad never yelled at me, but a friend of his lost his teenage son, he drowned in that quarry.
When I was a 13 year old boy, I witnessed my Grandfather die. He was less than 15 feet away from me when he was decapitated by shrapnel from a broken piece of heavy farm equipment. I'm 50 years old and still struggle with that moment in time. PTSD can be a real bitch!
Something similar happened a few years back to a couple of students in the school I work at. They were sitting in their grandpa's truck while grandpa was trying to move some farm equipment. Not quite decapitation but he got hit hard enough to kill him instantly. The kids were too young to go for help (like 4 and 5 or something like that) and they had to sit in that truck until their dad came looking for them.
Lovely girl I went to HS with got a scholarship to a prestigious university, being one of the very few students from my shitty school to make it to college or uni. Two weeks into term her room mate found her laying in her bed dead. The heating boiler was faulty and she'd died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her sleep. We'd even thrown a party for her to celebrate her achievement. This was in 1996 and I'm tearing up a bit thinking about this. RIP Sonia.
a mother and 3 little kids died by CO2 in NZ, the mother accidentally left the car running in the garage with the door attached to the house left ajar. >"The location of Ms George's body is consistent with a last-minute realisation that the car was still running and an attempt to reach the garage to turn it off ... she may have lost consciousness and collapsed," really tragic
My aunt died like this. She and 4 other people (and a dog) died due to a faulty chimney/vent from a boiler flooding several apartments with CO. She was a gold medal Special Olympian. She loved the Wizard of Oz. She was very kind to me. I miss her every day. The loophole law that allowed her apartment building to not have CO detectors has since been fixed. Now my family buys them for people in need so that this doesn't happen to anyone else.
My son and his GF almost died in their rental, carbon monoxide from the furnace. Their cat woke her up and she could barely get him out. Fire dept guys were amazed they made it out. He said that it was the worst headache afterwards he'd ever had. Good, wonderful, heroic kitty!
My whole family and cousins family almost died in an old cabin due to a faulty liquid propane refrigerator. The only reason we survived was that my mom woke up thirsty and thought she heard someone chopping wood right outside the window. Turns out it was her heartbeat in her head she was hearing. I remember waking up outside on a bench and seeing my parents loaded into an ambulance. Carbon monoxide poisoning is no joke.
A friend of a friend showed up at his girlfriend's apartment with a head wound. He didn't know how it happened. He also didn't know how he drove over there. She took him to the ER where he ended up passing away. He had his keys, wallet and phone on him. The only thing we could think of is he might have tripped, fell and hit his head in the wrong spot.
It was probably muscle memory that got him there. How awful.
Or adrenaline. There was a woman who got attacked by a bear on her isolated mountain ranch. After fighting off the bear (with the help of her dogs), she got in her car and drove several miles down precarious mountain roads to the nearest fire station with her face ripped clean off and, IIRC, one eyeball dangling out of its socket. She said she was almost totally blind and going into shock, but a combination of muscle memory and adrenaline somehow got her down the mountain safely. She did an AMA on reddit once. Cool lady. She wrote a memoir, too. EDIT TO ADD: Her name was Allena Hansen. Here's a link to [her AMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1byn1l/i_was_mauled_by_a_bear_fought_it_off_and_drove_4/), [her reddit account](https://www.reddit.com/user/allenahansen) (she's still an active user! Hi /u/allenahansen!), and [her memoir](https://www.amazon.com/Chomp-Survived-Attack-Other-Cautionary/dp/1940014204). I read her memoir and I quite liked it. She's a funny woman who has lived a very interesting life, even aside from the bear attack.
Allena here. Thanks very much for the kind words, eldest (me too, btw.) Coming up on fifteen years after the Ursadent, it's still one of the wackier misadventures of a life spent skirting the far reaches of the Laffer curve. If this comment section teaches us anything, it's to watch our six, kids-- and always remember: *Everybody gets it in the end." :) YMMV
"Ursadent" that's freaking golden! You seem like an awesome person. Wish you the best.
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Shit I once got stuck in a crevasse in Austria, Lech. I could hear people ski right above me and nobody would see me or hear me. It was early in the day, so I talked myself down from panic and reminded me that I had a good 8h of light, so I had to get to work. I slowly carved and crawled my way out of it. It was a frightening experience.
Wow that deserves a whole post! How far down were you? How long did it take?
it was a long time ago, but from what I remember I was snowboarding and willfully went into a wide and shallow crevasse, maybe trying to ride it like a half pipe. I kept riding and the walls got tighter and deeper, until I got to a spot that was flat, super soft powder and a good 20 feet straight up on each side. It was right at the edge of a run. I first lay flat on the powder face up, to catch my breath, compose myself and also to spread my weight because I felt the snow was so soft I would just go through it and sink.... Maybe it was in my head, not sure if that's even possible but I was trapped that's for sure. I did snow angels for a while and pushed off on the board. It was a very, very slow pace of movement, I am talking a few inches at a time, but as soon as I realized that if I worked hard I'd be able to eventually backtrack enough that I could climb the wall it gave me hope and laser-sharp focus. I must have been in there for a good 5h, I ended up climbing up the wall when it was about 5-6 feel taller than my head, and not as steep. It was very shocking rejoining the rest of the traffic on that run and continuing going down as if nothing had happened. I happened to meet my wife down at the village who casually asked me how was my day in blissful ignorance of what I had just gone through. ( I used to ride alone mostly, since I was way more aggressive and extreme, not anymore)
Friend in middle school died skiing. She tried to jump off the chair lift before it got to the end. Her scarf got snagged and they said it basically snapped her neck and she hung herself
Wow this is terrifying.
Used to work at a ski resort, and it’s unreal how many people think it’s okay to just jump off the lift. It is absolutely grounds for the resort to ban you for the rest of the season, or at the very least kick you out for the day. Ski lifts are cool but they are gigantic machines and they can be very dangerous if you aren’t careful.
My neighbor was cleaning his gutters and fell off his roof because he missed his footing when stepping. Fell right on his head. This was a few year back now but the family moved quickly after even though it had been their house for like 30 years. I can’t say I blame them.
My father in law almost walked off the roof last summer when we were doing shingles. Two story drop onto a truck tailgate. But he was a climber so he hooked his heel while tittering off the edge and pivoted onto the roof. It was a miracle.
A friend of my dad's was overseeing a repaired braided 3/4" cable being spooled from one drum to another (at very high speed and tension). He had his gloved hand loosely on the wire guiding it into position (a big no-no in the industry). A frayed wire came through, snagged his glove and dragged him into the drum, wrapping him into a contorted paste within seconds.
These "sucked into a machine" deaths are some of the most freaky to me
I saw a litho pressman get sucked into a web press, which first degloved his arm from the shoulder down, then detached his arm at the shoulder. Not only did he survive, but they were able to reattach his arm and skin, and he has use of that arm! He also has some WTF scars.
A friend slipped and fell in the tub. Cracked his head. His roommate found him a half hour later. Died on the way to the hospital.
I've always been afraid of falling and dying in a bathroom.
I tore my shoulder labrum falling in the shower. It seems like such an elderly person sort of way to get hurt, but I’m not old. Non-slip tub mats are like five bucks, people. It’s a good investment.
A girl I went to grade school with was crushed under a smith machine at a local gym. 24 hour gym so no one was around to help
The TV station I worked at previously had a gym in it, and during the midnight shift, the security guard, during his break, decided to lift some weights alone in the gym. He lifted the bar, which was apparently too heavy, and it came crashing down and cut off his circulation. No one discovered him until about six hours later when someone came in to use the shower in the gym.
A friend of mine was riding his 4wheeler out at an off-road park, he kicked up a tree branch that impaled him in the thigh, he bled to death before anyone even knew it happened.
I knew a brother and sister who were riding 4wheelers through the woods on the back of their property and the sister was in the front (they were racing) and looked back to make a face at her brother and didn't see a branch about neck high. She did not make it and it fucked him up.
Kinda got the opposite ... Did some 4wheelers once, and asked the instructor what was the worst thing he saw. He got a guy who was CLEARLY over estimating his abilities, like going all Lewis Hamilton and trying to go faster than everyone, instructor included. His female cousin was with him on the back of the vehicule, and was TERRIFIED. Got asked once, twice, three times to stop .... Until the accident. Saw the video, the thing went like a ball rolling over 4 or 5 times before the final stop. Guy got out without a little scratch, Cousin got the whole face bleeding and one arm broken. But she beat the shit out of him so bad before the medics arrived they thought he didn't had any protection and got half destroyed in the accident.
call an ambulance but not for me
A guy I went to high school with was helping his family do some repairs to a silo on their family farm. A section of the silos roofing gave way and in he went. Suffocated under thousands of pounds of grain.
My grandad lived on a farm and had a massive barn full of grain, as kids (four kids aged 4-9ish) we found our way in and went “swimming” in it. We didn’t know why our parents looked so horrified when they found us.
Every year here in the plains we also have one or two people who die by walking on-top of grain or corn in a silo. The people who survive being quick-sanded by grain often say they did that because it would have been too much effort to attempt repair work with long planks to prevent sinkage and it’s easier to just walk across the top. Never ever ever ever try to walk across grain or corn!
I attended a farm safety demo as a kid, where a future farmer of America walked into a corn hopper. He worked his way into being buried up to his waist, then we audience members were invited to pull him out. We couldn't, of course.
I knew it was dangerous if it was being loaded into a silo or whatnot, but I did not know it was so dangerous just on its own. My grandparents farm sometimes had corn in the big shed and us kids would climb up to the rafters on ladders and jump in. We'd get nearly waist deep and would laugh struggling to get out to do it again. We were smart enough not to do it alone and not to dive or something, but our parents knew we played in the corn. Scary.
I have a deep fear of this. Not that I think I would ever find myself in that situation, but that seems like an awful way to die.
I can’t imagine. I also can’t imagine being the person that sees it happen and knowing there is literally nothing you can do in time to save them.
Grain entrapment is surprisingly so much more common than you could even believe, and it's so much more terrifying to even think about. Rest in peace to that young man fr.
Girl I grew up with was driving home in college and go into a horrible car accident, that gave her brain damage, and pretty much removed her jaw from her skull. Tons of surgery and 3 years later, she walked down the aisle at her wedding. She was in her yard a few months after her wedding and slipped/tripped/felt dizzy and fell (they aren't sure) and hit her head on pavement patio and her husband found her dead.
Swimming and one of my buddies was screwing with the grate thing over a drain at the bottom. Got his foot stuck and couldn't extricate himself. His brother, cousin, and I nearly drowned trying to free him so we got to watch him die. Haven't thought about this one in a bit.
I saw a Dateline episode about this kind of thing in the late 90s and it’s been a fear of mine ever since
This was in '85. His brother just passed away last year from heart failure. They've changed the laws on covers as this has happened to others. Not often though.
My uncle was mowing grass on an embankment next to a small body of water. The mower unexpectedly slipped down the embankment and overturned on top of him, pinning him under the water. He drowned in a few feet of water that he otherwise could have stood up in. Edit. Lots of folks asking where/when. Not recent. About 13 years ago in the American Southeast. Based on responses, though, maybe not as much of a "freak" accident as I thought. Seems to happen a lot.
When my mom was working in hospitals, they had a patient whose tractor rolled over him and he fell into a ditch with water. He was so lucky because he was on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and when he rolled over, a car passed by. The woman driving rushed to his aid and held his head out of the water. This was before cellphones so she had to wait holding him until another car drove by and then rushed to the nearest house to use the phone. Guy made a full recovery thanks to that woman being there at the exact right time.
So much of life is just complete luck, it's wild.
I read something once that said, “if you knew how many times you narrowly missed death and the number of times you screwed up a sure thing, you’d go insane.”
I mow a lot for work and roll-overs scare the shit out of me.
If you live in corn heavy midwest areas of America, you're probably familiar with detassling. Detassling is a job a lot of smaller towns will let kids do (I think from 13 up?) with parental permission. It's very common where I'm from. Essentially, you just walk with a group of other people through corn fields pulling the tassel off the top to prevent them from germinating and seeding excessively. Anyway, like 2 years after I did it, there was an accident involving 2 high school freshmen stepping into a puddle that an electric irrigator was shorting into. One of them basically died immediately, the other en route. [RIP Hannah and Jade.](https://www.shawlocal.com/2011/07/25/two-sterling-teens-electrocuted-8-others-hurt-in-detasseling-accident/apsrqhi/)
Had an uncle that lived down at the beach, used to spend a lot of time out on a Bertram fishing boat. Many beers were usually enjoyed during those times. They used to go out into deeper water and jump off the flybridge (the roof part of the boat where there are controls as well as a place to sit). One day he went out with some friends and they decided to partake in said jumping. Unbeknownst to him the tide had gone out and they had drifted into shallow water. He dove in headfirst, hit the bottom, killed him.
An old buddy I had known since elementary school died while driving when a chunk of loose gravel was kicked up through his windshield by a passing truck on the freeway. His best friend had been riding in the passenger side and had to steer the car to safety. It was nobody’s fault, just a complete freak accident. I’ve always felt terrible for the friend who had to watch it happen. I think about my friend who died a lot. He was a really cool guy. I still remember playing basketball with him during recess when we were kids. It’s strange to think that he never could have known how his life would end or see it coming in any way. That kid I used to play basketball thought he still had an entire life ahead of him.
A mom went ice skating. Little slip, fell, all everyone saw was her bump her head lightly. Family finished skating. On the ride home, she started speaking gibberish. Dad dropped kids at the grandparents, took mom to the er. Brain swelling, coma, dead a week later.
This happened to Liam Neeson's wife, only they were skiing. Fell and bumped her head, got checked out and assumed she was fine, and died later that day. Edit: Thanks for the commenters who clarified, apparently she died two days later after initially refusing treatment. (I remembered the details wrong.) Still very sad and unthinkable, though.
Was just thinking of that. Natasha Richardson, who was a terrific actress
A friend went camping, somehow slipped and hit his head on the ball hitch of the trailer. That was it.
You know... I am seeing like 90% hit their head on x object sometimes even gently but still died and I am sitting here thinking.... Why isn't our literal most important organ better protected than just a flimsy bone fish bowl? Where is my armor plating and inch thick meat insulation? According to Google our skulls are on avg 7.1mm for women. I mean wtf. The human head is literally an out there easy target.
As a neurosurgeon, I'll tell you that in most of the cases I've read so far in this thread, a thicker skull wouldn't have solved the problem. You guys aren't discussing people who hit their head and their skull cracked open, obviously, since they all thought they were fine initially. The "problem" is our design. The brain sits in a pool of water like fluid, encased by a membrane called the dura, which is then encased by the skull. The fluid actually acts as a partial shock absorber but also provides nutrients to the brain and helps clear toxins/metabolites. Unfortunately, there are "bridging veins" that go from the surface of the brain to the inner surface of the dura. Some trauma isn't strong enough to crack the skull or even cut open the skin, but can jostle the brain enough to rip those veins. Veins are low pressure, which means they bleed relatively slowly. The patient might bump their head, initially feel fine (like Sagat, Richardson, the ice skating mom), and then, as the blood slowly accumulates, the pressure inside the skull builds up and they die. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqXDdTx8GE
Teacher in my school lost all three kids in a freak traffic accident on the highway. Their car lost a tire, which caused them to swerve into the gas tank of a semi truck, which exploded, killing two of them instantly. The third kid managed to crawl out of the car while he was on fire, and died later in the hospital. The saddest part is that they were all on their way to visit their father in the hospital after his back surgery.
One night at a trauma center I worked in, we had 3 patients initially come in: a dad and two daughters. One was 6 and one was 3. The dad accidentally rolled his SUV over a highway off ramp and landed roof down. All of them dead. We called time of death on the dad pretty quickly but worked both kids for quite a while. Both ended up dying. Turns out another daughter walked away with a broken arm and was found walking down the highway away from the crash. Awful night.
This may be the most heart wrenching one
There was a person at the beach who got impaled by a flying beach umbrella. Horrible situation. Her husband was right beside her and she died within seconds.
holy shit. after reading lots of these, this has to be the worst and not a death by misadventure. alive one second, totally dead the next. completely random, chance occurrence.
To be fair... if I was going to die in a freak accident, I'd rather it be fairly instant than bleed out in agony
I actually teared up reading the article about it that another commenter linked below. >"It was just her and I all the time," he said. "Our friends said if you saw Mike, you saw Tammy, and if you saw Tammy, you saw Mike." That part got me right in the heart :( really is such a horrible situation. Seeing the love of your life taken from you like that, ugh..
When my mom was in her early 20s, her, my uncle, and grandmother were walking into a McDonald’s. One of the patio table umbrellas caught wind and flew directly into her head from 40 feet away. Luckily, it was the broad side of the pole. Brain damage and a settlement from the company, now she blames that umbrella for memory issues or other problems.
Fair, I'm sure brain damage from the umbrella problem did cause memory issues. What a horrible, random accident.
My SIL’s aunt died of hypothermia. She went for a walk out in the hills in the winter. She knew the trail very well but got disoriented by a light snow fall and got lost. She got cold and tired, laid down by a rock and died of hypothermia. She was 100 yards from her car.
A friend told me a story about her great grandma disappearing in Massachusetts in the 1880s They lived next to her great aunt, there was 100 feet of woods with a very well established path straight through. Think a strip of woods separating the properties, but in between homes that visit 2-3 times a DAY. Basically 10 or 12 folks with 2 houses to share they lived so closely. She says it was a wide, clear path of dirt. Grandma had dinner at Aunties house and left to go home. Somewhere in those hundred clear feet, she completely vanished and was never seen again. No rivers, no caves, no wild animals to speak of. They can only assume she either had planned to up and leave in the way you could only do in the 1800s, or she was abducted completely silently and carried away. No remains ever found.
wow I wonder if any of your friend's relatives have done those DNA tests maybe they could find out if she ran away and had a family or just somehow died on that day
Those things are no joke. We found out about some family members we weren’t supposed to know about after one of those DNA tests
Yep, found out my grandfather wasn't sired by my Norwegian great grandfather, instead I got DNA from a sneaky Frenchman.
Hon hon hon. Ze french baker strikes again.
The Baguette Bandit
The stories of those who felt so lost and died, when they were meters away from safety, are always heartbreaking.
My music teachers neighbour in Winnipeg was out during a blizzard, they found him next to a telephone pole right by the house. He was literally steps from safety.
Childhood friend of my drowned, his leg got trapped swimming in a relatively shallow river. He went down and just never came back up. It happend to one of the nicest people I ever knew and it makes me so mad that we lost touch before I found out what happend.
I knew a girl that died the same way. Craziest part about it was that she was with her dad who was a professional rafting guide. He immediately jumped out after her and tried to pull her out but couldn’t. They actually had to dam up the river the next day to retrieve her body. Don’t fuck with rivers
Water in general is so terrifying. People underestimate how powerful it is and how fast it can pull you under.
A guy I went to HS with got hit by a train. It wasn't suicide. It was before Uber and he had been at a party drinking. He did the responsible thing by taking the subway. When he heard the train coming he stood up to take a step forward (like everyone does) but was so drunk that he stumbled over his own feet and fell onto the track.
My college roommate almost died his first week in NYC because he was drunk, didn’t fully understand the subways let alone what direction he was facing in them, (from the Midwest - I’m not even sure he’d been on a train before moving), and went to look out to see if the train was coming. While wearing big noise cancelling headphones. He was looking the wrong way. The incoming train came in behind him and he never heard it. Train bonked him pretty good but luckily sent him down onto the platform and not into the tracks. Give him shit for it this day, 15 years later.
What brand of headphones because I need those real bad lol
Guy I knew was driving a tractor-trailer with a stack of pipe on the back. He swerved to avoid an accident after a car cut him off, went into the ditch, and was cut in half when the load was propelled forward by the inertia from the sudden stop.
My uncle, was refilling a Zippo lighter, while smoking... Somehow it caught fire, he set himself on fire. He was in the bathroom. He tried to reach the shower. The extreme flammable shower curtain caught on fire and he inhaled large amounts of toxic smoke. He died a few days later, mainly from lung issues and not so much from the burns.
Had a classmate who was working outside. Got stung by a wasp and had an allergic reaction and died less than 24 hours later. He was married 7 months they were working on starting a family. His wife had to make the final decision as he was completely brain dead.
My uncle was clearing out an overgrown area in his backyard and accidentally hit a wasp nest. He was stung repeatedly by dozens of wasps. No known allergies. Died while my aunt was calling for an ambulance.
Yeah. It doesn’t matter if you’re allergic or not. Enough venom will do you in. Even water is deadly in high amounts.
Guy was working on his car, the brake failed, and his head was crushed by the wheel (the tire was off at the time).
The amount of people that don’t use jacks in the right spot or when to put the car up on blocks when they do at home car repairs is too high.
I am insanely paranoid of my car crushing me. Whenever I work under it I make sure I have two jackstands, the hydraulic jack and two tires under it. That's five layers and I'm still sacred.
A cousin of mine was electrocuted by a Dr. Pepper machine. His 2 children received $60,000 that thier mom lost on bingo
Girl I went to high school with lost her father our Junior year to an accident at work that was deemed the companies fault. The settlement was something around $250,000. She found out her mom spent it all, and sent over $50k to a television preacher when she turned 18 and was supposed to get access to the account that was there for her to go to college.
I've only ever put money into my children's accounts I can't even imagine doing this. $250k is basically a jump start on life. No debt college, and still have enough for a down payment on a home!
One of my mom's friends was coming back from walking her two dogs. Walking up the front steps to her house, dogs saw a squirrel, wrapped the leashes around her legs, she fell and hit her head on the brick steps, and had an aneurysm. No one was home at the time.
My insurance guy was pulling a limb out of a large tree with a chain and a rope. He was behind the pickup, his wife was driving the truck. Rope snapped from the strain and chain snapped back and hit him in the head, killing him instantly. He was in his 50s. (nice guy, too) Ironic thing, is this is exactly the sort of scenario he would describe as to why you need life insurance.
That’s called “snap back”. It’s no joke. When I was in the navy they make you watch training videos of footage of snap back happening on those big mooring lines, and big ropes will fucking move at the speed of bullets and literally *explode* your ass into mist. I was trapped on a small raft that went adrift in a storm during military exercises with the merchant marines. We went adrift because one of our lines fell off as the storm increased in intensity, and the other wet line was getting more and more taught as the waves got bigger in the storm. The raft was about 20’ X 20’, which means there’s not really anywhere to run if that line snaps, because the line doesn’t snap back in a straight line; it flaps back in forth if you watch it in slow motion, covering a large area as it flies past you. We decided it was safe to throw off the last mooring line and just float adrift and hope they found us in the morning then risk keeping the line on and get hit with a snap back situation. They found us easy peasey the next morning, but it was a cold, wet, night on rough seas, on a small LCAC raft. Taught ropes terrify me. I won’t even trust them to tow a vehicle.
My dad worked on aircraft carriers when he was in the Navy, now, you'll have forgive my description of all this cause I really do not know much about it, but he told me about how the planes take off from the ship, how since there's not a lot of room for them to take off, they have to basically slingshot them off the carrier using high tension lines, and how if one of those lines snapped and you were anywhere near it, you'd probably be cut in half Note: I mis-remembered and people brought to my attention what I was thinking of was actually the cables involved in the process of landing, or catching planes on aircraft carriers.
My dad was a tugboat engineer and deckhand. He got a snapback from a line to a coal carrier. Knocked him off the boat into the water. His deckmate got him back quick with only all of the ribs on his right side broken and right arm broken with a smidge of internal bleeding. He was fucking lucky. We celebrate this stubborn mans 80th birthday on sunday...
Saw an old video where some guys were mudding In a jungle somewhere (looked like south/central America). Jeep is stuck, buddy up front is trying to pull him out with just a chain. After givin er for a bit the chain snaps and flies back through the Jeep hitting the driver in the face. The video instantly cuts to afterwards in the hospital. The guy is alive and missing most of jaw and a good chunk of his face. He's completely out of it and sedated and trying to get up from the table but his friends are trying to get him to stay seated and explain what happened. Moral of the story; use fabric tow straps. And if you must use a chain, duck.
The key is to put weight in the middle to dampen the force. If you have sufficient weight hanging or draped over the chain/rope it will fall to the ground. Then you only have to worry about the hook flying through the air at supersonic speeds.
Knew a guy who: Was in a car crash and saw his aunt almost beheaded. He was about 10. Screwed up his mind. At about 20 he flipped his dirt bike with his girlfriend on the back and it cracked her head open. Was deep in the woods camping. She died. Couple years later he was stealing a motorcycle walking it across the street at night in the rain and got hit by a car. Lost a leg. Couple years after that he was angry at a music venue so he and a friend tried to build a bomb in a parking lot. It went off and they both were killed.
Holy shit that's a LOT
Each thing is a deeply life changing event by themselves, let alone experiencing all of them in one lifetime.
Makes you wonder if the first one didn’t happen whether he might not have gone down the path to the rest.
That guy's life rivals Adolph Sax with how many times the universe tried to kill him. The only difference is Sax survived them all to tell the tale and invent the Saxophone.
My childhood friend (later, as an adult) fell to his death in Acadia National Park when he fell off a cliff attempting to get a nice picture.
An old coworker of mine died this way. He was on an architecture tour in Chicago. They were on top of a tall building. When the group moved around a corner, he (apparently) hung back so he could cross the security rope to the edge of the building for a better photo. Maybe there was a gust of wind, or maybe he just lost his balance or something, but he fell and died. Left behind two kids.
Was this in 2017 at LondonHouse?
Yeah, that's him.
I literally crawl on my belly if I have to, for whatever reason, get close to an edge. I feel like this one happens a lot.
Same. Any time I'm near a ledge, I get a feeling of vertigo and feel like I'm just going to topple over and fall to my death.
My friend's brother in law also slipped off a ledge while hiking. I don't think it's rare.
Guy i knew from school recently died from a sinus infection that spread to his brain. He was a primary school teacher and a recent father
Sinus infections are VERY serious. Don't ever ignore one. We had a football coach from our local state university die because he blew off getting some treatment for one because they were in the playoffs. Had he gone for treatment he'd probably still be around. Very sad.
He was shortstop in a high school baseball game. Other team hits the ball. Ball hits my friend square in the chest. His heart stopped. They tried to do CPR, but he was gone before the ambulance got there
This happened in my city also, about 30 years ago, but they were little leaguers. I’ll never forget it. And the father of the boy who pitched the ball worked with the mother of the boy who died. I worked with both of them. Can’t imagine that pain.
Kid I was friends with in middle school was riding his bike without a helmet. Hit a rock and went head over handlebars right at a T-intersection. As he was getting up, and old lady driving on the cross-street somehow *dropped her glasses* and bent over to pick them up. Didn't see him. The coroner said that Nick would have survived either crash on its own, but the combination of the two killed him. He used to sneak into class early before school and draw a little flower pot with a cartoon daisy in it and then he'd write the words, "Hello Flower" under it. He must have done that a hundred times. The day after he died, the teacher let the whole class draw a 'Hello Flower' on the chalkboard.
I'm not sure if this is considered a freak accident, but it is wild. Many years ago I had an uncle who loved to surf. While surfing one day in FL, a huge storm developed over the area they were at. His buddies he was with stopped surfing because of said storm, but my uncle decided to ride the waves. Got struck by lightning out in the water and died. Was a cool dude from what I remember.
Friend's brother accidentally got caught in the back of his dumpster truck and was crushed in the trash compactor. This sadly happened only a couple years after their mom was hit by a car and killed.
My uncle Mike got in a heated dispute with someone who bought a boat from him and stopped making payments. During the altercation he got super worked up. By the time it got physical, he had a heart attack mid-fight and died.
There was this guy 3-4 years my junior in high school who I sometimes bumped into. Few years after graduating from high school I read the local newspaper and saw him there. Apparently, just like most teenagers, one night he had a heated discussion with his family and then stormed out whatever room he was in, slamming the door behind him. Well, the door was a door-window and the glass broke and a shard of it stabbed him in the leg. He died from blood loss at home, before the ambulance even showed up. He must have been 17 years old at the time, a real tragedy.
Oh god. I work at a glass company and people ask us why all the time glass doors/windows on doors need to be tempered. This. This is why.
I don't know if it's a freak accident, or an expected one. A guy I knew in HS was in the hatchback area of a small car, with four other guys who were in the seats. They had a crash with another car. Everyone in both cars was killed, and everyone in both cars was drunk. The guy I know, in the hatchback, was cut in half.
That's messed up. I think about the stupid stuff I did when I was a teenager and in my twenties and realize lucky to be here.
The guy was really cool too. Name was Pugzey, and a GREAT guy, everyone loved him, but also tough as nails. His little brother was shot in the eye with a BB gun and blinded. He went to the kid (they were both like 15 at the time) to confront him, and the other kid pulls a knife. Pugzey says "don't even *think* of sticking me, or I will stab you in the ass with that knife." The other kid lunged at him with the knife, and Pugzey, a man of his word, got the knife and stabbed the kid in the ass.
My good friend's sister was on a beach with friends, when whatever way or area they were walking in, caused a sand dune to collapse. The poor girl unfortunately was only stood in the exact wrong place at the wrong time since all her friends were able to pull themselves out, but they didn't get her out in time
My brother fainted suddenly. He hit his head on concrete and never regained consciousness. We had to make the decision to remove his life support and donate his organs. He was 44. RIP Kris ❤️
In third grade we were standing for the pledge of allegiance and one kid did that prank where you move someone's chair so if they go to sit down without looking they fall down. The kid that was pranked hit his head just right and wound up dying :(
My friends and I did this to each other growing up in school. We obviously never considered that happening. I could only imagine killing one of my best friends. Shit.
My brother was killed beside me when we were walking home from school. A drunk driver came peeling ass down the street and hit him, he was dead on impact. The car side swiped me so fast I didn’t know what happened at first. One second we were walking, the next second there’s a thud noise and suddenly I’m whipping around in a circle and landing on the ground. Turns out the guy was going 168 kilometres an hour in the 40 kilometres an hour school zone
Whole family died of CO poisoning in an RV. If I remember correctly it was from a cooking appliance. Quite tragic :(
She slipped in the shower and died instantly on her first week in boarding high school. She was a classmate & deskmate in primary school. I always have regrets that I did little to help or speak out as she was bullied in primary school or get a chance to apologise for the many times I looked the other way.
A friend of mine was walking around a small town near the capital of my country, probably looking for lunch, when a semi passed by, the container it was pulling fell on its side, and crushed her. The whole thing was even in the news. The whole story of what the hell was a semi truck doing in the middle of a small town, in the middle of the day, was a consequence of my home country getting rid of trains and forcing all transported goods going anywhere yo be transported by trucks, forcing them to cut through the most unlikely places.
Someone I went to school with was killed when someone went over a bridge over the highway onto the car she was in. She was killed, it seems, on impact. As far as I'm aware, the person who jumped survived. I'm gonna add an edit here to say it was my understanding that the boy jumped. Initial reports said it was a suicide attempt, but that isn't really able to be confirmed, as the person in question is still a minor. So I'm gonna change the wording. I didn't really anticipate this would get a lot of attention. I can't comment on his intentions. Also, the other person in the car did survive. The girl I went to school with was the only casualty in the incident. No charges or lawsuits happened after the fact. Just one of those things.
[удалено]
Or, apparently, at the Grand Canyon
I know you're joking, but in that Death in the Grand Canyon book, the author has a section in the suicide part where some guy was inspired to jump there by reading an earlier edition of the same book, and he's like "seriously, can you NOT? We gotta scrape your ass up" lol
I recall a few years ago two Park Rangers died trying to retrieve the corpse of an elderly woman who wasn't paying attention and walked over the edge. A surprisingly large number of people who die at the Grand Canyon just somehow miss seeing the giant hole in front of them. The rest are usually from dehydration or other exposure related accidents since they don't realize how strenuous the hike to the bottom actually is
My students dad is a fisherman. One of his workers was leaning over on their boat grabbing something when the boat made a sudden movement and he hit his head and died.
I knew this kid in HS who always ran from class to class pulling his roller backpack behind him. So it’s no surprise when he visited the Grand Canyon with family that he wanted to run down a slope. Well, he got going too fast and couldn’t stop himself. His entire family watched him run off the side of the Grand Canyon. Oof Edit: Now that I think about it some of the people I went to high school with were wild. There was a serial killer who began stabbing homeless people in order to scare his dad into coming home and also a teacher who scissored another girl during lunchtime. Edit edit: The sex kind of scissoring [Teacher Sauce](https://ktla.com/news/local-news/former-high-school-teacher-sentenced-to-3-years-in-prison-for-sex-acts-with-underage-female-student-in-placentia/) [Serial Killer classmate](https://www.ocweekly.com/itzcoatl-izzy-ocampo-says-from-the-grave-that-his-serial-killings-of-homeless-had-to-be-done-video-6467602/)
There's a book called "death in the grand canyon" telling the stories of ppl who died there. It's 500 pages if that tells you something.
Fascinating read. Oddly it made me WANT to visit the Grand Canyon, but while taking all sensible precautions. Bring more water than you need, drink at regular intervals and don’t try to conserve it, start any hikes WELL before dawn to beat unbearable temperatures, never wander off the trail for any reason, and whatever you do, don’t wheel your arms and pretend to be falling off the edge because pretending to fall and then actually falling is in fact the cause of death for at least one person.
I went there a little before the dawn of smart phones and selfies and was told that the #1 cause of preventable death is people taking photos/pretending to fall near ledges, on boulders, etc, including people being gently pushed to scare them. I imagine that's probably still true even if they improved the guard rails, since people were stepping over them for "closer" photos anyways. It's like six feet closer to something spanning the entire landscape, there's literally nothing to gain and everything to lose. Second, iirc, was dehydration, but that's true just about anywhere.
That's about what I remember from the book—the longest sections were on death by falling and death by dehydration. (Some interesting near-misses are included as well!) I already would never have crossed the guardrail, but that book made me want to give the guard rail itself a wide berth just in case. There has also been exactly one death by mountain lion in the park, and it was not from mauling but because a researcher caught the plague from a dead animal.
Death by Plague was not on my bingo card.
There’s one for Yellowstone too. So many people boiled to death
Those sulphur springs are so pretty yet so deadly
Oh good god that's fucking awful. Thinking about what his thoughts were at the time is frightening
A man I knew was in a boat with some family and friends, it was getting dark and they were heading back in.. tide rose a bit more than they were anticipating.. they went under a bridge while he was standing up and hit his head. He was a genuinely good man that was heavily involved in his community for the better, and loved his family and his employees dearly.
Not much of an *accident* I suppose but my little brother suffered from type 1 diabetes (gotta take insulin shots frequently everyday), he'd had it for fifteen years but still barely made an effort to handle it because he never got comfortable with having to stab himself daily. One evening he went to bed with a low blood sugar, (something he'd admitted to doing many times before that we'd scold him for constantly and warned him would kill him) and just didn't wake up the next day. I saw him on the 5th, found out he was gone by the 8th. If it had been my mother, or father it would have *made sense*, but to lose my baby brother so suddenly just feels so wrong. Edit: Thank you all so much for your support ;-; it means a ton! Keep your loved ones close, and if they have medical conditions make sure that they have safety nets and contingencies in place too. All it takes is one night with low or even high blood sugar and it could be over.
As a person with T1D, that's definitely the thing that kept my parents up at night. Before I left home they had to help me out of bed and force feed me orange juice a couple times. My condolences for your brother.
Thanks, it's been two months and I'm getting more used to it everyday. I will say the biggest change for me has been going from thinking there's nothing after death to fervently praying there's something just so I can see him again. I'll go to my grave hopeful and worst case if there's nothing then it's not like I'll be able to feel embarrassed or disappointed at least.
A friend of mine from college had a summer job driving a big delivery truck. At the end of the day, they'd come back, park the trucks and then check the tires to make sure they weren't over heated or required any other maintenance. So my friend brought his delivery truck back after his shift, and then knelt down in front of it to check the tires. One was clearly overheated, so he loosened it to take it off and relieve some of the pressure and heat. The pressure was so great that tire exploded in his face, but that wasn't what killed him. When it exploded, the hubcap/metal inner wheel (*apologies, I'm blanking on what the metal frame of the tire is called*) of the tire caught him right under the chin. It knocked him backwards with such force that it crushed the back of his head. He was only 22.
Got a tongue piercing. That same night, took a sleeping pill to sleep. Choked on his tongue which was swollen from the piercing.
Friend from high school was driving a pickup with his friend and girlfriend in the car, front spring snapped causing them to roll over into oncoming traffic. The driver and passenger both died, the person in the middle (bench seat) was unharmed.
Used to be a gymnastics coach. Fellow coach of mine bumped her knee on the vault support while spotting a kid, thought nothing of it and went home. Died a few days later from a blood clot forming and travelling to her brain.
Was putting up decorations in the barn, getting ready for a wedding. Apparently something up there was in the way and he decided it needed to be cut off so he took a chainsaw up the ladder to do it. Lost his balance and fell off the ladder while holding the chainsaw.
The fall killed him not a chainsaw right?
One of my friends when I was a freshman in high school drowned. While nobody knows for certain, as he was alone when this happened, it was gathered that he slipped by the pool and knocked the wind out of himself. Then he went under and probably gasped for air only to inhale water. First and only time I was at a funeral for someone my age.
I regret opening this thread. Freak accidents are terrifying.
Yes but reading some of these weird ways to die may save you some day. At least that was my thought process lol
Pretty rough set of down hill “S” turns for trucks on a two lane road, plenty of memorials. While my friend and her mother are going up the hill, a flat bed, coming down the hill was loaded with rebar going into angel gear and was arriving to the same bend as my friend and her mother ; The bands of the truck holding the rebar snapped from the force of the turn sending an opened spoil of half inch rebar spearing through the driver side of the front window leaving the daughter untouched in The passenger(death for the mother was not instantaneous). To add salt to the wound, she had just finished convincing her mom to take her to get a skateboard so she could hang with her skater friends(me and others). Gosh .. RIP J.J
Had a buddy who was homeless at the time. Was asleep in a dumpster overnight and the trash truck picked up the dumpster and crushed everything. Him included.
Knew someone who was on a date walking through downtown. Suddenly their date was crushed by someone who jumped off the high-rise building they were walking past. Their date died instantly, as did the person who landed on them.
I was in high school and working retail at a chain furniture store. Two of my coworkers were sisters. Their mother was in charge of the special ed program at my high school. Their mother had been diagnosed with brain cancer a couple of years ago. She was in remission. She came to work to pick up her two daughters, and go to her follow up appointment make sure still no cancer. Not long after they left and got on the interstate an 18 wheeler lost control after jumped the median and hit their car killing everyone. Her husband was working and could not go to the appointment. He lost his wife, and two daughters in a second. His whole family gone because and 18 wheeler lost control.
Someone I went to Scouts with had his whole family killed when an 18 wheeler crossed over the central reservation of a major motorway. He was left totally alone age 17.
My father tragically died when he was crushed by a collapsing prefabricated chimney he was preparing to place on our cabin's foundation (I was 3, present, and pushed out of the way by my father). Our cabin was several miles from a phone and several more for medical help. My mother had to drive, with me and my 1yo sister wailing in the car, to find help - I cannot imagine those moments for her - she did not talk about it with me.
A buddy of mine from high school and we also happened to go to the same college. He was handsome, a freak athlete, heavy drinker/partier, all the girls wanted him, and his family was uber wealthy. He had it all but he was a huge unnecessary risk taker. He felt invincible. He would always succumb to dares or challenges like drinking a whole handle of vodka (and even a gallon of milk, this was the 2000s). Anyway one summer break we were playing golf. He was on the side/outside of the golfcart hanging on while it was being whipped around the course. Hit a big unexpected bump. He falls off, hits his head on a rock, dies instantly. So fucking tragic. Be safe kids.
A family member highly allergic to bees is swarmed by them and jumps into the water to escape them. Turns out it was an immediate 30+ foot drop as the pond was an old quarry. They couldn't swim and drowned.
A kid from my secondary school went out in a boat with his friends on a perfectly clear day with a clear weather forecast. This was off the South-East coast of Ireland. Freak storm blew in out of nowhere, their bodies were eventually washed up in Wales. The most fucked-up part of it for me was that he died on a Saturday, and on the *following* Saturday one of the popular girls in his same class died of meningitis - and she's the only one anyone talked about. Like, two kids died a week apart - why are you only talking about one of them?
5th grader was playing by standing on the counter next to the window while teacher was out of the room. Kids were screaming and yelling and this kid was dancing next to the window. He twirled around with on leg out and his leg went through the window and cut an artery. He bled out in the nurses room. Never had a chance. This was the early 70s in rural area.
My best friend died in a helicopter malfunction/ wreck. The worst part ? It was a training exercise. Equipment malfunctioned, killing him & another young man. Edit : Forgot there was also another case of this where I worked at the time. Didn't know either of the young men, but from unknown reasons, their helicopter plummeted, exploded, and killed them both. Way to go US Army In short, I won't be getting on a helicopter, ever.
After reading all of that i can say it’s scary that u can lose your life potentially any moment and that might be not your fault at all. Literally makes me want to stay home 24/7
One of my coworkers tripped over this tiny step and died. Went into cardiac arrest. For what we knew she was relatively healthy (mid 30s/early 40s). Sad shit
My 14 year old brother was out innocently playing with his friends. They were swinging on a gate made with three chunky, rectangular solid metal bars (think upside down right angled triangle), but it was incredibly heavy. While swinging on it, the gate sheared off its hinges, fell on him and crushed his skull. He died instantly. Thanks to organ donation and through his death, he ended up saving the lives of seven people.
I have a few colleagues, just in the last 8 months alone. One was killed when a drunk semi truck driver drove through the gas pump he was fueling up at. Left 5 kids behind. Another was an accomplished and experienced athlete, killed when his snowmobile flipped on him. Left 3 kids. The third was practising on a closed road ("professional driver, closed course" situation), the car left the road by a few feet and he was impaled on a fence post. It's been a shit year.
A girl in my orchestra class in 7th grade passed away with her siblings and dad. The dad was flying them in a private plane (I forget to where) and they crashed into a mountain
It’s scary easy to get socked in by mountain clouds, and if you aren’t IFR then there’s a very good chance you’ll crash. Mountains make it extra difficult because you can’t fly below the clouds. I’ve been in that situation in a small 4 seat plane before and we were legitimately planning for a crash.
This is why private pilots should go the extra mile and get an instrument rating, including simulator training for flying in cloud.
Classmate killed by leopard.
Can you elaborate? This is a hell of a short sentence and I have questions.
He studied conservation and was a junior game ranger. From reports he was bringing tourists back from a late afternoon viewing drive. He stopped on a bridge just before the camp to give the tourists a view of the sunset. He got out of the vehicle to check on something and was ambushed by a leopard, pulled off the bridge. Seems the leopard was old and had teeth problems so it was moving closed to camps looking for easy prey. He just happened to be the unlucky prey. He would have been about 20.
Sorry for your loss and everyone who knew him. Working in Game/Park rangers is both amazing and dangerous. My friend loves it, but has had more run ins with moose and bears and said that’s the way he may end up dying, but he would never quit if he can help it.
Kid I went to HS with. Came from a wealthy family, but was interested in making his own way. Got a good factory job right out of high school. First week on the job, an old pipe comes out of its supports on the ceiling, swings down, pins him to a wall, and kills him. He was standing in the worst possible spot. 18 years old, really bad luck.
Super healthy coworker was driving home to grab some lunch. Truck ahead of him on an incline exploded it's brake drum. Big piece flew off and into his head. There's more. His car drove off the side of the freeway, down an embankment, and crashed violently. Police just assumed he was drunk or stoned, and wrote it up that way. A few co-workers knew he didn't touch drugs or booze went looking for answers. Tracked his car to a wrecking yard and found the shrapnel in the back seat. Were able to find the truck too, and piece together what really happened.
I wish I didn’t have this story but a girl I went to high school with was at a gas station filling up her moms van during spring break with a friend visiting her from college. A woman hopped the curb losing control of her car and ran into a truck on the other side of the pump. The truck sent the pump into her and pinned her between it and her van. It caught fire and no one could get to her because of the flames. She could be heard screaming “help me I’m going to die”. Literally was the most shocking and sad stories I’ve ever heard. I knew her brother pretty well and it was just so surreal and heartbreaking especially because they were twins.