5. Video games
They’re supposed to be fun and entertaining, but seriously people. There’s a time to take a break from the video games. And that time is before they kill you.
In 1981, a 19-year-old gamer named Jeff Dailey became the first official video game victim. After racking up an impressive 16,660 points while playing the game “Berzerk,” Jeff toppled over and died of a heart attack.
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Less than two years later, 18-year-old Peter Burkowski also died of a heart attack while playing the same game.
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August 2005 – South Korean Lee Seung Seop died of exhaustion after playing Starcraft online for 50 hours straight in an Internet café.
January 2007 – A 28-year-old woman named Jennifer Strange died of hyponatremia (water intoxication) after participating in a contest at a local radio station. In order to win a Nintendo Wii, the contestants competed to see who could drink the most water without taking a potty break. Strange ingested enough water to severely dilute the sodium levels in her bloodstream and bring about her death.
4. Floods – but not the water kind
Usually when we hear “flood” we think “water,” and usually we are right to think this. However, there are at least two famous flood incidents that had nothing at all to do with water.
The London Beer Flood, October 1814 – nine people died after a 22-foot high, 130,000-gallon vat of porter burst at the Meux & Co. Brewery. The enormous volume of beer caused other vats to rupture as well, and more than 300,000 gallons of beer smashed its way through brick walls and blasted into the slums of St. Giles, a London parish. The sound of the explosion was reportedly heard up to five miles away. (BBC Article)
You can imagine the reaction of Londoners who weren’t immediately overwhelmed by a beer tsunami. Yes, exactly what you would have done – run outside with pots, pans, and anything else that can hold beer. Drink as much as possible, save the rest. (Technically speaking, only eight of the nine casualties were because of the actual flood. The ninth guy died from alcohol poisoning a few days later!)
The Boston Molasses Disaster, January 1919 – 21 people expired when a 50-foot high storage tank full of molasses exploded and unleashed a crazy wave of sticky death through Boston’s North End. (Bizarre Tragedies) The warm weather apparently helped build pressure inside the poorly-constructed tank, eventually causing an explosion. Several city blocks were flooded, and the wave was high and strong enough to lift a freaking train off the Elevated Railway tracks.
They say it still smells like molasses there on hot summer days.
3. Your own wooden leg
This one is probably a little less common in the current day and age. Unfortunately for Sir Arthur Aston, an English soldier best known for supporting King Charles I during the English Civil War, it was the seventeenth century and he was the proud owner of a wooden leg.
In 1649, Aston was serving as governor of Drogheda, Ireland. In an attempt to help establish Ireland as a power base for the English Royalist cause, he had joined forces with the Marquis of Osmond, the Commander-in-Chief of Royalist forces in Ireland.
In September of that year, Oliver Cromwell and his troops stormed the city and proceeded to massacre most of its inhabitants. When Parliamentary soldiers captured the governor, they had two main priorities: 1) kill this guy, and 2) check for gold coins inside his wooden leg. There weren’t any coins, but Aston was literally beaten brainless with his own leg in the process of not finding any gold.
2. Exploding lakes
How about getting killed by an exploding lake? It doesn’t happen too often, but that’s exactly how Lake Nyos decided to off nearly 1,800 people in 1986. Thanks to a pool of magma 50 miles below the surface, dangerous gases had been collecting at the bottom of the crater lake. On August 21, a rare natural phenomenon known as limnic eruption unleashed a murderous bubble of carbon dioxide upon the surrounding villages.
Most lakes have water layers that mix or “turn over” frequently, allowing gases to escape slowly into the atmosphere. Limnic eruption occurs when a deep water layer becomes saturated with dissolved gases over a long period of time. These gases are then released by some sort of trigger – for example, a landslide, heavy rainfall, or an earthquake – that displaces the saturated water and allows the gases to come out of solution. All at once, the lake overturns with a huge explosion. It’s like shaking up a soda can and spraying it, except with a lot more death and destruction.
When Lake Nyos blew up, a geyser of gas and water shot more than 250 feet into the air, set off an 80-foot tsunami, and spewed out a killer cloud of carbon dioxide that asphyxiated people as far as 15 miles away.
1. Your enemy’s severed head
Sigurd the Mighty, the ninth-century Viking Earl of Orkney, died a particularly ironic death after returning from a successful battle. Having defeated his foe Máel Brigte, Sigurd strapped the Pict’s severed head to his saddle and headed home. As he was riding, however, Máel’s tooth scraped against Sigurd’s leg and caused a sore that later became infected in a fatal sort of way.
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