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“I Didn’t Even Know That Was Possible: 80 Of The Most Shocking And Unusual Ways People Have Lost Their Lives
No one can live forever, and sooner or later, every life comes to an end. Still, knowing that does little to prepare us for when it actually happens. And sometimes, the circumstances can be so sudden or unexpected that they are difficult to even process.
One Redditor asked people to share the craziest way someone they knew had passed away, and they came through with some truly wild stories. We gathered some of the most shocking and saddest ones below. Scroll down to read them, but be warned that this article contains sensitive and potentially upsetting content.
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#1
I got invited to a small town in Australia for Christmas. That's a whole other story. But while I was there I met this nice lady from the local swimming club. Very kind, seemed to take an interest in me as I was very out of place.
4 months later I was sat in a bar in Vietnam and they had CNN world on. The name of the town I was staying in was scrolling across the bottom and her picture popped up with "Fatal shark attack".
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#2
This just happened recently, unfortunately. Someone in my life went through years of invasive surgeries to remove cancers from all over her body and came out the other side. She’s been in remission for a couple years now. Last weekend, she was crossing the street and was hit by a car who fled the scene. She died on impact.
#3
A guy I went to high school with died in what has to be one of the most bizarre chains of bad luck I've ever heard.
He was really into photography and decided to hike up to an old abandoned fire lookout before sunrise to get pictures of the fog. He'd done that trail dozens of times.
On the way back down, he realized he'd left one of his camera lenses at the top. Instead of just writing it off, he hiked back up to grab it.
When he got there, a sudden thunderstorm rolled in out of nowhere. He took shelter under a large dead tree, thinking it would keep him dry for a few minutes. A strong gust snapped one of the rotten branches, and it hit him in the head.
The saddest part is that another group of hikers found him less than ten minutes later and called emergency services immediately, but the injuries were too severe.
What always stuck with me was how every single step depended on the previous one. If he'd forgotten literally anything else, if he'd decided the lens wasn't worth it, if the weather had changed five minutes later, or if he'd stopped under a different tree, he'd probably still be here.
It's been years, and I still think about how unbelievably random life can be sometimes.
#4
A tooth infection. The infection made its way into her blood stream and went to her brain. She had a stroke while she was in bed. I didn’t know she was sick at all and I don’t think she did either.
Longjumping_Ad_4431:
Probably more common, but when it happened I couldn't wrap my head around it... my Aunt died from a really bad toothache.
The toothache quickly turned into an abscess, then she was in a coma for a bit.
Toothache to death in less than a month.
That's wild to me.
#5
Ate before a simple surgery. He didn’t listen the pre-op instructions. He got a tube put in and was told to say his goodbyes. It was 100% preventable.
Just me, Happy Flower 1 minute ago
I don’t understand this one. Can someone please explain. Thanks
#6
Didn't sterilize their hands picking an ingrown hair on their Brazilian wax - got flesh eating disease. Truly horrific all the bits they lost.
#7
A church friend of ours went canoeing in the winter before the lake froze over, he accidentally tipped the boat, he recovered but he didn’t make it back to the cottage and died of hypothermia.
#8
My great grandfather worked in the coal mines his whole life. He had black lung, yet still smoked several packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day. And also drank a daily pint of Crown Royal.
He died at 92. He got hit by a truck walking home from the liquor store.
#9
Where my sister in law works they have a huge freezer where all the food for preparing meals is kept. A co worker was working a shift on her own and the door closed on her. They had all been aware of the issue with the door locking and not opening from the inside. They found her the next day dead. Poor woman. Obviously they finally fixed the freezer door, but typical government run facility, they didn't do anything about it till a tragedy occurred.
StrangeOne 1 hour ago (edited)
I highly doubt it was legal for her to be working alone. I hope the family got some justice. Something similar happened at a Walmart, except it was a walk-in oven and the employee wasn't working alone. The door closed on her and the oven was turned on. Her mother worked at Walmart, too, and they both had the same shift. It was her mom who found her burnt in the oven. An update to the investigation revealed there was nothing wrong with the oven, but it has been removed from the store. What really angers and shocks me, though, is that Walmart is claiming there were no safety violations involving the incident. ... What??? That makes 0 sense. They scrubbed their hands clean of any responsibility.
#10
I had an elderly uncle die of mad cow disease. The doctors were actually completely baffled and couldn't figure out what else it could possibly be.
He took excellent care of himself. He was elderly but ran six miles every morning, ate clean, etc.
When he got sick he went from being super active to no longer verbal and not enough motor control to swallow in the space of a week.
It was a massive shock to everyone close to him.
#11
A friend of a friend died from a wasp sting. Didn't know he was allergic and died before he got treatment. I didn't even know that was possible.
#12
Not washing her hands after changing her litterbox is what the medical investigator suspected.
My aunt had heart surgery; she survived it despite being given low chances due to her long-standing malnutrition issues and her type 1 diabetes.
A couple of weeks after surgery, she was found dead at home locked in her bedroom with the cats. They told my grandma that she died from an E.coli infection in her heart, at the site of the incision, and the most likely cause was handling cat litter or dog feces and not washing her hands before touching her incision or clothing that touched the incision.
#13
My mom died of an UTI. She was in the hospital being treated for a bad UTI. She was on antibiotics and was improving. She died in her sleep and was found in the morning when the nurse went to check vitals. The autopsy indicated she passed from sepsis caused by the infection. The worst day of my life!
#14
Infection from cat scratch.
Rob D 9 minutes ago
I'm a cat owner. We live in blissful but willful ignorance over how disgusting cats actually are. They vehemently paw through the material that they defecate in. Then walk 20 ft down the hall and jump straight into our beds. Where we lovingly allow them to walk all over us. It's unscientific not to realize it's the equivalent of running your finger around the inside of your toilet bowl and drying it on your bed sheet.
#16
My uncle passed away, and at his memorial service, my grandpa (uncle’s dad) buried a portion of his ashes. While digging the hole at the cemetery, my grandpa was bitten by a spider on his leg. That spider bite became septic, my grandpa had the leg amputated but never ended up waking up in the recovery room, the infection was too far gone by that point.
#17
My friend from high school had a real piece of [trash] stepdad. Anyway he died after being sat on by a cow. Sometimes justice is poetic.
#19
He was living in an apartment above his parents garage. He was out late one night, not drunk, no [substances]. He accidentally locked himself out. Instead of waking his parents up, he decided to climb in a window. He slipped and the window fell on his neck. He hung there til his parents found him the next morning.
#20
Someone I used to know's daughter hit a deer with her car and was in the hospital for a long time. Had to learn to walk again and everything, very severe injury. She was a strong woman, she worked her way back, and took up jogging because she wanted to own her body and her recovery. On like her third long jog, a car hit a deer on the road and threw it on her and she died on the scene.
#21
My wife's grandfather was standing on the corn in his silo to break apart some that had gotten stuck due to moisture. Fell through and was buried in the corn. Nobody was with him so they didn't suspect anything until he didn't come in for dinner. Allegedly he had just found out he had cancer and knowing that, the family was at least grateful he went out that way instead of a prolonged illness.
FIR3W0RKS:
This is actually a horrendously common way for people to die on family owned farms nowadays, with 15-25 people in America dying every year to it.
Also, suffocation is a horrible way to go out, I would not wish that death on anyone, being buried alive.
#22
He was drunk, thought the gun was unloaded, tried to be funny, made a fatal Russian roulette joke.
Everyone else sitting at the table ended up in therapy and I'm glad I stayed home that night.
#23
Where I grew up, there was a local Mennonite family that lived on a farm. The drainage for their septic pond had clogged and they didn’t know it, which created a massive methane bubble. Dad walked into it, passed out, fell into the pool of feces and drowned. One by one, family members ran to rescue him and each other, and they all died in the same way.
#25
My old babysitter simply fell in her kitchen. Hit her head, never woke up. She was Miss America at one point.
#26
Nice gal I knew was hit by a car traveling at racing speeds while sitting in a porta potty. Just as awful as it sounds.
#27
I know a guy who was using his body to hold a mattress down on the back of a pickup truck. They got out on the highway, the mattress with the guy on it blew off. He hit the highway and then in Looney Tunes style, the mattress landed on him. This guy was my father's cousin.
#29
Tripped and fell while drunk. Banged her head on a table before hitting the floor. Friends asked if she wanted them to call 911. She said no, she just needed to go lay down for a bit.
It was her birthday.
#30
Each one by itself isn’t so crazy, but together it’s pretty wild. Some people I knew growing up got married. Pretty young. Had two kids. Driving back to Utah, they hit a patch of black ice, and the young mom just happened to be unbuckled at the moment to take care of a baby in the back seat. She was ejected from the vehicle and died. Age 22. The young dad gets remarried a few years later and has two more kids. While trimming branches from a tree, he falls and breaks his neck and died. So his wife with the four kids gets remarried. A few years later while celebrating her birthday she suffers either an aneurysm or embolism and slumps into her mother-in-law’s lap, dead. Her new husband, who is not related by blood to any of the four kids, quickly adopts them all, goes back to school to become a teacher, and finishes raising them all. Has yet to remarry. The kids are all in their late teens/early twenties now and they’re all great people, from what I hear.
StrangeOne 30 minutes ago (edited)
A crying baby in the car is okay and can wait until the car can stop at a safe spot.
#32
For people in certain industries, likely a well known risk and not "crazy", but when I was younger a family friend died from going into an empty storage tank. Like a big one. Maybe the kind on tanker trucks, but not sure since I was a kid when it happened and didn't get the details. Despite being empty of liquid, there were fumes enough to displace all the oxygen and he suffocated. Two other people went in to save him, and one of them died, too. The other had lifelong effects from prolonged hypoxia.
#33
A friend of mine medevac-ed a farmer who was replacing a large light on the outside of his barn. The farmer couldn't reach the bulb, so he tried to climb the paddock fence and balance on that. Still couldn't reach it, so he drove a tractor with a front-end loader over, raised the bucket, and climbed up the fence into the bucket.
He was screwing the bulb in when he lost his grip on the bulb. It fell and shattered on his head. He staggered backwards off the bucket and slammed down onto the gate to the paddock fence, partially impaling himself. The entire gate crashed to the ground, pulling some of the fence down with it. A piece of the broken fence somehow kicked the brake off the tractor, and the tractor then ran him over.
Since he was being medevac-ed, I realize this might actually be the weirdest way someone *almost* died, but the air ambulance crew was told his odds of survival were beyond astronomical. I'd be thrilled to find out that he made it though!
#34
I worked at a steel mill and a guy decided to pole vault over a large ladle of molten steel. He did not make it. Barely anything of him was recovered.
#35
My business partner’s twin brother stepped on a bee whilst walking in his yard, barefoot.
It became infected and he became septic and ended up passing away. He also had diabetes so it was a whole thing. The crazy part is, my partner knew when his brother died. He said he felt it like it we a pain in his heart. So sad.
#36
Not someone I knew but a pt broke their own neck (complete dislocation cervical spine) shimmying under a car to fix the engine. He died within a few days. Also had a patient come in straight from the chiropractor’s - broke his neck while getting adjusted (?) - he must have had some prior history of cervical myelopathy - he also didn’t survive.
StrangeOne 39 minutes ago
My mom brought me to a chiropractor when I was a teen. She didn't like how my scoliosis, that I've had since I was a baby, made my shoulders uneven. She thought it was something that just happened recently at that point. I went for a few sessions before I put my foot down, refusing to go. Every time he adjusted my neck I was scared that was going to be it for me. Plus, my body was increasing in pain. I wasn't in pain before.
#37
I had a friend in college who always had a beer in her hand. She also coughed a lot, nearly every time I saw her. I always figured she just had smoker cough because she'd share things and I always asked if she had a contagious cold and she'd say she'd had it forever.
Her cough turned out to be untreated pnuenomia. Her brother convinced her one night when she was wheezing so hard it woke him up to go to the ER. By the time she was checked over, it was too late and the infection was too far into her lungs. She died in the icu. She was 27 years old. A med student spoke to us after that and said it was tragically common for alcoholics not to know they had pneumonia as the alcohol would depress their coughing and the infection would get worse before they realized what was happening. (I'm sure smoking cigarettes didn't help either but I'm not a doctor, just a wild guess.)
#38
Had a cop friend who survived 27 years on the department - back when most of the time you were on your own when you responded to calls. He retired, two months later he stepped on a nail fixing his roof, got gangrene and died shortly thereafter due to blood poisoning and complications from infection.
#40
Fell through a skylight. He was 12.
The paper published a picture of the skylight with part of his footprint.
#41
My great uncle Hans was initially from Switzerland. Him and all his brothers moved away from Switzerland in their 20s in order to avoid mandatory military conscription.
He ended up moving to South Africa.
While there, he met a woman from Angola that he absolutely loved, and who loved him deeply in return. He agreed to move out to her family farm in Mozambique. Unfortunately, his wife contracted cancer in the early 2010s and she died.
After her death, the rest of her extended family showed up at the farm and completely ransacked it. They took absolutely everything and left my uncle, an old man at this point, out in the middle of nowhere. Mozambican authorities didn’t find his body until 2 weeks later.
#42
When my cousin was 19 years old he went to a party and left early because he was wasted. He must have passed out in the middle of the road because his friends ran him over when they went to look for him.
#43
The previous owner of our house died in Alaska after she fell out of a raft on a guided river/wildlife tour. She was in her 70s. Her husband, same age range, caught her as she was going over the edge and held her hand as the boat dragged her over rapids - but he lost his grip and she was lost in the rapids. She didn’t even want to go on the trip apparently. A few years later, her grandson took his life by shooting himself in the driveway - the house was then put up for sale and we bought it knowing nothing about these tragedies.
#44
Ran off to Ukraine and join the war... fighting for Russia. Blew my mind when I heard that as someone from northern England.
#45
My mom's young husband lost the gas cap from his motorcycle, so he stuffed a rag in and went to buy a new cap at a place close by. A car knocked him down causing a spark that ignited the gas tank and he died. A few years later, my mom married my dad. It's weird to think that if not for that tragedy, I wouldn't exist.
#46
A kid in my high school had his car up on ramp jacks when he was laying flat on the driveway working underneath it. It somehow rolled off the ramps and one of the tires rolled directly onto and over his head.
#47
Irwindale, Ca.- My brother watched a man at his quarry fall into their pit lake. He couldn't swim. A co-worker jumped in to save him, but they both drowned. Very sad.
#51
A guy I went to school with died a couple of years after we left school when he into a diabetic coma living alone and died because his room was messy and he couldnt find his insulin pen. His mom found it under a pile of clothes cleaning up after he died.
#52
Pilot in Alaska. Flipped his float plane on landing and was pissed so he sat there a few minutes stewing. All his passengers got out while he was sitting there - when he finally went to unbuckle his seatbelt it was stuck and no one else was there to help him out. He drowned.
#54
A coworker of mine, a UPS driver, was sorting packages in the back of his truck while on his route when a small aircraft crashed into it. The plane and truck burst into flames, and he was k****d instantly.
#55
Manager I worked with went home one weekend, didn't show up the following week.
Tree fell on him and he died. I started laughing when someone told me because I thought they were joking. They were not.
#56
My mother had surgery back in the 80s. After she came out, she was having a real rough time with pain control. On the second day, the surgeon switched the IV meds from demerol to dilaudid. He wrote the change in the paper chart. He wrote to give her 1mg. There was a new nurse. She misread it as 7mg.
My grandmother was staying in the hospital room with my mother, and when my mother said she felt MUCH better immediately after the shot, my grandmother shoo'd the nurses out and turned off the lights so my mother could get some sleep. My mother quickly fell asleep and began snoring. Which my grandmother thought that was a great sign she was getting some great rest, not knowing my mother never snored.
My grandmother was knitting a throw blanket. It took her a while before she realized my mother was no longer snoring, but when she did, she thought she was in a really deep sleep now, and getting healing rest. It took her a while to realize she wasn't breathing. She called nurses, who called the Harvey Team. They got her heart restarted and ventilated to force her to breathe. She was in the ICU for a week. The hypoxia caused her brain to swell. By the fifth day, she was brain dead. We had to get a court order to be able to turn the machines off. We turned them off the day after she turned 42.
#57
We had some really amazing neighbors. Their kids and ours were roughly the same age, walked to each others’ houses to play all the time. They went to the beach for the dad’s birthday, out on their boat, which they did all the time. They apparently spent all day jumping off the boat with their friends. Then the dad jumped in just a a wave went by, and it broke his neck. He didn’t hit the bottom or anything, it was just the angle of the wave. Died right there in front of his friends, wife, and kids. Absolutely devastating.
#58
There was a family of 4 in my home city that died in a fire. The neighbors called in the fire during the middle of the night because the family was away for a vacation. The fire spread quickly and the fire department had trouble containing it. Long story short, the fire didn’t get put out until the next day. And thats when they discovered the family inside. The fire department hadn’t even attempted a rescue because they thought the home was empty.
#59
Birthday cake crumbs.
Older auntie accidentally inhaled a crumb from her birthday cake. Got a lung infection, didn't recover. Happy birthday, I guess?
#61
High school class president was hiking. He reached above his head and grabbed on to a rock to pull himself up, and stuck his hand in a rattlesnake nest. He didn't make it to the hospital.
#62
Ex partner was a fitness trainer. Great shape, good diet. Had a blood clot or something in his leg. He was 42, I think. I think about him every single day.
#63
1 - Guy tripped and fell into an auger drill bit "spudding in" an oil well.
2 - Guy was on a carrier flight deck when an F-14 Tomcat nudged his throttle to taxi forward. It blew him back behind another F-14 on the catapult as it went to afterburner for the catapult shot. That blew him into the JBD (Jet Blast Deflector) and he caromed off into the ocean.
#65
I used to go to a renfaire in my town. They had to move their location to a different park, and the first year they were at the new place, there was an actor sitting under a tree, doing some sort of crafting, when an enormous tree limb broke with no warning and fell directly on her head. The staff there were heroic: instantly formed a crew to move the limb off her and start CPR. They did it for what seemed like forever, but was about a half hour until the ambulance arrived. She likely died on impact, and one of her kids was right next to her and wasn't injured. I was walking right there less than a minute before the accident, and had several friends trapped by the other end of the limb. It was a horrible day, and the renfaire itself, after being a major summer event for our community for roughly 30 years, ended up moving to a completely different area several hundred miles away. I personally have never walked in that park since then.
#66
Several years ago... North Dakota oil fields. Guy was standing outside next to some large semi trucks with trailers. Someone backed over him with one of the trailers... he didn't see it coming. Died on scene.
#68
A kid I went to school with died when he was skidooing and ran into one of those diagonal utility cables that attaches to the ground on an angle. It was missing the yellow plastic warning tube and because it was night time, it was practically invisible. A week before, a friend of mine was walking his girlfriend home and ran right into it and got injured.
#69
My grandpa died flying his own 2 seater airplane. He was a pilot for decades and would go flying every day. That one day the engine stalled and he was over canyon land and couldn’t land safely. I have melted aluminum from the crash site I picked up.
#70
Not crazy. But an old highschool buddy of mine died because he pushed a person out of the way at a railroad crossing. Saved their life, but died. Barry? Love you.
#71
I went to India in high school to “preach the gospel” and anyway the pastor there had 3 small children and a wife who would make our food every day. I probably still have pictures somewhere. When they were older like…about teenagers he sent them to live in the US. I can’t remember which state.
All 3 kids were staying with an American family that was parents and their one or two kids. One night the fireplace caught the Christmas tree on fire. The house burnt up. The entire American family made it out alive and all three Indian kids died.
The mother has obviously never been the same since. She basically went comatose, just repeating their names over and over. I cannot imagine.
#72
Drowned in a barrell of water. He was an old guy, nobody home. People assume he bended over it and couldn't get himself up.
#73
Not a friend but a coworker at a big-4 consultancy that I previously worked for; he was working at his desk and we all went out for a late boozy lunch but he stayed back working.
We got back to the office around 6 and he was still at his desk seemingly working.
He had headphones in and didn't respond to us so we didn't think anything of it.
Little did we realise that he had a heart attack while working and died sitting up at his desk.
We only found out because the cleaners found him that evening.
Grim.
#75
Friend of mine was out looking for apartments with his kid.
He opened a door off a hallway, and took a step inside expecting it to be a closet. It was the stairs to the basement. He fell down the entire flight of stairs.
Was in a coma for a week before he passed.
I still miss him and talk to him when I need advice.
#76
In our early forties our social circle included a guy who was the most convivial, positive pleasant man you could meet. Not a mean bone in his body. Great husband and father. He was a lifelong avid downhill skier. He was with some of our mutual friends and knew the mountain they were on like the back of his hand.
He started his run down, they all did, and when they got to the bottom he wasn't there. He wasn't anywhere.
Turns out he used a cross trail to reach another run, caught an edge on an exposed tree root and slammed head first into a tree. Helmet on. Died instantly.
Just like that. Poof. Gone.
#77
She got kicked in the head by a horse. Well nobody actually knew what happened for sure but she was found in the field after turning her horse out.
The irony was that she'd previously had a very highly strung stallion and had sold him because he was too much for her and she then bought a much quieter and safer mare. She'd only had the new horse for 2 weeks and it k****d her.
#79
I visited a remote island in Alaska where we were working for an indigenous group. They had a woman who was working as a teacher at their school and she was from Manhattan. She used to jog up the hills after work and come back around dusk. Everyone warned her that there are wolves out there but she wouldn’t listen. She thought they were messing with the city woman. The one night she didn’t come home and they went looking for her. Of course the wolves had gotten to her and there wasn’t much left.
#80
A coworker i used to drink with after shifts at a restaurant, he was one of the most charismatic dudes ive ever met. guys loved him, girls loved him, he was just super cool and charming. its not that crazy at all really but one night he got home after a night of drinking, the house was locked so he just crashed out on the deck, and didnt wake up the next morning. froze to death on a not particularly cold night in virginia because he couldnt get inside his house. a strong, healthy 22 or so year old, not a frail old geriatric.
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