David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

In August 1981 11-year-old Simon Longhurst of Wigan, England, attended a Sunday afternoon junior disco session where, along with other youngsters, he performed the ‘head shake’, a New Wave dance in which the head is shaken violently as the music gets faster and faster. The following day, young Simon began suffering headaches and soon a blood clot developed. Three weeks later he died of acute swelling of the brain. The coroner ruled it ‘death by misadventure’.

American revolutionary patriot James Otis often mentioned to friends and relatives that, as long as one had to die, he hoped that his death would come from a bolt of lightning. On May 23, 1783, the 58-year-old Otis was leaning against a doorpost in a house in Andover, Massachusetts, when a lightning bolt struck the chimney, ripped through the frame house and hit the doorpost. Otis was killed instantly.

On April 15, 1982, 26-year-old Michael Scaglione was playing golf with friends at the City Park West Municipal Golf Course in New Orleans. After making a bad shot on the thirteenth hole, Scaglione became angry with himself and threw his club against a golf cart. When the club broke, the club head rebounded and stabbed Scaglione in the throat, severing his jugular vein. Scaglione staggered back and pulled the metal piece from his neck. Had he not done so, he might have lived, since the club head could have reduced the rapid flow of blood.

In 1924 British newspapers reported the bizarre case of a man who apparently committed suicide while asleep. Thornton Jones, a lawyer, woke up to discover that he had slit his own throat. Motioning to his wife for a paper and pencil, Jones wrote, ‘I dreamt that I had done it. I awoke to find it true.’ He died 80 minutes later.

Bobby Leach was a colourful character who first became famous in 1911, when he went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. He continued to perform dangerous exploits, including parachuting over the falls from an airplane. In April 1926 Leach was walking down a street in Christchurch, New Zealand, when he slipped on a piece of orange peel and broke his leg so badly that it had to be amputated. Complications developed and he died.

Seventy-nine-year-old cornetist and music professor Nicolas Coviello had had an illustrious career, having performed before Queen Victoria, Edward VII and other dignitaries. Realising that his life was nearing its end, Coviello decided to travel from London to Saskatchewan to pay a final visit to his son. On the way, he stopped in New York City to bid farewell to his nephews, Peter, Dominic and Daniel Coviello. On June 13, 1926, the young men took their famous uncle to Coney Island to give him a taste of America. The elder Coviello enjoyed himself but seemed irritated by the blare of jazz bands. Finally he could take it no longer. ‘That isn’t music,’ he complained and he fell to the boardwalk. He was pronounced dead a few minutes later. Cause of death was ‘a strain on the heart’.

On August 1, 1985, lifeguards of the New Orleans recreation department threw a party to celebrate their first drowning-free season in memory. Although four lifeguards were on duty at the party and more than half the 200 party-goers were lifeguards, when the party ended, one of the guests, Jerome Moody, 31, was found dead on the bottom of the recreation department pool.

Thirty-five-year-old Richard Fresquez of Austin, Texas, became drunk on the night of May 7, 1983. He tripped on a garden hose, became tangled in it and strangled to death while trying to break free.

On April 23, 1991, Yooket Paen, 57, of Anghton, Thailand, slipped in some mud, grabbed a live wire and was electrocuted. Later that day, her 52-year-old sister, Yooket Pan, was showing some neighbours how the accident happened when she slipped, grabbed the same live wire and was also electrocuted.

In 1991 Bulgarian environmental artist Christo erected 1,760 yellow umbrellas along Southern California’s Tejon Pass and another 1,340 blue umbrellas in Ibaraki Prefecture north of Tokyo. Each of the umbrellas weighed 48 lb. On October 26, Lori Jean Keevil-Mathews, a 30-year-old insurance agent, drove out to Interstate 5 to view the California umbrellas. Shortly after Keevil-Mathews and her husband got out of their car, a huge gust of wind tore one of the umbrellas loose from its steel screw anchors and blew it straight at Keevil-Mathews, crushing her against a boulder. Christo immediately ordered the dismantling of all the umbrellas in both countries. However, on October 30, another umbrella-related death occurred when 57-year-old crane operator Wasaaki Nakaruma was electrocuted by a power line in Japan as he prepared to take down one of the umbrellas.

Michael Anderson Godwin was convicted of murder and sentenced to the electric chair, but in 1983 his sentence was changed to life in prison. On March 5, 1989, Godwin, 28 years old, was trying to fix a pair of earphones connected to the television set in his cell at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina. While sitting on a steel toilet, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.

Nitaro Ito, 41, a pancake-shop operator in Higashiosaka City, Japan, concluded that he needed an extra edge in his 1979 campaign for the House of Representatives. He decided to stage an attack on himself and then draw sympathy by campaigning from a hospital bed. Ito’s scheme was to have an employee, Kazuhiko Matsumo, punch him in the face on the night of September 17, after which Ito would stab himself in the leg. After Matsumo had carried out of his part of the plan, Ito stabbed his right thigh. Unfortunately, he cut an artery and bled to death before he could reach his home, 50m. away.

Ford Motor Company’s casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, employed a one-ton robot to fetch parts from a storage rack. When the robot malfunctioned on January 25, 1979, 25-year-old Robert Williams was asked to climb up on the rack and get the parts. While he was performing the task, the robot suddenly reactivated and hit Williams in the head with its arms. Williams died instantly. Four years later a jury ordered Unit Handling Systems, the manufacturer of the robot, to pay Williams’ family $10 million. Williams is believed to have been the first person killed by a robot.

Ivan McGuire was an experienced parachutist who spent the afternoon of April 2, 1988, in Louisburg, North Carolina, videotaping parachuting students as they jumped and jumping with them. On his third trip up, McGuire dropped from the airplane and began filming the instructor and student who followed him a second later. McGuire reached back and discovered that he had forgotten to put on his parachute. His videotape, which was shown on the news in nearby Raleigh, recorded McGuire’s final words: ‘Uh-oh.’

Betty Stobbs, 67, put a bale of hay on her bike and went out to feed the sheep at her family farm in Stanhope, England, on January 26, 1999. Forty sheep rushed towards her and began jumping up on the bike to reach the hay, knocking Stobbs into the 100-ft deep Ashes Quarry. Alan Renfry witnessed the incident from his home and was convinced that the sheep were responsible for Stobbs’ death.