Strange Ways to Die, 4-7
Our list of strange ways to die continues with a Roman torture method.
4. A terrible taste
War is hell, but ancient wars were particularly brutal. After the Persians captured the Roman emperor Valerian during battle around A.D. 260, Persia's King Shapur I is said to have humiliated Valerian by using him as a footstool. But it only got worse for the Roman. After Valerian offered a king's ransom for his release, Shapur responded by forcing molten gold down his prisoner's throat, stuffing him with straw, and then putting him on display, where he stayed for a few hundred years.
5. Too long in the tooth
Sigurd I of Orkney was a successful soldier who conquered most of northern Scotland in the 9th century. Following a fever-pitched victory in A.D. 892 against Maelbrigte of Moray and his army, Sigurd decapitated Maelbrigte and stuck his opponent's head on his saddle as a trophy. As Sigurd rode with his trophy head, his leg kept rubbing against his foe's choppers. The teeth opened a cut on Sigurd's leg that became infected and led to blood poisoning. Sigurd died shortly thereafter.
6. An unfair way to go
Mark Twain once said, "Golf is a good walk spoiled," and although many a duffer has spent a frustrating couple of hours on the links, few actually die as a result. In 1997, Irishman David Bailey was not so lucky. Bailey was retrieving an errant shot from a ditch when a frightened rat ran up his pant leg and urinated on him. The rat didn't bite or scratch the golfer, so even though his friends kept telling him to shower, Bailey didn't think much of the encounter and kept playing. His kidneys failed two weeks later, and he died. The cause was leptospirosis, a bacterial infection spread by rodents, dogs, or livestock that is usually mild but can cause meningitis, pneumonia, liver disease, or kidney disease.
7. Fantasy meets harsh reality
Many people who like playing video games or online computer games do so to escape the pressures of the real world for a bit. But when that escapism is taken too far, gamers can leave the real world altogether. That's what happened to South Korean Lee Seung Seop in August 2005. Lee was an industrial repair technician, but he had quit his job to spend more time playing Internet games. Lee set himself up at a local Internet café and played a game for nearly 50 hours straight, taking only brief breaks to go to the bathroom or nap. Exhaustion, dehydration, and heart failure caused Lee to collapse, and he died shortly thereafter at age 28.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS:
Helen Davies, Marjorie Dorfman, Mary Fons, Deborah Hawkins, Martin Hintz, Linnea Lundgren, David Priess, Julia Clark Robinson, Paul Seaburn, Heidi Stevens, and Steve Theunissen
