A common taboo is that royal blood must not be spilled on the ground, and so history records a few unusual methods of executing royals. When Kublai Khan defeated his uncle Nyan, he ordered that Nyan be placed in a carpet and tossed to and fro until he died. In 1688, the king of Siam (now Thailand) ordered that one of his relatives be placed in a large mortar and pounded to death with a huge pestle. (source)

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), the first documented conductor, was the first musician to use a baton. It was a heavy, six-foot-long staff that he pounded on the ground in time to the music. One day, at a concert to celebrate the king's return to health, he accidently stuck the staff into his foot. He developed gangrene and died. (source)

The last occasion on which professional scientists took any serious notice of an alchemist's claim to have turned lead into gold happened in 1783. The Royal Society in London called on one of its Fellows, James Price, to show how he had achieved the alchemist's dream. But Price failed to replicate his successful experiment and, before the eyes of three colleagues, drank prussic acid and died.

Reverend Dwayne Long, 45 years old, died from a snakebite he suffered while handling a rattlesnake during an Easter service at a Arthurs Chapel in Rose Hill, Lee County, Virginia in 2004. He is one of an estimated 80 people to have died from handling snakes during worship since George Went Hensley begun the practice in the fundamentalist Pentecostal Holiness Church in the early 1900s. (source)

Frenchman Samuel Tapon was rich. He was valued at over $2,000,000. He was a wine maker who owned substantial vineyards and several châteaus at Cognac. His other interest was money. This miserly man liked to watch every penny. In October 1934 he suffered a loss of about $75,000 in a speculative venture. Now, if you're worth $2,000,000, you might think that $75,000 wouldn't be a big deal, but Samuel couldn't deal with it. He went to a nearby village and haggled with a vendor over a length of rope. He then went home and hung himself.

In August 1820, an avalanche on Mont Blanc swept a nine-man team of mountaineers into a glacial crevasse on the mountainside. Local people who knew the rate at which the glacier was moving calculated that in 40 years the bodies would appear at the foot of the mountain in the Chamonix valley, some 8 kilometres from where they had died. The bodies appeared in 1861, only a year later than predicted, and still looked "in the bloom of youth", according to some reports.

There is a rare disease called "progeria", in which the body ages much faster than normal. One of the earliest reported cases is that of Charles Charlesworth, who was born on March 14, 1829. At age four he began growing whiskers, and shortly afterwards his veins and tendons stood out in relief from his skin, his hair turned white, and his skin became wrinkled. At the age of seven, Charles died. The coroner assessed the cause of death as old age. (source)

Kimberly Marie Barnes and her four friends disappeared from Palm Beach, Florida, in a van one summer evening in 1979. What happened to them was unknown until eighteen years later, when a mud-filled van was spotted in Palm Beach County canal. The automobile was dragged out and was ready to be shredded for scrap when a Miami salvage yard manager noticed a shin bone fall from the van. Investigators later found a total of five skulls inside.

In 1626, Sir Francis Bacon, one of the most influential minds of his time, was watching a snowstorm. He was struck by the notion that maybe snow could be used to preserve meat. Determined to find out, he purchased a chicken from a nearby village, killed it, and then, standing outside in the snow, tried to stuff the chicken full of snow to freeze it. The chicken never froze, but Bacon caught a cold that turned into pneumonia, and died shortly afterward. (source)

In 1940, black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, aged 53, suffered a stroke, and it was rumoured that he had died. Before Garvey could come forward to stop the rumours, the Chicago Defender ran his obituary. It was quite unflattering, describing him as a man who died "broke, alone, and unpopular." When Garvey read his obituary, he moaned loudly and collapsed, suffering a second stroke, this one fatal. (source)

Victor Biaka-Boda, a lawyer and former witch doctor who represented Ivory Coast in the French Senate, was the only senator ever eaten by his constituents. In January 1950 he returned home to campaign for re-election. He set out on a tour and was never seen again. His belongings and a pile of bones were found near the village of Bouaflé on January 28th. After two years of investigation, the French overseas ministry determined that Biaka-Boda had been eaten by cannibals among his constituents. (source)

On July 31, 2009, 23-year-old Michael Gregory Thomas and 24-year-old Thomas James decided to rob a Sprint PCS store in Columbia, South Carolina. The robbers, apparently unaware that concealing your identity only works when you choose a method of concealment that can easily be removed afterwards, attempted to conceal their identities by spray-painting their faces gold before the robbery. The robbery was a success, but after the robbery James started having trouble breathing and died from inhaling paint fumes.

One day in 1893, James Ziegland of Honey Grove, Texas, walked out on his fiancée, Metilda Tichnor, who killed herself. In response, her brother shot Ziegland and, believing he had killed the man, then killed himself. His shot at Ziegland, however, just grazed his face before burying itself in the trunk of a nearby tree. In 1913, Ziegland decided to remove the tree from his property by using dynamite. The explosion dislodged the bullet, shooting it violently into Ziegland's head, finally killing him twenty years later. (source)

Around the year 1900, fear of premature burial was very strong. In the early 1900s, Franz Hartmann claimed to have collected around 700 cases of either premature burial or "close calls". In 1896 the "Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial" was founded. In 1897, in Germany, a patent was granted for a device that sent up a warning flag and turned on a light if movement was detected inside the coffin. Modern technology eventually put an end to the premature burial fear. (source)

The last person to contract smallpox through natural transmission was Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia who contracted it after coming into contact with an infected child in 1977. Maalin survived. In 1978, Janet Parker, an English medical photographer, was exposed to smallpox through a laboratory accident, and subsequently died. The laboratory's virologist felt so guilty that he later committed suicide. On May 8^th, 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated, although some samples remain in laboratories in Atlanta and Moscow. (source)

In 1014, Byzantine emperor Basil II decided to end for once and for all a war that had already lasted forty years. To break the spirit of the hated Bulgarians, he blinded all but 150 of 15,000 prisoners. The "lucky" 150 were blinded in one eye only. Every 100 blind men were guided by a one-eyed leader back to the Bulgarian capital of Ohrid, whose ruler, Samuel, had received word that his army was returning to him. Samuel hastened to meet his men—and found himself staring at thousands of helpless blind men. The sight was fatal. Samuel suffered a stroke on the spot, and died two days later. (Basil II received the title Bulgaroktonis, meaning "slayer of Bulgarians.") (source)

William the Conqueror died in 1087 after sustaining an abdominal injury from his saddle pommel after falling off his horse at the siege of Mantes. Following his death, the king's noblemen went back to their own estates, and their retainers looted the house where William was lying. Eventually, his body was brought to St. Stephen's church in Caen. During the funeral procession, a fire broke out in the town, and most of the mourners left to try to put it out. When the service began, it was interrupted by a man called Ascelin who announced that he owned the land that was to be William's burial ground but had not been paid. After he was paid, the monks attempted to squeeze William's putrefying body into a stone sarcophagus, but as they were doing that, William's abdomen burst, and an intolerable stench filled the church. (source)

In 1877, during the height of violent labour unrest in the United States, three men were found guilty of the murder of a foreman of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and sentenced to hang. Two of them went stoically to their deaths, but the third, Alexander Campbell, swore that he was innocent. As he was being dragged from his cell to the gallows, Campbell rubbed his left hand in dust from the floor and pressed his palm against the plaster wall, and shouted repeatedly, "This handprint will remain here for all time as proof of my innocence." And so it did. In 1931, Carbon County Sheriff Robert L. Bowman undertook a renovation of the cell, removing the section of plaster wall containing the handprint and replacing it with a new section of fresh plaster. Nonetheless, the handprint came back, and still exists today. (source)

William Kogut, an inmate on death row at San Quentin in 1930, decided to commit suicide. Being an inmate on death row, he only had access to what was available to him in his cell. He tore up several packs of playing cards, focusing on the pieces containing red ink (at that time, the ink in red playing cards contained nitrocellulose, which is flammable and can create an explosive mixture when wet). He then stuffed them into a pipe. On October 9, he plugged one end of the pipe firmly with a broom handle and poured water into the other end, thoroughly soaking the pieces of cards. He then put the pipe on a kerosene heater next to the bed, and placed the open end against his head. The heater boiled the water, and enough pressure eventually built up to cause the pipe to burst; the explosion shot out bits of playing cards with enough force to penetrate Kogut's skull, killing him. Kogut left a suicide note that stated that he felt that only he should punish himself for his crimes. (source)

On December 1, 1948, a man was found, dead, on Somerton Beach, Australia. Police were unable to identify the man, who carried no identification or passport, just cigarettes, tickets, gum, a comb, and, most interestingly, a scrap of paper with the words tamam shud, Persian for "it is finished," printed on it. It was determined that this was the final page of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Following a police appeal for the book, a man turned the book in, saying that he had found it on the front seat of his unlocked car around the time of the murder. On the inside back cover of the book were a jumble of letters; police assumed the writing to be some sort of code, but cryptologists were unable to break the code. Furthermore, a coroner's inquest was unable to determine a cause of death, although some sort of poison was suspected. To this day, the identity of the man, the cause of death, and the meaning of the code are all unknown.

Clement Vallandigham was an outspoken Ohio politician during the American Civil War. By the time the war was over, his now-obsolete pro-slavery beliefs made it hard for him to get elected, and he retired from politics and returned to practicing law in Ohio, at which he was quite successful. Six years later he was defending a certain Thomas McGehan, who was accused of murder in a bar fight. Vallandigham claimed that the victim, a certain Meyers, had accidentally shot himself by trying to draw his pistol while kneeling down. At Lebanon, Ohio, on the night of Friday, June 16, 1871, he was in a hotel room discussing McGehan's defence with Andrew McBurney, who had previously been Lieutenant Governor of Ohio. McBurney expressed scepticism at Vallandigham's theory, so Vallandigham grabbed a pistol he had placed on the table and demonstrated what he would show the jury. The only problem was that he didn't grab the pistol he thought he had, but rather a loaded gun, which discharged during the demonstration, Vallandigham received a wound similar to the one found on Meyers and died the next morning. As it turned out, however, Vallandigham's death was not entirely in vain. The jury in the McGehan case were now quite amenable to believing that Meyers' wound was self-inflicted, and McGehan was acquitted and went free. (source)