12 Of The Strangest Ways People Have Died

To discover a dead body is one of the most shocking things an average person can ever experience. And yet, depending on their job, a person can find themselves examining corpses on a daily basis. And even though most people are uncomfortable around bodies, you don't last very long in a profession like policing or forensic examination unless you can get comfortable pretty quickly.

It's this adaptation to the job that can cause a conversation with a medical examiner to jump from the weather to a grisly murder scene without them batting an eye.

Still, even when you think you've seen it all, life can have a way of surprising you. In this reddit thread, those with these kind of professions and their families share their stories of unusual cases that surprised even them.

But if you don't want to sift through the hundreds of macabre stories collected there (and I can't say I blame you), these 12 bizarre causes of death should give you the right idea of what to expect. Be warned that many of the descriptions of these people's fates are graphic and may disturb you.

1. The man who died of uterine cancer.

When 37-year-old Vincent Liew received a new kidney in February of 2002, doctors didn't know his donor had cancer. When they found out, there was no indication of cancer in the kidney. Plus, the donor's cancer was in her uterus, so Liew's doctor told him there was little chance of the disease affecting him.

But when Liew died in September of 2002, cancer specialist Robert Gelfand concluded that he was a victim of uterine cancer, despite not having a uterus.

2. The 20-year "football" hernia.

When redditor Maniac_Moxie was working at a funeral home, he encountered a man who developed a severe inguinal hernia over the course of 20 years. 

As a result, the man's scrotum had developed a bulge the size of a football by the time he died. The case was so severe that the medical examiner reportedly called a colleague and simply said, "hey dude, come check this out."

3. The light bulb attacker.

When the man in this story was bleeding out in the emergency room, the culprit seemed to be a stab wound. But when doctors treated the wound, they noticed he was still bleeding from behind.

After turning the patient around, they discovered that his attacker had shoved a light bulb in his anus before stabbing him. This is a notably difficult object to remove and the man died of septic shock after the procedure.

4. The fatal wine enema.

There's been cases of people dying from wine enemas before, but they're usually the result of acute alcohol poisoning. But although the deceased in Like_meowschwitz's story exhibited signs of alcoholism despite his apparent lack of drinking, this is not how his red wine enema killed him. 

Instead, he bled to death, having pierced his colon with the device he was using. 

Advertisement