Story The Darwin Awards

[maniac116]

In the early 1900s, Paris-based tailor Franz Reichelt claimed to have invented a wearable parachute.
He believed in his invention so much, in fact, that he sought to test it by leaping off the Eiffel Tower.
On February 4, 1912 — despite prior tests with dummies yielding unsuccessful results and warnings from his friends not to be a dummy himself — Reichelt leaped off the Tower's first platform wearing his parachute suit. The parachute failed to deploy, and he plummeted nearly 200 feet to his death. The entire episode was filmed, and it's believed to be the first death caught on camera.

Pathe

 

[maniac116]

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Death By Caviar
The gluttony of royalty throughout history has been pretty stupendous — Henry VIII was famously extremely greedy, and many suffered gout from over-indulgence — but Adolf Frederick, who reigned as king of Sweden in the 1700s, appears to have genuinely killed himself via a single excessive meal. Historians report that in 1771 he ate a feast of caviar, lavish amounts of seafood and sauerkraut, and a mind-boggling 14 servings of semla, a bun soaked in warm milk.

 

[maniac116]

Evil Feather

Falling deaths aren't all that uncommon, so why the Darwin Award?

In 2009, a middle-aged woman was walking a path along the top of a cliff when she spotted a feather on the ground. She went to pick it up, but the wind carried it over the guard railing set up to protect wanderers.

Any normal person would simply let the wind carry the feather away, but this woman had to have it. In her quest to capture the elusive feather, the woman toppled off the 80-foot cliff and died the next day from the head injury she sustained.

All we want to know is: Did she get the feather?

 

[maniac116]

GRIZZLY MAN' EATEN BY BEAR

Timothy Treadwell loved bears. The problem is, bears didn't love him nearly so much.

Blonde-haired and a trifle feminine, young Timmy loved animals as a boy, then overdosed on heroin as a young man, and subsequently devoted his adult life to living among bears. Every summer for 13 years he'd have a bush pilot drop him off amid the savage wilderness of Alaska's Katmai National Park to live among the giant grizzlies. He never got too close to them, but he made up names for them and sang songs for them and filmed them and claimed he loved them far more than he loved filthy humans and their stupid so-called "civilization."

But of course it was the end of the 13th year that would prove unlucky for the rabid bear enthusiast.

Timothy thought he understood bears. What he clearly failed to understand is that bears are highly capable of killing him, not to mention frequently more than willing to do so.

He stayed a week later than normal as the summer of 2003 started crashing into the Alaskan fall. During his final days, while he was camping out with his reputed girlfriend Amie Huguenard, he mentioned seeing a new bear that for some reason he didn't quite trust. Perhaps it was this new interloping brown bear that devoured Timothy and Amie on that fateful autumn morning as they screamed in vain. Treadwell's camera recorded the sound but not the video because the lens cap was still attached.

German director Werner Herzog turned Timothy's tragically ironic story into the brilliant 2006 documentary Grizzly Man. In the film, Herzog listens to the death audio on headphones and decides that not only shouldn't it be included in the film, the tape should be destroyed.

But it appears that the ultra-ghoulish soundtrack of Timothy and Amie's death has surfaced online. If you dare, you can hear Timothy and his girlfriend's dying screams here. WARNING: This audio is EXTREMELY upsetting:

[youtube ]

 

[maniac116]

Laughing to Death – Alex Mitchell, 1975

While watching a comedy sketch, Alex Mitchell found himself laughing uncontrollably for 25 minutes. Unfortunately, the laughter triggered a fatal heart attack.