Category: Death Curiosities

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Hard Luck

From a bet gone wrong to the man suffocated by BOOBS…these are 8 of the most bizarre cases of people who died during sex

By George Harrison

[T]HESE are the shocking true stories of the unfortunate people who died whilst having sex.

The tragic stories highlight a dangerous side to everyone’s favourite pastime, so remember to take care next time you get your rocks off.

This mountain of X-rated magazines crushed a man to death at his flat in Japan

Crushed by porn stash

One man recently met a sticky end after being crushed by a mountain of pornographic magazines.

The Japanese man, named as 50-year-old Joji, was found six months after his six-tonne stash of porn magazines fell on him.

Cleaners tasked with tidying his neglected flat found that the entire apartment was rammed with the explicit magazines.

It is unknown whether the man, a former car-manufacturer, had died from a heart attack and then fell into a stack of pornography, or whether he was crushed to death by his X-rated collection.

Plunge of passion

In 2007 a couple from Columbia, South Carolina, fell to their deaths after plunging naked from the roof of an office building.

The bodies of Brent Tyler and Chelsea Tumbleston, both 21, were found by a taxi driver in the middle of an otherwise-empty street at 5am.

The couple’s clothes were later found on the roof of a nearby building, where they were believed to have been having a risky outdoor romp before falling from the roof.

One man died after taking enough Viagra to get him through a 12-hour romp

Half-day romp ends in tragedy

A Russian man died in 2009 after completing a 12-hour orgy with female pals, who had bet him over £3,500 that he couldn’t keep going for half a day.

Minutes after completing the bet, mechanic Sergey Tuganov died of a heart attack, which had been caused by the huge quantity of Viagra he had guzzled to prepare him for the task.

A woman was mauled to death by a lion after having sex in the nearby bush

Eaten by a lion after romping in the bush

In 2013, a Zimbabwean news website reported that a couple were attacked by a lion after having sex in the bush.

The big cat killed Sharai Mawera after interrupting the couple, although her unidentified lover managed to run away before he could be killed.

After notifying the police, the male lover, who escaped wearing only a condom, found the woman’s mauled body at the scene of the attack.

Smothered to death by lover’s breasts

Donna Lange, 51, smothered her lover to death inside a mobile home.

The intoxicated woman, from Washington, claimed she didn’t know how the man died, although a witness claimed to have seen her crush his face with her chest.

A Chinese student died of a heart attack after making a donation to a sperm bank

Sperm bank heart attack

A trainee doctor, Zheng Gang, died of a heart attack in 2011 – after over-exerting himself whilst producing a sample at a sperm bank.

The 23-year-old was pronounced dead at the scene of China’s Wuhan University, where he had spent two hours inside a booth, having already visited four times that week.

Policeman cops it during a threesome

A cop died in 2009 when his heart gave out during a threesome – and his wife sued his doctor for not warning him against having sex.

William Martinez, a 31-year-old Atlanta police officer, died whilst having sex with another woman and a male friend.

But his wife won $3 million (£2.4 million) after suing his doctor for not warning him that he had a weak heart, and should avoid strenuous activities.

Death by neo-Nazi roleplay

A sick neo-Nazi roleplaying session ended in tragedy, after 38-year-old Simon Burley died when a sex game with lover Elizabeth Hallam went wrong.

The hanging-enthusiast had a noose fitted around his neck whilst his lover played the part of a Nazi executioner, who hanged him as part of a sex game they were playing.

Unfortunately, the knife she planned to cut him down with was blunt, and the man was left to suffocate to death at his house in Grimsby.

Complete Article HERE!

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Exploring death through the isolation of VR

Confronting your own mortality is tough but helpful.

By Mona Lalwani

[I]’m sitting on a field of tall, red grass staring straight ahead at a lone tree. Its leaves match the crimson landscape that stretches out before me. In the distance, a rusty orange forest fades into the background. There’s a gentle rustling of leaves, occasionally interrupted by the faint chirping of a bird, that forces me to breathe slower.

“Thank you for being here and being willing to consider moving towards the idea of dying and death,” a calm, male voice prepares me for the virtual meditative journey.

A hazy white light source rises in the distance as the voice walks me through the process of focusing on my breathing. I watch the blades of the grass swish to the left with the wind. The tree slowly starts to lose its leaves. “Feel the air around you,” the voice continues. “Feel yourself letting go as if you’re a tree dropping your leaves. The breeze takes the leaves away. Everything that you know and everything you cherish will be taken by the wind.”

As I let the weight of those words sink in, the blue sky slowly takes on a deep green hue, ushering in darker skies. Within moments, the field beneath me turns into a deep red lake that starts to rise around me. I gasp for air before I quickly remind myself that I have an Oculus Rift headset on my face.

When We Die is a virtual reality experience for perhaps the most difficult kind of contemplation: the end of life. The first half, with the metaphorical tree, presents the ephemerality of nature as a symbol of the finiteness of your own life. But the next chapter addresses the wider perception of death as a tragedy through real-life experiences.

In the second half, serene views of the cosmos shift the narrative from considering your own mortality to thinking about the process of dying as an inescapable reality for all. Celestial objects that dot the night sky reveal audio clips from a hospice worker, who shares her observations of death, and a neurologist, who grounds the experience in a physician’s approach to it.

“We wanted to create a safe space for people to have difficult conversations,” said Paula Ceballos, an NYU student who is a part of a trio that created When We Die for the school’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. “We find that in the Western culture death and dying and aging get put behind closed doors, and we wanted to bring it up and make you think about it.”

The fear of death, your own or a loved one’s, is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. It can drive the choices we make, yet it continues to be shrouded in mystery. Over the years, hundreds of research studies have probed the process of dying, the fear of confronting death and how the awareness of one’s own mortality has impacted religious, cultural and spiritual world views.

When We Die makes room for that spiritual contemplation with its abstract worlds: There are no physical bodies, only metaphors for the process of aging and dying. But the idea is rooted in a more practical understanding of the ways in which neglecting end-of-life processes can hamper the process of dying, especially for the elderly and the terminally ill.

“It leads to systemic challenges,” said Leslie Ruckman, an NYU student whose background in health care informed her work on When We Die. “There’s all this money that gets spent on treating patients in ICUs, and people [often] end up dying in hospitals even though advance directives might say they’d rather die at home. These are bigger issues that arise out of the inability to look at the end of life and not being able to define what a good death might look like.”

The VR experience relies on surreal visuals to make that happen. According to co-creator Dana Abrassart, when the group first started working on the project, they envisioned a James Turrell-style liminal space. But they quickly realized that a virtual take on the light and space movement would trigger motion sickness.

Nausea in a death-related experience would defeat the purpose of their work. So instead, the group found inspiration in Richard Mosse’s infrared imagery. “It’s this idea that there’s a light spectrum around us but the human eye can’t see it,” Ruckman told me. “We liked that as a parallel to this natural process that is always present and yet, we choose not to see it.”

Death is a constant. Yet its prevalence is hidden behind hospital doors. “In the US, there’s a sanitization of death,” Dr. Gayatri Devi, the neurologist whose voice floats through the cosmos in the second half of the VR experience, told me at her clinic in Manhattan. “Our current view of death might be a victim of industrialization and development. There’s less contact with ill people who are dying so they get sequestered and put in a different place. Whereas in India, for example, there is a philosophy of maintaining contact with family and contact with death is not uncommon.”

More than 80 percent of Americans with chronic illnesses would prefer to forego hospitalization, but according to the CDC, 70 percent of that population dies in a hospital or nursing home. Even in cases where patients have advance directives to avoid aggressive measures, a widespread study revealed that only 25 percent of the physicians were aware of their patients’ end-of-life choices. The discrepancies are jarring. Even though the rise of palliative care and hospice work in the past few years is starting to close that gap, the inability to talk about death continues to get in the way of making better choices.

“Death is not a contagious illness,” said Dr. Devi. “But in some ways, we treat it like one. We need to talk about it and get comfortable around it and maybe use VR to experience it. The better the conversation about death, the more likely we’ll be to allow more of us to die at home so we’re not scared of it.”

Conquering those fears has been the focus of recent psychological explorations in VR. While When We Die uses a light meditative touch to approach conversations around death, a Spanish research group recently simulated an out-of-body experience to tackle the full spectrum of thanatophobia (or the fear of dying) in an attempt to reduce anxiety.

“Death is not a contagious illness. But in some ways, we treat it like one. We need to talk about it and get comfortable around it and maybe use VR to experience it.” — Dr. Gayatri Devi

The idea of one’s own nonexistence has always been a tough one to conquer. “But it’s a reality and we can’t opt out of it,” said Dr. Devi. “When you allow yourself into that space of thinking you’re dead, where you lose agency over yourself — that can be a powerful experience. Allowing yourself to sit with that makes you vulnerable and to be able to think about death. You have to allow that to happen.”

While some might consider this exploration of death terrifying or even futile, in many cases the practical rewards offer the required motivation. Preparing beforehand, for instance, allows people to get their affairs in order, which unburdens families from making end-of-life decisions.

“When people are faced with death, if they haven’t done any preparation, there’s too much fear and anxiety to let anything else in,” Stephanie Hope, the hospice nurse who shares her experiences in When We Die told me. “It makes it important to talk to people who aren’t faced with that yet.”

Hope, who has been a hospice worker for about four years, points out that when people think about having limited time, they start to withdraw and often show an inclination to spend time with people they’re close to. She likens that purposeful shrinking of the world to a kind of intimacy and peace that can be felt in the aloneness of VR.

The isolation, which tends to be one of the biggest criticisms of the medium, lends itself to the deeply personal experience of contemplating death. “You’re in your own world and this is your moment,” said Hope. “So to think that that’s what it might be like at the end for you can be powerful thing.”

While the immersive possibilities of VR feel contemporary, tools that address the human predisposition to death have been around for centuries. John Troyer, director of the center for death and society at the University of Bath, traces the lineage of the visual format all the way back to mediumship. “For me, a lot of it, although a different kind of technology, has a relationship to this idea of connecting with the dead in some way,” he said. “To understand any kind of new tool that is supposed to help people think about death, we have to place it in context of the long history of tools that were created by humans to help other humans make sense of their mortality.”

Troyer pointed to theatrical experiences like phantasmagoria of the 19th century, which played with themes of monsters and death long before VR. The use of projection systems like magic lanterns turned those imaginative ideas into visual experiences for audiences, which in a way is comparable to the current applications of the immersive technology.

The visual trickery of present-day VR, however, is far more profound than its predecessors, both in terms of the visual display as well as its potential for real-world impact. Death-related VR experiences can help prepare people for the inevitable but can also be used to train hospice nurses. Hope believes that bringing VR headsets into nursing school simulation labs, where trainees already work with dummies to stage scenarios, could provide crucial insight into hospice work from a patient’s perspective.

While hospice workers are trained to care for the dying, physicians are primed to prevent death. “In medicine we’re taught to keep that heart beating,” said Dr. Devi. “There’s an attitude of ‘let’s do whatever we can to keep this person’s heart beating, even if that doesn’t improve their quality of life.’ But why are we putting our elderly or very ill patients through these aggressive ways when the outcome is not going to be a good-quality life?”

When We Die doesn’t address those questions directly. Instead, it gets at them with an acknowledgement of death as a potentially positive experience. There’s an inherent belief that dying is depressing. It continues to be a terrifying unknown because we lack experience in it. But as the VR experience reveals, the tragedy of death isn’t true for all.

Complete Article HERE!

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Broken pebbles offer clues to Paleolithic funeral rituals

Pebbles were refitted during analysis.

[H]umans may have ritualistically “killed” objects to remove their symbolic power, some 5,000 years earlier than previously thought, a new international study of marine pebble tools from an Upper Paleolithic burial site in Italy suggests.

Researchers at Université de Montréal, Arizona State University and University of Genoa examined 29 pebble fragments recovered in the Caverna delle Arene Candide on the Mediterranean Sea in Liguria. In their study, published online Jan. 18 in the Cambridge Archeological Journal, they concluded that some 12,000 years ago the flat, oblong pebbles were brought up from the beach, used as spatulas to apply ochre paste to decorate the dead, then broken and discarded.

The intent could have been to “kill” the tools, thereby “discharging them of their symbolic power” as objects that had come into contact with the deceased, said the study’s co-author Julien Riel-Salvatore, an associate professor of anthropology at UdeM who directed the excavations at the site that yielded the pebbles.

The Arene Candide is a hockey-rink-sized cave containing a necropolis of some 20 adults and children. It is located about 90 metres above the sea in a steep cliff overlooking a limestone quarry. First excavated extensively in the 1940s, the cave is considered a reference site for the Neolithic and Paleolithic periods in the western Mediterranean. Until now, however, no one had looked at the broken pebbles.

Possible use of the pebbles: retoucher or hammer.

“If our interpretation is correct, we’ve pushed back the earliest evidence of intentional fragmentation of objects in a ritual context by up to 5,000 years,” said the study’s lead author Claudine Gravel-Miguel, a PhD candidate at Arizona State’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change, in Tempe. “The next oldest evidence dates to the Neolithic period in Central Europe, about 8,000 years ago. Ours date to somewhere between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago, when people in Liguria were still hunter-gatherers.”

No matching pieces to the broken pebbles were found, prompting the researchers to hypothesize that the missing halves were kept as talismans or souvenirs. “They might have signified a link to the deceased, in the same way that people today might share pieces of a friendship trinket, or place an object in the grave of a loved one,” Riel-Salvatore said. “It’s the same kind of emotional connection.”

Between 2008 and 2013, the researchers painstakingly excavated in the Arene Candide cave immediately east of the original excavation using small trowels and dental tools, then carried out microscopic analysis of the pebbles they found there. They also scoured nearby beaches in search of similar-looking pebbles, and broke them to see if they compared to the others, trying to determine whether they had been deliberately broken.

Claudine Gravel-Miguel is with anthropologist Vitale Stefano Sparacello at the Arene Candide site in 2011.

“This demonstrates the underappreciated interpretive potential of broken pieces,” the new study concludes. “Research programs on Paleolithic interments should not limit themselves to the burials themselves, but also explicitly target material recovered from nearby deposits, since, as we have shown here, artifacts as simple as broken rocks can sometimes help us uncover new practices in prehistoric funerary canons.”

 

The findings could have implications for research at other Paleolithic sites where ochre-painted pebbles have been found, such as the Azilian sites in the Pyrenee mountains of northern Spain and southern France. Broken pebbles recovered during excavations often go unexamined, so it might be worth going back and taking a second look, said Riel-Salvatore.

“Historically, archeologists haven’t really looked at these objects – if they see them at a site, they usually go ‘Oh, there’s an ordinary pebble,’ and then discard it with the rest of the sediment,” he said. “We need to start paying attention to these things that are often just labeled as rocks. Something that looks like it might be natural might actually have important artifactual meaning.”

Complete Article HERE!

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How Death Makes Us Human — For Now

Thinking of death is inherent to being human. Technological advances, like so many human activities, reflect our desire to avoid it. But that may all be bound to change.

 
By Darío Sztajnszrajber

The human being’s link to death is intrinsic and existential. It is not an external notion one could discard or disregard and somehow remain human. Death, simply put, is a part of us.

As the German philosopher Martin Heidegger observed, our death is both imminent (we could die almost immediately) and conceived in our minds as too distant (we usually think we still have a long time left to live). French philosopher Jacques Derrida asked cheekily, “Is my death possible?” when dying precisely eliminates all possibilities. The curious thing is that while we know we are born to die, we spend our lives trying to transcend death. There is a basic awkwardness or nonsensical origin to all our actions: Whatever we do, we will still die, whence our flight toward daily routines in order to forget or seek relief. This ambiguity may explain a great part of human culture. Just as we want to negate death, we also seek to surpass ourselves.

The 20th-century Spanish writer Miguel de Unamumo postulated that human anxiety was a product of the tension between reason on the one hand, which understands that life is finite, and the desire that it continue forever. That desire has become the engine behind all the attempts to supercede our limits. Thus with every technological innovation, symbolic transformation, revolution in values or new narrative on the meaning of life, are we not aspiring, ultimately, to achieve immortality?

Graveyards do not so much recall our provenance as our destination

 
Now death, which pertains to others, is not the same as dying, which we cannot possibly experience. Cemeteries and their rituals are a means of linking ourselves to the deaths of others, the only possible death experience. In any case, a person supposes that he too will also be buried, honored and remembered — or forgotten. Graveyards do not so much recall our provenance as our destination, prompting the sensations of uncertainty, respect and concern among us all.

Cemetery in Buenos Aires

Cemeteries remain of their time of course. Technology makes it possible today to live on through images and sounds, and create a presence from the experience of absence. It would be interesting to analyze the impact of death’s omnipresence, and the evolution both of mourning and the mechanics of a memory that now is live before us, always within reach.

In reality, current trends like robotics or cloning will change the roots not just of our ties with the death of others, but our own dying. The day will eventually come when we have resolved death, which can only happen when we stop dying. That of course is also when we will stop being human. And so we shall mutate again …

Complete Article HERE!

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The virtual reality ‘death simulator’ that could help ease terminally ill patient’s fear of dying

It could be a helping hand for the terminally ill.

The moment of death: Researchers first used headset to trick participant’s brain into thinking their VR body is real. Then, they were taken out of the body to simulate an out of body experience.

By Mark Prigg

[R]esearchers have revealed a virtual reality simulation that can help people comes to terms with death.

It teaches then how to become ‘disconnected’ from their physical bodies.

Mel Slater at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and his team used an Oculus VR headset on 32 patients.

‘Immersive virtual reality can be used to visually substitute a person’s real body by a life-sized virtual body (VB) that is seen from first person perspective,’ they wrote.

Researchers fool the volunteers into thinking the virtual body was their own.

While wearing a headset, the body would match any real movements the volunteers made.

They were also fitted with movement sensors and vibrating units on their hands and feet.

When a virtual ball was dropped onto the foot of the virtual body, a vibration was triggered on the person’s real foot.

Once they became ‘in sync’ with the virtual body, participants were then transported to a virtual living room in which they could move their legs and kick balls thrown at them from a distance.

Then, they were taken out of the body.

‘The viewpoint of the participant was lifted out of the virtual body towards the ceiling of the virtual room, and just behind the body, so that the body could be seen below,’ the team wrote.

‘When the viewpoint is lifted up and out of the VB so that it is seen below this may result in an out-of-body experience (OBE).’

‘Fear of death in the experimental group was found to be lower than in the control group.

‘This is in line with previous reports that naturally occurring OBEs are often associated with enhanced belief in life after death.  

People who had felt totally disconnected from their body – and the virtual body – reported having a significantly lower fear of dying.

‘The effect was quite strong,’ Slater told New Scientist.

He hopes the experience might give a feeling that a person’s consciousness is separate from their physical body.

‘It gives a sense that it’s possible to survive beyond death,’ he says.

The virtual experience is similar to some kinds of near-death out-of-body experiences.

Some people who survive heart failure have described seeing the hospital room from the ceiling during critical moments, says Slater.

‘Our results open up the possibility that the virtual OBE experience provides an implicit learning that consciousness in the sense of the centre of perception can be separate from the physical body, and that therefore death of the physical body is not necessarily the end of consciousness,’ the researchers concluded.

Complete Article HERE!

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Death and the Irish: A miscellany

 Do we ‘do’ death best?

Collection features 75 perspectives on death in Ireland and whets appetite for further study

“The Humours of an Irish Wake as celebrated at St Giles London.” Original artwork: engraving by Thornton, published by Johnson c 1750.

By Bridget English

[T]he Irish wake is nearly as celebrated and stereotypical an Irish export as Guinness, leprechauns or shamrock. Its reputation as a raucous, drunken party that celebrates the life of the deceased is now regarded internationally as a desirable way to mark the end of one’s life, even for those who claim little or no Irish heritage.

It is conceivable, then, given the famous link between Ireland and death, that the Irish “do death well”. Where does this association come from? Do the Irish really “do” death better than anyone else? These are some of the questions behind a new collection of essays, Death and the Irish: A miscellany, edited by Salvador Ryan, a professor of ecclesiastical history at St Patrick’s College Maynooth.

The collection is part of a recent surge of academic interest in death and dying, as is evidenced by the publication of edited collections such as Grave Matters, Death and Dying in Dublin, 1500 to the Present (2016), edited by Lisa Marie Griffith and Ciarán Wallace, and Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain and Europe: Historical Perspectives (2013), edited by James Kelly and Mary Ann Lyons, both of which explore these themes from a historical perspective.

>Subtitled “a miscellany”, Death and the Irish is different from these publications because it features a medley of 75 perspectives on death and the Irish from historians, hospice workers, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, priests, librarians, musicologists, and funeral directors, to name a few. It also covers a vast time span, taking readers from the fifth century to the present day.

Entertainment

The brevity of the essays (around three to four pages, including footnotes) and their pithiness, though a departure from the extended discussions commonly found in academic anthologies, is true to the form of the miscellany, which was originally intended for the entertainment of contemporary audiences.

Death and the Irish will interest readers looking for interesting tidbits of information on death and provides ample fuel for those searching for inspiration for further research.

Some tantalising morsels from the miscellany include: the tale of a young woman buried with her horse sometime between 381 and 536 AD; the variety of terms for death in the Irish language; social media’s role in keeping memories of the dead alive; an analysis of Stuart-era funerary monuments and what they reveal about women’s role in society; the 18th-century Dublin practice of laying executed corpses at the prosecutor’s door; a quirky account of the discovery of James McNally’s death by elephant in Glasnevin cemetery’s burial registers; and the story of a young cabin boy’s death by cannibalism.

Given the number of entries included in the volume, it is not possible to provide a detailed account of each, but a few entries are worth mentioning. Clodagh Tait’s Graveyard folklore and Jenny Butler’s The ritual and social use of tobacco in the context of the wake are particularly thought-provoking accounts of folk practices and the material cultures surrounding death. Tait’s gruesome description of the pieces of human remains that were collected for charms and the dead man’s hand that “could be used to make churning butter less onerous” provides readers with images that they are unlikely to soon forget.

One downside of Death and the Irish is that the experience of reading such short essays can be frustrating for anyone (particularly students) coming to the collection looking for an extended discussion of death practices in a particular era. Organising the entries by time period or by theme (burial, folklore, historical figures or events, etc) might make for more streamlined reading, but to do so would also destroy one of the collection’s main strengths, which is to bring disparate approaches together, taking interdisciplinarity to an extreme, provoking new ideas through a multilayered view of death in Ireland.

Under-represented

Despite the inclusiveness of Ryan’s miscellany, certain disciplines, such as history and theology, seem to dominate, while others are absent or under-represented. Philosophers have certainly shaped the ways that modern secular society conceives of death, yet there are no entries on the relationship between Ireland and philosophy.

Irish film, literature and drama feature some of the most insightful and humorous portrayals of death and dying in western culture, yet there are only three entries on literature, and these are limited to poetry (Irish language poetry, bardic poetry and 18th-century elegies).

These are minor criticisms and on the whole, Death and the Irish: A miscellany is commendable for its inclusion of marginalised groups such as Travellers, and for the links made between Irish practices and Jewish and Muslim beliefs. The Irish may not necessarily “do” death better than anyone else, but as this volume makes clear, the history and rituals surrounding death offer a rich and complex area of study, one that has much to tell us about Irish attitudes towards mortality and treatment of the dead.

Complete Article HERE!