Some of the Strangest Deaths in History

So Francis Bacon was a martye to scientific experimentation and died stuffing a chicken with snow !

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (22 January 1869 – 29 December 1916) is a shadowy character about whom the first forty years are still a mystery.  Many of the stories about his life as a child and young man are contradictory and it is impossible to know the truth.  The myths about him, however, suggest that people believed he had supernatural powers even when very young.

At eighteen he entered the Verkhoturye Monastery for three months – this was a regular way of dealing with minor thefts.  On his release he claimed to have a vision of the Mother of God and that along with is experience in the monastery turned him into a religious mystic.  There were rumours (never proved) that he had links with cults which used impassioned services ending with wild sexually ecstatic behaviour.  He travelled to Greece and Jerusalem before settling in St Petersburg in 1903.  Here he slowly gained a reputation as a Holy Man (Starets) with healing and prophetic powers.  This was what brought him into contact with the royal family.

Rasputin was asked to help cure Alexei, the son of the Tsar and Tsarina, when he suffered internal bleeding after falling off a horse.  Alexei suffered from haemophilia but this condition was neither known nor understood then. Rasputin claimed to heal him by prayer and the fact that every time Rasputin treated him the bleeding eventually stopped and Alexei recovered, seemed to prove that the prayers worked.  Rasputin came to have tremendous influence over the Tsarina and she believed that God spoke to her through Rasputin.

Rasputin’s unparalleled influence over the royal family angered and frightened  many  of the elite of  Imperial Russia. He was accused of many things from insatiable sexual lust, to raping a nun. He was also accused of having complete political power over the Tsar.  He did, in fact, believe that divine grace could be achieved only through sin and repentance – two sides of the same coin.  Salvation then could only be achieved by yielding to temptation – by sinning – then you could repent and find salvation.  For Rasputin sin meant sex and alcohol and he had no difficulty in persuading his many women admirers of St. Petersburg’s ruling elite to join him.

The first attempt to kill Rasputin was in 1914 when Khionia Guseva, a prostitute, stabbed him in the stomach to the extent that his entrails could be seen hanging out. To everyone’s surprise he recovered and this helped his mystery grow.  On 16th December 1916, however, a group of nobles took it upon themselves to kill him.  

They lured him to the Moika Palace where they plied him with cakes and red wine laced with enough cyanide to kill five men – but he was completely unaffecteed.  (At this point it is necessary to add that Rasputin’s daughter disputes that they tried poison.)  One of the conspirators, Yusupov, drew his revolver, shot him, and Rasputin fell.  Delighted, the conspirators left the palace but Yusupov returned a short while later and to his horror found Rasputin still alive. Rasputin grabbed Yusupov and tried to strangle him.  At that point the other conspirators arrived and fired at him.  He was shot three times in the back at point blank range and fell sprawling on the ground.  When they examined him he was not only still alive but making a good attempt to get up.  They grabbed what heavy instruments they could find and tried to club him to death.  Then they wrapped him in a sheet and dropped him into the River Neva where there was a break in the ice.

Three days later the body was recovered from the river.  A post-mortem showed that there was  water in his lungs and that as a result he had clearly died from drowning not from poison or being shot four times or being badly beaten. But Rasputin still had one surprise left.

Empress Alexandra had the body buried but after the February revolution a group of workers dug him up and tried to burn the body.  They saw the body appear to sit upright and roar a curse.  Never having cremated a body before they didn’t realise they should have cut the tendons to prevent bodily movement.  The fire caused the gases in the body to expand and rush through the body causing the movement and on through the voice box causing the roar.  Right to the end Rasputin was unnerving his fellow Russians!

Isadora Duncan: Strangled

Isadora Duncan is regarded as the founder of modern dance.  Although she was American her career was based in Europe.  Her death was the result of a freak and tragic automobile accident.  On 14th September 1927 she was in Nice in the South of France and was a passenger in an Amilcar. driven by a particular favourite of hers, Benoit Falchetto.  She loved wearing long trailing scarves and on that day she sported a hand-painted silk scarf by Roman Chatov.  It was so long that as they were driving one end of it caught on the open spokes of a rear wheel.  It strangled her to death.