[Summer Bummer intro] I'm John Green; welcome to my salon; this is mental_floss. And today marks our third consecutive, and last, video about death. Last week, we looked at ways you could reduce your risk of death; this week we will discuss ways of dying that even micromorts can't predict. Let's begin where all great things do: with whiskey. 1. Jack Daniel died from an infection sustained after he kicked a safe and busted his toe. All right, Mark, let's get started. To the intro! [intro music] 2. Alexander, the King of Greece - no, Mark, not that one, yep that one - died at the age of twenty-seven in 1920 from an infected monkey bite, sustained when he tried to protect his dog from an attacking monkey in his palace gardens. Let that be a reminder to you: use Neosporin on your monkey bites! 3. Bobby Leach cheated death when he made the historic, and historically stupid, trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel, the second person ever to do so, but he was not so lucky on dry land, because when he was on a publicity tour in New Zealand, he slipped on an orange peel - or possibly a banana peel; reports differ - and he fractured his leg, which then became infected, and he died - after only two months of excruciating pain and gangrene and the amputation of his leg. Yay! 4. Charles-Valentin Alkan, a French composer, died in 1888 after he was crushed by a coat rack; evidently he fainted, and pulled the heavy coat rack down on himself. Why was he alone in the coat rack closet? We shouldn't speculate. 5. Attila the Hun reportedly died of a nosebleed on his wedding night. 6. Tennessee Williams, author of some of the most enduringly brilliant plays in the twentieth century, choked on an eyedropper bottle cap in 1983; he was holding it in his mouth will tilting his head back to do the eyes droppings. 7. Clement Vallandigham's reputation as a lawyer was cemented with his death in 1871 - as counsel for the defense, he was trying to prove how the victim in a murder trial could actually have shot himself and then he succeeded by actually shooting himself with the pistol in question. He died, but did win the case. 8. Maria, Countess of Coventry, was a famous Georgian society beauty and a big fan of Georgian makeup, but she found that she was breaking out in spots and she kept using more and more makeup until she died at the age of twenty-seven of lead poisoning. Her spots were, in fact, symptoms of lead poisoning. 9. Here's an occupational hazard peculiar to being a royal during the War of the Roses - tradition has it that George Plantagenet was executed by drowning in a barrel of wine. Apparently he has to go that way. 10. Korean crown prince Sado was sealed alive in a rice chest in the mid-eighteenth century, at the request of his father, the king; that's not good parenting. It took him eight days to die, by the way. 11. Austrian Hans Steininger was famous for his ridiculously long beard - four and a half feet of true magnificence. And he's also famous for dying because of that beard - in the 1550's, he tripped over it and broke his neck. That's why even bobblehead me keeps it to an eight-day stubble. 12. The great Isadora Duncan was killed by her trademark white scarf while riding in a convertible car; the scarf was flapping in the wind and wrapped around the tire axle, and I don't really want to describe the rest. 13. But I will described this: Vic Morrow was decapitated by a helicopter blade during a stunt for the Twilight Zone: the Movie. 14. Sirkka Sari, an up-and-coming Finnish actress, died after falling into a chimney. In 1939, at a party with cast and crew from her third and last film, she had the gentleman friend went to the roof of the hotel, and Sari saw the chimney, which she mistook for a lookout spot, and... worst Santa Claus-ing ever. 15. Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio, died in 1941 of peritonitis - an infection of the lining of his stomach after he swallowed part of a toothpick. 16. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton detective agency, died from an infection that started after he bit his tongue. 17. John-Baptiste Lully, the famous seventeenth century French composer, died of gangrene after striking himself in the foot with his conductor's staff! 18. A guy named Henry Pert died in the sixteenth century after shooting himself in the head with his own bow and arrow. How did he do that, you ask? Well, Pert had drawn the bow to its fullest extent with the intention of shooting it into the air, but the arrow jammed, so he bent around to look at it, at oh! Unjammed! 19. King Bela I of Hungary died in 1063 when his own wooden throne collapsed under him. Mark, this episode is really depressing me; let's talk about someone who lived - the guy who tied a bunch of balloons to his lawn chair and then flew up to 15,000 feet? He lived! Yes! He later died, but he lived through that! 20. A tailor named François Reichelt jumped off the Eiffel Tower in 1912 wearing a parachute of his own making; it did not open. 21. Greeks and Romans knew a thing or two about dying spectacularly, although to be fair, the myth than the real world mix together, and it was a long time ago, so take all of these with a grain of salt. The playwright Aeschylus died around 455 after an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head; the tortoise reportedly lived. 22. The philosopher Chrysippus is reportedly - Mark, that's not even a turtle; that's Yoshi; he's a dinosaur... -ish creature. But anyway, he supposedly died of laughter after getting his donkey drunk and watching an attempt to eat figs. 23. The Greek playwright Philemon also supposedly died of laughter at the age of 97 while watching one of his own plays - finally, a pleasant death! 24. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras was also like something of a cult leader, and one story claims that among his religion's tenets was that followers were not allowed to touch beans. Not everyone was a fan of this proclamation and Pythagoras found himself being chased by an angry mob, and he was getting away, until you reach that field of beans. Some accounts claim that he was killed then and there, but others say that he managed to slip away and later starved to death. 25. Draco - not Malfoy, the Greek lawmaker whose strictly legal code gave us the word "draconian" - died somewhere in the seventh century BCE, supposedly after a particularly wonderful speech. They say he suffocated under the mounds of hats and cloaks that were thrown upon him by admiring Greeks as a show of appreciation, 26. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was killed by cow manure; he got sick, prescribed himself a topical preparation of cow manure, left himself outside to bake in the sun, and died the next day. 27. And of course, there's Emperor Claudius of Rome, who supposedly choked on a feather he'd been using to induce vomiting during a banquet in 54 AD. More likely, he was poisoned by his wife. 28. Roman senator Lucius Fabius Cilo choked on a single hair in a glass of milk, according to Pliny. Do not eat your hair, Rapunzel! 29. Okay, to the bathroom. British king George II died in 1760 after an over exertion on the toilet. 30. Edmund II of England also may have died on the toilet, by being stabbed in the butt by a Viking hiding in the privy. What can we say, it was 1016; these things happen. 31. In fact, lots of people died on the toilet including Lenny Bruce, and All of these people. [32. Don Simpson, 33. Catherine the Great, 34. Evelyn Waugh, 35. Edmund Ironsides, 36. Elvis Presley, 37. Christopher Shale.] 38. Arthur Aston, a Catholic royalist on the side of King Charles I during the English Civil War, was bludgeoned to death with his own wooden leg by Oliver Cromwell's forces. 39. Viking leader Sigurd the Mighty was killed in about 892 CE by the decapitated head of his enemy - he'd affixed the head to his saddle, where its teeth grazed his legs, causing an infection that ultimately killed him. 40. Jim Fixx was the formerly overweight guy who started the jogging craze in the U.S. with his hugely successful The Complete Book of Running. He then died in 1984 of a heart attack, while running. Was it the running, the smoking, the drinking - we'll never know. I just avoid all of them. 41. And lastly, we return to the salon to discuss the famous, and famously consumptive, French actor and playwright Molière. He died during a staging of his play, The Imaginary Invalid. He was playing a hypochondriac, and everyone thought that his coughing fit was part of the acting. That wraps up our roundup of terrible ways to die; thank you for watching mental_floss on YouTube, which is made with the help of these nice people. Every week, we endeavor to answer one of your mind-blowing questions. This week's comes from Frederick Newhouse, who asks, "Was there a time when there were no allergies?" Hippocrates was the first person to describe food allergies in writing; that was around 370 BCE, and there's no reason to believe that allergies didn't exist before then. By the way, mental_floss is also a real-life physical magazine, and there's an online store where, if you enter the code "YoutubeFlossers", you'll get 15% off your order. Thank you for watching, and DFTBA!