6 Historical Deaths That Read Like Crazy Myths (But Aren’t)

Sokolov used words as well, and what he described is downright ghoulish:

palish blue ball of fire, as big as a fist, came out of the rod without any contact whatsoever. It went right to the forehead of the professor, who in that instant fell back without uttering a sound.

An anonymous engraving of a 1755 medical report would also eventually surface:

There appeared a red spot from the forehead from which spirted some drops of blood through the pores, without wounding the surrounding skin. The shoe belonging to the left foot was burst open. Uncovering the foot at that place they found a blue mark, by which it is concluded that the electrical force of the thunder, having forced into the head, made its way out again at the foot.

So a few lessons to take from that. 1) No matter how cool it looks, one should never stand near a conductor during a thunderstorm. And 2) a blue ball of fire to the forehead does not give you superpowers. Still, this was a guy excited about science, and who died doing it. That's rad, and we're sorry to see you go, Professor Georg Richmann. And also sorry about the lack of superpowers thing, because that would have made the latter half of the century a lot more interesting and given us a couple more articles.

In ye olden times, one big health trend was drinking gold. That's not a euphemism; people would mix gold flecks into a concoction of chemicals and chug it back in the hopes of retaining a youthful appearance. In the 16th century, Diane de Poitiers, a French noblewoman and mistress to King Henry II, was one of many addicted to aurum potabile. And did it work? Surprisingly, by some accounts, yes:

I saw her at seventy years of age beautiful of face, also fresh and also pleasant as she had been at thirty years of age ... and especially she had a very large whiteness without any make-up. But it is well said that, every morning, she would use some drinks made up of drinkable gold and other drugs given by good doctors and apothecaries.

Unfortunately, she soon started to feel some unwelcome side effects. It weakened her entire body and caused malformed teeth, fine hair, and porcelain-esque fragile bones. The white complexion that guy was complimenting? That was anemia. She would die at the age of 66, a couple years after a riding accident she never really recovered from. Did drinking poison have any effect on this? It's hard to state definitively 500 years later, but yes, let's say it very definitely did. When her body was exhumed and examined by archaeologists, they found that her hair contained levels of gold 500 times higher than normal, as well as absurd amounts of mercury. Her skeleton was basically the T-1000.

Apparently, your only choice of chaser for your homebrewed Goldschlager is mercury or drinking actual knives.

With no other option, Arrichion reached over and twisted his opponent's ankle until it snapped in his hands. His opponent yielded in agonizing pain, and Arrichion was awarded the medal. Posthumously. In his grab for victory, Arrichion somehow choked himself to death. At first, it was thought that his opponent had deliberately killed him, or that he died when he was thrown to the mat, but science recently came up with a third option: The chokehold was depriving Arrichion of so much oxygen that the "simple" act of breaking someone's ankle like dry spaghetti was enough to cause his heart to self-destruct.

Wow.

But don't you feel ashamed that the only time you get sweaty is when you play video games. That's still a little metal.

At one point, Scheele accidentally created Prussian blue, aka hydrogen cyanide, aka one of the deadliest poisons ever made. He thought it smelled "almondy." He understood the risks, but none of this really bothered him. In his own words, this was simply "the trouble of all apothecaries." His devotion to his art was so great that he married the widow of another pharmacist so she could inherit all of his many poisons, lab equipment, and notes. Also, he was so modest that he lost the credit for many of his findings. (Or maybe he ate his notes.) Tragically, one thing he was credited for was one of his mistakes. Copper arsenite, or "Scheele's Green," was used to decorate candy for 50 years or so before someone realized feeding children copper and arsenic wasn't so good for them.

Anyways, Carl "Yes, I Know I'm Dying, Did You Want Something?" Scheele succumbed to arsenic/cyanide/mercury/everything poisoning on May 26, 1786, at the age of 43. He was last seen being pulled to the heavens in a chariot driven by white, fire-breathing stallions.

Guggenheim and Giglio were asleep in their cabin when the infamous iceberg came a-knocking. After the gentlemen helped Aubart and Sagesser into a lifeboat, Guggenheim reassured them that this was only a temporary problem, and that the ship would be up and working by the next day. Which was total bullshit. He was rich, not an idiot. Guggenheim and Giglio knew they were going down with the ship, and set about literally going down in style. They returned to their quarters and changed into their evening attire, then after finding a crewmember boarding a lifeboat, Guggenheim asked for a message to be passed on to his estranged wife: "Tell her I played the game straight to the end and that no woman was left on board because Ben Guggenheim was a coward."

Meaning this scene played out even more baller in real life.

According to eyewitness accounts from the sinking, Guggenheim and Giglio were last seen relaxing in deckchairs, knocking back brandies and smoking fat cigars. Within hours, the ship was on the bottom of the ocean, though it might have lasted longer if Guggenheim, Giglio, and Father Thomas Byles weren't weighing the craft down with their gargantuan balls.

Speaking of sinking ships ...

That's a painting -- probably not painted contemporaneously -- of Sheean after he'd strapped himself to his weapon, which was itself bolted to a sinking ship. This wasn't just bloodlust; he was reacting to an atrocity. The survivors in the water were being shot from the air by the Japanese. It's quite possible that it was thanks to his efforts, there were 49 survivors instead of none. The gun was still firing when it finally slipped beneath the waves.

Sheean would go on to win several posthumous awards and honors, and became an almost legendary figure in Australian naval history. And not long after, somewhere in Valhalla, Odin would pull out a chair and hold up a horn of thousand-year-old mead.

You can follow Marina and Adam on Twitter, IF YOU DARE. (You should, they're actually really nice.) Marina learned to be a death metal Space Valkyrie with the help of the Skwisgaar Skwigelf Advanced Finger Wizard Master Class, and so can you! Adam's more of a laidback, classic rock kind of guy, and it really balances out quite nicely with Marina's Scandinavian insanity (in-Scand-ity?). It should be mentioned in fairness to Prof. RICHmann that Marina REImann was once standing next to a can crusher that was struck by ball lightning at face level. Being a single-digit pipsqueak and not yet aware of the Skwisgaar Skwigelf Advanced Finger Wizard Master Class, she ... wet her pants. Immediately.

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