6 Real People Who Cheated Death In The Craziest Way Possible

Actually, it went reasonably well for a while. The family made it over a year and nearly to Central America before they ran into trouble. At that point, because God doesn't like it when you defy him and succeed, they were struck by some passing killer whales and their ship was sunk. In most stories, that would be the end of the Robertson family, but they proved to be a crafty bunch. After solving the most immediate problem by clawing into the relative safety of the boat's rubber dinghy, they took stock of the situation and determined they had enough water for ten days and food for even fewer. In the middle of the ocean. The math didn't look good. So they took one of their paddles and shivved it into a spear, which they used to stab turtles and sharks and drink their blood to stay hydrated. Be honest, that wouldn't even be the tenth idea you'd have.

via BBC
Seventh, at best.

When this feat somehow failed to give them superpowers, they had to get grosser. (Yes, grosser than going Dracula on the Koopa Kids.) The Robertson matriarch, who used to be a nurse, collected rainwater and fashioned the rubber rungs of a ladder into enema tubes which everyone could use to ingest rainwater they collected, well, rectally. (You see, the rainwater wasn't good to drink, as the boat was not only filled with the survivors, but also tons of turtle blood and viscera.) Please imagine Jack from Lost explaining to Hurley and Sawyer that they'll have to do this or they'll die.

That little trick kept the family going through the final leg of their ordeal, and they were finally rescued by a Japanese ship after 38 disgusting days. Anyway, feel free to cite this story the next time your dumbass kid has an idea.

This is when a normal person would, at best, break more bones than they have in their body, but Spah's training came in handy. "I landed on my feet, bounced into the air, and fell on my face," as he described it. In other words, he treated the site of history's most famous airship crash as a trampoline-based physical comedy routine. The force of the impact threw him away from where he'd landed, which happened to be exactly where the Hindenburg made its blazing grave. We guess the moral of the story is that puns will definitely save you if you've got a Final Destination situation going on, kids.

The group spent a total of 12 days adrift in the ocean, and their supplies were exhausted after three. For those keeping score at home, this means they spent over a week literally without a pot to piss in. Not that much pissing was happening; by the fifth day, they were so dehydrated that they could only spit blood. That's when Faustina asked her sister to suck on her boobs. No, she wasn't delirious, she was lactating.

Her sister found that, indeed, milk did her body good, so she passed some back to her sister, who then offered all the other passengers a turn on the nipple fountain. And suck they did, for the next seven days, until their boat washed ashore, after which they were presumably unable to look each other in the eye ever again.

And that's when reality made a full turn into bad '90s action movie territory. With the wave of fire approaching, the squad's leader, Wag Dodge (!), headed for a nearby patch of grass and ... lit a fire there. The idea was that this "escape fire" would provide a thin layer of oxygen to anyone who dove into it as the bigger fire tore what there was from the air. It sounds insane, which is exactly why the other firefighters said "to hell with that" and kept running. It's also why Dodge was one of three men out of the 16 who survived.

The other two survivors managed to run around a ridge that shielded them, which was probably a much more sensible plan, in hindsight.

By his account, Selkirk spent a lot of his time on the island praying and studying his Bible, more out of pure tedium than legitimate devotion. Oh, and he also became a beastmaster. Spanish explorers had previously brought goats, rats, and cats to the island, and Selkirk made good use of all of them. Well, at first the rats made more use of him, attempting to fashion a meal out of his toes at night. So he trained an army of feral cats to defend him. Do you know how hard it is to train a cat? The bastards don't even respond to their own names. A man with a devoted cat-talion is not to be trifled with. Man, movies always leave out the best parts.

But Selkirk's real passion was his goats. He mostly tortured them, whether by hunting or with simple foot races, which would end when he threw the goat to the ground (he was not a good loser). There's even "some debate among experts" regarding how far his passions extended. Translation: He may have fucked the goats too.

via Wiki Commons
No word on whether he got that idea out of one of the kinkier parts of the Bible.

The fictional story gets the ending mostly right, in that Selkirk was eventually rescued by a passing British ship. But he didn't go home afterward. Instead, the captain was so impressed with the skills Selkirk had learned during his marooning that he put him to work as a captain of his own ship, which is what Selkirk did for the remainder of his life. And to think, you wasted all that money on college.

Manna tweets.

You can also train cats with some colorful clickers or just some delicious treats, but we can't guarantee they will save your life. Be careful!

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