Death is not the most pleasant topic out there, but it is a reality that is hard to ignore. This list of unusual deaths -- from 586 BC all the way up until the 21st century -- details some unbelievable circumstances (some of which are not for the squeamish) that you may find hard to look away from once you start reading through them. Among them:

• A 28-year-old South Korean man who collapsed of fatigue and died after playing Starcraft for almost 50 consecutive hours in an Internet café.

• A dancer who was accidentally strangled in 1927 when her scarf caught onto the wheel of the car she was riding in.

• The Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed in 458 BC when an eagle dropped a live tortoise on him, mistaking his bald head for a stone.

• Baseball player Ray Chapman was killed in 1920  when he was hit in the head by a pitch.

• A 5‘3" Florida woman fell behind a 6‘ tall bookcase in her family‘s home and suffocated.
  

Last year, I posted another morosely intriguing article about this topic, 19 Facts About Death You May Not Want to Know, which you may find interesting. (By the way, did you know that nowadays up to 80 percent of people actually end up dying in a hospital?)

If death is a topic that makes you uneasy, you may take comfort in this video of psychologist Carl Jung, in which he talks about death from a spiritual perspective.

Fear may be a logical reaction to death and dying if you believe that everything ends after you die. For me, though, I’ve found that believing this existence is only a transition to a higher level makes it very simple to feel at ease with the topic of death.

What’s The Crack July 31, 2007