My vote:
You wake up with a priest standing over you, giving you the last rites, with a sleazy but beautiful blonde next to you in bed in a sleazy motel room, with your wife screaming at you from the doorway, and your kids looking down at the floor, and your mother, with her back turned, saying the rosary.
Best? All of the above, but you don’t wake up! 
My vote goes for rabies.
A close runner-up would be Ebola, which overall seems like a pretty gross way to go, with the “bleeding-out” and all that. Leprosy doesn’t seem attractive. I wouldn’t want to die of trichonosis either. Starving to death would suck as well. Ditto for crucifixion- depending on where they nail you.
An overdose of a stimulant such as strychnine must be a bad exit. In general, people who commit suicide rarely use an overdose of stimulants. I wonder why that is.
Mike King:
Would that be coming and going at the same time?
I don’t know if this experience would apply to a flame death or not, but I suspect it might. Many (how long do I have to be here before I can use manny?) years ago I was burned quite badly in a chemical plant accident. Due to a plugged oxygen line, I passed out and fell down in a tank of caustic solvent (lye being the caustic, toluene being the woo-woo agent). I was wearing a semi-impermeable space suit (i.e., designed for splash control, not submersion) and my nimrod co-workers decided the best course of action was to drag me out of the tank and lay me down beside a chemical shower and wait 45 min. for the ambulance driver to arrive and cut my clothes off and use the chemical shower. Result was I marinated for a while, and didn’t feel a thing. I went into shock immediately, and I didn;t feel any pain until three days later.
I’ve always thought that burning would be the worst.
I’ve heard a couple of different stories on being burnt at the stake. Some say that they just tied you to a stake and lit a bunch of sticks under it, and you slowly roasted in your own juices. (BTW–how long would this method take to kill you?)
Other accounts have it that a bag of gunpowder was tied under your chin so that your head would quickly be blown off, saving you quite a bit of suffering.
I’m sure that different cultures did it differently, but does anyone have the straight dope on the stake?
-David
Guess it doesn’t matter how you go, I would like my last thought as I’m drifting away to be “now that wasn’t too bad at all.” Or maybe that would be the first thought, after.
As for going in your sleep. I’d like to know what people were dreaming before I choose.
JACK
Here are a couple of sites on interesting ways people have died…
http://www.officialdarwinawards.com
http://www.darwinawards.com
You can judge which one is the worst.
“[He] beat his fist down upon the table and hurt his hand and became so
further enraged… that he beat his fist down upon the table even harder and
hurt his hand some more.” – Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
Ever read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”?
Once I had a dream that I watched these people put this lady in a chair with a spacesuit-type thing on, and a helmet. They did something to the pressure of the inside of the helmet to the point where her whole head exploded. The whole time they were changing the pressure she was screaming and screaming. It was the most horrifying dream I had ever had.
Welfy
I wonder what the king is doing tonight?
There was an airliner crash in Chicago in 1979 where the plane lost (I mean literally dropped off of the airplane) an engine shortly after takeoff. The airplane crashed and KIA’d everyone aboard. What I remember from the reporting at the time was that, as a prelude to the inflight movie, they had a live video feed from the cockpit to all the little video screens at the seats so that all of the occupants of the plane got to watch it all come apart and catch the crew doing their “oh, shit!” and “I love you Mom!” numbers.
Sunbear: Elvis didn’t die with his pants down; people just like to say that. He wasn’t puking, either; never heard that one before. He was cutting his toenails. Picture him, grossly overweight, with one ankle on the other knee, leaning over with the toenail clipper, when suddenly his heart says, “That’s enough, seeya.”
Once when I was about 21, I woke up to find vomit all over my pillow and in my hair. I had known nothing about it. I know my friends would eventually have started looking for me, but I often wondered how long it would have taken someone to look in my room. Not to mention how my parents would have taken it.
Remember, I’m pulling for you; we’re all in this together.
—Red Green
Sorry, I don’t read books about Elvis. I only liked the music up to 1960, so I ignore all Elvis materíal after that. Biut I heard the death dicussed by Terry Gross and the Elvis biographer, and I think Terry described a messy death and the biographer did not correct her.
She’s been mostly reliable, does her homework.
I think everyone has forgotten one of the worst ways to go: long, excrutiating, insufferable: starvation. Worst way would be to have adequate water, this draws it out even more. Depending on your size and activity level, this could take a few months. Knowing the whole time that there is no rescue.
Or how about suicide by jumping off the World Trade Center and changing you mind around the 90th floor?
“There was an airliner crash in Chicago in 1979 where the plane lost (I mean literally dropped off of the airplane) an engine shortly after takeoff. The airplane crashed and KIA’d everyone aboard. What I remember from the reporting at the time was that, as a prelude to the inflight movie, they had a live video feed from the cockpit to all the little video screens at the seats so that all of the occupants of the plane got to watch it all come apart and catch the crew doing their ‘oh, shit!’ and ‘I love you Mom!’ numbers.”
Video screens at the seats on a DC10 in 1979!?!? I REALLY don’t think so! I remember when you had to pay to get the headphones to listen to the audio feed and the inflight movie was actually a movie, projected onto a screen. Maybe the passengers could HEAR the cockpit-to-tower radio transmissions on their headsets (I have never understood why airlines have this), but they didn’t have at-seat video screens in '79, period.
So, this leads to a question to anyone who can answer it: if something is going wrong with the flight, does the pilot cut off the feed from the cockpit radio to the passenger headsets or not? (Thank God that I’ve never experienced this situation personally!) Either way, the passengers KNOW something’s not right, and they might panic.
I would have to say the nicest way I can think of to die was reported in the case of a woman named Bhagawhandi P., reported in the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by the neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks. She died of a brain tumour; in the months prior to her death, she slipped into and out of comas, during which she had comforting and peaceful visions of going back home to India. Eventually, she fell into a permanent coma, and presumably had these visions until she died.
Hey; Soulfrost, I have read that people burned at the stake in the old days were burned with a fire made of green wood, so that they would die of smoke inhalation before being flamed up. I have also read that the Inquisition strangled or garotted people sentenced to death at the stake before they were burned, if they showed signs of repentance. No sources on this and I am not sure whether it is true or not. I hope it is because if it weren’t, the fates of those victims would have been too horrible to contemplate.
My personal weird fear of the worst death possible is hanging. I can’t believe they still hang people in Washington state, and they still use hanging in Japan. They hanged a couple of men about two months ago. Not to mention such other countries as Malaysia and Singapore, where they routinely hang drug traffickers. There was a story in the Economist not long ago that said that Singapore, by far, is the country with most executions per capita in the world.
Probably not the most horrible, but one of the most memorable was Slim Pickens riding the H-Bomb down in Dr. Strangelove.
Not long after the Gulf War, I remember seeing a picture in the newspaper showing some Iraqi guy that was hanged for drunk driving (A bit exreme, but not by much :)) The most interesting part was that he appeared to be wrapped in a blanked while his body was hanging in the gallows. I couldn’t tell if he was wrapped before of after the hanging.
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
I always wondered if you could fill a cup with gasoline, and force yourself to drink it. Then, light a match (or something)and swallow. Would the fumes in your throat ignite, and travel down into your stomach? I am most afraid of burning to death, and this scenario popped into my head one day.
Also, there is some evidence that a decapitated head can function for 10-15seconds. If this is true, decapitation might be worse than burning.
I imagine the most horrible way to die is crucifixion. To be beaten to a bloddy pulp, then hung on a cross to die is unimaginable. Death often took many hours, while the victims suffered extruciating pain. I am not afraid to die at all, so an airplane crash, or falling out of a building is actually a better way to go. It’s over very quickly, so that’s better.
Come to think of it, suicide is the worst way to die. No matter how it’s done, the punishment of hell is far worse than anybody can imagine. Afterall, for the suicide victim, hell is imminent.