Crucifixion
The most horrible thing would be not to be allowed to die at all. Ever. To watch all your loved ones get old and dying, and to find new loved ones, knowing you’ll outlive them too.
And you’d have to keep on living, even when you’ve lost the will.
Being stretched out and hung over growing bamboo shoots watching them grow into you and through you… you get the picture…
Painful, slow, torturous, death.
not fun…
Being flayed alive would suck. I wish I hadn’t read this thread, now I have new nightmare material.
While all these sound terrible, my own personal choice is to be smashed by a tsunami. I have had a number of nightmares that involve standing on a calm beach when suddenly a gigantic wave of water climbs out of the sea and the last moment I know is of terror as the icy water crashes down upon me.
Carina42 wrote:
A novel?!?
Don’t you know you’ll die a horrible, lingering death from a thousand paper cuts if you try to read one of those things?!
Being buried alive in a large unmarked grave, with already dead bodies all around you in the grave.
I recall an Edgar Allen Poe story about a man that was chained to a wall, and then another wall was built around it, starving him to death.
I think in the mid 1950(?)'s, a Buddhist monk in Vietnam douesed himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire in the middle of a crowded street to protest the government.
panache45 wrote:
Horrible? Nuts, I can always get a new set of loved ones. I want immortality!
Kaps wrote:
[nitpick]
You’ll die of thirst long before you starve.
[/nitpick]
I’m torn between being drawn and quartered (ha! torn betw…ah, forget it) and being crushed to death. Crushing seems mighty unpleasant, as done by witch-hunters and the like: put a board on the chest and pile on rocks until confession or human-juice results.
About the modern lethal injection: three drugs are used. The first is sodium pentothal, an anesthetic. The condemned is completely asleep for the remainder of the process. After the first drug has taken effect, they administer the second drug, Pavulon, which stops lung function. The third drug, potassium chloride, stops the heart. Comparatively, it’s a pretty quiet way to go; a quantum leap from the gas chamber, to say the least.
What, then?
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Buried alive…I’d probably slowly go insane long before I died.
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Being slowly crushed under a steamroller (I don’t think it’d be as hilarious as in the cartoons).
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Having to spend an hour trapped in an elevator with a certain person at work, who shall go nameless. Yow.
“Cask of Amontillado”
In Russia, at the coronation of Nicholas II, a bunch of peasants were trampled to death in a stampede. They were rushing to the fair grounds and due to inadequate preparation on the part of the Tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei, there were huge ditches and no guardrails. People were trampled to death, young children, everyone. How horrible!
Then, wasn’t there a shipwreck where the survivors were attacked by sharks?
The way the victims in The Cell died would really suck. I mean drowning is bad enough, but the psychological torture beforehand?
Yikes.
Drowning would suck. It takes a lot longer than you think to pass out underwater. Remember when yall was little and your big brother held your head underwater?
Getting your eyelids cut off and being photographed alot wouldn’t be very pleasant. Although that would be more of torture thing.
I know, I know. I’m not that imaginative…
In college, one of the books we were assigned (for a sociology class on dealing with pain and illness in different cultures) was written by a social scientist/psychologist (don’t remember which) after he discovered he had an inoperable spinal tumor that would eventually kill him.
He kept track of how his body was becoming steadily weaker and how he was increasingly unable to perform even basic tasks by himself, all with the full knowledge that he would be dead within a few months and there was nothing he could do to stop it or slow it down. The last chapter was written by his wife after he died.
I can’t remember the author, but I think the title was “The Body Silent.” That was probably the worst natural way I could imagine dying.
As for human-caused ways of dying, the ‘sloth’ guy’s death in Se7en was probably the worst.
Guinastasia, the shark event you’re referring to is, IIRC, the USS Indianapolis. Due to some combination of secrecy and plain old SNAFUs a rescue party wasn’t sent out until several days after the ship was sunk. Quinn talks about the incident in “Jaws”, and there is a rather grisly description of the event in Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”
Being tortured with sharp pointy things and then slowly drawn and quartered, Brave Heart Style. Once you’ve been dismembered, you’d probably still be alive for a while.
2nd place: Burned at the stake.
I once hit that point when scuba-diving. Had multiple equipment failures–including my tank blowing all the air–at 80ft. I made it to the surface, but the water was choppy and I inhaled a bunch of water through my snorkel. I was also slightly negatively-buoyant, so I started sinking again. When I dumped my weight-belt I still went under (this water was rough). Through the stars of the growing blackout I could see the water’s surface receding above me, and though I knew I was dead meat I was surprised at how calm I was. It felt strangely placid.
I didn’t start freaking and fighting for life until my dive-buddy found me and brought me back to the surface. Once I got a bit of air and a sense that death wasn’t a total certainty, that’s when the rage to live and fear of death came.
For me, there would be far worse ways to go.
Impalement.
Burning. Definitely burning.
Being eaten alive.
Boiling.
Total immersion in strong acid.
And that upside-down sawing in half that someone else mentioned. Yow.
The American Indians would bury you up to your neck and fill your mouth with sugar.
Near an ant hill.
I think “The Bone Collector” (the book) does an excellent job portraying some of the most horrible ways to die. The steampipe, the rats, the guy getting buried alive.I also caught part of an episode of “Millenium” that showed a women getting stoned (with rocks, no comments from the peanut gallery) to death. That seemed pretty horrid.