# Weird Celebrity Deaths **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 25, 2016, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134 "2016-02-25T20:16:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/81 "2016-02-27T17:02:34Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > This happened on January 5, 1998. Michael Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy, died on December 31, 1997 from skiing into a tree. > > You cannot make that up. What am I missing? ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/82 "2016-02-27T17:14:15Z")
What are the odds that two celebrities would die from skiing into a tree in the same week? ---
**Author:** ![fachverwirrt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/94ad74/32.png) [@fachverwirrt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fachverwirrt)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/83 "2016-02-27T17:22:17Z")
The odds of random weird coincidences happening occasionally are more or less 1. Was Michael Kennedy really a celebrity anyway? Other than dying by skiing into a tree (while playing football) and boinking his babysitter, what did Michael Kennedy ever really do? I don’t think I had ever heard of him before his death. He was a Kennedy, but there are lots of Kennedys. ---
**Author:** ![bibliophage](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bibliophage/32/7615_2.png) [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/84 "2016-02-27T18:53:45Z")
Nelson Rockefeller died of a heart attack while he was alone in an apartment with his twenty-something female aide. The speculation, never proved, is that they were having sex at the time. Eighteen years earlier his son Michael had disappeared while on an anthropological expedition to New Guinea. The speculation, again never proved, is that he was killed and eaten by cannibals. ---
**Author:** ![Superdude](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/superdude/32/13450_2.png) [@Superdude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superdude)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/85 "2016-02-27T21:15:06Z")
[Carter Albrecht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Albrecht#Death), keyboard player/guitarist for the group Edie Brickell & New Bohemians was shot and killed by his girlfriend’s next-door neighbor. Albrecht and his girlfriend returned to her house after he’d been drinking. They both took the anti-smoking medication Chantix, and he became violent and hit her a few times, which he’d never done before. She went outside, and he followed. She went back inside and locked the door. After he tried to get in, he went to her neighbor’s back yard, where Albrecht was yelling and trying to get in the house. The neighbor tried to fire a warning shot over Albrecht’s head. Albrecht, however, stood 6’5", and the bullet hit him in the head. He died at the scene, with no charges filed, ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/86 "2016-02-27T21:26:47Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > This happened on January 5, 1998. Michael Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy, died on December 31, 1997 from skiing into a tree. > > You cannot make that up. I remember both events. At first, when reports of Bono dying in the exact same manner as Kennedy came out, people assumed it was a joke. ---
**Author:** ![TreacherousCretin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/treacherouscretin/32/476_2.png) [@TreacherousCretin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TreacherousCretin)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/87 "2016-02-27T21:37:15Z")
> [@Siam\_Sam](#): > > And speaking of Thailand, don’t forget David Carradine’s weird death by kinky auto-asphyxiation in the Nai Lert Park Hotel in Bangkok. Hard to forget when it was mentioned in post #4. > [@kunilou](#): > > French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully stabbed himself with his staff while conducting. The wound became infected, leading to the gangrene which killed him. …post #21 > [@Siam\_Sam](#): > > They sicced a bear on him too? :eek: Yep. Covered with the blood and guts and all, the bear was a grisly grizzly. ---
**Author:** ![Randolph](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Randolph](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Randolph)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/88 "2016-02-27T21:42:04Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > What are the odds that two celebrities would die from skiing into a tree in the same week? It’s a cone-spiracy! ---
**Author:** ![Superdude](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/superdude/32/13450_2.png) [@Superdude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superdude)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/89 "2016-02-27T21:50:42Z")
I posted [this](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19119117&postcount=47) in the “Mental Disorders” thread, but it’s too weird to not put here. too. > [@Me](#): > > Also, Swedish black metal musician Per “Dead” Ohlin suffered from a few disorders. Reports vary on the cause (ice skating accident or beaten by a bully as a child), but he suffered a ruptured spleen, and was technically dead for a few minutes. > > From his wiki entry: > > Quote: > Originally Posted by wikipedia > For concerts, Dead went to great lengths to achieve the image and atmosphere he wished. From the beginning of his career, he was known to wear “corpse paint”, which involved covering his face with black and white makeup. According to Necrobutcher, “\*t wasn’t anything to do with the way Kiss and Alice Cooper used makeup. Dead actually wanted to look like a corpse. He didn’t do it to look cool”. Hellhammer claimed that Dead “was the first black metal musician to use corpse paint”. To complete his corpse-like image, Dead would bury his stage clothes and dig them up again to wear on the night of a concert. According to Hellhammer: > > “Before the shows, Dead used to bury his clothes into the ground so that they could start to rot and get that grave scent. He was a corpse on a stage. Once he even asked us to bury him in the ground — he wanted his skin to become pale.” > > During one tour with Mayhem, he found a dead crow and kept it in a plastic bag. He often carried it about with him and would smell the bird before going onstage, to sing “with the stench of death in his nostrils”. He also kept dead birds under his bed. > > Dead would cut himself while singing onstage. During a gig in 1990, he slashed his arm with a broken bottle. Faust claims that Dead had to be taken to hospital after the gig, but arrived too late and so “it was no use to give him stitches”. > > In an interview done by Marduk guitarist Morgan ‘Evil’ Håkansson and published in Slayer fanzine, Dead explained how he and the band tried to weed-out poseurs at their concerts: > > “Before we began to play there was a crowd of about 300 in there, but in the second song ‘Necro Lust’ we began to throw around those pig heads. Only 50 were left, I liked that! […] We wanna scare those [who] shouldn’t be at our concerts and they will have to escape through the emergency exit with parts of their body missing, so we can have something to throw around. […] If someone doesn’t like blood and rotten flesh thrown in their face they can FUCK OFF, and that’s exactly what they do.” > He went on to commit suicide. He slit his own throat, and both of his wrists. Right after, he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. > > One of his bandmates found the body, and took pictures of it. They used one of the pictures as the cover for their bootleg live album Dawn of the Black Hearts. I won’t link to the artwork, but it’s easily found using google. > > His suicide note read: > > Quote: > Originally Posted by Per “Dead” Ohlin > Excuse the blood, but I have slit my wrists and neck. It was the intention that I would die in the woods so that it would take a few days before I was possibly found. I belong in the woods and have always done so. No one will understand the reason for this anyway. To give some semblance of an explanation I’m not a human, this is just a dream and soon I will awake. It was too cold and the blood was frozen in time, plus my new knife is too dull. If I don’t succeed dying to the knife I will blow all the shit out of my skull. Yet I do not know. I left all my lyrics by “Let the good times roll”—plus the rest of the money. Whoever finds it gets the fucking thing. As a last salutation may I present “Life Eternal”. Do whatever you want with the fucking thing. / Pelle. > > I didn’t come up with this now, but seventeen years ago.[4] > It’s been speculated that Per suffered from Cotard Delusion, stemming from his ruptured spleen. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/90 "2016-02-27T22:45:54Z")
> [@Superdude](#): > > [Carter Albrecht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Albrecht#Death), keyboard player/guitarist for the group Edie Brickell & New Bohemians was shot and killed by his girlfriend’s next-door neighbor. Albrecht and his girlfriend returned to her house after he’d been drinking. They both took the anti-smoking medication Chantix, and he became violent and hit her a few times, which he’d never done before. She went outside, and he followed. She went back inside and locked the door. After he tried to get in, he went to her neighbor’s back yard, where Albrecht was yelling and trying to get in the house. The neighbor tried to fire a warning shot over Albrecht’s head. Albrecht, however, stood 6’5", and the bullet hit him in the head. He died at the scene, with no charges filed, Chantix is some nasty stuff. I have no idea how or why it was approved for sale. :mad: The band House of Freaks is better known for the way Bryan Harvey died than they are for any of their music. ☹ About 10 years ago, he, his wife, and their two young children were murdered in a random home invasion. > **[House of Freaks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Freaks)** > > House of Freaks was a two-man band formed in Richmond, Virginia in the mid-1980s. Bryan Harvey played guitar and sang, and Johnny Hott played percussion. The band managed to achieve a remarkably full sound, mostly because of Hott's inventive drumming and Harvey's confident vocals and knack of playing bass lines on his guitar (cribbed from his many years as a bass player) while simultaneously playing a melody. > The Freaks' sound was a combination of folk and rock, and drew heavily from the blues a... ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2016, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/91 "2016-02-27T22:48:53Z")
> [@cochrane](#): > > I remember both events. At first, when reports of Bono dying in the exact same manner as Kennedy came out, people assumed it was a joke. Same here. I also remember that at his memorial service, Cher gave a beautiful eulogy, and his then-daughter Chastity was described on CNN not as his daughter, but as “Lesbian Activist”. :smack: 😕 An aside: As a man, he had his name legally changed to Chaz Salvatore Bono, after his father. ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/92 "2016-02-28T00:28:37Z")
> [@TreacherousCretin](#): > > Covered with the blood and guts and all, the bear was a grisly grizzly. As everyone knows, blood is a polar liquid. Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer, died while riding in an automobile. Her long, flowing scarf became entangled in the car’s open-spoked wheels and nearly decapitated her. ---
**Author:** ![Rick\_Kitchen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rick_kitchen/32/522_2.png) [@Rick\_Kitchen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick_Kitchen)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/93 "2016-02-28T00:49:26Z")
While filming the 1931 film **The Viking** , the movie’s director, Varick Frissell, its cinematographer and 25 other members of the film crew were killed when an attempt to blow up an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland went awry. King Charles II of Navarre burned to death when his brandy-soaked bandages caught fire. Surinder Singh Bajwa, deputy mayor of Delhi, Inida, died when he fell from a roof while fighting off a band of monkeys. British film maker Lee Halpin froze to death filming a documentary about living homeless. Jimi Heselden, the owner of the Segway company, died when the Segway he was riding ran off a cliff. ---
**Author:** ![Superdude](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/superdude/32/13450_2.png) [@Superdude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superdude)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/94 "2016-02-28T01:10:00Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > As everyone knows, blood is a polar liquid. > > Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer, died while riding in an automobile. Her long, flowing scarf became entangled in the car’s open-spoked wheels and nearly decapitated her. Post #9 ---
**Author:** ![E-DUB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/e-dub/32/403_2.png) [@E-DUB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-DUB)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/95 "2016-02-28T01:52:26Z")
Further ironicizing the death of Keith Moon is that the pills on which he OD’d were intended to combat alcoholism. ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 3:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/96 "2016-02-28T03:48:35Z")
Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, had a death worthy of the Darwin awards. Ozzy was sleeping off a bender in the tour bus, and Rhoads hired a plane to “buzz” the bus and give Ozzy a huge scare. The pilot crashed the plane, killing himself and Rhoads. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 5:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/97 "2016-02-28T05:20:31Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, had a death worthy of the Darwin awards. > > Ozzy was sleeping off a bender in the tour bus, and Rhoads hired a plane to “buzz” the bus and give Ozzy a huge scare. The pilot crashed the plane, killing himself and Rhoads. And two other members of Osbourne’s entourage. Speaking of buzzes, the pilot was high on cocaine. ---
**Author:** ![Rick\_Kitchen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rick_kitchen/32/522_2.png) [@Rick\_Kitchen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick_Kitchen)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/98 "2016-02-28T06:02:41Z")
Eugene Aserinsky, a scientist who did some of the first research on REM sleep, died when he fell asleep at the wheel of his car and crashed. Porn star Echo Valley died in a car crash because her breasts were too large for her to wear a seat belt. King Adolf Frederick of Sweden died after having eaten a dinner of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, kippers and champagne, which was topped off with 14 servings of his favorite dessert. Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, decapitated an enemy he had killed in battle and attached the enemy’s head to his belt. As he rode in triumph away from the battle, the head’s teeth scraped against his bare leg and he later died of a fatal infection. Race car driver Renzo Zorzi experienced a car malfunction at the South African Grand Prix in 1977. With his engine burning, he tried to get out of his car, but his oxygen hose would not disconnect from his helmet. So two race marshals ran across the track to try to help him out and put out the fire. Zorzi’s racing team partner, Tom Pryce, didn’t see the marshals, and hit and killed one of them. The marshal he hit was carrying a fire extinguisher, which flew through the air, hit Pryce in the head, and killed him. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/99 "2016-02-28T15:24:13Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > What are the odds that two celebrities would die from skiing into a tree in the same week? If only it had been the same tree. ---
**Author:** ![Superdude](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/superdude/32/13450_2.png) [@Superdude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superdude)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2016, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134/100 "2016-02-28T19:21:13Z")
There’s actually a [wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths) for this topic. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/weird-celebrity-deaths/747134.md?page=6)