STRANGE DEATHS UNUSUAL WAYS OF SHUFFLING OFF THIS MORTAL COIL
Veteran stand-up comedian Ian Cognito, 60, died on-stage at the Atic bar in Bicester, Oxfordshire, on 11 April. He sat down on a stool while breathing heavily, before falling silent for five minutes. The audience thought it was a joke, and continued to laugh. “Everyone in the crowd, me included, thought he was joking,” said compere Andrew
Bird. “Even when I walked onstage and touched his arm I was expecting him to say ‘Boo’.” He was pronounced dead at the scene. Mr
Bird said Cognito had not been feeling well before the gig started, but insisted on going on-stage. He had even joked about his health during his set, telling the audience: “Imagine if I died in front of you lot here.” Audience member John Ostojak said: “Only 10 minutes before he sat down he joked about having a stroke. He said, ‘Imagine having a stroke and waking up speaking Welsh’.” Cognito, whose real name was Paul Barbieri, was born in London in 1958, and was based in Bristol. He had been performing since 1985 and won the Time Out Award for standup comedy in 1999. Mr Bird said dying on stage would have been the way the notorious hell-raiser would have wanted to go. BBC News, 12 April; D.Telegraph, 13 April 2019.
After a man died in his sleep in the Thai village of Nong Bung, locals believed an evil spirit was coming for their menfolk. It could only mean one thing: Phee Mae Mai (the ghost of the widows) was on the loose. San Yendee, 58, was one of many locals who attached red T-shirts with signs to the trees and front gates of their houses. The shirts had Thai wording that said there were no men in the houses, only women, in the hope that this would save the men from being taken. thaivisa.com, 29 Oct 2018.
Chaiwat Nak-iaw and his brother heard cries emanating from a five-storey block of police flats under construction next to the Bang Bon police station in Bangkok, and located the source of the sounds to the second floor. Hat, a 41-year-old furniture repairman from Surin, was stuck in a narrow cement shaft housing water pipes. It was a mystery how he got into such a small space. To free the trapped man, they had to smash the shaft, which took an hour. Sadly, he died shortly afterwards. His younger brother said he had received a call from the police to come and pick up his brother who was drunk and disorderly.
He said his brother suffered from paranoia. thaivisa.com, 4 Feb 2019.
On 30 April 2018, a maintenance worker was called to fix a toilet that wouldn’t flush in a women’s washroom on the fourth floor of the Core Shopping Centre in downtown Calgary in Canada. He found the body of a 20-year-old man inside a wall. He had crawled into a vent behind a toilet three days earlier and got stuck. It took several hours to extract his body. “The victim’s motivation is unknown,” said a police spokesman. (Victoria) Times Colonist, 1+3 May 2018.
On 8 January, a Canadian woman was found dead after becoming trapped inside a clothing donation box in Toronto. The bins have teeth to prevent theft, but people can easily get caught on them. In fact, seven Canadians have died in donation bins since 2015, the latest being a 34-year-old man in West Vancouver on 30 December. A 32-year-old man was found dead inside a donation box in Cambridge, Ontario, in November 2018, and a man in his 20s died in Calgary in July 2017. Another victim in 2017 was a 56-year-old Pennsylvania woman dropping off clothes. Her arm became stuck in the bin when a stool she was on gave way under her. Others have found themselves stuck when trying to take clothes, or using the bins as shelter in cold weather. Homeless and antipoverty activists have called on engineers to redesign the bins so they no longer pose a safety risk. Toronto Star, 3 Jan; BBC News, 8 Jan 2019.
A 14-year-old kickboxer died due to a rare medical fluke when a blow to his chest caused a cardiac arrest during a championship bout. Scott Marsden from Sheffield collapsed in the final seconds of the fifth round of a fight in Leeds in March 2017. He died from a rare disruption of the heart’s rhythm caused by a direct blow at a specific moment in the heartbeat cycle. D.Telegraph, 12 Feb 2019.
Six people from the same family were “killed on the spot” by a lightning strike in Madagascar on 26 January while sheltering from a storm. The relatives, including a three-year-old child, were killed in the central village of Bakaro while hiding in a thatched cottage. Another person suffered superficial burns. D.Telegraph, 29 Jan 2019.