Crazy Crazy Facts

10 Creepy and Bizzare Suicides

by Morris M., listverse.comJuly 19
One odd side effect of human consciousness has been our penchant for suicide. In the United States, suicide is currently a bigger killer than car accidents; in Britain, it remains more likely to kill young men than literally anything else. Part of the reason for this is our cultural view of suicide as something hopelessly romantic and deeply subversive. But the truth is that there's little to celebrate in suicide. More often than not it's grimy, unpleasant, and very weird, while "romance" can easily take a backseat to creepy and perverted.

10Manchester's Bizarre Love Triangle

In 2004, a 14-year-old boy was stabbed in a frenzied attack in Manchester. His 15-year-old attacker plunged a kitchen knife once through his chest and again through his stomach, but didn't quite manage to kill him. To the first cops on the scene, it must have sounded like a typical tragedy: both boys were former best friends who'd become involved with the same woman. But then other, atypical details began to emerge; like how the "woman" was a middle-aged spy they'd met in a chat room, or how the younger boy was secretly in love with his older friend. And then things got really weird.
It transpired that the woman had ordered the murder. It also transpired that she didn't exist, despite having had frequent webcam sex with the older boy. In the subsequent investigation, detectives discovered a complex web of fiction spun around the older boy, with one purpose: to end its author's life. Yeah, turns out the 50,000 messages the "three" had sent each other were nothing more than a perverse suicide bid on the part of the 14-year-old. At the end of the trial, the judge announced that "skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as that which arises here," and we're inclined to agree.

9Self-Decapitation

As a motivation for suicide, "revenge" seems pretty pathetic. But that didn't stop Gerald Mellin, whose disregard for his own life was second only to his hatred of his wife. For complex reasons best described as "first-world problems" the two had fallen out and were preparing for divorce. Where most people might have grumbled for a bit, hired a lawyer, and drowned their sorrows with booze, Mellin decided now was the time to ruin his spouse's life, end his own, and traumatize loads of bystanders in the process.
Like a toddler throwing a tantrum, Mellin taunted his wife with texts threatening suicide-going so far as to show her the rope he was going to use. Then he canceled his life insurance policies and proceeded to ring up stratospheric debts, before ending it all in a very public manner. Tying one end of his rope around a tree and the other end around his neck, Mellin got into his car, aimed for a busy main road, and floored it. The jolt caused the rope to decapitate him just as his car reached the road, meaning his gruesome death was witnessed by dozens of people. Basically, it was one heck of a selfish way to go, made all the worse by the ridiculously petty reasons behind it.

8The Silver Bullet

Eighteenth-century Polish nobleman Jan Potocki is chiefly known for two things: his bizarre, Gothic novel The Manuscript Found at Saragossa and his bizarre, Gothic death. During the decade or so that he worked on his strange ghost story, Potocki's mental health began to slowly unravel. Once an explorer, adventurer, and social butterfly, he spent the last years of his life slowly retreating from the outside world-sinking deeper and deeper into both anonymity and melancholia. Finally, it all became too much for him-and what happened next would become the subject of legend.
Hidden away in his castle, Potocki fashioned a bullet from the handle of a silver sugar bowl his mother had given him. He then had it blessed by the castle chaplain and retired to his study, where he drew an insulting caricature of himself before firing the bullet into his head. In short, it was an end so utterly morbid it could have come straight from his own ghost story-and no one has ever known why he did it.

7Entombed Alive

Taphephobia-the fear of being buried alive-is one of the most common phobias, second only to spiders as absolute nightmare fuel. But, as bad as premature burial is, it apparently doesn't compare to the agony caused by gout. How do we know? Well, in the second century, the Roman orator Polemon of Laodicea found himself crippled by the "king's disease." Like many others forced to live in constant pain, Polemon eventually decided it wasn't worth carrying on and resolved to end it all. However, his chosen method was less a sad-but-necessary "release from pain" and more a terrifying descent into HP Lovecraft's nightmares.
At the age of 65, Polemon ordered his servants to shut him up in the family tomb and leave him there to die. Think about that for a second and allow the full horror to sink in. Trapped in a dark chamber, surrounded by the grinning corpses of his ancestors, Polemon slowly starved to death-wracked with agonizing pain even as the life seeped out of him. It sounds like something Jigsaw wouldn't wish on one of his victims, and yet Polemon did it voluntarily.