5 Historical Figures Who Died Completely Puzzling Deaths
You don’t get into the history books for being ordinary, so people of importance throughout time have tended to die rather sensationally. They get murdered a lot, having made a lot of powerful enemies, and they tend to be fond of drink, drugs and danger. Sometimes, though, they leave this world the same way they lived in it: confusing the absolute hell out of everyone.
Alexander the Great
Alexander of Macedonia was a perfectly healthy young man of only 32 when he suddenly came down with a mysterious violent illness and died 12 days later. To make matters weirder, he showed no signs of decomposition for a good six days. To his followers, this cemented his status as a god, but historians’ only explanation is that he wasn’t actually dead yet. He was just so sick that he looked dead to people who believed women’s uteruses sometimes go wandering around their bodies. As for what did kill him, theories range from an autoimmune disorder that would explain his corpsey state to the West Nile virus. Yeah, a mosquito bite might have succeeded where countless armies failed.
Edgar Allan Poe
If you thought “autoimmunity to mosquitos” was a wild spectrum, consider the range from “rabies to voter fraud.” Specifically, a type of voter fraud common in the 1800s that involved kidnapping people, drugging them and sending them out to vote for a candidate multiple times in various disguises. That’s just one explanation for why Edgar Allan Poe disappeared for a week and was found hundreds of miles away, wearing someone else’s clothes, delirious and calling out for a mysterious figure named Reynolds before passing away. Yeah. You figure it out.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
It’s widely believed, thanks to stuffy theater and kickass movies, that Mozart was poisoned by his rival, Salieri, but that’s only because we have no idea what actually killed him. The fever, rash and full-body swelling caused by the disease that took his life could be attributed to tuberculosis, syphilis, scarlet fever or even mercury poisoning. The prevailing outlook today is a streptococcal infection, but there’s no postmorteming at this point.
Martin of Aragon
The king of Spain before Spain existed may have died from the plague, poisoning or even a coma induced by high levels of urea in the blood. You can tell that we don’t know because the prevailing explanation is that the king ate too much, went to bed with a tummy ache, called for his favorite jester to cheer him up and laughed himself to death. We know that can’t be true because the alleged joke that killed him isn’t even that funny.
Meriweather Lewis
Lewis minus Clark was already battling what was probably malaria when he arrived on his last expedition to a Tennessee inn, where the innkeeper’s wife, Priscilla Grinder, reported she heard several gunshots in the middle of the night and saw a wounded Lewis crawling around his cabin. He had been depressed and delirious, so suicide seemed likely, but she later changed her story, claiming Lewis had gotten into a gunfight with other lodgers. It’s possible he was gunned down by local bandits, but it’s also believed he may have been murdered by Mr. Grinder after catching Lewis in bed with his appropriately named wife or even by Mrs. Grinder herself. It might be a terrible tragedy, but if you can arrange your death in such a way that it’s possible the same person either shot or schtupped you, do it.
