Unlucky Timing: 56 Stories About People Losing Their Lives In Odd Ways

A friend of mine was backpacking Australia after finishing university.

One evening he and some friends had a barbecue on the beach in Darwin and he fell asleep on the beach afterwards.

His friends thought it would be funny to leave him sleeping and all went home.

He was never seen again but the police believe he was eaten by salt water crocs who were known to be in that area.

A friend of mine’s parents. In their late 50s.

His mom was on her last hours after a long battle with cancer. She chose to die at home and was expected she wouldn’t last more than a few more hours so the family gathered to each say goodbye.

When she passed, her dad kissed her and then went outside for some time alone, he made it as far as the patio, slumped in to one of the chairs and died. Heart attack.

My friend lost both parents within 15 minutes. One expected, one not. But he had said he was worried about his dad once she was gone because he’d be useless without her, he was a good husband and father, worked hard to provide for them and give them a good life but they were a traditional couple. She cooked, did his laundry, cleaned and generally took care of him. He had his mental health struggles and past alcoholism and she grounded him and kept him stable. In a way, it was for the best, but also a heartbreaking end for them both.

They were born within days of each other, and died within minutes of each other.

This one's going to get buried but it's absolutely tragic. About 15 years ago I worked for a homeless shelter and we had this one client named Mike. Now Mike was a super great guy but due to some mental issue he would occasionally get excited and Shout out too loud. At this particular homeless shelter to be able to eat you had to go to a 30-minute service. One of Mike's particular issues was that during the service he would randomly shout amen mid sentence from the pastor. I know for a fact that he was not doing this to be a malicious and he had no control over it. One day the director of the homeless shelter got tired of it and barred him from going to the homeless shelter for a week. Point of reference here is this is the only homeless shelter in the town and it was the middle of winter. Mike was found Frozen one day in a porta potty where he had tried to spend the night. The director of this homeless shelter said when interviewed that this man always had a place to stay and all he had to do was ask for help conveniently forgetting to mention that he was the reason that Mike was out on the street.

I live in the U.K.. One of my friends (age 20: very beautiful girl) never returned to college after the summer vacation. She was on holiday in France with her parents, and had been hit by a vehicle when she was a pedestrian, crossing the road. Like a lot of British people abroad, she had been looking the wrong way (we drive on a different side of the road to most other countries). One second of inattention can make such a huge impact.

My Dad also lost someone at around the same age. His best friend had died right beside him in a factory in the 1940s. The two young men had been in the "milling room" (both friends were skilled metal workers), when a large carborundum stone that spun round at speed (and was used for grinding), shattered.

Pieces of the stone went everywhere-Dad's attention was rather taken up dodging the large piece that whizzed past his head and embedded in the wall right beside him (thankfully, Dad always had lightning-fast reflexes). He then turned to his mate, only to see him toppling over and subsequently dying in the most horrific way imaginable. A huge piece of carborundum stone had hit him in the abdomen. There was nothing anyone could do: just be there for him as he died.

Heath and safety is often mocked ("Heath and safety has gone mad"), but never by me. The workplace was so often a deadly place before it was brought in.

An acquaintance of mine was on breathing assistance in a home care situation. Someone doing a gender reveal celebration down the road let those metallic helium balloons go and they got caught in the power lines. Caused a local blackout which caused his equipment to stop working overnight and by the time he was found the battery backup had died. As had he.

Someone from my year in high school went in for a tonsillectomy and died on the table. Not because of any crazy anatomical issues or surgeon's mistake.... But because he was apparently allergic to anesthesia. Aside from the tonsils he was super healthy, on the football team. He was the only child. I felt so bad for his mom, who thought her kid was going in for the most routine surgery of all time only to have him d*e.

A friend in high school was riding a 4-wheeler down a trail in the woods. Somebody hung up a No Trespassing sign. At neck height. With a wire. The sign came off somehow.

My friend was beheaded.

More rare than weird, but my sister developed an allergy to her own platelets. Her blood got so thin, she spontaneously started bleeding through all her veins. She died of a massive hemorrhage in her brain, but all her organs were full of blood. She was 13 years old.

The manager of a place I used to work at was on vacation in Hawaii and while out hiking too close to restricted areas, he fell into a volcano and died. They never found any part of him. It’s true. And happens more than you would think. 😳 🌋.

I remember in highschool having the police, ambulance and fire bridge come to talk to us and try to scare us about various dangers we will face in life. The ambulance woman walks in to the lecture hall and says "one person in this room won't live to the age of 21". One of my mates next to me loudly calls out "bags not me" (bags is akin to dibs in the US). He died at age 19 in a car crash...


I guess maybe it's not weird, but it was eerie and sad.

My friend (in 9th grade in the 80's) was on summer vacation at his Grandmother's house in NY. He was mowing her front yard when a pregnant woman went into labor while driving, lost control of her car, ran up into the yard and k****d him.

EDIT: I'm honestly not sure what happened to her, legally. I know she and her baby were not hurt. I honestly think about her more often now than I do him. From what my Mom told me, by talking to his Mom, the lady was beyond inconsolable. I can't imagine living with something like that. The entire situation was awful, from every perspective.

I knew someone who died from a snake bite. He was driving on a highway in Panama when one of his tires blew out. He slowed down and pulled over onto the emergency lane.

While he was fixing the tire, a snake bit him. The cellphone signal on that highway was poor, so they couldn't call emergency services. His wife started waving at passing cars, hoping someone would stop and help drive him to the hospital. But no one stopped, because people in Panama tend to be distrustful of strangers. By the time someone finally did pull over, it was already too late.

Snake bites are not an uncommon occurrence, but the fact that it happened this way makes it so bizarre.

A building I worked in had a freak elevator accident.

A woman was stepping onto it and it shot up suddenly and k****d her instantly. I rode that exact elevator for years before and after. Really, really, s****y unlucky timing. Very sad.

My friend’s priest died at her wedding ceremony. Actually before the ceremony. Everyone was waiting for him to come out of his little room in the church…. Eventually they checked on him and he’d passed away.

She broke her ankle. Joked about being a klutz. We made plans to reconnect after she was off crutches because it had been too long.

She died from an embolism caused by the break. It was incredibly sudden: one minute she was talking to her roommates and the next she died.

Maybe not the weirdest overall, but super unsettling for all us 20-somethings.

My wife died of an undiagnosed heart condition, age 27. Long QT syndrome. It might not fit here, as sadly it's not that weird. It turned out her father was.a.carrier for the genes. Her sister has it. And my daughter has it. It's well managed with both of them. But man, that was a tough time. She doesn't know her mum as my daughter was 17 months when my wife died.

What was weird (annoying is a more appropriate word) was health professionals, later on and once my daughter had been diagnosed, constantly asking me how I knew she had a heart condition. An attitude of 'how would you know?' among dentists, nurses etc... like it's f*****n serious and I'm going to act like a hawk if you are thinking of using lignocaine, novacaine and many other d***s on my daughter... there's a big list and it's not hard to check when the patient's parent tells you. After they had given me their attitude, you could see them squirm when they asked how was it diagnosed... and I told them that my wife had died from it. Got sick of justifying myself. Well in the past now.

A guy I went to HS with was on his 9th day at a new job and he didn’t have the necessary safety equipment or training and fell into a vat of molten iron. His autopsy report says thermal annihilation. Only half of him fell in. His colleagues had to see the other half of his body that DIDN’T fall in.

My cousin died after a soccer injury. He stepped on the ball and fell. Hit his head. He went home, was falling in and out of consciousness, and he passed away on the way to the hospital. He was 18.

Welp I guess this is the thread for me. 

1. I worked at a betting agency which had a dozen or so TVs on the wall showing a random mix of Teletext racing odds and different horse and dog meets. A regular wanted to change the channel on one of the TVs and instead of asking us to use one of our universal remotes he climbed up on the counter. Lost his balance, grabbed the TV for  support, pulled it off the wall and it landed on another regular’s head. That guy spent years in a coma and eventually died during surgery after a medical mistake that I won’t share because it made the news and will dox me. 

2. Another regular got trapped upside down in a manhole trying to get his keys and drowned. That was also in the news but shouldn’t dox me. 

3.  A guy I went to school with got electrocuted by his garden shed. Somehow some wiring made the whole shed live. 

4.  A girl I went to school with had a fight with her boyfriend and he locked her out of the apartment. She tried to climb back in via the fire escape and it turned out the fire escape wasn’t securely attached to the building. .

My colleague, her daughter, and a man who tried to help them, were all swept out to sea and drowned.

Her daughter was first knocked in by a wave and then the other two got knocked in while they tried to reach out to her, not one of them went into the water intentionally. It was a terrifying reminder of how wild and powerful the sea is.

I had worked closely with her and it sounds like such a cliché but she really did light up the room, she was such a beautiful soul. This only happened at the beginning of this year and I'm still reeling from it.