After spending the last week wandering through fairy rings, peering into hedgerows and trying very hard not to pet the Hounds of Annwn, it would be very easy to think the strangest stories belong to folklore. History, however, has other ideas.
For every changeling left in a cradle or spectral dog padding silently across a lonely moor, there is a very real king who allegedly laughed himself to death, an astronomer who is rumoured to have died because he was too polite to leave the dinner table, and a city devastated beneath a wave of molasses moving faster than a horse could gallop .
These are stories that’ll make you stop halfway through and mutter “Surely Not!”. Sometimes they are completely true. Sometimes they are half true, embellished by generations of re-telling (much like the tales in my book, Tales From the Rumour Mill.), Occasionally they are absolute nonsense that has somehow been accepted as fact. But they all reveal something fascinating – not just about the person who died, but about the people who told the story afterwards.
Humans have always tried to make sense of death. Sometimes we explain it with religion. Sometimes with science. And sometimes, when neither seems quite enough, we wrap it in a tale so peculiar it is unlikely to ever be forgotton.
A tragic accident becomes a cautionary tale. A rumour is repeated so many times it hardens into accepted history. An unfortunate coincidence transforms into a legend repeated for centuries. Before long, the facts matter a whole lot less than the story itself.
This week, we will attempt to separate myth from reality. We’ll meet rulers whose last moments have become the stuff of legend, scientists whose deaths are still debated, disasters so absurd they seem invented and everyday objects that proved unexpectedly lethal.
Along the way, we’ll discover that history doesn’t always end with dramatic battles or heroic last stands. Sometimes it ends because someone wore the wrong dress, or because someone trusted an invention a little too much, or because fate seems to possess a wicked sense of timing.
We’re not here to mock the dead, quite the opposite in fact. Many of these stories ended in genuine tragedy, and those involved deserve to be remembered with respect. But history has always contained moments of extraordinary irony. The Grim Reaper, it seems, has a very peculiar imagination.
So, over the next seven days, we’ll explore some of the strangest deaths ever recorded – from the genuinely unbelievable to the surprisingly misunderstood. Some may make you laugh, some may make you wince. Some may convince you never to wear a crinoline, attend a formal banquet or stand too close to a vat of molasses, but that’s between you and your God and no concern of mine. You do you.
However these stories affect you, one thing is for certain. History will, as always, remain to be gloriously, wonderfully and occasionally ridiculously stranger than fiction.
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