Worst Ways to Die (Compilation)

it's the end of june 1462 and the ottoman army is met with an eerie silence as it marches into the town of targoviste in romania someone has been here before them his name is vlad dracula the ottomans moved cautiously through the streets wondering all the time where the people are there are no kids playing no men hard at work just empty houses and the odd wandering dog and then they see it a sight so chilling it almost brings them to their knees before them stands a forest of the impaled for hundreds of feet around 20 000 people are impaled on stakes not only the men but also the women and children too one man has to look away as he sees a woman and her infant impaled on the same stake a bird has made a nest where their guts used to be this is unforgivable what we just described to you was written by the byzantine greek chronicler of nicoscalco condiles and was part of the 10 books he wrote known as the histories it described the diabolical nature of the man we know today as vlad the impaler certainly not the only man in history fond of impaling his enemies but perhaps the best known for this hideous form of execution today we'll talk about impaling throughout history and we'll also explain how it was done and why it was done the why part might surprise you you can read many old texts that were written in parts of europe that describe vlad's utter brutality but historians tell us to be cautious in regard to what we believe because some stories may have been exaggerated still not many people disagree that vlad was described as a demented psychopath a sadist a gruesome murderer and a masochist he certainly tortured people and he certainly impaled people but as some people point out he did so to put the fear of god into his enemies and retain order among his people he might not have actually nailed turbines to men's head or executed women for being lazy and maybe not all the legends that are written about vlad the impaler are true but there's no doubt he impaled a lot of people during his reign he wasn't the first person to do it either and people did it for a long time after vlad took his last breath in fact folks were impaled not so long ago but let's now go back in time to ancient history if you look at something called the code of hammurabi an ancient babylonian law book that dates back to around 1772 bc you'll see that impalement was the sentence handed down to a woman who'd killed a man for another man law number 153 states this if a woman brings about the death of her husband for the sake of another man they shall impale her we found other texts relating to laws in the ancient near east that talk about impaling but it seems in some areas all the woman had to do was cheat on her husband and she could get impaled while prisoners of war or people who were accused of certain sins could also face the same fate later in time it happened during the neo-assyrian empire we know this from statues and carvings that depict impaling there are some descriptions too over 800 years before christ was born a neo-assyrian king named king ashornospirel ii wrote about his handiwork i cut off their hands i burned them with fire a pile of the living men and of heads over against the city gate i set up men impaled on stakes and the city i destroyed and devastated i turned it into mounds and ruined heaps the young men in the maidens and the fire i burned the reason a king might do this of course was to instill terror in people seeing a bunch of people being impaled on stakes acted as a deterrent to anyone else thinking about becoming a rebel centuries later darius the great the king of purgia was said to have impaled three thousand babylonians when he conquered babylon in an inscription this is how he explained what he did to a rebel i cut off his nose and ears and tongue and put out one eye he was kept bound at my palace entrance all the people saw him afterward i impaled him at ekbatana and the men who were his foremost followers those at ekpatana within the fortress i flayed and hung out their hides stuffed with straw okay so it seems to have happened a lot in ancient times it's also referenced in the bible although some translations use hanging and others use impalement so there are disagreements there as for those torture loving ancient romans while they seem to derive enjoyment from the whole gamut of creative punishments there's little written about impalement in the ancient roman texts it seems to have happened from time to time but the romans preferred crucifixion to impalement a punishment that could last a lot longer let's remember while impalement was horrific once that stake was driven through the body the victim will usually die very quickly well in most cases as you'll see impalement could be a slow process at times now let's talk about transversal impalement something we haven't touched on yet there are quite a few mentions of this in the old german text from the late middle ages similar to some assyrian laws from ancient times it seems as if women in parts of germany were accused of killing her own child she could be impaled what was different from the assyrian way of doing it is rather than the person being mounted on a stake the stake was driven through the victim there's evidence dating back to the 14th century that tells us a woman and a man accused of adultery could be impaled this way they would be tied together and placed on the ground or in a grave and a stake would be driven through the both of them a kind of symbolic execution as it meant the cheaters would stay together forever in 1340 there exists a german law code that said the husband of the woman who has cheated on him with another man can make a choice that is collect some cash's compensation or have the couple tied down he is then handed the hammer with which he'll drive the stake through his wife and her lover staying with germany laws were written in the 1500s that stated if a woman killed her own child the usual punishment would be drowning but in some cases she might be buried alive and this stake would be driven right through her heart it seemed around that same time this punishment was also sometimes reserved for women accused of being witches transversal impalement was certainly no walk in the park for the victim but we think longitudinal impalement was worse as described the former is having a stake pushed through a person's middle mostly their chest the latter is having the stake pushed through the length of the person's body how exact this was we can't be sure but in some cases the perfect longitudinal impalement would be if the stake entered the anus and came out through the chest yeah a stake through the heart would beat that any day of the week as you know this punishment often happened to rebels or prisoners of war it was a statement used by vladimir paler more than anyone else but it happened all across europe one thing it was used for was when a person defected to another army or collaborated with the enemy possibly the worst crime in the eyes of the country you were fighting for there are instances of it happening a few times when local people just provided food for soldiers those locals were captured by the other side and then accused of helping the enemy only the most extreme punishment was handed down to them in western europe it seemed to be the germans that were particularly fixated on this form of punishment not only did they do it to rebels but they also impaled people who'd been accused of robbery one book it's mentioned in doesn't state what kind of robbery but it's likely the victims had been accused of stealing from the state impalement might also happen to people who'd been accused of committing the very worst kind of crimes against one's own community let's take murderers for instance they might have been beheaded or even had their bodies broken on the wheel but some lawmakers saw this as getting off lightly especially when they were serial killers we might take the case of a man named pavel vashonsky he was a prolific highway robber in the 1500s who worked in today's czech republic he not only stole cash and valuables from the people he robbed but he often killed them in the process when he was arrested he confessed to 124 murders which made him a very active killer his punishment was definitely commensurate to the crime if he actually committed those crimes police work back then was somewhat sketchy first they cut off his limbs then while he was still breathing they took a pair of red hot pincers and removed his nipples only then was he impaled on a stake for good measure they set him on fire we should say that in those days when you admitted to a number of murders you weren't doing so in the name of a plea deal you were more often than not tortured before you admitted your guilt we found another case this time in germany that involved a man that went by the name of pushpiter he killed 30 people and some of those were pregnant women he'd done this because he wanted the unborn babies he thought if he ate them he would gain the power of invisibility such were the times people were quite superstitious we guess pushpither found out the hard way that his invisibility medicine didn't quite work there's a legend about this man which involves him telling off his executioner for not doing the impalement correctly according to this legend he told the executioner to take him down and do it again this time hitting the right spot is that true according to the book history of the german people at the close of the middle ages they first took off one of his hands with red-hot pincers then dragged him through the town but there's no mention of the botched execution what's interesting in this book is that it recounts many crimes and punishments in germany in the mid to late 1500s and it seems a lot of people were executed for civil crimes but they were usually beheaded or hanged the book explains that the authorities only tortured people who'd been accused of the worst kind of crimes the torture itself was weighted against the strength of a person if the person looked tough the torture was more brutal the torture was not recorded but the confession was after that the torture stopped the accused was never asked again about the torture and only had to confirm and court his confession we told you police work was sketchy in those days okay back to impalement and the last times it was employed as a punishment during the 17th and 18th centuries people were impaled throughout the ottoman empire the punishment was again seen as the worst of the worst and only reserved for the worst kind of criminal it didn't happen often but when it did it was usually highway robbers who were late on the stake apparently the last time the ottomans impaled highway robbers was in the late 1830s so when you consider it was happening in 1772 bc impalement was punishment with legs it also happened to christians who'd been accused of speaking against islam or having a love affair with a muslim woman according to the writer jean de thevano the man could convert to islam and get out of the impalement in the early 19th century the ottoman government also did this to greek bandits that had become rebels they'd be taken to a place where the entire village or town could see and be impaled there as a message to anyone else thinking about rebelling even if you were accused of giving food to a rebel or offering one shelter you might also get impaled and it gets worse sometimes those rebels would have parts chopped off them before being impaled they might also be flayed beforehand on occasion the person would be impaled and then held over a fire and roasted to death the greek war of independence then broke out in 1821 and during that war a lot of greeks found themselves on the wrong end of the stake around 65 greeks were impaled during the constantinople massacre something which was a retaliation for the war breaking out it happened to 30 more greeks on the island of zakintos in various parts of greece even women older people and monks were impaled from time to time during this bloody war we've talked about this next method of impalement before so we'll make it short this is a method known as bamboo torture and it's simple bamboo is hard as hell and grows very very fast tie a man over a shoot and he will slowly be impaled on it there are records of this happening in thailand india and where the japanese held prisoners of war in the pacific this might not seem so brutal but what would be better being thrown onto the stake or having one slowly work its way through your body two other slow methods of impalement both around the 18th century involved the use of hooks one of them sometimes called singular was very slow and very painful a man would be fastened to a hook that was placed right below his rib cage the hook would then be pulled up until it pulled open his chest this was used by the ottomans and it was also a punishment for rebel slaves and dutch suriname a name for this punishment is hanged by the ribs yet another form of impalement happened from time to time in algeria in the 18th century it was simple painful and slow hooks were fixed into city walls and men were thrust upon these hooks howling out in pain for everyone to see death is scary but what leads up to death can be even worse there are quick ways to die and slow ways to die since death is an inevitability most of us would like to die of old age we can guarantee with 100 certainty that no one wants to die by being skinned alive it's a long excruciating process that can last from hours to days but just how bad is it we'll argue that it is the worst what you're about to watch will make your skin crawl being skinned alive or flayed was a punishment used all around the world in the past records from around 900 bc recount the flaying of prisoners by assyrian kings skinning people alive was used by the ancient chinese as well as the aztecs of mesoamerica it was also used as a torture method in medieval europe so flaying has made its way around the world but what if someone were to be skinned alive what would it be like what could they expect how would they actually die some of these answers might surprise you others you'll find hard to stomach each step of the process gets worse and worse and that's why being skinned alive would most definitely be a terrible way to die at the most basic level being skinned alive means having the skin of your body sliced and then peeled off while you're still alive the point of this form of torture and death is to create as much pain as possible in terms of ways to die the longer it lasts the more painful it is the worse it must be that's why being flayed to death is at the very top of worst ways to die now let's get started we're about to walk you through the process and what someone could expect if you were to be skinned alive it's not going to be pretty the flaying started with a series of long cuts what part of the world or culture was doing the flaying determined where the first cuts were made but skin is tough and the body needed to be softened before the process of flaying could begin there were two common ways to get the skin to soften the first was to leave someone outside in the scorching sun until they were covered in intense sunburn this caused the skin to swell and made it easier to cut through the second way that the skin was prepared to be flayed was by placing someone in a vat of boiling water as the person screamed in agony from the searing pain of being burned alive the skin would swell and soften making it easier for the torture to make precise incisions so before being skinned alive the victim would already be in excruciating pain from the preparation process now comes the really messed up part you won't believe how horrifying this is going to be the person being skinned alive would have their hands and feet tied to a table so that they could not move they would have to watch as the knife that would cut through their softened skin was sharpened right before their eyes no matter how hard they struggled they would not be able to get away from the nightmare the knife would then be used to make a long cut somewhere on the body common spots to begin cutting were the thighs or buttocks this was because a relatively long straight incision could be made from these locations on the body if the person was really unlucky the flare would start with the face this would cause immense pain as there are large concentrations of nerve receptors all along the head these receptors give someone the ability to make facial expressions with each nerve receptor there's also a pain receptor as the nerves are severed by the knife the brain receives pain signals you would never ever want to be skinned alive but if you were you would pray that the person doing it did not start with your face the cutting might seem like the worst part about being skinned alive but it is not not by a long shot the worst part about being skinned alive is what comes next the goal of the flayer is to keep as much skin intact as possible why would they need to keep large pieces of removed skin intact you might wonder we're going to get to that later on but some of the reasons you wouldn't guess in a million years in order to get the largest amount of skin possible the flare would make long cuts until they reach the end of a limb or a part of the body that posed a problem such as the curvature of a finger after they made the series of cuts around the piece of skin they wanted to remove the flare would put down their knife and begin to pull that's right they didn't cut the entire piece of skin off the body instead the flare would cut the outline and pull the section off by hand this meant that after being cut up the person would then have to endure the nerve endings of their skin literally being ripped off their muscles that's thousands upon thousands of pain signals flooding their brain with each tug of the skin did we mention this would be the worst way to die the problem was the person would not be dead yet they might not even be close to dying it was possible that if someone who was skilled at flying bodies was behind the knife the entirety of someone's skin could be removed from their body and they could still survive for days that's right days worst way to die so what would actually kill someone who was skinned alive the obvious answer would be blood loss although most of the blood runs through the veins and muscles cuts along the skin would inevitably bleed also the exposed muscle would allow blood to seep out of the body eventually the person would lose more blood than they could produce as the person was being flayed shock would inevitably settle in the person would feel dizzy confused and breathing would become harder and harder this could cause vomiting and hot flashes all of which would add to the unpleasantness of being skinned alive as shock took hold it would cause the body to pump blood faster in hopes of getting enough oxygen and nutrients to vital organs this would speed up the process of blood loss and lead to death you may not believe it but there were even more gruesome ways to die from being skinned alive the skin is an extremely important organ for the human body for two reasons the first is because it acts as a protective barrier from the outside world if the skin is removed pathogens can enter the body and infect the individual at will this could lead to nasty infections that might cause even more pain and eventually death the person who was skinned alive would literally be helpless against foreign invaders this includes bugs and microbes who would consume the body until the person passed away this would be a truly terrible way to go yet there was an even worse way to die from being skinned alive the second vital function that a person's skin plays is thermoregulation in simpler terms this means a person's skin helps maintain a certain body temperature skin is especially useful for keeping the body warm when the skin was removed from someone's body they would instantly feel a chill as the warmth from their blood and muscles escaped into the air then as if being skinned alive and bleeding everywhere wasn't bad enough the person would begin to freeze to death if someone was super unlucky and did not die from blood loss or infection they might have to wait skinless for days for hypothermia to set in and eventually freeze to death that pretty much sums up why being skinned alive would be the worst way to die but before you go we want to leave you with a couple more terrifying facts we know you're wondering what might happen to someone's skin after they're flayed well you're about to find out one thing the skin was used for was a warning to others to not break the law flayed skin would be hung on the doors and walls for everyone to see as a reminder of what could happen if they broke a law in some parts of the world flayed skin may have been worn by priests and rituals imagine being skinned alive and having to watch someone put on your epidermis to perform a ritual for the gods that would be a super creepy thing to witness just before you die but perhaps the most disturbing thing that was done with flayed skin was to bind books that's right anthropodermic bibliophogy is the term given to binding of books in human skin researchers have found and documented 18 books that were bound this way a person who was skinned alive would eventually die there's no doubt about that but their skin could remain in use long after their death wrapped around the pages of a book it seems like something out of a horror story but we know it happened to at least 18 people so are there terrible ways to die absolutely are any of them as bad as being skinned alive probably not it's hard to imagine what could be worse than being boiled to tenderize your skin having someone make long cuts along your body than having your skin literally peeled from your muscles all before eventually dying from blood loss infection or hypothermia however the worst part about being skinned alive might have been what your skin was used for after you were dead he was just a kid a kid according to his neighbors that always had a friendly smile on his face it seemed for a while that fate had dealt him a bad hand a tumor on the brain not something to be taken lightly but as things turned out that tumor was benign it was removed by first-class surgeons in new york and that was that the boy was back on track and good to go but as medical protocol demands he had to return to the hospital for a scan just a routine imaging procedure to check if all was well inside his skull he laid down on the mri machine platform and with the push of a button was delivered into the tube in a flash of an eye a super powerful magnetic field sent a metal oxygen tank flying across the room the patient's skull was crushed it was a bad way to die now you're probably wondering how that happened we wouldn't blame you for thinking that the scene we just described is a work of fiction but we regret to tell you that it isn't it happened just like that the boy aged six died soon after from his injuries he was a healthy kid and since his tumor was benign he didn't have much to worry about how could he or his patients have known that freak accidents can happen in an mri room we'll get around to telling you why they happen but first let's have a look at some more accidents at times tragic and in some cases downright insane imagine this scene an off-duty walks into a hospital he's there for an mri scan aka a magnetic resonance imaging scan he might be off-duty but he's still carrying a weapon a loaded weapon too one of the staff at the hospital tells him it's okay to remain strapped for the scan well that was a mistake not just a rookie mistake but a downright foolish blunder no sooner than the cop entering the room his gun flies out of its holster as if in the grips of a malevolent spirit it zips across the room sticks to the side of the machine and before anyone has time to say what the hell the gun fires the cop ducks the staff dive for cover it's total chaos when calm is restored staff try to pry the gun from the machine but it won't give it up it takes three hours to pull it off and it's only possible when the machine powers down and releases its grip now for something a little more gruesome rajesh maru 32 used to live in mumbai india until an mri machine had its way with him maru was just a ward boy the type of person that carries out errands in a hospital one day he's told to take an oxygen cylinder into an mri room and that doesn't go down too well for him no sooner than he enters the room he's sent hurtling through the air on contact with the side of the machine the cylinder leaks and poor maru inhaled a steady draft of liquid oxygen goodbye mr maru that certainly was a worst way to die a few years earlier over in new delhi something equally as absurd happened a hospital technician and a ward boy were carrying a metal oxygen tank into an mri room and as you can probably guess that was a big mistake the machine did its magic and sent the four foot tank flying across the room but as both men were standing in front of the tank they were pinned between it and the machine the pressure wasn't like being cramped on a third class indian train carriage the guys were literally being squashed for four hours until the machine was powered down both men fell unconscious under the extreme pressure the injury sustained included a damaged abdomen a punctured bladder muscular damage a fractured elbow and severe bleeding we'll come back to the accidents and possibly the most horrific thing you've ever heard in your life but first let's look at the science of why mris have done some very nasty things to people since it's called a magnetic resonance imaging machine you probably have guessed by now that inside the machine there's a magnet a very powerful magnet magnet strength is measured in tesla and the most powerful magnet that's ever been invented had a continuous field of 45.5 tesla and that's a lot have you ever seen one of those giant magnets used in junkyards to lift cars they're about one tesla those magnets you have in your fridge they're usually around .005 tesla the magnet inside an mri machine is usually between 1.5 and 3 tesla although the inumak magnet inside the 250 million dollar super mri machine has a power of over 12 tesla as one person put enough power to lift a tank like magneto while most mri machines will be three tesla or less that's enough to pull guns out of holsters and send canister-carrying hospital staff flying through the air we don't want to scare you guys from ever getting an mri scan accidents are rare and when you consider that from 1982 there have been millions and millions of scans inside the u.s alone your chances of becoming canned meat inside a machine well you have more chance of choking on a jackpot winning lottery ticket mris are great they give specialists detailed images of your brain and other organs the thing is though you can't take any risks with them those veritable x-men have incredible powers they can kill maim squash heads and as you'll see torture the magnets are usually on all the time so it's not as if people walk into mri rooms thinking the machine might be sleeping they should know that it never sleeps and will only do so if a big red shut off button is pushed this only ever happens in an emergency such as when two lean indian dudes are having their internal organs violently massaged even when the magnetic field is turned off it takes some time to die down such an emergency quench hardly ever happens because it can damage the magnet and cost a chunk of cash mri room protocol demands that no magnetic objects are taken into the room lest they become murderous projectiles although as you've seen things don't always go to plan that's either because staff are uninformed or they thought they were carrying non-magnetic metal what you're all thinking now is what about the fillings and teeth and if you go in for a scan is there a possibility of them coming out maybe even taking an implant and at worst an implant that's burrowing through your mouth and into your brain that's a disturbing image but this has never happened and never will if crowns contain magnetic material there's a chance they could come out or at least be dislodged but we just can't find any data on when this has happened okay so you can stop worrying about your mouth and death by dental implant but there's more to worry about and we think you need to know about it this is just awful but as macabre as accidental deaths gets there was a woman a woman who had something called an aneurysm clip embedded into her brain this is a metal clip that holds the base of the aneurysm to prevent blood from getting into it it's a lifesaver but in 1992 for a 74 year old woman it was a killer the magnet pulled the clip and that shift through her brain caused a hemorrhage so you have to be aware of what you have inside your body let's say you have a pacemaker while that thing can malfunction under the magnetic assault you certainly don't want a machine that keeps you alive getting stressed when this has happened people have died it happened to a former english mayor in 2004 she didn't tell the staff she had a pacemaker and when the mri scan was switched on her device scrambled the hospital should have known better then there was that guy that had metal lodged in his eye and he didn't tell the hospital staff about it the metal moved and he came out of the mri blind in that eye there was that woman whose hair pin went right up her nose and lodged inside her pharynx and there was the man who almost had the worst death ever he had what's called a brain shunt something to help remove excess fluid on his brain he turned down an mri on one occasion because he was claustrophobic he was a few minutes away from going into that too but he backed out and more importantly he hadn't even told them about his brain shunt a few months later and he was back in the hospital having come to terms with entering that tunnel on this occasion he did tell them about his shunt only for a technician to say no mri for you he asked why and the reply was the magnet would heat up your shunt and possibly explode your head this was a bit of an exaggeration but the accidental pressure change from the strong magnetic field could have been lethal it wouldn't have been a nice way to go a boy and a girl no older than 10 are paraded in front of the statues of the gods their faces look almost serene their skin is unblemished their clothes are of the finest cloth emblazoned with gold silver and gleaming seashells the pair are laid down at the sacrificial site splayed upon a large slab of stone held by their shoulders and legs by the priests deep incisions are made in their chests they howl out in pain but the priests keep cutting until the children finally fall unconscious from blood loss and shock their hearts are taken out and held aloft to the gods witnesses dance and cheer as the priests smear the statues with the children's blood now that doesn't sound like a great way to go huh it's not that this is what happened to quite a few children in the mid-1400s and what is now known as the country of peru back then the chimu state archaeologists dug up 137 boys and girls in a mass grave and what they discovered is that many of the bodies had been damaged in a way that looked like the kids had died healthy but at the time of death had suffered horrendously they had been opened up and their ribs had been displaced which led the experts to believe that their sacrifice involved their hearts being pulled out indiana jones style this kind of thing didn't just go on in chimu state there's plenty of evidence that human sacrifice happened in the maya culture the aztec culture the inca culture and other cultures that existed south of the us border let's take the incas for example since they didn't write anything down how do we know they slaughtered children in the name of their gods well burial sites have been found and the spanish wrote something about sacrifices back in the day when they were expanding their empire it's believed that in some cultures children were chosen for their perfect looks it made them seem untouched pure they might be a boy or a girl from the age of 6 to 15. for the months prior to their execution they would be fed well and treated well because hey you don't give the gods damaged goods children were often chosen just for that reason they had purity that adults didn't that was the rationale anyway for instance if the mayans sacrificed prisoners of war they only did it with their high-ranking soldiers those from lower ranks became slaves a much worse fate in the eyes of their captors you didn't sacrifice just anyone when you were trying to placate those mighty and sometimes furious gods that you relied on to protect you before the children were sacrificed they might meet the emperor and feasts would be held in their honor they were treated like royalty and would be dressed in the finest clothes available at the time while also having their bodies decorated with jewels and ornaments still the ending was hardly a happy one in the inca culture the children would be marched up a mountain in horrific conditions fed coca leaves to keep them going and then before they were killed they'd be given some kind of drug that would at least take the edge off their fear and pain one of the mummies that archaeologists found had his feet and hands tied so we guessed the cocktail didn't work too well that time in the case of the incas the kids were usually then strangled or hit over the head in other cultures there was heart extraction head removal flaying of the skin and it might end with the children being eaten sometimes by their own parents if we look at the aztecs for them being part of a sacrificial right was supposed to be an honor the gift to the gods had to look as though they were pleased about it and if the victim screamed and cried it was an insult to the gods they'd still die but would die in shame while being chastised it couldn't have been easy trying to look like you were okay with the whole ceremony imagine being sacrificed to an aztec god first a priest would take a sacrificial knife and sometimes drive it into the abdomen and from there he'd cut through the diaphragm the heart which was thought of as part of the sun would then be placed into a bowl that was held by something called an achmul a statue sitting down looking to the side like it had just been interrupted while doing a sit-up the dead body would then be ceremoniously thrown down the temple stairs all while this was going on there would be music dancing and a little bit of self-harm in the form of piercing blood would be flying all around as the merriment continued later the body would be thrown to the animals and sometimes eaten by humans not the head though no one got to eat the head that would be kept on something called the zampantly aka skull rack we're being reductive here because this kind of thing went on in many places over hundreds of years and the manner of sacrifice and the reason for the sacrifice could be very different one thing for certain was that there would almost always be gods involved if you could appease the gods the gods were nice to you and if they were kind you got good harvests it rained it didn't flood you won wars you didn't suffer from climate change or disease back to the maya and their rituals what would often happen first was bloodletting that would entail using a very sharp object such as a stingray spine with that part of the person's body would be pierced maybe the fingers maybe the ears and maybe maybe the male sex organ that person would then be laid down at an altar and amateur surgery would take place usually starting with something called a median sternotomy that's not what the mayans called it of course but that's the term we use today it starts with an incision down the sternum which is then cracked open so there's access to the heart they would either get to the heart through the sternum or through the diaphragm down below the ribs and it would be cut out you're probably wondering at which point the person died well they would very likely be alive and kicking during the initial incision and that's how people survive open-heart surgery but once their bodies were further exploited that would be it however long they lasted we think human sacrifice deserves to be on the list of worst ways to die but heart extraction was only one form of sacrifice in pre-columbian america there was much more sometimes a person would be buried in a tomb with the dead which was a sign of respect it wasn't bloody but it very likely got lonely the person would die of dehydration if they didn't die from suffocation if there was famine or drought the mayans might throw people into what's known as a cenote which is kind of a sinkhole there's also evidence that the mayans sometimes tied a person's head behind his neck and then disemboweled them in ancient mexico and central america there's some evidence that people were flayed and their skin would be used in a dancing ceremony while at other times people would simply be burned what about more modern human sacrifice well there isn't much of it going on these days in the 19th century the pawnee native americans had something called the morningstar ceremony this consisted of a captured young woman being tied to a scaffold her captors would then ride past her on horses while burning her armpits and groin with torches after which she would be touched with war clubs by other men a sacred arrow would be shot into her heart and she'd be hit over the head with the club her chest would be cut but it was just a small cut to allow the blood to flow her heart would remain where it was after all this male members of the tribe would fill her body with arrows this shooting of arrows was supposed to represent the men copulating with her and the blood that drift represented fertility for plants and animal life the last time this happened was 1838 archaeologists have discovered burial sites of the sacrificed in china rome greece and egypt and there's some evidence that human sacrifices took place in the middle east africa and ancient and prehistoric europe in fact from what we can see human sacrifices might have taken place at one point in time all over the world scientists don't always agree only because very old bones aren't always easy to understand how do you want to go out of this world probably resting peacefully slipping away in your sleep completely unaware of it happening that makes sense since most people are afraid of death so what better way of crossing over to the other side than when you aren't aware us though we'd prefer to go out in a giant explosion perhaps battling terrorists or a giant gorilla at the top of the empire state building or maybe even giant guerrilla terrorists we just think it'd be kind of weird to be a sleep one moment and the next thing be sitting in the afterlife but if you die in an explosion it's quick painless and you're fully aware of what just happened and bonus points for going out killing a bunch of terrorists or rampaging giant gorillas but what science have to say about the absolute worst ways to die let's dig deep and answer yet another of life's most pressing questions eaten alive all right we didn't exactly consult any scientists on this one we just figured that dying while being eaten alive has to be one of the worst ways to go there is and we're not talking about getting chomped on by an animal and then bleeding out and dying we're talking about being alive for the entire or at least a large portion of the experience and there's several ways this could happen to you even in the safety of your big city most large predators will kill their prey with a single bite or blow to a vital area lions cheetahs and tigers all have an innate instinct to go for the jugular and suffocate a victim to death bears and mountain lions share this instinct as well and it exists for the protection of the predator rather than some sense of mercy for the prey being a predator is all about taking risks and every hunt involves the risk of injury which can be fatal for a predator who needs to hunt daily to survive that's why most predatory animals have evolved to find the most efficient way to kill rather than wound prey and risk them fighting back some animals though show little regard for their own safety in bringing down and eating prey enter the hyena one of the most savage predators in the world and the last animal you'd want to be eaten by hyenas typically hunt in packs but can often go on solo hunting expeditions unlike other pack animals hyenas though don't suffocate their prey hyenas start eating their prey alive before it's dead prey will find themselves swarmed by hungry hyenas who bite and tear into their flesh often consuming large quantities of it before the animal finally dies from massive blood loss typically this means disemboweling the prey and going for the soft bits around the stomach area while lesser ranking members rip the legs from the body so as not to risk angering the senior hyenas who feast on the soft stomach bits by the time any vital organs are finally consumed the prey animal has been watching itself be eaten alive for a significant amount of time even worse though is when solo hyenas hunt while a pack might tear apart prey in a minute or less the solo hyena follows the same feeding strategy but that can drag death out over many minutes even more terrifying is the fact that hyenas have attacked many campers out in the african bush eating them alive within their tents if you think you're safe in the city think again just last year a toddler was eaten alive by ants and only saved from her fate after authorities investigated claims of abuse and neglect by neighbors by the time the police arrived the child was completely covered by ants who had consumed parts of her body in 2015 a former beauty queen was eaten alive in her nursing home after her body became infested by hundreds of thousands of mites staff not only neglected the woman but were warned not to touch one of her hands for fear it would simply fall off the coroner who performed her autopsy said it must have taken her months or years to die and it must have been horribly painful slow deaths are probably the worst way to go and our next worst way to die is all about going slow burning alive fire hurts trust us on this one we've researched it but the good thing about burning alive is that typically you either die from the extreme heat before your body is consumed by flames like happened with many people burned at the stake or you're consumed by fire so quickly that it sears off your nerve endings before you can register much of the pain but what if the fire was slow to spread and not particularly large in that case the fire won't generate so much heat and smoke that it makes breathing difficult leading to asphyxiation nor would it spread fast enough to consume large parts of your body and sear off the nerve endings a slow burning fire starting at the feet would move slowly enough that while any nerves in direct contact with flames would die all the nerve endings remaining along the length of your body would very much be alive and transmitting pain signals to your brain some ancient societies use this particularly brutal method of execution regularly letting victims be consumed by a controlled fire from the feet up but today if you're kind of particularly nasty vehicle accident you could suffer a similar fate imagine being trapped in a cage of broken metal good samaritans unable to pull you out as your car slowly burns the incredible heat would roast your body as flames slowly consume you our next method of death will have you begging for sweet release and was experienced by one man who was kept alive for 83 days against his will radiation death by radiation is a grim prospect and probably one of the most gruesome ways of passing away when your body is blasted by radiation the high energy particles zipping through your body can destroy cells or damage your dna causing harmful mutations we're not talking superpowers here unless your superpower is to get cancer if exposed to high enough radiation dose your body's cells and even your dna can be so badly affected that you simply start to break down physically typically a person starts exhibiting radiation sickness after an explosion of about 200 rem for comparison a chest x-ray is equivalent to about .02 rem at 200 or higher rem the risk of cancer is drastically increased and odds of survival begin to plummet you could look forward to a slow lingering death in a hospital bed that can take weeks or months and unlike regular cancer which has a chance of being treated the damage caused by radiation is so severe that the resulting cancers are simply unstoppable the only way to save you would be to repair your dna something we're currently unable to do what if you had no dna left in your body though like a japanese man in 1999 who became the only human in history to have no dna hisashi aouchi was a technician at a nuclear power facility who suffered the greatest direct radiation exposure of any person to date the accident occurred when too much urinal nitrate solution was dumped into a precipitation tank pushing the uranium content to a level that caused the fuel tank to go super critical and temporarily become a makeshift nuclear reactor this resulted in iwuchi who is the one pouring the liquid to be blasted with an incredible 17 sieverts of radiation that's the equivalent to being blasted with 85 000 chest x-rays all at once typically eight sieverts are considered fatal and uchi had received twice that dose so needless to say his outlook seemed grim doctors were shocked to discover that the damage to his body was so extensive that they discovered no dna left in his blood and soon after the accident his body began to decompose from the inside out incredibly uchi would survive for 83 gruesome days as his body broke down doctors found it increasingly difficult to draw blood which was itself becoming thick brackish and brown ochi's flesh began to fall off his body and nurses were forced to wrap him in bandages just to keep him from bleeding through his own flesh and dying to blood loss doctors desperately tried to keep uchi alive by pumping him with multiple blood transfusions a day but after just a week ouchie begged that he'd be allowed to die his doctors however knew this was a once in a lifetime chance to study the effects of radiation on the body and refused his request the blood transfusions continued and were the only things keeping ochi alive as his own body became unable to produce new blood cells the bandages his body was wrapped in were keeping his flesh from falling off the bone and in a small act of mercy uchi was placed in a medical coma ochi's right leg eventually simply fell off at the knee and within a few weeks he resembled a living skeleton finally ouchi passed away from a heart attack on day 83 weighing less than a quarter of his original weight and mostly just a skeleton wrapped in a thin layer of flesh our next way to die is not just very possible in our modern world but incredibly painful dehydration compared to slowly falling apart due to radiation dehydration seems like a rather easy way to die that's only because you don't know the science of one of the worst ways to die whether you're lost in a desert or simply trapped in an elevator for several days you have about three days before dehydration will kill you dehydration starts at losing two percent of your body's weight worth of water which you can do by nothing more than rigorous exercise for an hour or a long walk on a very hot day this effectively makes you thirsty and as your body begins to panic about water loss it shuts down any ways of losing water that aren't completely vital to your survival you'll begin to sweat far less which is bad news because sweating is one way we keep from overheating your urine will also become very dark as your body sends less water to the bladder and the smell will be much more pungent after two days of no water your blood thickens in your veins leading to greatly decreased blood flow this in turn causes your skin to shrivel up on your body and with a loss of blood pressure you become prone to fainting your body will no longer waste water on sweating which puts you at a great risk of overheating shortly after your body kills the flow of blood to non-vital organs in an attempt to keep you alive this means that organs within your body begin to wither and die and toxic waste begins to build up inside you at this point your insides slowly start to become a toxic dump your muscles also begin to cramp from a lack of water and salt leading to incredible pain imagine the worst charlie horse you've ever experienced but all over your body instead of just one of your legs then imagine it lasting for a day or more eventually your body simply can't continue functioning without water and the buildup of toxic wastes in your body will become fatal unable to expel waste your breaking down organs poison you from the inside out and your blood thickens even further becoming more a sludge-like paste than a free-flowing red red crovie you're familiar with at this point if you don't start drinking water immediately you'll be dead within the day turns out there's a lot of incredibly painful and horrifying ways to die though for us being eaten alive by wild hyenas or even ants in your own home is probably the most terrifying if this video has scared you just remember death is inevitable and it comes for all of us but some of us will experience more horrifying deaths than others almost two in the morning on the 26th of april 1986. 25 year old firefighter vasily ignatenko is part of the first response team tasked with putting out a fire at the chernobyl nuclear power station chunks of highly radioactive graphite lie around the site the men pick up bits and kick them around not knowing that they're sealing their faith they do a commendable job a heroic job but ignatenko and others on that team are just hours away from falling gravely ill one of the firemen jokes there must be an incredible amount of radiation here we'll be lucky if we're all still alive in the morning days later an ignitanko's pregnant wife has to bribe hospital staff so she can see her dying husband he's just too radioactive to be close to his skin is almost white translucent he's unrecognizable he's been eaten from the inside months later after he's passed his daughter is born her heart is malformed she has cirrhosis of the liver she dies just hours after childbirth what you just heard is an abridged version of one of the worst ways to die one of the most painful most brutal ways to leave this blue planet of ours you could call ignatenko's downfall extreme he was a first responder to the worst nuclear plant disaster the world has ever seen but death by radiation comes in many forms its horror manifests itself in myriad ways it can be fast well a few days won't seem to pass so fast when your body is eating itself but it can also be slow very very slow let's stay with the story of ignatenko for now when he and the other firemen turned up at the power plant on that fateful early morning they didn't know what was really going on it's true that one of the firemen joked about there being a possibility that they were exposed to high levels of radiation but it was just that a joke it soon became a reality though 27 firefighters died from what's called acute radiation sickness aka ars in simple terms that's the sickness you get when you're exposed to massive amounts of radiation the number of actual radiation related deaths was more than 4 000 but many of those deaths were of the slow kind there were other deaths too such as the firemen that died from external and internal radiation burns as well as get this a blistered heart let's hope you never have to hear those two words together for the rest of your life let's now talk you through ars there are usually four stages starting with what the medical profession calls the prodormal stage this happens soon after the exposure and it involves a lot of throwing up and leaking from the rear end in the case of ignatenko he was excreting bloody loose stools around 25 times a day if that wasn't bad enough at times he threw up bits of his internal organs we told you this was bad and it gets worse his wife lewd milla watched on as her husband slowly fell apart she actually risked her own life being near him because the father of that fetus in her womb was radioactive himself she watched helplessly as staff struggled to put slippers on his swollen feet another of the symptoms she witnessed staff not being able to clothe him in a hospital gown his body she said had transformed he was taking on different shapes in her own words she said every day i met a brand new person the burns started to come to the surface the lesions on his body spread making his skin look like a glossy white film this came as a surprise to her because at one point he seemed to get better it was as if the sickness was abating it wasn't what was happening is that he was experiencing stage two of ars the latent stage this can last hours or weeks some people can recover after ars but those that don't are going to experience literal hell on earth the radiation will destroy the bone marrow in the body which can lead to deadly infections and hemorrhage the gi tract can be destroyed as can the cardiovascular and central nervous system you don't have much chance of survival after that it all depends on how much radiation a person is exposed to some folks might be kept alive with the help of medical staff antibiotics can fight infections blood transfusions can supply much-needed white blood cells but the fact is even if the person gets through the month there can be many many complications let's now talk about the skin if a person's poisoned by radiation what often happens at first is their skin will become reddened and may feel itchy this can lead to blisters which may scar and in worse cases may even kill the skin cells something called the necrosis as for poor ignatenko he suffered from something called declamation which basically means his skin started to peel off the blood vessels in his skin failed to work and so he lost tissue at deeper levels and this is why his wife said he barely looked human at that point we should say that hair loss is almost guaranteed but that's hardly a concern when your skin has fallen off stranger things can happen months after radiation exposure listen to this it's what one guy said about a friend of his who was at the disaster site my neighbor he was also there he worked a crane he got black like coal and shrunk so that he was wearing kids clothes what the hell you see we've only explained to you some of the horrors that happened to the people who died just days or weeks after exposure there were many others who would succumb in months or years sasha yuvchenko could tell you about the prolonged agony on the night of the disaster he held a heavy reactor hall door open so men could get through the three guys that went in died within two weeks he survived but that part of his body that held the door was exposed to massive amounts of radiation about an hour later he was vomiting he had a searing pain in his throat more time passed and he couldn't stand up at the hospital the staff measured the amount of radiation in his body and he was given a 50 50 chance of surviving he was sent to moscow with other men who had been exposed five of them died quite quickly something yuvchenko would later say was a blessing in a matter of days all his hair had fallen out not just on his head but on his entire body he said most men suffered from skin rashes huge ugly rashes that burned some were given bone marrow transplants and all the men received multiple blood transfusions he experienced that latent stage when the sickness seemed to calm down but it came back with a vengeance one day he pulled back the sheets on his bed only to see piles of black dead skin the part of his body that had held the door had become horribly swollen the skin died around his shoulder and arm and it was just plain luck that he managed to keep it years later it would almost be half the size of his good arm for many years the affected body parts would just break out in ulcerations which meant for much of his life he was covered in bandages after having operations he actually felt like one of the fortunate ones because he witnessed his friends losing their eyesight or succumbing after bone marrow transplants you see the radiation destroys bone marrow cells and when they go the victim doesn't have the white blood cells that fight infections they're vulnerable sitting ducks for those who survived like yuvchenko their lives were forever changed they were likely infertile but they were told not to bother having kids anyway there was a likelihood that the kids would be born malformed or would develop leukemia more still the survivors became pariahs people looked at them like they were the living dead dangerous carriers of radiation and so people would cross the street when they saw them coming then there were the ones that died of radiation related cancers no one could say exactly how many people that was but it's thought that maybe as many as 270 000 people in ukraine russia and belarus developed cancers because of the disaster it's estimated that around 93 000 of them died a lot of them just children many women were exposed to high levels of radiation but because they never suffered the more extreme symptoms of radiation poisoning they didn't think too much about it then they had kids sick kids it should also be said that many people drank milk from cows that grazed on contaminated land some of those kids developed cancer early on in life but others suffered from very strange and macabre sounding birth defects the human embryo and fetus are very sensitive to radiation so while mom might look fine it doesn't mean her newborn will be some kids whose parents had been exposed to high levels of radiation were born with a club foot or a cleft palate or a cleft lip some had an extra finger or an extra toe while others had digits on their hands or feet that refused together believe it or not in 1993 there were reports of a two-headed baby being born in the former soviet republic of moldova she had not only two heads but also had two hearts two sets of lungs and two spinal cords radiation was to blame we've concentrated largely on the chernobyl disaster but death from radiation has taken out a lot of people some of them well-known figures take for instance marie curry the nobel prize-winning physicist who discovered polonium and radium she used to love the blue-green glow of her test tubes that contained radioactive isotopes she'd walk around with them in her pockets this would lead to her downfall she became almost blind severely ill and eventually died because of her ignorance then there was the wealthy american socialite named evan byers in the 1920s he was a huge fan of drinking radium dissolved in water a glass a day keeps the doctor away he told his friends in the public only to gradually become sick lose weight lose his teeth and the best part of his jaw when he died there were holes in his skull a similar thing happened to who we now call the radium girls these young women were employed to paint watch vases with radium-infused glowing ink something which was great for soldiers and that took off as a fashion little did they know that when they sharpened their paintbrushes by putting the bristles in their mouth they were ingesting radio many of them lost teeth their jaw and some died painfully and slowly let's not forget the former kgb agent alexander litvinenko after gaining political asylum in the uk in 2006 his cup of tea was dosed with polonium-210 within weeks he was a dead man some believe that this kind of hit was a big statement and a warning to anyone that dared defy the almighty putin the poison wasn't designed to kill litvinenko quickly but to make him suffer as much as possible may 30th 1431 hull france a girl of 19 is taken by soldiers to the stake where she'll be burned alive she's been accused of heresy witchcraft and of all things cross-dressing the first two charges are bogus of the third offense she is guilty and proud she's tied to a pillar with log stacks below her her bare tender feet graze the planks a christian cross stands in front of her the fire is lit smoke bellows into the young woman's face the monstrous flames tickle her feet flicking around her ankles like a serpent's tongue and second she's engulfed by an inferno what are to her enemies the purifying flames the skin melts from her face and she's done her name was joan of arc or jandak to her friends what you might be thinking now is wow that must have been one horrible way to die after all we guess most of you have gotten too close to a flame at one point in your life and howled out loud burning hurts even if it's just your fingertip getting too close to a grill we can tell you this after today's show you won't want to mess with fire again but what about young joan when she was standing in the middle of the conflagration how much did that hurt how long does it take to die from burning how does it actually kill you just how burned do you have to be to die can you survive a full body burning all will be answered shortly okay so we should first tell you that joan of arc didn't die from being cooked to death it was the smoke that killed her the cardinal of winchester saw that parts of jones still vaguely resembled her so he ordered her to be burned again after that he noticed some of her organs were stubbornly hanging around so he ordered a third fire only then was he content that she'd been purified the whole trial was in fact a travesty of justice but that's another story being burned to death as a form of execution goes back to ancient times it has been in vogue at some point just about everywhere in the world the romans wrote that the carcinogens burnt very young people as a form of sacrifice and that might seem like roman fake news propaganda to put people off their enemy but modern archaeologists have backed it up it was the romans that said the ancient druids of gaul had perhaps the worst sacrifice of all maybe even matching their own brutality damn hypocrites that was the use of the wicker man a term you've likely heard before but you might not have known its origins this was a multi-story kind of sacrifice an all-in-one execution consisting of a bunch of innocent people packed into a giant man made of wicker folks would be stuffed into the effigy's torso legs and arms and then the entire thing would go up in flames to the sound of screaming that's what the roman said anyway some people think it might not have existed there's no shortage of stories relating to human burning as an execution in europe during the witch trials which spanned from 1450 to 1750 maybe around 40 to 50 000 women were killed many of them burned at the stake in england during the middle ages a woman might have been burned to death for counterfeiting cash killing her husband or even getting in on the wrong side of her superior hordes of people would turn up for this day out so they could watch as the guilty gal screamed on the pyre we should say it happened to men too but not for high treason for that they were hanged drawn and quartered the english thought it was bad manners to do this to a woman so they politely burned her okay you get the point we have a lot to go on when we're talking about this as the worst way to die it was common if not absolutely brutal generally speaking when the fire was lit the condemned person had enough time to get a few words out before the flames were stoked by the fanning of the wind archbishop thomas cranmer accused of treason and heresy managed to say this before he bit the dust lord jesus received my spirit i see the heavens open and jesus standing at the right hand of god another accused english heretic richard snell went up in flames fast his executioners piled straw around the pyre and added some gunpowder and tar as the flames grew he became engulfed in smoke and he shouted christ help me a minute or two later he could still be heard whimpering and then there was silence in 1726 englishwoman catherine hayes was burned for being part of the murder of her husband in her case she was supposed to be strangled first as often happened but the fire was lit too early it was said she filled the air with her cries and lamentations in 1727 scottish woman janet horn was burned at the stake for witchcraft her neighbors had accused her of turning her daughter into a flying horse so she could ride it to the devil for that wicked transgression she was arrested covered in tar paraded through the streets and then burned it was a horrible way to die and many times the people weren't heretics or treasonous or even criminals as for witches they don't exist and have never existed so thousands of women were burned when they were innocent some people thought it unfair that for regular crimes not treason men were usually hanged but women were burned how is that okay they said because the former is way worse than the latter after a woman named margaret sullivan was burned in england in 1788 for counterfeiting coins the times newspaper wrote there's something so inhuman about burning a woman no kidding another person wrote that it was a disgrace to the enlightened sense of this country a year later the last woman in england was burned in the case of executions like this and how they went you have to consider the size of the fire if it was a very small fire then the experience was absolutely horrendous people don't generally die when the lower half of their body is on fire the good thing is if we can even say there's a good thing is that once the nerves are destroyed the pain goes in that area but still the flames keep crawling up the body what would happen in most cases is the person would die from suffocation before they literally cooked to death this might only take a few minutes it sounds strange but the best thing a person could hope for was a very smoky fire and lots of that smoke entering their lungs still the initial flames on their skin must have been excruciatingly painful well we know it is but we'll get to the evidence soon say a person breathes in a lot of fumes and passes out and dies what happens next well the soft tissues of the body will contract skin tears muscles and fat will shrink as will the internal organs all this shrinking and contracting will make the body's joints flex and that's why people who've died from being engulfed in flames will often look like a charred person in a regular boxing stance the term they use in forensics is the pugilistic stance but as you know from the story of joan of arc the body doesn't just turn to ashes some bones take longer than others to burn and the fire has to be strong to burn everything the body helps because it becomes fuel for the fire but still a total cremation will only happen under the most extreme heat but what if a person is burned all over almost to the point of death but actually survives in that case a person might die a few days later after the deed is done in 1969 czech student jana palach set himself on fire in protest of the soviet occupation of his country he was taken from the public square where he performed the act and was rushed to the hospital there doctors said he could talk he could think but he could hardly breathe he died after several days the reason some burn survivors can't breathe is their lungs alveoli fill with smoke and then they suffocate slowly it's a terrible way to die and you could argue a much worse way to die than going out on a pyre emitting 10-foot flames to really know that this is the worst way to die we can't really go on screams alone what we have to do is listen to someone who came to the point of death but survived and was well enough to talk about the experience many people fall unconscious quickly when they're in a fire but in 1999 after a young woman in the u.s was hit head-on by a drunk driver in texas the fire took its time to burn through the car where she was trapped when a cop arrived she said she was screaming and moaning and wailing an almost inhuman sound that i never heard another person make she screamed so much that he hoped god would take her and enter suffering she survived but the skin on much of her body melted away from third degree burns when they finally got her out she was still moving and still moaning she spent the next 10 months in a coma after countless surgeries she got her vision back only to look at herself and think she was a monster i miss my body she said in an interview and while she felt stronger she said she wasn't so keen on everyone staring at her she died in 2019 of cancer sorry guys this all sounds very grim but it is a worst ways to die video then there was a kid from texas who was burned over 80 percent of his body as a two-year-old after a candle set fire to the blankets he was wrapped in his case is unusual but not unique we'll get back to him but first you must know this some of you will know their first second third and fourth degree burns you've likely all had a first degree burn you know when you're scalded by hot water or maybe even sunburned it hurts but it's not much of a worry second-degree burns affect the lower layer of skin so that might lead to blisters and swelling third degree burns affect the deeper tissues and nerves fourth degree burns go even deeper through the muscle sinew and bone and that might lead to the person losing the affected body part third and fourth degree burns are the most severe but because the nerves are dead they aren't the most painful with less extreme burns the nerve endings are exposed and very sensitive but when burns are more serious the pain will feel at first like a duller pain on the inside now we get back to the kid in texas his face was burned beyond recognition the fire had burned right through parts of his body the fact that he survived is a miracle because he suffered 4th degree burns to parts of his body he lost a number of appendages and his eyes he survived though and he hopes he'll get his vision at age 16 he said i'm sharing my story to inspire people and show them that miracles do exist he's hoping in the future to become an interpreter or even a motivational speaker still his life is hard that's the thing about being almost burned to death the recovery is brutal london england the month of may 1536 anne boleyn the second wife of the bloodthirsty king henry viii has been accused of adultery incest and treason the accusations are no doubt made up so henry could be done with her and remarry but justice in those days was in short supply in prison anne is at times hysterical but sometimes calm waiting for the word will she lose her head or be burned at the stake her friend and ally archbishop thomas cramer informs her that it'll be the former the lesser of two evils may 19th 8 am dressed in a dark gray robe of damask and covered in a mantle of white arm and fur she's led to the scaffold i take my leave of the world and of you all and i heartily desire you all to pray for me she says at the end of a moving speech she's blindfolded she waits kneeling facing the floor her head is severed from her body by a swift blow of a frenchman's sword did she die in an instant or for a few seconds did she remain conscious did she make a face and try to speak after her head was no longer attached to her body that's what some witnesses said could it be possible today we're going to talk about all kinds of forms of decapitation but we'll start with the express version such is the way that 35 36 year old anne boleyn went okay so we need to tell you about mike aka miracle mike he lost his head in the usa in 1945 and he lived on for another 18 months mike was a chicken a chicken whose brain stem remained intact and whose blood clotted after his beheading he survived due to the position of the brain in a chicken's head and the fact that his executor sliced his head at a certain angle because of the remaining brain he could control his movements and his breathing and heartbeat were regulated this could never ever happen to a human but we thought we'd tell you about the animal on record that has survived the longest after being decapitated in view of today's show we might ask how long a human is conscious after the act has a head ever fallen into a basket or landed on a scaffold and looked up at the blue sky and thought damn i won't see that again it's hard to say of course because it's not as if scientists are presently doing decapitation tests on humans they have however tested on live rats they've cut off rodents heads and then measured the electrical activity in their brain it turns out the rats might think for a few seconds while their head is not connected to the body in one study the brain signals were lost after 17 seconds although the researchers said consciousness was gone at around the four second mark they also noticed something else that was one last surge of activity after about a minute they called this the wave of death it's generally thought that the brain activity also may last three to four seconds after a human is decapitated but there have been instances where people have reported that the headless person seemed alive for longer take the case of a french man who was a convicted murderer and guillotined in 1905. this is what the doctor wrote i was able to note immediately after the decapitation the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds i waited for several seconds the spasmodic movement ceased the face relaxed the lids half closed on the eyeballs the doctor shocked to shout at the man's name longhi only to see his eyelids open once again and look right at him for a few seconds the question is was that the wave of death there are other reports of so-called lucid decapitation one involved a car crash in the u.s that happened in 1989 an army veteran saw his friend die and not only that his buddy had been decapitated he later remarked my friend's head came to rest face up and from my angle upside down as i watched his mouth opened and closed no less than two times the facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion followed by terror or grief if this is true if humans can think after they lose their head then being decapitated has to be one of the weirdest ways to die being beheaded by an executioner at the top of his game someone with the right tools may not actually be the worst way to die but the fact is beheading can be a very messy business we might take for instance the execution of mary queen of scots on february 7 1587 she was taken to the scaffold and while knelt down the executioner asked for her forgiveness for what he was about to do she said to him i forgive you with all my heart for now i hope you shall make an end of all my troubles he did but his form was off that day after she uttered her final words into thy hands oh lord i commend my spirit he struck with his axe he missed his mark her slender neck and instead hit her in the head she was certainly not dead since she moaned in pain the second blow was on target and killed her except bits of stubborn sinew hung on and he had to cut through that finally he grabbed her head held it aloft and shouted to the crowd god saved the queen to make the spectacle even worse the beautiful auburn hair he was holding turned out to be a wig and mary's head fell with an unceremonious plop to the floor her head adorned with only short gray hair rolled onto the ground in front of the shocked witnesses one of them swore he saw her lips move we don't know exactly how long she lasted after that first wayward blow but you can understand that being beheaded by a bad executioner was a pretty unpleasant experience it gets worse a lot worse it would be an understatement to say that the beheading of margaret pohl the countess of salisbury was a bit of a botched job margaret was accused of being a traitor and was locked up in the tower of london by the prolific lady killer henry viii she denied she'd done anything wrong and even scribbled a poem on her cell wall it started for traitors on the block should die i am no traitor no not i the poem fell on deaf ears and off to the chopping block she went he hacked and hacked at her neck missing most times sometimes hitting her in the back sometimes hitting her head it said it took 11 blows to finish her off one witness later said that the person with the axe was a wretched and blundering youth who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner maybe it was hard to get the staff in those days maybe he was an intern or maybe margaret just made his job difficult another account says that she refused to lay her head in the block and that she moved around during the blows while telling the executioner to do his best in the circumstances it states she ran about the scaffold and the executioner followed her with his axe aiming many fruitless blows at her neck before he was able to give the fatal stroke in any case it was a brutal death beheading shouldn't have lasted too long if the executioner's tool was sharp and he had good aim the tools back then were usually a heavy sword but bearded axes were also sometimes the weapon of choice as you've now heard not all beheadings went as planned this is why new technologies were created we tend to think that the french invented the guillotine in the 18th century but very similar devices were around for a long time before that the halifax gibbet named after a town in northern england was used the last time in 1650. on that occasion one man had stolen some cloth and another man had stolen two horses harsh but such were the times the halifax gibbet worked in a way similar to the guillotine in that a heavy axe was fastened to a wooden block and raised into the air by rope when the rope was cut the block and the blade would fall down and decapitate the prisoner the block was so heavy that one witness once wrote that it could have decapitated a bull it was certainly better than the axe and a lot better than a knife but we'll get to that later first let's talk about someone named joseph ignis gyaton he didn't invent the guillotine and was even against the death sentence what he did do was call for a more humane form of executing a person than chopping off their head with a sword or an axe or breaking them on the wheel he wanted executions to be painless once remarking about a machine that would cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye and you never feel it indeed the machine invented that would get a lot of use in france had a blade and connecting weight that weighed around 176 pounds this fell from a height of 14 feet and the person it fell on had his head secured by a round frame called the lunette it was so good at what it did that it was hailed as the execution that never fails only a century or so earlier executions were supposed to be a long drawn-out spectacle that crowds could enjoy people were slowly broken on wheels or they were pulled limb from limb by horses and they were supposed to suffer unimaginable pain the guillotine or the national razor as it would be called during the french revolution was reliable fast and more humane believe it or not in the 21st century there have been people that have called for the introduction of the guillotine in the u.s jay chapman who created the three drug protocol in 1977 that's now used for lethal injection said in 2007 that the guillotine was the simplest form of execution he said i'm not at all opposed to bringing it back the person's head is cut off and that's the end of it before that in 1996 a georgia state legislator named doug tepe tried to bring the guillotine back but to no avail so if you're ever in the unenviable position of having to choose between methods of decapitation it seems the guillotine would be the way to go there's not much chance of that though since it was last used in france in 1977 and has never been used again anywhere else this now brings us to the very worst form of decapitation that of being decapitated by a knife this much slower and way more painful process happened in spain centuries ago and it was thought to be a more noble way to die than having your throat slit today such a gruesome act would not be carried out legally as a form of capital punishment although people can still be decapitated by sword under the law in the country of saudi arabia if it happens these days and it has the criminals doing the act are usually insurgents in the middle east and asia members of organized crime or certifiably insane people that have lost their minds and attacked innocent folks a few years back it happened to a woman in mexico with her executioner announcing well gentlemen this is what happens to all those in the golf cartel on behalf of los detas the fighting over the drug turf in mexico has actually resulted in quite a lot of people losing their heads sometimes when they were alive and sometimes after they were killed another way the scary truth is since the message can be spread using social media these groups at times have used decapitation to induce fear in their opponents or the public it can also create terror for governments and citizens of the world if we're talking about insurgent groups in such grizzly murders the decapitation is not over when a heavy blade falls but it's slow and painful soft tissues are first cut then ligaments and bones that hold the neck together have to be cut with much more effort when it happens this way we can certainly say it is one of the worst ways to die now you need to watch this strangest ways people died or have a look at this what happens when you die

Channel: The Infographics Show

Views: 612,935

Rating: 4.796936 out of 5

Keywords: dumb ways to die, worst, the infographics show, die, death

Id: mC7FgdaRiGg

Length: 73min 58sec (4438 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021