April 2, 2009 • 21 mins
When it comes to shucking this mortal coil, no two deaths are exactly alike -- and some are truly bizarre. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to hear Josh and Chuck discuss some of the strangest deaths imaginable.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Chuck do your cheek
thing all right? I'd like to explain to everyone we
(00:23):
have a little superstition here at Stuff you Should Know,
And basically, every time Chuck doesn't do that with his
cheeks ahead of time, we have a terrible take. And
sometimes I have to have to stop part way through
it gets so bad and do it again. And we've
noticed that when Chuck does this, we have a good take.
So prepare for an excellent podcast because he just did
(00:45):
it twice. So we're good, right, Chuck. I think we're set. Yeah, so,
and and I feel a little bit better after um,
you told me that this article we're about to talk
to you talk about Tim Bazzarre Ways to Die, was
blowing up on the home page because it means that
there's a lot more people, uh than me who are
who have a morbid curiosity slash fascination with death. There
(01:06):
are Buddy this one and the are their dead bodies
on Mount Divers apparently did phenomenally well on the homepage.
They exploded on the home and uh, you know, people
want to to know about these wacky, bizarre death so
we're going to share some of them. Yeah, we agree.
We we're gonna do all ten right now, of course
not okay. I don't know if you picked h the
(01:28):
guy from Canada the first one, but if you didn't,
have a question for you. So, this guy from Canada
in two thousand and eight got stuck in a sewer
grade after he win after his wallet, and he was
still alive right when they pulled him out by tow truck,
but then he died. So my question is, did was
he crushed to death and they pulled him out? Did
the tow truck kill him? Like? What killed this guy? Well,
(01:51):
that's a great question and I don't have the answer. Actually,
my editor, Amanda asked me the same question. She said,
how do you actually die? And I couldn't find it.
I looked other than the fact that he was stuck
in a sewer, wedged several feet down, you know, upside
down for a period of hours, which can't be good
for you. But he was still alive when they pulled
him up. By tow truck. He died on the way
(02:11):
to the hospital or at the hospital something. I think
he was alive when he came out of the sewer
grade he was, so he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
And this isn't the first person to die from being
stuck in a sewer dry, which really sad. Yeah, and
we should say we're not We're not making light of
any of these very sad tragedies that have happened, but
so abnormal sometimes that they you know, well, it's in
(02:33):
the title bizarre. Bizarre. Yeah, yeah, he'd he'd uh went
down to get something, retrieve something, to drain his wallet
and after a robbery and got stuck upside down for
a period of hours and was, like you said, pulled
out by a tow truck. Yeah, and it was too late.
It's odd. It is. Well, uh, that's one. I don't
(02:56):
know if you're playing on talking about that guy or not,
but I had that question. I was not actually, Okay,
well give me give me one of yours, Josh, I'm
gonna talk about the woman who died by her sheep's
hand or I guess um. And this again another sad tragedy.
A woman in England. Uh. You know, she was a
(03:17):
farmer's wife and she was going out to feed the
sheep and she had a little a TV that I
guess she wrote out to where the sheep were, and
sheep were really hungry, and apparently they came at her
with a lot of force and knocked her off of
a cliff and she was parked along the edge of
a quarry, right, yeah, And so they knocked her off,
and they say that the sad tragedy is that she
(03:38):
may have lived, um, if not for her a TV
falling on top of her. So that was knocked off
as well. I came down on her hungry sheep, very
hungry sheep. Did you get an idea of how many
there there were? Uh, it just said a flock a flock,
So well, it's like two or more, right, sure, Yeah,
so I'm thinking probably a little more than two to
(04:00):
to TV and a woman. Yeah, that is kind of,
um bizarre. Again, I think that definitely falls in the category.
Let me ask you, how did you choose these? That's
a good question. I thought you might ask that. Well.
I mean, you just start looking around on the internet
for strange deaths and bizarre deaths and pretty soon you've
got a big master list of stories, and did you
(04:23):
have to pare down? Oh yeah, sure, Okay, well give
me one that you that didn't take the list. Yeah,
I can't think of one right now. You put me
on the spot. I love putting you on the spot.
I can't think of one, all right, Well maybe by
the end of the podcast. Okay, well, let me give
you one of my chuck which, by the way, this
is just an excellent article. It's it's as good as
numbers journalism gets, right. Yeah. Um, so I guarantee this
(04:46):
is one of yours too, but I'm going to just
go ahead and steal it. Um in nineteen nineteen. Yeah,
I love this one. It's just so nuts. Um. In
nineteen nineteen in North Boston, there was a neighborhood that
was largely populated by Italian immigrant it and one of
the big features of this neighborhood was, I guess a
huge holding tank. I assume a molasses processing plan or
(05:08):
something huge, huge holding tank that that held um two
point five million gallons of molasses. Apparently that's a couple
of gallons too many, because the tank ruptured and from
what I gather, exploded with molasses. There was shrapnel that
was flying everywhere. So some people died that way, sure,
But I think the the the most horrific aspect of
(05:32):
the deaths that came out that that day was that
one people were killed by a twenty five ft high
wall of molasses. And you know, the term slow as
molasses that did not apply in this case, because their
reports where that it was going about thirty five miles
an hour. The problem is that you have that much
(05:52):
molasses and it's traveling that fast and you get stuck
in it, You're going to drown in molasses. And I
can't imagine it takes more than one breath of molasses
to drown you. Yeah, I would say something, but yeah,
that's a pretty horrible way to go. Yeah. And the
weird thing is is that it's apparently to this day,
I understand they the residents of this neighborhood almost a
(06:14):
hundred years later, at least well ninety years later, still
say that on a hot day they can smell the
molasses that took years to clean up this mess, right,
And don't you know, of course that's one of those
things that might be lower at this point, but it
makes for a good story. It definitely does. But yet
one people died drowning in molasses, right, Yeah, bizarre, very bizarre.
(06:35):
Onto the Call Your Brothers. These two, this is my
other favorite one. These guys were pretty famous too. If
you're from New York City, UM, you've probably heard of
the Call Your Brothers at some point. Um Langley and
Homer Callier. They moved to New York to Harlem in
nineteen o nine when they're in their twenties, and they
were from an upper crust family, uh, kind of well
to do, and the brothers lived together in Harlem and
(06:58):
uh became hermits basically over the years. Yeah, and not
just hermits, but compulsive hoarders, which you know, we should
do a podcast on this one, which should That's very interesting,
you know. Um, I read an analysis of compulsive hoarding
using the Wonder Machine, and they found that when asked
to decide like if they if they should throw away
one piece of junk mail or another, the region of
(07:20):
the brain that's associated with processing very unpleasant experiences lights
up like a Christmas tree. Really interesting and I'm yeah,
from what I gather, Homer and Langley, we're definitely compulsive hoarders. Legendary, right, legendary.
Apparently they accumulated a hundred and eighty tons of you know,
they called it junk in their apartment. I know, and
(07:42):
think about that every time you can think of that's
sixty more tons than what they've got every year on
Mount Everest, which is one of the most littered places
on Earth, and there is an apartment. These guys had
it an apartment. Yeah, so I think to call them
compulsive hoarders is right on the money. Uh so. I
mean we're talking busta chandeliers, baby care, just smashed pianos, clocks, furniture,
(08:03):
newspapers just stacked to the ceiling. Homer went blind in
the nineteen thirties and was bedridden because of rheumatism. By
and his younger brother helped care for him night and
day and saved all these newspapers and hopes that one
day his brother would regain his sight, which I found
beyond sweet. Yeah, it's pretty sweet and strange. Um. The
(08:27):
other odd thing is is they had their home booby
trapped because they were What they did was, you know,
they moved to Harlem, and then Harlem over the years
started becoming a little bit more of a rough neighborhood,
and they never moved. They just like shut themselves in
and and you know, closed all the doors. Yeah that's true. Yeah. Um,
so they set these booby traps and uh, it turned
(08:48):
out to be Langley's undoing. He tripped on one of
these booby traps and was buried beneath an avalanche of junk,
and Homer was starved to death because his brother wasn't
around the thick care of him. Did you get the
impression that Langley died instantly, like a broken neck or
something like that, or did he possibly starved to death
as well? You know, that's a good question. I didn't
(09:09):
get that because I didn't say it, just said that
he was buried underneath a pile of junk, So he
could very well just been trapped and had to starve
to death as well. I mean, can you imagine Homer
realizing that his brothers just died under a pile of
junk and blind and bedridden. You imagine you would have
been like, oh right, I'm toasted. Yeah, exactly. So bizarre, Yeah,
(09:30):
very bizarre. Yeah. And apparently I read this, I think
it was a New Yorker article about this, and the
author said that he grew up in the nineteen sixties
and seventies in New York and his parents that was
something they would say, They say, you know, clean up
your room and you're gonna end up like this. Call
your brothers sort of poor guys. But they were grossly
misunderstood too. Probably. Yeah, alright, well, I guess it's my turn. Hunt.
(09:54):
I call this one death by irony because that's what
it feels like to me every time I hear this one.
Pagan twistle. Yeah. Yeah, So she was a failed actress,
somewhat successful back in New York, but she got um.
She was drawn to Hollywood Land, as the sign originally said,
right um and and in ninety two, after a string
(10:16):
of rejections she acting role rejections, Thank you romantic, Yeah,
you're absolutely right, wow wow um she so yeah. She
kept turned down for part after part after part um,
and she decided she was going to take her own life,
which I called dedication to your craft. Right. So she
climbs up to the H but first leaves a suicide
(10:37):
note at the bottom of it. Climbs up to the
top of the H which is like what sixty ft
or something like that. I think it's about that. I
smell some listener mail in my future. Um. But she
climbed it to the top, jumped off sixty ft or
whatever it is. It killed her and they found her
two days later, and her her suicide note was very
(10:59):
apologetic and short and sweet, and she just couldn't take
it anymore, right. And what what kills me is that
the day after she died she killed herself, a letter
arrived at her house offering her apart for the role
of a suicidal woman. Yep, yeah, that one. That's bizarre
(11:21):
and agonizing, agonizing. You know, I used to the Hollywood
sign was outside my window in my apartment in l A. Yeah,
that's very cool, very cool view. And didn't for Sutherland
to live in your neighborhood too. Uh, ry mouth be there.
I'm gonna go ahead and jump straight to number one.
Death by unexplained phenomenon is what I'm calling it, even
(11:43):
though I know it's really space aliens. Uh. In the
Ural Mountains of Russia. This is a group of college students,
Russian college students went hiking from Eural Polytechnic Institute. And
this is in the wintertime and so it was cold.
Nine never made out of the woods, and what the
(12:03):
investigators found was frightening. It really was horrific. I think
is a good word. Hurt. I don't even know if
this one's bizarre. It's horrific. Yeah, just unexplained and horrific. Um.
First of all, they found their tent abandoned. It was
ripped open from the inside and half buried in snow,
and their shoes and like their coats and their belongings
were still inside the tent. So that's where we're starting
(12:25):
with the investigating. There's there's snow everywhere, it's like winter
right sure, February and Russia. The first two bodies were
found at the edge of the forest, barefoot and dressed
in their underwear. The next three bodies were found near
near there in similar state, and then two months later,
the last bodies were found buried in the snow about
two hundred and fifty feet away from them. So they're
(12:47):
all dead. Um. Four of the students had massive internal injuries,
broken ribs, crushed skulls. One of them was missing her tongue,
which is just freaky and uh, but they had no
external wounds and no signs of struggle. No, so they
had like crushed skulls, but no external wounds. That's insane, yes,
But the weird thing is what they found on their clothing, right, Well,
(13:11):
the final victims were wearing the clothing of the other victims, right,
But it wasn't the clothing irradiated. Yeah, they did test
on the clothing and found that it had high levels
of radiation. The case records were sealed until nineteen and
when the case came back open, they learned that there
were bright orange spheres spotted in the sky that night
(13:31):
by other hikers. So you think, you think aliens? Oh
and these people their faces were a sunburned too. Well,
I mean, I don't know if it was aliens necessarily,
but I think it was probably what I think it
was some kind of army experimentation radiation, maybe bombs, something
like that. That's very odd, but I mean it's still
(13:53):
to this day, they the Russian government won't own up
to anything happening out of the ordinary in the area
nine of your your youth killed it your hand accidentally
or otherwise. It makes for bad pr And you guys
can't see this, but that one, it was clearly Chuck's
favorite because normally, like in an article, he will highlight
a little passenger to as a reminder. He has that
(14:14):
entire thing highlighting. You love that one, don't you do?
It's really strange. Can I do one more? We have
a hit? Ten? Yea have we? Okay? So I call
this one disco boy, the sixteen year old kid in England.
Um And if he was sixteen, he probably only started
using deodor it maybe a couple of years before. But
he took a real shine to this stuff, a Saul
(14:37):
deodorant right. Um. And apparently this kid would just slather
it on all over his body a couple of times
a day. And you say in the article it was
so so thick sometimes that his family downstairs could taste
it right in the air. Um. And eventually, at age sixteen,
he dropped out of a heart attack, right. And the
(14:58):
reason why they round he he had heart failure due
to um UH levels ten times the lethal dosage of
butane and propane liquid liquid natural gases that are used
as accelerants and aerosols or were. And this kid built
it up time over over probably two years. Man, I
(15:21):
mean think about that, and it just built up in
his system and finally just stopped his heart, which is
just crazy to me. And apparently he used it in
a very confined space like his bathroom. Um, so not
only was he absorbing it through his skin, yeah he was.
He was inhaling it as well. So we're not saying
it's dangerous to use any kind of aerosol. Well, good
luck finding an aerosol deodorant these days. I don't legal illegal,
(15:42):
at least ones with with propane and butane in them. Sure,
so we'll go to the store and look, you want
to after this? Yeah, well I bring that up because
I know somebody who occasionally will use fabreeze in her
hair to kind of like freshen up. And now now
I'm kind of like, what kind of kild do not?
I find that strange? As do I? As do I?
(16:03):
So yeah, okay, well it's ten bizarre deaths x number
of bizarre deaths. There's still more that you can read about. Yeah,
and I strongly recommend anyone go on to the site
read this article, a fine one written by one Charles W. Bryant,
and all you have to do is type in ten
bizarre ways to die in the handy search bart how
(16:24):
stuff Works dot Com and chuck while we are here,
while we have everyone's attention because we know you guys
don't go anywhere. You know, listener mails coming eventually, you
want to hear your names. So first, exactly, Um, first,
let's talk about our spoken word album. That's right, Josh
and I and Jerry got together, excuse me, Josh and
me and Jerry got together and we recorded our first
(16:47):
ever full length is like an hour plus super Stuffed
Guide to the Economy and we break it down economics
on a global level and tell you what it means
to the individual and get into some pretty complex stuff
in it in the way that we like it. Yeah,
I feel like we broke it down into very um
manageable knowledge, right, Yeah, well that's the stuff you should know.
(17:10):
Super Stuff Guide to the Economy, which we love that name.
It's up on iTunes for what right now nine If
you guys want to go get it, that's cool with us.
You can actually find it on iTunes by typing in
super and stuffed. We're super stuffed two words, I mean
in the little search bar on iTunes. And I think
it's the first thing that comes up, maybe the only thing.
(17:32):
No it's not, but it is definitely the first thing
that comes up. And you can find it there, like
I said, on iTunes, And I guess while we're at it,
we should go ahead and plug the blog to right
our weblog. Well, we have a blog now, folks called
stuff you Should Know oddly enough, and you can access
it through the homepage how stuff works dot com over
on the right side. Chuck and I each post once
(17:54):
a day, so it's updated twice. Sometimes it's news items
that we find interesting. Sometimes it's something that a fans
and end that maybe isn't full enough for a podcast.
I do a little recap on Friday, so where we can,
you know, talk to the fans about what we podcasted
about that week. And it's fun stuff. It is fun.
Actually I've kind of taken to taken a shine to it. Yeah,
(18:16):
I can see that. Yeah, so, Chuck, I guess it's
listener in mail time, right, Josh, this is a really
good one. I'm just gonna call this exceptional fan mail.
We get these from time to time. Remember when you
brought up proso pagnosia. Yeah, facial blindness, facial blindnes. Yeah,
(18:38):
you're gonna do a real quick recap of what that is. Basically,
there's a there's a malfunction of the brain region that
processes visual facial information. And so people with probe how
do I We'll say it one more time, chuck, Uh,
proso pagnosia. Yeah, well, facial blindness. Um, I have a
total inability to make a memory of someone's face. So
(19:01):
seeing somebody you've known for years, uh, for the thousandth
time is like seeing them for the first time. You
don't recognize them. So we had someone right in who
has this, which is very cool. So we like these
firsthand accounts. So Anna wrote in and said that we
could read this to our fans. So I thought it's
kind of cool. She said that she cannot visualize the
(19:21):
faces of her coworkers or anybody for that matter, but
she does I do see faces when I look at them.
This means that we can memorize features such as hair
and skin color, haircut, and facial structure to some extent.
Feature based recognition like this is useless for recognizing people
out of context, but it's usually enough to differentiate differentiate
(19:42):
between people in context when you expect to see them. So,
in other words, she's comes up with a system of
how to recognize people at work, Let's say, or you know,
somewhere else she might go to the club. Um. Secondly,
we recognize voices just as well as the next person.
I know a lot of people wrote in an assets
much excellent point. Yeah, so that safe uh that safe
word thing when talking to relatives is absolutely not necessary.
(20:05):
You were talking about and having a safe word, that's fine.
Uh So in the workplace, if a colleague greets me,
I know who they are from their voice. Thirdly, people's
body language is very individual, and although I can't recognize
somebody's face, I can recognize how they walk and move,
which is very individual. And that made sense to me
because it's just the face exactly, only the face. Um, yes,
(20:28):
that's what she says. It's it's facial recognition is specialized
for faces only in the brain. And fourth she says
that people tend to dress similarly from day to day,
and that's also a good guideline. So you develop coping strategies.
Most of the time you get by well enough. Although
I work at a large company, I very rarely have
problems at work and with people I meet regularly, and
(20:50):
I don't think my colleagues notice. So that's correct. Yeah,
you come up with a system it's it's kind of interesting,
kind of like the guy Memento would write down important
things or tattooed the really important thing, right somebody? Yeah, Well,
thanks Anna, you sound like a sharp tech. Appreciate you
sharing all that with us, And if you want to
share some tips for overcoming facial blindness or anything else,
(21:13):
you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Chuck do your cheek
thing all right? I'd like to explain to everyone we
(00:23):
have a little superstition here at Stuff you Should Know,
And basically, every time Chuck doesn't do that with his
cheeks ahead of time, we have a terrible take. And
sometimes I have to have to stop part way through
it gets so bad and do it again. And we've
noticed that when Chuck does this, we have a good take.
So prepare for an excellent podcast because he just did
(00:45):
it twice. So we're good, right, Chuck. I think we're set. Yeah, so,
and and I feel a little bit better after um,
you told me that this article we're about to talk
to you talk about Tim Bazzarre Ways to Die, was
blowing up on the home page because it means that
there's a lot more people, uh than me who are
who have a morbid curiosity slash fascination with death. There
(01:06):
are Buddy this one and the are their dead bodies
on Mount Divers apparently did phenomenally well on the homepage.
They exploded on the home and uh, you know, people
want to to know about these wacky, bizarre death so
we're going to share some of them. Yeah, we agree.
We we're gonna do all ten right now, of course
not okay. I don't know if you picked h the
(01:28):
guy from Canada the first one, but if you didn't,
have a question for you. So, this guy from Canada
in two thousand and eight got stuck in a sewer
grade after he win after his wallet, and he was
still alive right when they pulled him out by tow truck,
but then he died. So my question is, did was
he crushed to death and they pulled him out? Did
the tow truck kill him? Like? What killed this guy? Well,
(01:51):
that's a great question and I don't have the answer. Actually,
my editor, Amanda asked me the same question. She said,
how do you actually die? And I couldn't find it.
I looked other than the fact that he was stuck
in a sewer, wedged several feet down, you know, upside
down for a period of hours, which can't be good
for you. But he was still alive when they pulled
him up. By tow truck. He died on the way
(02:11):
to the hospital or at the hospital something. I think
he was alive when he came out of the sewer
grade he was, so he was pronounced dead at the hospital.
And this isn't the first person to die from being
stuck in a sewer dry, which really sad. Yeah, and
we should say we're not We're not making light of
any of these very sad tragedies that have happened, but
so abnormal sometimes that they you know, well, it's in
(02:33):
the title bizarre. Bizarre. Yeah, yeah, he'd he'd uh went
down to get something, retrieve something, to drain his wallet
and after a robbery and got stuck upside down for
a period of hours and was, like you said, pulled
out by a tow truck. Yeah, and it was too late.
It's odd. It is. Well, uh, that's one. I don't
(02:56):
know if you're playing on talking about that guy or not,
but I had that question. I was not actually, Okay,
well give me give me one of yours, Josh, I'm
gonna talk about the woman who died by her sheep's
hand or I guess um. And this again another sad tragedy.
A woman in England. Uh. You know, she was a
(03:17):
farmer's wife and she was going out to feed the
sheep and she had a little a TV that I
guess she wrote out to where the sheep were, and
sheep were really hungry, and apparently they came at her
with a lot of force and knocked her off of
a cliff and she was parked along the edge of
a quarry, right, yeah, And so they knocked her off,
and they say that the sad tragedy is that she
(03:38):
may have lived, um, if not for her a TV
falling on top of her. So that was knocked off
as well. I came down on her hungry sheep, very
hungry sheep. Did you get an idea of how many
there there were? Uh, it just said a flock a flock,
So well, it's like two or more, right, sure, Yeah,
so I'm thinking probably a little more than two to
(04:00):
to TV and a woman. Yeah, that is kind of,
um bizarre. Again, I think that definitely falls in the category.
Let me ask you, how did you choose these? That's
a good question. I thought you might ask that. Well.
I mean, you just start looking around on the internet
for strange deaths and bizarre deaths and pretty soon you've
got a big master list of stories, and did you
(04:23):
have to pare down? Oh yeah, sure, Okay, well give
me one that you that didn't take the list. Yeah,
I can't think of one right now. You put me
on the spot. I love putting you on the spot.
I can't think of one, all right, Well maybe by
the end of the podcast. Okay, well, let me give
you one of my chuck which, by the way, this
is just an excellent article. It's it's as good as
numbers journalism gets, right. Yeah. Um, so I guarantee this
(04:46):
is one of yours too, but I'm going to just
go ahead and steal it. Um in nineteen nineteen. Yeah,
I love this one. It's just so nuts. Um. In
nineteen nineteen in North Boston, there was a neighborhood that
was largely populated by Italian immigrant it and one of
the big features of this neighborhood was, I guess a
huge holding tank. I assume a molasses processing plan or
(05:08):
something huge, huge holding tank that that held um two
point five million gallons of molasses. Apparently that's a couple
of gallons too many, because the tank ruptured and from
what I gather, exploded with molasses. There was shrapnel that
was flying everywhere. So some people died that way, sure,
But I think the the the most horrific aspect of
(05:32):
the deaths that came out that that day was that
one people were killed by a twenty five ft high
wall of molasses. And you know, the term slow as
molasses that did not apply in this case, because their
reports where that it was going about thirty five miles
an hour. The problem is that you have that much
(05:52):
molasses and it's traveling that fast and you get stuck
in it, You're going to drown in molasses. And I
can't imagine it takes more than one breath of molasses
to drown you. Yeah, I would say something, but yeah,
that's a pretty horrible way to go. Yeah. And the
weird thing is is that it's apparently to this day,
I understand they the residents of this neighborhood almost a
(06:14):
hundred years later, at least well ninety years later, still
say that on a hot day they can smell the
molasses that took years to clean up this mess, right,
And don't you know, of course that's one of those
things that might be lower at this point, but it
makes for a good story. It definitely does. But yet
one people died drowning in molasses, right, Yeah, bizarre, very bizarre.
(06:35):
Onto the Call Your Brothers. These two, this is my
other favorite one. These guys were pretty famous too. If
you're from New York City, UM, you've probably heard of
the Call Your Brothers at some point. Um Langley and
Homer Callier. They moved to New York to Harlem in
nineteen o nine when they're in their twenties, and they
were from an upper crust family, uh, kind of well
to do, and the brothers lived together in Harlem and
(06:58):
uh became hermits basically over the years. Yeah, and not
just hermits, but compulsive hoarders, which you know, we should
do a podcast on this one, which should That's very interesting,
you know. Um, I read an analysis of compulsive hoarding
using the Wonder Machine, and they found that when asked
to decide like if they if they should throw away
one piece of junk mail or another, the region of
(07:20):
the brain that's associated with processing very unpleasant experiences lights
up like a Christmas tree. Really interesting and I'm yeah,
from what I gather, Homer and Langley, we're definitely compulsive hoarders. Legendary, right, legendary.
Apparently they accumulated a hundred and eighty tons of you know,
they called it junk in their apartment. I know, and
(07:42):
think about that every time you can think of that's
sixty more tons than what they've got every year on
Mount Everest, which is one of the most littered places
on Earth, and there is an apartment. These guys had
it an apartment. Yeah, so I think to call them
compulsive hoarders is right on the money. Uh so. I
mean we're talking busta chandeliers, baby care, just smashed pianos, clocks, furniture,
(08:03):
newspapers just stacked to the ceiling. Homer went blind in
the nineteen thirties and was bedridden because of rheumatism. By
and his younger brother helped care for him night and
day and saved all these newspapers and hopes that one
day his brother would regain his sight, which I found
beyond sweet. Yeah, it's pretty sweet and strange. Um. The
(08:27):
other odd thing is is they had their home booby
trapped because they were What they did was, you know,
they moved to Harlem, and then Harlem over the years
started becoming a little bit more of a rough neighborhood,
and they never moved. They just like shut themselves in
and and you know, closed all the doors. Yeah that's true. Yeah. Um,
so they set these booby traps and uh, it turned
(08:48):
out to be Langley's undoing. He tripped on one of
these booby traps and was buried beneath an avalanche of junk,
and Homer was starved to death because his brother wasn't
around the thick care of him. Did you get the
impression that Langley died instantly, like a broken neck or
something like that, or did he possibly starved to death
as well? You know, that's a good question. I didn't
(09:09):
get that because I didn't say it, just said that
he was buried underneath a pile of junk, So he
could very well just been trapped and had to starve
to death as well. I mean, can you imagine Homer
realizing that his brothers just died under a pile of
junk and blind and bedridden. You imagine you would have
been like, oh right, I'm toasted. Yeah, exactly. So bizarre, Yeah,
(09:30):
very bizarre. Yeah. And apparently I read this, I think
it was a New Yorker article about this, and the
author said that he grew up in the nineteen sixties
and seventies in New York and his parents that was
something they would say, They say, you know, clean up
your room and you're gonna end up like this. Call
your brothers sort of poor guys. But they were grossly
misunderstood too. Probably. Yeah, alright, well, I guess it's my turn. Hunt.
(09:54):
I call this one death by irony because that's what
it feels like to me every time I hear this one.
Pagan twistle. Yeah. Yeah, So she was a failed actress,
somewhat successful back in New York, but she got um.
She was drawn to Hollywood Land, as the sign originally said,
right um and and in ninety two, after a string
(10:16):
of rejections she acting role rejections, Thank you romantic, Yeah,
you're absolutely right, wow wow um she so yeah. She
kept turned down for part after part after part um,
and she decided she was going to take her own life,
which I called dedication to your craft. Right. So she
climbs up to the H but first leaves a suicide
(10:37):
note at the bottom of it. Climbs up to the
top of the H which is like what sixty ft
or something like that. I think it's about that. I
smell some listener mail in my future. Um. But she
climbed it to the top, jumped off sixty ft or
whatever it is. It killed her and they found her
two days later, and her her suicide note was very
(10:59):
apologetic and short and sweet, and she just couldn't take
it anymore, right. And what what kills me is that
the day after she died she killed herself, a letter
arrived at her house offering her apart for the role
of a suicidal woman. Yep, yeah, that one. That's bizarre
(11:21):
and agonizing, agonizing. You know, I used to the Hollywood
sign was outside my window in my apartment in l A. Yeah,
that's very cool, very cool view. And didn't for Sutherland
to live in your neighborhood too. Uh, ry mouth be there.
I'm gonna go ahead and jump straight to number one.
Death by unexplained phenomenon is what I'm calling it, even
(11:43):
though I know it's really space aliens. Uh. In the
Ural Mountains of Russia. This is a group of college students,
Russian college students went hiking from Eural Polytechnic Institute. And
this is in the wintertime and so it was cold.
Nine never made out of the woods, and what the
(12:03):
investigators found was frightening. It really was horrific. I think
is a good word. Hurt. I don't even know if
this one's bizarre. It's horrific. Yeah, just unexplained and horrific. Um.
First of all, they found their tent abandoned. It was
ripped open from the inside and half buried in snow,
and their shoes and like their coats and their belongings
were still inside the tent. So that's where we're starting
(12:25):
with the investigating. There's there's snow everywhere, it's like winter
right sure, February and Russia. The first two bodies were
found at the edge of the forest, barefoot and dressed
in their underwear. The next three bodies were found near
near there in similar state, and then two months later,
the last bodies were found buried in the snow about
two hundred and fifty feet away from them. So they're
(12:47):
all dead. Um. Four of the students had massive internal injuries,
broken ribs, crushed skulls. One of them was missing her tongue,
which is just freaky and uh, but they had no
external wounds and no signs of struggle. No, so they
had like crushed skulls, but no external wounds. That's insane, yes,
But the weird thing is what they found on their clothing, right, Well,
(13:11):
the final victims were wearing the clothing of the other victims, right,
But it wasn't the clothing irradiated. Yeah, they did test
on the clothing and found that it had high levels
of radiation. The case records were sealed until nineteen and
when the case came back open, they learned that there
were bright orange spheres spotted in the sky that night
(13:31):
by other hikers. So you think, you think aliens? Oh
and these people their faces were a sunburned too. Well,
I mean, I don't know if it was aliens necessarily,
but I think it was probably what I think it
was some kind of army experimentation radiation, maybe bombs, something
like that. That's very odd, but I mean it's still
(13:53):
to this day, they the Russian government won't own up
to anything happening out of the ordinary in the area
nine of your your youth killed it your hand accidentally
or otherwise. It makes for bad pr And you guys
can't see this, but that one, it was clearly Chuck's
favorite because normally, like in an article, he will highlight
a little passenger to as a reminder. He has that
(14:14):
entire thing highlighting. You love that one, don't you do?
It's really strange. Can I do one more? We have
a hit? Ten? Yea have we? Okay? So I call
this one disco boy, the sixteen year old kid in England.
Um And if he was sixteen, he probably only started
using deodor it maybe a couple of years before. But
he took a real shine to this stuff, a Saul
(14:37):
deodorant right. Um. And apparently this kid would just slather
it on all over his body a couple of times
a day. And you say in the article it was
so so thick sometimes that his family downstairs could taste
it right in the air. Um. And eventually, at age sixteen,
he dropped out of a heart attack, right. And the
(14:58):
reason why they round he he had heart failure due
to um UH levels ten times the lethal dosage of
butane and propane liquid liquid natural gases that are used
as accelerants and aerosols or were. And this kid built
it up time over over probably two years. Man, I
(15:21):
mean think about that, and it just built up in
his system and finally just stopped his heart, which is
just crazy to me. And apparently he used it in
a very confined space like his bathroom. Um, so not
only was he absorbing it through his skin, yeah he was.
He was inhaling it as well. So we're not saying
it's dangerous to use any kind of aerosol. Well, good
luck finding an aerosol deodorant these days. I don't legal illegal,
(15:42):
at least ones with with propane and butane in them. Sure,
so we'll go to the store and look, you want
to after this? Yeah, well I bring that up because
I know somebody who occasionally will use fabreeze in her
hair to kind of like freshen up. And now now
I'm kind of like, what kind of kild do not?
I find that strange? As do I? As do I?
(16:03):
So yeah, okay, well it's ten bizarre deaths x number
of bizarre deaths. There's still more that you can read about. Yeah,
and I strongly recommend anyone go on to the site
read this article, a fine one written by one Charles W. Bryant,
and all you have to do is type in ten
bizarre ways to die in the handy search bart how
(16:24):
stuff Works dot Com and chuck while we are here,
while we have everyone's attention because we know you guys
don't go anywhere. You know, listener mails coming eventually, you
want to hear your names. So first, exactly, Um, first,
let's talk about our spoken word album. That's right, Josh
and I and Jerry got together, excuse me, Josh and
me and Jerry got together and we recorded our first
(16:47):
ever full length is like an hour plus super Stuffed
Guide to the Economy and we break it down economics
on a global level and tell you what it means
to the individual and get into some pretty complex stuff
in it in the way that we like it. Yeah,
I feel like we broke it down into very um
manageable knowledge, right, Yeah, well that's the stuff you should know.
(17:10):
Super Stuff Guide to the Economy, which we love that name.
It's up on iTunes for what right now nine If
you guys want to go get it, that's cool with us.
You can actually find it on iTunes by typing in
super and stuffed. We're super stuffed two words, I mean
in the little search bar on iTunes. And I think
it's the first thing that comes up, maybe the only thing.
(17:32):
No it's not, but it is definitely the first thing
that comes up. And you can find it there, like
I said, on iTunes, And I guess while we're at it,
we should go ahead and plug the blog to right
our weblog. Well, we have a blog now, folks called
stuff you Should Know oddly enough, and you can access
it through the homepage how stuff works dot com over
on the right side. Chuck and I each post once
(17:54):
a day, so it's updated twice. Sometimes it's news items
that we find interesting. Sometimes it's something that a fans
and end that maybe isn't full enough for a podcast.
I do a little recap on Friday, so where we can,
you know, talk to the fans about what we podcasted
about that week. And it's fun stuff. It is fun.
Actually I've kind of taken to taken a shine to it. Yeah,
(18:16):
I can see that. Yeah, so, Chuck, I guess it's
listener in mail time, right, Josh, this is a really
good one. I'm just gonna call this exceptional fan mail.
We get these from time to time. Remember when you
brought up proso pagnosia. Yeah, facial blindness, facial blindnes. Yeah,
(18:38):
you're gonna do a real quick recap of what that is. Basically,
there's a there's a malfunction of the brain region that
processes visual facial information. And so people with probe how
do I We'll say it one more time, chuck, Uh,
proso pagnosia. Yeah, well, facial blindness. Um, I have a
total inability to make a memory of someone's face. So
(19:01):
seeing somebody you've known for years, uh, for the thousandth
time is like seeing them for the first time. You
don't recognize them. So we had someone right in who
has this, which is very cool. So we like these
firsthand accounts. So Anna wrote in and said that we
could read this to our fans. So I thought it's
kind of cool. She said that she cannot visualize the
(19:21):
faces of her coworkers or anybody for that matter, but
she does I do see faces when I look at them.
This means that we can memorize features such as hair
and skin color, haircut, and facial structure to some extent.
Feature based recognition like this is useless for recognizing people
out of context, but it's usually enough to differentiate differentiate
(19:42):
between people in context when you expect to see them. So,
in other words, she's comes up with a system of
how to recognize people at work, Let's say, or you know,
somewhere else she might go to the club. Um. Secondly,
we recognize voices just as well as the next person.
I know a lot of people wrote in an assets
much excellent point. Yeah, so that safe uh that safe
word thing when talking to relatives is absolutely not necessary.
(20:05):
You were talking about and having a safe word, that's fine.
Uh So in the workplace, if a colleague greets me,
I know who they are from their voice. Thirdly, people's
body language is very individual, and although I can't recognize
somebody's face, I can recognize how they walk and move,
which is very individual. And that made sense to me
because it's just the face exactly, only the face. Um, yes,
(20:28):
that's what she says. It's it's facial recognition is specialized
for faces only in the brain. And fourth she says
that people tend to dress similarly from day to day,
and that's also a good guideline. So you develop coping strategies.
Most of the time you get by well enough. Although
I work at a large company, I very rarely have
problems at work and with people I meet regularly, and
(20:50):
I don't think my colleagues notice. So that's correct. Yeah,
you come up with a system it's it's kind of interesting,
kind of like the guy Memento would write down important
things or tattooed the really important thing, right somebody? Yeah, Well,
thanks Anna, you sound like a sharp tech. Appreciate you
sharing all that with us, And if you want to
share some tips for overcoming facial blindness or anything else,
(21:13):
you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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