• Sherwood Anderson swallowed a toothpick at a party and died of peritonitis.
• Francis Bacon died of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow.
• Jack Daniel, the distillery founder, kicked his safe when he forgot its combination, injured his toe, and died of blood poisoning.
• Actress Isadora Duncan broke her neck when her scarf caught in a car’s wheel.
• Tour de France winner François Faber was in a trench in World War I when he learned his wife had given birth to a daughter. He cheered and a German sniper picked him off.
• Jockey Frank Hayes died of a heart attack during a race in 1923. The horse finished first, making Hayes the only dead jockey ever to win a race.
• Pope John XXI died when his scientific laboratory collapsed in 1277.

The all-time winner is still the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, who survived being poisoned, shot multiple times in the head and torso, bludgeoned, mutilated, wrapped in a sheet and dropped in a frozen river. He was swimming to shore when he died of hypothermia.