Mysterious And Interesting Deaths Of Famous Authors: On February 25, 1983, Tennessee Williams was found dead at age seventy-one in his hotel suite in New York. Chief Medical Examiner, Elliot M. Gross, originally reported Williams choked to death from inhaling the plastic cap of a bottle used on nasal spray or eye solution. The report was later corrected on August 14, 1983, to state Williams used the plastic cap found in his mouth to ingest barbiturates and had actually died from a toxic level of Seconal, a short-acting barbiturate derivative. In his will Williams requested he be put in a sack and chucked off the side of a boat into the sea. His family ignored the request and buried him at Calvary Cemetery.
Mysterious And Interesting Deaths Of Famous Authors: Virginia Woolf was an early feminist and an important figure in the London literary scene, but she suffered from severe mental illness, and ultimately committed suicide. Here is the opening paragraph from her suicide note: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” On March 28, 1941, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. Her body was not found until April 18.
Mysterious And Interesting Deaths Of Famous Authors: Percy Shelley was a romantic poet and married to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Percy died drowning when his boat sank during a sudden storm on the Gulf of Spezia. The strange part about his death is his body was cremated on the beach at Viareggio, but his heart had calcified and refused to burn. Edward Trelawny, a novelist and friend of Percy Shelley, was at the funeral and grabbed the whole heart from the fire. He eventually gave the heart to Mary (who was not at the funeral, as women were not allowed in those days), and she supposedly kept it her whole life. It is believed his heart is still kept at the vault in the churchyard of St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth. An 1885 New York Times article theorized the “heart” might, in fact, have been his liver because of the saturation of sea water making it more than normally incombustible. To this day no one knows for sure what the object was, but it was probably just a piece of something calcified. The important thing is Mary “thought” it was his heart.
Mysterious And Interesting Deaths Of Famous Authors: If you don't know who Francis Bacon is, that's okay, but his death was interesting: He caught pneumonia trying to stuff a chicken with snow. On April 9, 1626, Bacon and the king’s physician were traveling when he suddenly had the idea it might be possible to preserve meat with snow. Bacon wanted to try the experiment at once, and so the two men jumped out of the carriage and bought a chicken from a poor woman, having her disembowel the feathered creature. Francis stuffed it with snow and became almost immediately ill.
Mysterious And Interesting Deaths Of Famous Authors: No, no, the beloved Ryan Reynolds has not yet left this earth, but Edgar Allen Poe has, and just as he is famous for his short stories filled with macabre and mystery, his death provided a little of its own. On September 27, 1849, Poe set off from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems by fellow poet Mrs. St. Leon Loud, but never made it to his destination. After missing for six days, he was found half-unconscious in a gutter wearing soiled clothes not his own. Nobody has ever discovered what happened to him in those six days, and the mystery is still unsolved. He died three days after he was found in the gutter, delirious and gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death he called out for “Reynolds,” but the person to whom the name belonged has never been identified.
