Futility Closet

In 1665, the Black Death came to Eyam in Derbyshire.

To prevent the spread of the disease, the entire village quarantined itself. In the ensuing year, its population dropped from 350 to 83.

The gravedigger survived.

Tennessee Williams had a routine for taking eyedrops. He'd put the bottle cap in his mouth, lean back, and place drops in each eye.

He was doing this in his room in New York's Hotel Elysee in 1983 when the cap slipped into his throat.

He choked to death.

During World War I, Wilfred Owen's younger brother Harold was an officer on the British cruiser HMS Astraea. While anchored off West Africa shortly after the armistice, he claims he had "an extraordinary and inexplicable experience":

I had gone down to my cabin thinking to write some letters. I drew aside the door curtain and stepped inside and to my amazement I saw Wilfred sitting in my chair. I felt shock run through me with appalling force and with it I could feel the blood draining away from my face. I did not rush towards him but walked jerkily into the cabin–all my limbs stiff and slow to respond. I did not sit down but looking at him I spoke quietly: 'Wilfred, how did you get here?' He did not rise and I saw that he was involuntarily immobile, but his eyes which had never left mine were alive with the familiar look of trying to make me understand; when I spoke his whole face broke into his sweetest and most endearing dark smile. I felt not fear–I had none when I first drew my door curtain and saw him there–only exquisite mental pleasure at thus beholding him. He was in uniform and I remember thinking how out of place the khaki looked amongst the cabin furnishings. With this thought I must have turned my eyes away from him; when I looked back my cabin chair was empty … I wondered if I had been dreaming but looking down I saw that I was still standing. Suddenly I felt terribly tired and moving to my bunk I lay down; instantly I went into a deep oblivious sleep. When I woke up I knew with absolute certainty that Wilfred was dead.

He later learned that his brother had been killed the preceding week.

See also A Sign and "That Apparition, Sole of Men".

On June 11, 1920, bridge expert Joseph Elwell was found dead in his Manhattan home, a bullet between his eyes. All the windows and doors were fastened except for Elwell's bedroom window on the third floor. There was no evidence of a break-in, nothing of value was missing, and ballistics evidence ruled out suicide. The case has never been solved.

No one knows how Henry Hudson died.

A mutinous crew set the explorer adrift in Hudson Bay in 1611, and he was never seen again.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti revered his wife, and when she died in 1862 he laid his journal in her coffin.

Seven years later he decided he needed the poems, so he had her exhumed.

Marcus Garvey suffered a stroke in January 1940, woke up to read his obituary in the Chicago Defender, learned that he had been "broke, alone and unpopular," suffered a second stroke, and died.

History's 10 deadliest natural disasters:

1. Yellow River flood, China, summer 1931: 1 million to 2 million dead
2. Yellow River flood, China, September-October 1887: 900,000 to 2 million dead
3. Bhola cyclone, East Pakistan, Nov. 13, 1970: 500,000 to 1 million dead
4. Shaanxi earthquake, China, Jan. 23, 1556: 830,000 dead
5. Cyclone, Coringa, India, Nov. 25, 1839: 300,000 dead
6. Kaifeng flood, China, 1642: 300,000 dead
7. Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami, Dec. 26, 2004: 283,100 dead
8. Tangshan earthquake, China, July 28, 1976: 242,000 dead
9. Banqiao Dam failure, China, August 1975: 231,000 dead
10. Aleppo earthquake, Syria, 1138: 230,000 dead

Six of the 10 occurred in China. See also Death Tolls.

Molière collapsed on stage in 1673 and died hours later.

The play was called The Hypochondriac.

Lawrence Sterne, after a lifetime of peculiarities, and becoming notorious as an eccentric, curious and able writer, at his death was buried in a graveyard near Tyburn, belonging to the Parish of Mary-le-bone, and the 'resurrection man' disinterred his corpse and conveyed it to the professor of anatomy at Cambridge where being laid upon the dissecting table, was at once recognized by one of those present who knew him well while living.

– Bizarre Notes & Queries, February 1886