Some Weird Death Facts You Didn't Know

We start counting down from the minute we are born until the moment we die, which is one of life's few certainties. For practically all living creatures, death is a given, but there are still a lot of unknowns. Get ready for fifty crazy facts about dying and death.

#16. Burial in the Sky

Buddhists believe the body is not important after death, because the soul has migrated to a new being as part of reincarnation. Thus, they pay tribute to the dead and then cut it up into pieces. Rather than burying it where it’s of no use to anyone but the worms, they place the body on a mountaintop and let the vultures pick the bones clean. While it’s an ancient tradition, it’s still practiced regularly in Tibet today. But few places have more unique burial traditions than the Philippines.

#15. Smoke ‘em Up

The Philippines have many ethnic groups, and many have their own traditions. The Tinguian people have a strange tradition where they give their dead a makeover, dressing them in the best clothes available, and then sit them on a chair at the memorial service. They then place a lit cigarette in their mouth. Hey, at least the dead look relaxed. Another group has a very different tradition.

#14. Hollow Ground

The Caviteno people live near the city of Manila, but their tradition is definitely not a city one. They bury their dead not in the ground, but in hollow tree trunks. But not just any tree. When a person knows they are nearing death due to illness or old age, they go out and pick their own burial tree. It’s even common for the person to live in a little hut by their death tree while their family works to hollow it out. But whatever the culture, death is the end of the road...right?

#13. What Comes Next

The belief in the afterlife is common across the world, with almost every religion having some concept of life after death. Some believe in reincarnation, as each soul becomes a totally new person or other being after death. Others believe in ascending to a higher plane of existence or becoming part of some cosmic being. Others believe that the first thing you see after death is a judge - to determine if you’ve lived well enough to enter the afterlife. But there’s no proof of any of this...right?

#12. Back from the Dead?

Surprisingly, there are a lot of people who claim to have seen what comes after death. These are usually people who nearly died due to their heart stopping and were revived, be it due to a heart attack or a surgical mishap. They often report seeing a white light or hearing voices. One boy, Colton Burpo, even reported seeing heaven and meeting people who were dead before he was born - and wrote a book about it with his father. But are these afterlife encounters proof of anything - or just the brain’s tricks?

#11. Closer to Earth

Neuroscientists who have studied the brain at the moment of death report that it releases an increased amount of hormones that cause positive feelings at the moment of death. This means that near-death experiences could be caused by these hormones, making people feel at peace and safe during their moment of greatest distress. But how does this explain children knowing things they have no way of knowing? Well, skeptics point at an old-fashioned solution - dad may be coaching his son. Harder to explain is one woman who floated out of her body and saw a pair of sneakers on the hospital roof- only to have a nurse fetch them after she woke up. But has anyone seen...the other place?

#10. Oh Hell

People reporting seeing the bad ending in the afterlife is much rarer, but those who did come back deeply disturbed. They report darkness, anguish, and distress - and a few have gotten much more detailed. When a man was shot in the head and spent an extended period in a coma, he awoke reporting that he spent that time being tortured in a terrible realm of fire and hopelessness. While he had a religious awakening and wrote a book, most doctors believe this was the product of the brain trauma he endured. But what do those who came the closest to death have to say?

#9. Back from Beyond

When Velma Thomas had a heart attack in 2008, she took a turn for the worse and was soon pronounced dead. Doctors tried to induce hypothermia to lower her body temperature, but it seemed to be no use, and she was without brain activity for seventeen hours as her family was called in to say goodbye. But when she was taken off life support, she suddenly started waking up? The fifty-nine-year-old woman eventually recovered and came home, but when asked about what she remembered from her time in the great beyond, the answer was...nothing. Death is universal - but a full life means something very different for different beings.

#8. The Blink of an Eye

The average human lifespan is in the seventies, solidly on the upper range of animals. But some animals live a full life in a much shorter time. Panther chameleons only live about a year, which means the previous generation is almost entirely gone before the next generation hatches from their eggs. Drone ants only live three weeks, dying soon after mating with females. But nothing tops the mayfly, which is born with one purpose - to reproduce. They spend most of their time as nymphs, and only have a total lifespan of twenty-four hours. But some animals can put humans to shame.

#7. The Heavy Hitters

Elephants are one of the few land mammals with a similar lifespan to humans. If you can’t stand the thought of losing another pet, you might want to consider a Macaw - these colorful birds can live for up to eighty years. Bowhead whales are the longest-living mammal, with lifespans of over two hundred years - one was even found with harpoon fragments from the 1800s still in it! But no large animal tops the Greenland Shark, whose slow growth cycle means they can live up to five hundred years. But for the longest-lived organism of all, you’ll have to leave the animal kingdom.

#6. Standing Tall

What is the longest any living organism on Earth has escaped death? That would be found in California’s White Mountains - a mighty bristlecone pine tree named Methuselah, for the notoriously long-lived biblical figure. How old is this tree? Almost five thousand years old, which means it has been standing tall on the North American continent before the Great Pyramid of Giza was even on the drawing board. But is death truly an inevitability for everyone - and everything?

#5. A Tight Squeeze

You might have heard the rumor that lobsters are immortal. Well, that’s obviously not true - they wouldn’t wind up on dinner plates if they were. But these sea crustaceans do not die of old age. They shed their shells and grow a new one, essentially renewing their body periodically. The problem is, eventually they get too big to escape their shell, and wind up getting stuck in an old one and dying that way. Not even the lobster can escape. But one creature might have figured out the secret to immortality.

#4. The Immortal Jellyfish

One species seems to have the process for avoiding death indefinitely - Turritopsis Dohrnii, a tiny jellyfish found in oceans around the world. They have a full life cycle, until they reach their dying medusa stage - at which point they avoid death by turning back into a tiny ball of cells that begins the life cycle anew. So they renew their life indefinitely - but are they truly the same being, or an identical clone? For a simple jellyfish, there’s really no difference - but for a human with a mind and personality, it’s a much bigger question. But will humans eventually figure out the way to conquer death?

#3. The Deep Freeze

Some people are already working on it. A cottage industry has emerged of people being cryogenically frozen, in the hopes that they can eventually be revived in the future. The law dictates that cryogenic freezing can only happen after the person is pronounced dead, and it is most commonly practiced by those who die of incurable diseases. At least two hundred and fifty people are frozen in the United States, and 1500 more have signed up. But contrary to rumors, Walt Disney was not one of them. But some people have talked about another form of life after death.

#2. Living in the Cloud

The development of the digital world has led some people to wonder - could we live forever as digital thoughtforms? The idea is that a process would be developed to read the brain patterns of a person and upload them to the digital world, allowing the person’s mind to continue to exist after death. It sounds great - except that the technology doesn’t exist. While research is ongoing, it’s more of a topic for science-fiction stories right now. But while humans try to escape death, death just keeps on coming.

#1. Keep on Reaping

The good news for humanity is that the global birth rate continues to outpace the global death rate, and the population keeps growing no matter what diseases are out there. The bad news? A lot of people are dying from all sorts of causes. It’s estimated that the global death rate is about 7.7 per one thousand people - a little under one percent of the population every year. Which means a lot of people looking over their shoulder for the grim reaper.