As determined by a forensic medical examiner, golfer Ted Mintzer was struck on the head and killed instantly by a golf ball on the fifth green at Burrowing Owl Golf Course in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, but went on lining up his putt. He three-putted for a bogey, not bad for a stiff. After that he caught fire, playing the best round of his life, though dead. When friends in the clubhouse told him he’d set a new course record, the now still golfer got as excited as a block of clay.
A woman passed away of natural causes just as she hit the snooze button on her alarm clock. The next buzz nine minutes later failed to rouse her, and finally, dead, she got up already half an hour late to work. Cursing, she dressed, went out to scrape the snow from her car, got in and tried to start it. When it wouldn’t start, she slumped forward in the driver’s seat, cold as a mound of slush.
A male pedestrian died quickly when struck in the head by a brick tossed from a moving vehicle, but he gave chase to the car and screamed obscenities at the laughing teenage passengers for several blocks until all the blood drained from his body and he sat down on the curb a wasted husk, never more to move.
Don, ticket taker at Lollapalooza 2007, accepted a pair of admission tickets from a teen couple dead for hours from drug overdose. “My suspicions were aroused when neither of them blinked after I told them Coldplay had cancelled,” he said. “In fact, they didn’t show any emotion at all. I had security follow them in.” The deceased teens boogied until late in the evening, then strolled into the shower tent. Rigor mortis hit them under the nozzles, and they fell out like two sacks of hardening concrete.
A woman thrown through the windshield of her car lost her brain and was dead as a broom handle. Still she managed to accompany friends to cash in a lottery ticket worth five hundred dollars and shout “Yowsa!” before she collapsed like a rickety bridge.
A man sliced in half by a rocket went to a movie (top half) and took a scenic hike (bottom half) before he finally keeled over (both halves).
A man killed in a flash after driving a nail into a 100,000 volt wire near his home went to a bar and drank “one last cold one” before he sank to the barroom floor as rigid as a stuffed owl. He still owes the bartender for that beer.
Vera Hatfield of Springfield, Illinois died of starvation after playing video games for 5 days straight without eating, but continued to work her X-Box for an additional 72 hours before she dropped to the floor with some body parts already starting to rot.
A man trying to run across an expressway was struck by a semi as soon as he stepped off the shoulder. He died instantly but continued on, with several more vehicles buffeting him and rendering him almost unrecognizable, until at last he achieved the opposite side. There he gave a thumb’s up to no one in particular and fell over the guardrail into some tall weeds, where he slept the Big Sleep.
An airline pilot died of heart failure after narrowly missing a control tower, but managed to land his craft safely and bed a stewardess in a hotel room — both on “autopilot” — before turning blue as the sky and blank as a sheet.
A 65-year-old woman died of a stroke while bowling. She appeared to revive when a teammate administered smelling salts, but she was really dead, and she wouldn’t quit bowling until she achieved a new personal best score. “I knew I could do it!” she crowed when success came 30 minutes after her death. Then she crumpled over and lay face-up in the right-hand gutter, about as frisky as a broiled scrod.
Flight 712 crashed into the sea and all 86 passengers were killed in the blink of an eye. Nonetheless they all escaped the wrecked plane and, in their various states of dismemberment and drowning, swam to a nearby tropical island. They were “rescued” by a US Navy vessel two weeks later in advanced states of decomposition, but not before sharks had eaten a dozen of them and natives speared ten more.
30-year-old Todd Morse gave up the ghost choking on a hotdog at a Cincinnati Bengals game. But he refused to stop watching the game since the Bengals were actually leading at the half. When the team pulled further ahead in the second with no hope of being caught, he jumped into the aisle pumping his arms and sailed headfirst down a flight of concrete steps. The fall actually revived him somewhat, and he had a near death experience. He beheld soft white lights and heard a comforting voice urging him to rise up and savor his team’s victory. But he remained a goner and in two days was six feet under.
