In this month of all things gruesome, here are some of the more memorable and outrageous ways people have died.

• Italian stag party attendants were disappointed when a stripper failed to pop out of a giant cake. 23-year-old Gina was later found dead inside the cake, suffocating after being in the sealed environment for over an hour.
• A Nebraska woman was shot in the head after jumping out of the closet and yelling "Boo!" to surprise her boyfriend. He mistook her for a burglar and pulled out his Glock. The couple had announced their engagement two days earlier.
• A young Arab man was camping on a mountaintop in South Africa when he took a cell phone call. The young man was killed when his phone was struck by lightning.
• King and General Attila the Hun died not on the battlefield but in his own bed on his wedding night. After an evening of partying and heavy drinking, Attila the Hun passed out, suffered a massive nose bleed and drowned in his own blood.
• A military Sergeant killed his cheating wife by filling her car with enough explosives to leave no trace of her or the car and leave a crater 55 metres deep and half a kilometre of road missing. People 15 kilometres away were able to see the explosion.
• French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully was leading an orchestra when he dropped the large conducting stick on his foot. The wound led to fatal blood poisoning when gangrene set in.
• Circus performer Vlad Cazacu was in the midst of a fire-eating stunt when he was blown into pieces. At the beginning of his act, Cazacu had shot a flammable liquid from his mouth to make a torch. Fellow performers guess he swallowed some of the liquid and when he burped it up, it triggered an explosion.
• Soul singer Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his own father.
• In Vietnam, a woman distraught over the death of her husband was given drugs by his children to calm her down. She was given too many drugs and died of an overdose. A joint funeral was planned for the couple but the truck transporting the coffins lost control and plowed through the funeral procession, killing a man and injuring six others.
• Dramatist and Post Sir W. S. Gilbert died of a heart attack after saving a woman from drowning.
• A 27-year-old man was clubbed to death by his landlord with a toilet seat after not paying rent for eight years.
• A Detroit man accidentally dropped his car keys into a sewer grate. After maneuvering headfirst into the 18-inch wide grate, he was unable to get out and drowned when steady rainfall raised the water level in the sewer.
• A man in Wales died after colliding with a school bus while herding cattle on his ATV. Not unusual except the man had appeared the night before on a local television show discussing the dangers of that stretch of road and sharing his belief that it was only a matter of time until there would be a fatal accident on it.
• A Russian gangster killed a bartender when he removed his glass of cola too soon from the bar. The gangster became irate and forced the bartender to drink 27 litres of cola, essentially drowning him.

Makes one wonder if their own death will make for such fascinating lore.