Given that people spend around 92 days of their life sitting on the toilet, the law of probability dictates that some unfortunate souls are also going to die there. And while fame and fortune can solve a lot of life’s problems, meeting your maker on the toilet isn’t one of them. Here are six notable people throughout history who shuffled off their mortal coil while on the porcelain throne.
Elvis Presley
As well as being world-famous as the “King of Rock and Roll,” Elvis Presley is also the first person who usually springs to mind when it comes to toilet deaths.
On August 16, 1977, the 42-year-old musician was using the bathroom at his Graceland mansion when he collapsed. He was found by his fiancée Ginger Alden and rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Elvis’s official cause of death was a heart attack, but the toxicology report suggested something different: he had 10 different drugs in his system at the time of his death, including high levels of codeine (which he also happened to be allergic to).
But Elvis’s personal doctor, George C. Nichopoulos, didn’t believe that a drug overdose could be the culprit. If it had been then, in his words, Elvis “would have slipped into an increasing state of slumber. He would have pulled up his pajama bottoms and crawled to the door to seek help. It takes hours to die from drugs.”
To this day, there’s no agreement about what killed the King. And there are even some people who think that he didn’t die at all—with sightings of Elvis lookalikes fueling the conspiracy theory that he faked his death and is actually living in hiding somewhere.
Duke Jing of Jin
Dying while you happen to be using the toilet is one thing, but dying because of a toilet is another thing entirely. Duke Jing of Jin, a state in ancient China, abdicated in 581 BCE after falling ill and he suffered a very grim death soon afterwards. According to the ancient history book Zuo Zhuan, Jing consulted a shaman after dreaming of a demon and she foretold his imminent death, saying, “you will not taste the new wheat.”
Jing was unexpectedly still alive when the crop was harvested, so he had the shaman killed for being wrong. But just before he took a bite of the wheat, he felt the urge to relieve himself. He went to the latrine, accidentally fell in, and drowned in the pit of feces and urine. Turns out the shaman was right after all.
Judy Garland
Judy Garland rose to fame at just 17 years old thanks to playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939). But Garland’s acting career also led to drug addiction, which eventually resulted in her death.
She told biographer Paul Donnelley that production studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had her and her frequent co-star Mickey Rooney “working days and nights on end. They’d give us pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they’d take us to the studio hospital and knock us out with sleeping pills.”
On June 22, 1969—when Garland was 47 years old—her husband, Mickey Deans, broke down the bathroom door of their London apartment to find her dead on the toilet. She was slumped over, with her head still resting in her hands. She had overdosed on barbiturates—then a commonly prescribed sleeping pill—but the coroner declared that it was “incautious” and “accidental,” rather than an attempt to kill herself.
Godfrey the Hunchback
Political assassinations weren’t uncommon during the medieval period, but Godfrey IV, Duke of Lower Lorraine—known as Godfrey the Hunchback—was murdered in a particularly unusual and unpleasant way. Although a few of the details are debated—some reports say the attack took place in Antwerp, while others say it was along the coast of The Netherlands—the main circumstances of his death are agreed upon.
The earliest account of the assassination, written by Lambert of Hersfeld just a couple of years after it took place, has it that Godfrey excused himself “because of a natural need” (i.e. he needed to use the toilet) [PDF]. At this time, toilets were often built into a protruding outer wall so that human waste could fall directly into a moat, river, or latrine below. Godfrey’s assassin used this architecture to their advantage, positioning themselves directly under the privy of his victim’s room. When Godfrey went to use the toilet, the assassin stabbed him up the backside with a spear.
The injury didn’t kill Godfrey immediately and he struggled on for around a week before finally succumbing to the wound where the sun don’t shine on February 26, 1076.
Lenny Bruce
Although Lenny Bruce’s vulgar style of comedy wouldn’t really raise eyebrows today, back in the ’60s he was arrested four times for obscenity (which in those days amounted to saying the word “c**ksucker”). The comedian had been blacklisted by many clubs as a consequence and the resulting stress served to worsen his drug addiction.
On August 3, 1966, police arrived at Bruce’s home in Hollywood to find him dead on the bathroom floor after accidentally overdosing on morphine. The friend who found him had pulled his pants back up because he had been on the toilet at the time, but the police apparently wanted a more lurid photo of the tragic scene and so they stripped him and placed syringes near his body.
Music producer Phil Spector didn’t want the photos of his dearly departed friend to be published, so he bought the negatives, but a few photos got out anyway.
George II
King George II ruled Great Britain and Ireland for 33 years before the Grim Reaper came to collect. On October 25, 1760, the 76-year-old woke up in Kensington Palace, drank a hot chocolate, and then went use the close stool (a portable toilet comprised of a chair or box with a chamber pot inside of it). Soon afterwards, his valet heard a loud noise and when he went to investigate he found the King unresponsive on the floor.
The official autopsy reported that he had died of an aortic dissection, which is a tear or rupture in the body’s main artery. But modern doctors, having read the autopsy report, think that the real culprit might have been coronary artery disease, which wasn’t known to medical science back in 1760.
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