Pathologist on the Worst and Most Painful Ways to Die

"Death has always fascinated humans, as far back as recorded history we have temples and gods in honour of death and dying," said forensic pathologist Charmaine van Wyk. "I have no idea why this is, but I believe it's because we all have to go through it and know nothing about it.

"So we conjure up heaven and hell to try and make the unknown more known, it's comforting to think we know what is going to happen when we die."

Understanding the worst way to die is an ongoing obsession online. There are over 620 million results for "worst way to die" on Google. TikTok has countless videos of people sharing stories about horrible deaths.

Posts on social platforms like Reddit discussing the most gruesome and painful ways to die regularly hit viral levels. One post from 2019 had over 11,000 comments from people suggesting the worst ways to go.

Stories include a man who slipped into a "boiling, acidic geyser" in Yellowstone to save his dog, a girl who got her hair caught in a lathe, and a man cut in half by a snapped cable.

One user referred to the case of to John Jones, a caver who became stuck in a cave tunnel in 2009. According to a report by Deseret News, he was trapped upside down in Utah's Nutty Putty Cave for 28 hours before dying from cardiac arrest.

The cave was sealed afterwards using explosives to prevent further accidents, leaving Jones's body entombed within.

But What Are Actually the Worst and Most Painful Ways To Die?

Van Wyk, a forensic pathologist at Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University in South Africa, told Newsweek that it would be anything in which pain receptors and consciousness stay intact the longest. "Cases such as self-immolation or 'necklacing'—where a petrol-soaked tire is placed around a victim and set alight—will be extremely painful because you know that that individual is fully conscious and gas inhalation would not decrease the level of consciousness.

"This will be painful until you reach third-degree burns after which the nerve endings in the skin will be injured," she said.

Van Wyk said that medieval torture would also be extremely painful. "They were engineered to keep you alive and conscious as long as possible and as such inflict the max amount of pain—imagine slowly being impaled with the cause of death most likely hypovolaemic shock once enough internal injuries are inflicted and you can bleed to death in peace.

"Or in the case of crucifixion where your body weight will pull on your inflicted injuries and you slowly demise due to positional asphyxia—you will not be able to breathe correctly because of the position your body is impeding on your respiratory muscles."

YouTube mortician Caitlin Doughty has also weighed in on the question. In one video, she said the most horrific death she had learned about was called scaphism, which was used as a form of torture in ancient Persia. In it a person would be slowly eaten alive by insects, eventually dying from "dehydration, shock and delirium," she said.

In the video, Doughty said she had asked forensic pathologist Judy Melinek what the worst thing she had ever seen was. Her response was the story of a man who fell down a manhole with a broken water main nearby, which had resulted in a pool of boiling water at the bottom. The man was stuck for hours. "His organs literally cooked as he had been boiled alive," Doughty said.

Why Are We So Obsessed With Painful Deaths?

The reason for our morbid curiosity about these gruesome stories is likely because of our inherent enjoyment of novelty, Glenn Sparks, a media professor at Purdue University and expert in the appeal of media violence, told Newsweek.

This is also the reason we enjoy watching horror movies or going to see grim museum exhibits: it allows us to experience danger in the safest way possible.

"Seeing things that are different from what we usually see is often pleasant just because we're seeing something that's different from the ordinary things we see everyday," Sparks said.

"That fascination can be experienced as a sense of excitement and even provide a spike in adrenaline that many people find pleasurable. But that excitement doesn't necessarily mean that the horrific aspects of the novelty are what people find to be pleasant."

Sparks said it is not that humans are necessarily drawn to death, but more that it is something that most people rarely encounter.

"When driving down the highway, people tend to slow down at the scene of a gory accident not because they enjoy the sight of people bleeding on the pavement, but because the accident scene stands out as something we don't usually see," he said. "The novelty is the thing that draws our attention."