Everybody’s gotta go sometime. (Warning: these are pretty grim.)
OWEN HART
While the world is widely aware that (spoiler alert) professional wrestling is heavily staged, there’s still considerable opportunity for its participants to be injured or even killed, but sometimes the damage has nothing to do with what moves take place in the ring. On May 23, 1999, during a pay-per-view event called Over the Edge, the Alberta-born Hart was latched into a harness and being lowered by grapple line from the rafters of Kansas City’s Kemper Arena into the ring when he accidentally trigged the quick-release mechanism on the harness, falling 78 feet and landing chest-first on the top rope of the ring.
TV viewers were spared the sight of Hart’s fall, as a pre-match film was airing at the time, and upon returning to the arena, the camera focused on the audience while Hart received medical attention, but announcer Jim Ross clarified the situation and repeatedly reiterated that the events which were unfolding weren’t part of a World Wrestling Federation “storyline.”
Although he was quickly moved to Kansas City’s Truman Medical Center, Hart died as a result of his injuries. The WWF actually continued airing the rest of the program—Hart’s death was announced to viewers but not to those in the arena.
TAYLOR MITCHELL
Although only 19 years old, Halifax-born singer Taylor Mitchell seemed to be well on her way to a successful career, having just earned a Canadian Folk Music Award nomination for Young Performer of the Year. While on an afternoon hike in 2009 on the Skyline Trail in Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Mitchell was attacked by a pack of three coyotes. The animals were feeding on her, when additional hikers happened upon the scene and scared the animals away. Although she was transported to a hospital by emergency crews and subsequently airlifted to Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, she succumbed to her injuries that night.
A Toronto design studio stuck a car in a pothole to promote its exciting pothole app.
In an interview with the CBC, retired Department of Natural Resources biologist Bob Bancroft observed, “In situations like a national park [where] usually there’s no hunting and no trapping allowed, [coyotes] can get used to a human presence and not have much fear of any retribution. They may have snuck up on her and knocked her over before she even knew what happened. They may have just capitalized on a situation where a young person was acting vulnerable and very frightened by their presence.” Still, such occurrences are so rare that the attack on Mitchell made her the first adult on record to have ever been fatally attacked by coyotes.
GARRY HOY
A co-worker at Garry Hoy’s lawfirm described Hoy as “one of the brighter lights at the firm, just a super nice guy, a very generous fellow,” he earned instant immortality—albeit in a very unfortunate fashion—due to the very unfortunate way in which he met his death in 1993. In order to demonstrate to the firm’s articling students the unbreakable nature of the office windows in the Toronto-Dominion Centre, Hoy decided to hurl himself at the glass. The first time he did it, he bounced off. The second time he did it, he most decidedly did not. When Hoy hit the glass, the window frame gave way, sending him hurtling out of the 24th story window and falling to his death. At the time, a Toronto Star article about the incident featured a quote from a Toronto Metro police spokesperson describing Hoy’s demise as being treated as a “death by misadventure,” with the officer noting that “the frame and blinds are still there.”
Regrettably, if not entirely unsurprisingly, Hoy’s death made its way into an episode of Mythbusters, receiving a shout-out of sorts during a scene in the sitcom Billable Hours, and earning the spotlight on Spike TV’s 1000 Ways to Die. None of this pop culture success likely served as consolation to Hoy’s firm, Holden Day Wilson, which closed in 1996 in part because it never successfully recovered from the notoriety surrounding Mr. Hoy’s death.
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“If you’re not annoying somebody, you’re not really alive.”
—Margaret Atwood
Bonar Law is the only Canadian to serve as prime minister of the U.K.