Jeremiah Clarke c. 1674 – 1 December 1707
“A violent and hopeless passion for a very beautiful lady of a rank superior to his own.” ~ Jeremiah Clarke
So I was not sure if this was going to turn into a series of blog posts or if it was going to be deemed necessary to have its own page or whatever, but #01 was written a year and a half ago. So I don’t know.
Nonetheless, this death may not be odd or unusual. But rather it is on how it became.
Jeremiah Clarke was an English Baroque composer and organist in the late 17th Century. He is best known for his composition work of Trumpet Voluntary – or the Prince of Denmark’s March.
I honestly looked and researched for hours about him, but there’s not a lot of information that I could find.
Then his death caught my attention.
Clarke decided that he was going to commit suicide. But he had not made up his mind on how he was going to do it and what method he was going to use. So he left the ending of his life in the hands of fate by way of flipping a coin. The choices were either to drown or to hang himself.
And here’s where the odd comes in………..
The story goes that the coin that Clarke tossed into the air landed on the ground, got stuck in the mud on its side, thus neither landing on one face of the coin or the other. The coin had failed to give him his fate. So rather instead of taking it as a sign and continuing to live and compose, he shot himself instead.
Damn.
Do you know of any strange but true stories of death? Let me know in the comments.
Dambreaker 