I Thought I Was Dead Trivia Quiz

Answer: Mark Twain

Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Missouri, was a brilliant writer but not quite as skilled a businessman. His lecture tour of Europe was needed for a quick cash infusion to pay substantial debts incurred back home in Connecticut. Following widespread rumors that Twain was ill or even dead, the New York Journal instructed one of their reporters to figure out what was going on. The reporter, Frank Marshall White, contacted Twain and received a letter in reply:

"I can understand perfectly how the report of my illness got about; I have even heard on good authority that I was dead. James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration."

A later biographer mangled the quotation into "Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated"; this form is more widely known than the original. The plural "reports" is apt, though: in 1907 the New York Times wrongly reported him lost at sea! Twain responded to that one by writing a humor piece for the Times the next day.

Twain died in 1910 at the age of 74. His various works, including the novels "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," are still widely read.

Answer: U.S. President Ronald Reagan

On March 30, 1981, a 25-year-old man named John Hinckley tried to kill Ronald Reagan as the President was leaving a DC hotel where he had just given a speech. Hinckley fired six shots before being subdued by onlookers and security, injuring four people: Jim Brady, DC police officer Thomas Delahanty, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and the President. All of the injuries were serious, but Brady's proved to be the worst. Shot in the head, he sustained significant brain damage that affected his movement and speech for the rest of his life.

Brady (1940-2014) was the White House Press Secretary; although his injuries prevented him from doing the work, he officially held the job title until Reagan left office in January 1989. At the time of the shooting, there was a great deal of confusion among frantic security personnel, journalists and onlookers, and someone somewhere thought that Brady had died from his terrible head wound. The death was announced on all major US news networks, and then retracted; ABC anchor Frank Reynolds famously lost his cool at that point, shouting to his staff, "Let's get it nailed down ... somebody ... let's find out! Let's get it straight so we can report this thing accurately!" (Reynolds and Brady, it was later reported, were friends.)

Brady and his wife Sarah devoted the rest of their lives to gun control, with their most notable success being the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in the U.S. Congress in 1993.

Answer: Murder, for supposedly killing actors during filming

Released in 1980, "Cannibal Holocaust" pioneered the found-footage genre of horror, in which the story of an ill-fated team of filmmakers is told primarily through the video footage they managed to shoot before their demise. In this case, the filmmakers in the story meet grisly ends in the Amazon rainforest - and their own horrifying actions are slowly revealed.

After the first screenings in Italy, director Ruggero Deodato was promptly brought up on obscenity charges, but his legal troubles worsened due to rumors that several actors had actually been slain in camera. To increase the realism of the film, the actors in question had signed contracts to stay out of the media for a year, further enhancing the illusion of their deaths. Ultimately, Deodato had to release the actors who'd played the film crew from their contracts, so that they could prove their continued existence on an Italian talk show. He also testified in court as to the special effects they had used to simulate the gruesome death of a Ya̧nomamö character, since the Colombian actress was unable to travel to Italy. Ultimately this was enough to save him from murder charges, although he and others were convicted of obscenity and animal cruelty.

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The story goes that Coleridge asked the man whether he could see the paper for himself, and the man opined, "It was very extraordinary that Coleridge the poet should have hanged himself just after the success of his play; but he was always a strange mad fellow." Coleridge's response was perfect: "Indeed, sir, it is a most extraordinary thing that he should have hanged himself, be the subject of an inquest, and yet that he should at this moment be speaking to you."

The dead man had apparently committed suicide in Hyde Park, in London, and was misidentified as the poet because his shirt was marked "S. T. Coleridge." Exactly what happened was never discovered, but Coleridge himself thought the shirt must have been stolen from him some time before it wound up on the unfortunate man.

Coleridge, born in 1772, actually lived until 1834 after a long and torturous struggle with opium addiction.

Answer: Abe Vigoda

Abe Vigoda (1921-2016) starred in a number of Broadway productions before landing his biggest role on the silver screen: Corleone family capo Salvatore Tessio, whose betrayal crystallizes Michael's transformation into a Mafia don, in "The Godfather" (1972). On television, he was on the regular "Barney Miller" cast from 1975 to 1977 as cranky NYPD detective Phil Fish.

But in his later years, his most celebrated role was as the good-natured target of a long stream of death jokes. When a 1982 issue of "People" referred to him as "the late Abe Vigoda," he posed holding the magazine - while sitting in a coffin. After the mistake was repeated on the television news in New Jersey, he gamely played it for laughs, appearing on late-night comedy shows and submitting to celebrity roasts. By the early 2000s, the joke had reached such epic proportions that a website and a Firefox browser extension were launched solely to report whether Vigoda was alive or dead. His actual death, from natural causes at age 94, put an end to a lot of fun.

Answer: It was treason to speculate about the death of the Emperor's heir

Drusus Julius Caesar, born in 14 BC, was the son of the Emperor Tiberius and the sole heir to the Roman Empire following the death of his cousin and adopted brother Germanicus in 19 AD. The hapless 40-year-old poet, Priscus, had written a eulogy for Germanicus that was very well received - to the point of a monetary reward from the Emperor. When Drusus became ill, Priscus got an early start writing the eulogy, in hopes of similar success. He got a head start on reading it, too, to a small audience at a private home.

That turned out to be a fatal mistake: as in many absolute monarchies, it was very dangerous to speculate about, or anticipate, deaths in the line of succession. An informer reported Driscus; almost all his audience gave evidence against him; and he was soon tried in the Senate. Despite a spirited defense by Marcus Lepidus, who argued for exile partly based on Priscus's lack of artistic merit ("His productions are as empty and ephemeral as they are replete with folly," Lepidus said, as reported by Tacitus), Priscus was sentenced to death and executed almost immediately afterward.

Drusus Julius Caesar recovered from that illness, though he still died two years later without ever becoming Emperor. His ultimate fate could have been due to natural causes, or it could have been murder via poison; at this late date, the case must be considered quite cold.

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway (1899-1961), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature later in 1954, had been touring Africa with his fourth wife, Mary. They were taking a sightseeing flight over what is now Uganda when the pilot, faced with a flock of large ibises, crashed the plane while trying to make an emergency landing. The next day, the injured Hemingways boarded another plane to get to Entebbe and medical care - and that plane crashed on takeoff. When they finally arrived in Entebbe - by car this time! - Hemingway was brash and confident with the reporters who had gathered to report on his demise. "My luck," he said, "she is running very good."

The crashes affected him, though. His friend and later biographer, A. E. Hotchner, claimed that Hemingway liked to review his obituaries with a glass of champagne in hand. Physically, his injuries - including a fractured skull and liver and kidney damage - brought pain for the rest of his life.

Answer: P. T. Barnum

Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891) was honest about his profession: "I am a showman," he said, "... and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me." He founded a circus, he ran a museum of curiosities, he peddled hoaxes like the Feejee Mermaid and the Cardiff Giant, but his career returned again and again to the display of unusual people. Sometimes those displays were of great mutual benefit, as in his management of Swedish singer Jenny Lind's American tour. Sometimes the morals were murky, as when he encouraged a very young child with dwarfism, Charles Stratton, to smoke cigars and drink wine to further the illusion of "General Tom Thumb." And sometimes he was downright cruel. At the beginning of Barnum's career, he made his name by purchasing the elderly slave woman Joice Heth, passing her off as George Washington's nursemaid, and charging money to see her. When the poor woman died, Barnum sold tickets to her autopsy.

Barnum knew that he was dying of a stroke in the spring of 1891, and begged his journalist contacts to publish his obituary early so that he could read it. The New York Evening Sun obliged, printing the obituary on its front page under the headline "Great and Only Barnum - He Wanted to Read His Obituary - Here It Is." Satisfied, Barnum died two weeks later.

Answer: Paul McCartney of the Beatles

Paul McCartney, born in 1942, was the bass guitarist for the unbelievably popular rock group The Beatles, as well as one of the primary singers and songwriters. In 1969, as The Beatles were in the process of breaking up, rumors started to fly that McCartney had died in a car crash in November 1966. The group was no longer touring, and McCartney was taking a break from the strains of the band and the public eye, spending most of his time on his farm with his family - an isolation which strengthened the urban legend.

Conspiracy theorists played the song "Revolution 9" backward and heard something that sounded like "Turn me on, dead man" - at least, it did if you were primed for it. They looked at the famous album cover for "Abbey Road" (1969), with the four band members striding across a crosswalk, and interpreted it as a funeral procession with Paul in the starring role. The swirling rumors were finally squelched by an interview (with pictures!) in "LIFE" magazine in November of that year, but the urban legend lives on as a cultural touchstone. In 1993, McCartney released an album of live performances entitled, cleverly, "Paul Is Live."

Answer: Alfred Nobel

At least one newspaper, Le Figaro, made this mistake when Alfred Nobel's brother Ludvig died in 1888; the published death notice, in French, described Alfred as "a man who cannot very easily pass for a benefactor of humanity." No textual copy of the "merchant of death" obituary has been located, however, and it may be an embellishment. We also can't know Alfred's real motives for writing his will the way he did, since he did not discuss them with others at the time. But, whatever his motivation, his decision to create the Nobel Prizes has certainly changed the way he is remembered, gradually shifting his reputation toward being a benefactor of humanity.

In physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace (as well as in economics, where the prize was created about 70 years after his death), the Nobel name is a badge of honor and glory.