They Died on Halloween Trivia Quiz

Answer: peritonitis (ruptured appendix)

Harry Houdini was born Eric Weisz in 1874 in Budapest. He made a name for himself performing magic and escape acts on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit after being "discovered" by manager Martin Beck. His most famous escape was from the Chinese Water Torture Cell, in which he was chained and hung upside-down in water in a glass tank. He also performed stunts such as being buried alive, and he liked to show how tightening his abs could protect him from injury when punched. After his beloved mother's death, he sought refuge from mediums who claimed to contact the dead -- an enormous craze in the early 20th century -- but as a magician he recognized their trickery, and spent the 1920s debunking spiritualists. One day his appendix burst, and he delayed seeking medical treatment because he attributed the pain to a blow he received as part of a belly-strike challenge. (Most likely the blow did not cause the appendicitis but rather masked the pain.) He performed despite great pain, and eventually weak and feverish, he was rushed to the hospital, where the surgeon removed his appendix. But in the days before antibiotics, there was nothing to be done, and the great Houdini succumbed to peritonitis on Halloween 1924.

As part his anti-spiritualist efforts, Houdini had left a coded message with his wife, which she was to listen for in séances held annually on Halloween for the next ten years. Houdini, unable to escape death, alas, never appeared, and eventually his widow halted the gatherings.

Answer: assassination

The daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi was born in 1917 in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh while India was still under British dominion. Proving herself to be a strong leader in her own right, she served as prime minister 1966-1977 and 1980-1984. During her second term, a Sikh uprising overtook India.

In retaliation, in 1983 Gandhi ordered 70,000 troops upon a Sikh gathering inside the Golden Temple in Punjab, where they slaughtered 450 people. Gandhi's bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, were Sikh themselves, and in the following year they returned her massacre with murder, and shot 31 bullets into the prime minister on her way to an interview with actor Peter Ustinov.

She died on October 31, 1984.

Afterward, thousands of Sikhs died and millions more uprooted in anti-Sikh riots. Gandhi's successor, Rajiv Gandhi noted, "When a big tree falls, the earth shakes."

Answer: "apoplexy" (stroke)

Born in 1814 in Hadley, Massachusetts, Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker was known to be aggressive in spirit and strategy. He served in the Seminole Wars, the Mexican-American War, and the U.S. Civil War, in which he led the initial Union attacks at the Battle of Antietam. Yet his pugnacity evaporated at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, which ended in his retreat. Within two months of that debacle, President Abraham Lincoln removed Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

He redeemed himself, however, at the battles of Lookout Mountain and Chattanooga and in the Atlanta Campaign.

After the Civil War, Hooker was forced to retire on 15 October 1868 after suffering a stroke (called 'apoplexy' in the 19th century) that left him partially paralyzed.

He lingered for another eleven years and died at Garden City, NY on 31 October 1879.

Answer: multiple drug intoxication

River Jude Bottom was born in 1970 in Madras, Oregon. He was the older brother of Joaquin, Rain, Summer, and Liberty, all of whom made a name in entertainment as well. His family joined a cult called the Children of God in 1973, and they went to Venezuela as missionaries and fruit-pickers. Eventually they tired of the life and changed their surname to Phoenix to symbolize their "rebirth". River began doing commercials as a young boy, but he became a Hollywood name when he starred in "Stand by Me" (1986), for which he won a Jackie Coogan award.

He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for "Running on Empty" (1988) and received accolades for "My Own Private Idaho" (1991). He struggled with drug addiction for many years, and he overdosed, collapsed, and died outside the Viper Room in Hollywood in 1993 at the tender age of 23.

Answer: lung cancer

Natalie Zane Moore was born in 1932 in Dayton, Ohio. After marrying Samuel Fisher Babbitt she became an acclaimed writer and illustrator of children's books. "Knee-Knock Rise" won a Newbery Honor in 1971. Her best-known work is "Tuck Everlasting" (1975), a children's fantasy that explores immortality and its consequences, which received multiple prizes including a Notable Book award from the American Library Association. Disney adapted the long-popular novel it into a film in 2002 starring William Hurt, Sissy Spacek, and Ben Kingsley.

Not immortal as her creations, she was diagnosed with lung cancer rather late into the progression of the disease and succumbed on October 31, 2016.

Answer: old age, perhaps

Louis "Studs" Terkel was born in 1912 in New York, but moved at age eight to Chicago, where he grew up. His parents ran a rooming house that was also a meeting place for various sorts. Although he earned a law degree, he pursued a career in the performing arts.

In 1934, he joined the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration and began his work on radio. In 1952, "The Studs Terkel Program" first aired on WFMT in Chicago. The one-hour weekly program made a remarkable 45-year run by the time it ended in 1997, during which he interviewed the likes of Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Martin Luther King, Leonard Bernstein, and Bob Dylan. He was a distinguished scholar-in-residence at the Chicago History Museum, and he was well-known for his work in oral histories of ordinary Americans. His books included "'The Good War': An Oral History of World War Two" (1945), which won a Pulitzer, and "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression", for which he interviewed Okies, convicts, and millionaires alike.

In 2006, Terkel and other plaintiffs sued telecom giant AT&T to stop them from submitting customer telephone records to the National Security Agency (NSA) without a subpoena. (The suit was dismissed). He passed away in his home in Chicago on October 31, 2008 at the ripe old age of 96. (No cause of death was released.)

Answer: grief, apparently

Eleanor of England was born in 1161 (or thereabouts), the second daughter of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was also sister to Queen Joan of Scotland and to two future kings of England, Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland, and in 1170 she became consort to King Alfonso VIII of Castile. The younger Eleanor was as strong and effective as her mother and had direct control of many lands, towns, and castles throughout the kingdom of Castile. Indeed, she was almost as powerful as her husband. She supported many religious institutions a shrine to St. Thomas Becket and the Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas (and its hospital). So devoted to her husband was she that when King Alfonso died, she was so grief-stricken that she sent her daughter to preside over the burial, and then joined her late husband less than a month later, on October 31, 1214.

This Eleanor should not be confused with her daughter, Eleanor of Castile (c.1200-1244) who died a nun following an annulled marriage, nor with the Eleanor of Castile (1241-1290) who married Edward I ("Longshanks") of England and bore Edward II.

Answer: multiple strokes after a dog bite

Maximilian Goldmann was born in 1873 in Baden (near Vienna), Lower Austria (Niederösterreich), Austria-Hungary to a Jewish merchant and his wife. In 1890 he took the pseudonym Reinhardt, possibly after a character in a novella he admired. As director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and elsewhere, he employed innovative staging techniques and design, and he pioneered the idea of a director as creative artist.

He also founded the annual Salzburg Festival in 1920, which still runs in the 21st century.

In the USA, he directed a film adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935) with Olivia de Haviland, Mickey Rooney, James Cagney, Dick Powell, and many other Hollywood stars. He fled the Nazi Anschluss of 1938 to escape persecution, but he never found the same kind of success in America that he'd had in Europe.

He was bitten by a dog, suffered multiple strokes that deprived him of speech, and died October 31, 1943, in New York City.

Answer: starvation

George Washington De Long was born in 1844 in New York City. In 1879, Lt. Commander De Long sailed from San Francisco on the USS Jeannette to seek a passage to the North Pole via the Bering Strait, in the misguided belief that Wrangel Island was large landmass whose coastline could be followed to their destination through a supposed Polar Open Sea.

Instead, the Jeannette became trapped in the ice in Chuckchi Sea, just northeast of Wrangel Island. She drifted for nearly two years, then sank in June 1881. De Long and his crew traveled in lifeboats to Siberia. One was lost; De Long's reached land near Yakutia; and a third led by chief engineer George Melville reached the delta of the Lena River. Aside from two men he had sent ahead for help, De Long and the rest of his crew, twenty in all, had perished by October 31, their emaciated bodies discovered by Melville months later.

Answer: murdered by male prostitutes

José Ramón Gil Samaniego was born in 1899 in Durango City, Mexico. Taking the stage name Ramon Navarro, he began working in film in 1917, with a breakout role in "Scaramouche" (1923). He starred in the silent version of "Ben-Hur" (1925), considered his finest work, with Francis X. Bushman as his Roman nemesis.

When talkies arrived, he did quite well in "Mata Hari" (1931) with Greta Garbo. He was promoted as a Latin lover and the new Rudolph Valentino, but he had a secret, devastating for the time: he was homosexual. Raised Catholic, he felt so conflicted with guilt that he turned to heavy drinking.

He frequently consorted with prostitutes, and on 31 October 1968, two brothers called and offered their services. They entered his home and proceeded to torture him to learn the whereabouts of money they believed he had hidden. From beatings so severe, Navarro choked on his own blood, and died.

The brothers departed with $20 taken from Navarro's bathrobe pocket.