7 of History’s Most Bizarre Deaths Involving Elephants

If there’s an elephant in the room, you need to address it. If there’s a deceased elephant in the room, you need to address that even more urgently, because it’s likely something very strange just happened.

Elephants may die on their own out in the wild unremarkably all the time, but when we look at the members of the species who achieved great fame, we see a series of hard-to-believe deaths. Here are eight instances throughout history.

The Assassination of Old Bet
Tusko’s Fatal LSD Trip
Pope Leo and the Golden Enema
When Norma Jean Died, Her Circus Just Took Off
The Elephant Who Lived Too Well
The Jumbo Train Crash
Mourning Mother

The Assassination of Old Bet

“Old Bet” was the name of an Indian elephant who was one of the first elephants to come to America. A farmer, Hachaliah Bailey, bought her as a circus animal and took her on tour along the East Coast, showing her off to paying customers. Then on July 24, 1816, a second farmer lay in wait along her scheduled route, then fired his musket at her, killing her.

Authorities arrested this killer farmer, named Daniel Davis Jr., and they charged him with trespassing, as the legal code at the time left unclear the exact other offense he’d committed. Then they released him without trying him.

As a result, the public never did learn for sure why he did what he did. We do know Davis was in financial trouble, thanks in part to that year’s global climate disaster set off by an Indonesian volcano. It’s possible that he envied Bailey’s success in pivoting from farming and decided to put an end to it.

He ended Old Bet’s life but not Bailey’s success. Bailey continued to make money, now from displaying Old Bet’s bones.

Tusko’s Fatal LSD Trip

In the 1960s, the CIA was investigating the effects of LSD on the human mind. One Oklahoma scientist on this team, Louis West, went off on his own and tried investigating the effects of LSD on the elephant mind.

He had a special reason for choosing elephants. Bull elephants enter a unique aggressive state known as musth, in which their testosterone levels rise to 60 times their normal levels. West predicted that LSD might trigger musth in elephants, and in 1962, he tested this by administering the drug to a three-ton zoo elephant named Tusko.

Tusko weighed about 40 times what a human does. But rather than multiply the normal human dose of LSD by 40, West multiplied it by 3,000 and shot the result into Tusko’s rear. The elephant did not enter musth. Instead, he quickly keeled over and started defecating.

He may have recovered, but if the LSD didn’t kill him, the drugs West injected next to counter the LSD did. And so ended what otherwise was surely an extremely promising line of scientific inquiry.

Pope Leo and the Golden Enema

Our next elephant also had some fecal issues, but this one’s issue was that he couldn’t defecate. Hanno the elephant suffered from constipation, earning a lot of sympathy from his owner, who happened to be the pope.

Pope Leo X received Hanno as a gift from Portugal in 1514. The elephant spent two happy years in Rome, living in his own custom-built house and periodically parading through the city, until the constipation presented a serious problem. Papal doctors offered a serious solution: a laxative containing gold, delivered rectally. Apparently, this preparation worked on humans. Hanno fared less well and quickly died. Leo entombed him within the Vatican itself.

Records at the time documented all this, but people in the centuries that followed forgot the story. So, when workers 450 years later stumbled on Hanno’s skeleton while doing renovations, it came as a surprise, and they weren’t sure what they were looking at. They thought they’d found a dinosaur.

When Norma Jean Died, Her Circus Just Took Off

Building a papal mausoleum for a dead elephant might sound extravagant, but it’s more responsible than the opposite extreme. Consider what happened to one circus elephant in Oquawka, Illinois.

In 1972, a visiting circus chained Norma Jean the elephant to a tree in the village park. Lightning struck the tree, and electricity shot through the chain and electrocuted her. The circus now pulled up stakes and left, leaving behind no clues for the town of 1,000 residents to deal with the 6,000-pound corpse.

Locals dug a hole 12 feet deep with a backhoe right next to where the body lay and made a grave. Five years later, someone raised $700 ($4,000 in today’s money) to erect a monument. It may have been an inconvenience, but it remains one of the most exciting things to ever happen in Oquawka, Illinois.

The Elephant Who Lived Too Well

The Tower of London used to display a menagerie of animals. People back then surely found the exotic animals even more exotic than we would today. No one was precisely sure of the species of the two beasts described as “leopards” (they were probably lions), and as for the elephant sent by the King of France in 1255, that was the first elephant to come to Britain in over a thousand years.

King Henry III allocated a large budget for taking care of the elephant, but an expensive diet is not the same as a good one. Rather than giving the elephant water, its keepers gave it a gallon of wine a day, quickly killing it.

They buried the unnamed elephant at the Tower itself. A couple of years later, however, King Henry figured the beast deserved more and had the bones dug up again so they could now be laid to rest in the sacristy at Westminster Abbey.

The Jumbo Train Crash

One of the most famous elephants in history was Jumbo, the circus elephant belonging to P.T. Barnum. Besides inspiring Disney’s Dumbo, Jumbo is the sole reason that we have the word “jumbo” today for referring to things that are big.

Jumbo met his end on September 15, 1885, when a freight train fatally mowed him down. The way P.T. Barnum told the story, the train was going to hit Tom Thumb, a smaller elephant (not to be confused with the 2-foot-tall human circus performer of the same name). Jumbo saw the approaching threat and stepped in, saving Tom’s life. That story is almost certainly not true, and Barnum just told it as part of his job as a showman.

The actual story, however, that a train hit Jumbo without him managing to step out of the way, is still pretty bizarre. It’s enough that people speculated that Barnum staged the entire thing, figuring Jumbo was going to die soon, one way or another, and might as well go out with a bang.

In 2018, long after his death, researchers analyzed Jumbo’s preserved remains to see signs of any diseases that proved his days had been numbered. They didn’t find the signs they sought exactly, but they did find that he’d died with the weathered joints of an animal twice his age.

They also found that the train collision didn’t fracture any of his bones. He died of internal organ injuries thanks to the crash, but those mighty elephant bones had stood up to the impact just fine.

Mourning Mother

We said earlier that elephants die in the wild unremarkably every day, but we want to talk about one of these deaths because of what came after.

Scientists in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park were recording the calls of elephants for an experiment, in which they planned to broadcast these calls to see which elephants recognized them. Then, early in 1996, one of these elephants died. This presented the scientists with an opportunity they hadn’t anticipated. They could now see if elephants recognized a dead family member.

Three months after the elephant’s death, family members (and only family members) tried responding to the recorded calls with calls of their own. A follow-up revealed that they still did this two years after the elephant’s death and tried getting close to the loudspeaker that broadcast the calls.

Some might argue that we should never do anything like this again.