11 candles are lit tonight.
Anyone can make a page for anyone. Readers work out the cause of death together. The family has the last word.
Still open
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
A 35-year-old died in two weeks of fever and swelling, with no autopsy, and told his wife he thought he'd been poisoned. The world's most famous musician has had 150 proposed causes of death. Which one is it?
Leading theory: a strep infection that reached his kidneys, during a Vienna epidemic · 46 of 52 find it likely
Napoleon Bonaparte
Seven doctors watched the autopsy and saw stomach cancer. His hair is full of arsenic. His father died of the same cancer. His wallpaper was poison. Was he killed, or did he die?
Leading theory: stomach cancer, exactly as the autopsy said · 48 of 55 find it likely
Pope John Paul I
A pope died alone on his 33rd night, the Vatican lied about who found him and what he was holding, embalmed him within hours, and refused an autopsy. Heart attack, or something else?
Leading theory: a heart attack in a frail man who ignored chest pain the night before · 42 of 51 find it likely
Jimi Hendrix
He took nine sleeping pills that weren't his, in a flat with one other person, and the coroner couldn't say whether it was an accident. The witness changed her story for 25 years. What happened in that room?
Leading theory: an accidental overdose: he took far too many of an unusually strong pill to get to sleep · 40 of 49 find it likely
Brittany Murphy
A 32-year-old died of pneumonia and anemia in a house in Los Angeles, and five months later her husband died of the same thing in the same house. The coroner says coincidence. Her mother says mold. Her father said poison. What actually happened to her?
Leading theory: pneumonia she treated at home, in a body that had no reserves left · 38 of 45 find it likely
Cass Elliot
Everyone 'knows' she choked on a ham sandwich. The autopsy found no food in her airway. What actually killed a 32-year-old the morning after the best two weeks of her career?
Leading theory: years of crash dieting wrecked her heart, and it stopped in her sleep · 41 of 46 find it likely
Edgar Allan Poe
He vanished for six days, turned up in someone else's clothes outside a polling place on Election Day, and died four days later saying a name nobody knew. What happened to him?
Leading theory: he was 'cooped': kidnapped by an election gang, drugged and beaten, and made to vote in borrowed clothes · 37 of 47 find it likely
Jim Morrison
A doctor who never examined him alive wrote 'heart failure.' Nobody cut him open. He was 27. The one witness changed her story and then died. What happened in that bathroom, or before it?
Leading theory: he overdosed at home, in the bath, on heroin he took with Courson · 31 of 39 find it likely
Bruce Lee
A tablet of a common painkiller, a nap, and the fittest man anyone had ever seen was dead at 32. The inquest said misadventure. What actually happened to his brain?
Leading theory: he drank too much water for his kidneys to handle, and his brain swelled from the inside · 44 of 53 find it likely
Elvis Presley
The certificate said his heart. Everyone in the room knew about the drugs. He was 42 and had a doctor on the payroll. What actually killed him?
Leading theory: straining on the toilet set off a fatal rhythm in a heart that was already failing · 39 of 46 find it likely
Also died on November 5
People who died on this date. None of them has a page yet; any of them could.
Readers are anonymous. Family members are not.