A Good Deed Gone Wrong
In order to raise awareness for the homeless in 1995, Robert Overacker decided to deploy a stunt to get people’s attention about the issue. As a professional stuntman, he decided to drive a jet ski over Niagara Falls.
This photograph captures the exact moment before disaster struck and Robert’s parachute failed to deploy, leaving him to plummet to his death into the depths below.
WSL – Spurs
Wall of Ash and Destruction
Photographer Robert Landsberg took his role as a photographer seriously until his dying breath. When Mt. St. Helen erupted, the photographer snapped a picture of the wall of ash that rose from the mountain’s tantrum.
Robert Landsberg did not survive the eruption, but his film did, and this was intentional on the professional’s part. While he came to terms with his own death, he used his body to shield the photos that he took.
Calm On the Top Chaos On the Bottom
This is a perfectly timed photo just that likely captured the last moments of a bird’s life. Sharks are intelligent and curious creatures, meaning that there is a chance it was just poking around to see what it was.
We don’t know the bird’s fate, but this photo is definitely suggestive. To be honest, the bird likely did not survive. Circle of life.
There Is a Bomb In This Photo
In August of 1998 in a town called Omagh in Northern Ireland, a car bomb was set off in a political attack. The red car in the photo was carrying the bomb.
The man and the child in the photograph miraculously survived the disaster, though the person who took the photo did not live to see another day. The attack killed 29 people and injured another 220 others.
A Nurse Gave Her Life
A woman named Mayinga N’Seka was working as a nurse in 1976 during the first Ebola outbreak in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
CDC/Wikimedia Commons
Mayinga N’Seka died while working with her patients. She gave her life to help heal others. Rest in peace!
A Farewell to Planet Earth
The Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy remains an important pillar in American (and perhaps world) collective memory. The shuttle left Earth and within 73 seconds broke apart and killed all seven crew members on board.
NASA/Wikimedia Commons
This photograph captured the last moments before disaster struck and critical failure in the ascent stage doomed the crew to their fates. Though their mission was not successful, it left a lasting impact. This photo is incredibly sad.
Youthful Mistakes With Big Consequences
We all made some silly mistakes when we were young, and luckily the ones reading this all lived to tell the tale. Not all of us are so lucky. A 14-year-old boy named Keith Sapsford made the biggest mistake of his life when he decided to climb into the wheel of an airplane.
Bored Panda
Taking off from Sydney towards Japan, the plane lifted into the air, and Keith was not able to hold on. A new photographer was testing out his camera lens when he accidentally got a photo of the boy falling through the air, 200 feet from the ground, in the midst of disaster.
Intentionally Poking the Bear
In 2009, a woman jumped into the Berlin Zoo’s polar bear enclosure. According to her ex-husband, the woman was suffering from depression and unemployment. He believed that this was a suicide attempt on her part.
Postoast.com
She survived the attack, of which was witnessed by stunned onlookers. The zoo decided to press charges against her for breaching the peace and harming their reputation. She was able to recover from the mauling.
A Story Fit For A Scary Movie
Sometimes life is stranger than fiction. This is the case with the last photograph taken before disaster struck Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. The plane, which was coming from Uruguay towards Chile crashed in the Andes, but the nightmare did not end there. 33 of the 45 crew members survived the crash, but the number dwindled to only 16 due to the harsh cold weather and the wounds that were not able to be tended to.
Nextluxury.com
After 10 days, the search was called off in search of the survivors. In order to survive, the remaining passengers were forced to do the unthinkable. Faced with starvation, they turned to cannibalism. The cold weather preserved the bodies of those who passed. After 72 days, two of the survivors gathered enough strength to look for help to return back for the others.
JFK’s Last Caravan
We live in a very different world than the world we lived in when John F. Kennedy was the United States president. This picture captures the last time the president would ever see the light of day and the last moments his wife Jackie and the rest of the world would see his face.
Walt Cisco/Wikimedia Commons
This photo alone would leave the viewer to see it as a happy moment in his presidency, but the moments that followed made a forever stain on the American public and the feelings of safety a sitting president did or did not have.
End Of the Magic
A famed magic show put on by Fischbacher and Roy was brought to a tragic end after a white tiger lashed out—as a wild animal will do—and attacked Roy.
Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons
The 2003 performance and subsequent attack ended with the performer partially paralyzed. Hopefully a lesson was learned from those who want wild animals to “act” in show business.
The Falling Man
For most Americans, the Falling Man lives in our memories of 9/11 as a deeply unsettling and scary reminder of that fateful day. While the man is still unknown, his photo will always shake the cores of minds and hearts.
Esquire
After a terrorist attack left the Twin Towers engulfed in flames, this man took his fate into his own hands and leapt from one of the buildings.
A Hero Until the Last Moments
A man named William “Dave” Sanders earned the right and then some to be called a hero for the way he went out on his last day alive. During the infamous and tragic Columbine shootings, Dave ushered out more than 100 students to their safety
.
Bored Panda
Dave would not survive the horrific attack, later dying from multiple gunshot wounds to the chest. It is because of his heroism that so many lived to see another day.
Tragedy and Outrage
Originally published by the New York Post, this photo caused an angry stir when it was released to the public. The photo was taken moments before disaster when the man on the tracks (named Ki-Suck Han) was struck by an oncoming subway train
NextLuxury.com
Many were concerned about the way the photo was taken instead of the photographer trying to help the man off the track. The photographer, R. Umar Abbasi was the person who took the picture. He claimed that he was trying to use his phone light to stop the train and captured the photo in the process.
Mick Fanning Rivals Chuck Norris
In one of the most stunning moments within the professional surfing world, Mick Fanning was confronted by a great white shark while in a heat out in the line-up.
Postoast.com
Apparently, the shark got entangled in the surfer’s leash. Thrashing around near Mick, the surfer decided to punch the creature, ending the sheer terror of those watching from the shore.
A Chilling Act of Desperation
Though this photo was not taken in the last moments of the children’s lives, it is a photo that represented the moment these four children’s lives catapulted into disaster. The mother, Lucille Chalifoux, 24, can be seen hiding her face from the photojournalist.
Bettmann Archive/Wikimedia Commons
Lucille and her husband, 40-year-old Ray, were facing eviction. Ray had just been laid off from his job as a coal truck driver and they were faced with potential homelessness. Unable to feed all of their children, they decided to auction them off. Within two years of this photo, all four children sitting on the steps, as well as the child Lucille was holding in her arms, were sold off or re-homed.
