What it feel like to die by being hanged

All we can know is from people who have been found attempting su!cide and cut down before they were actually dead - it can take up to 15 minutes in an amateur hanging before you are gone.

It is apparently extremely unpleasant - not painful exactly but the sensation of choking and stifling is very nasty. Unconsciousness does follow fairly quickly - within half a minute I am told. And it can result in brain damage because the oxygen is cut off.

 In the old days of judicial hanging, once the long-drop method was adopted and scientifically calculated for the length of the drop it was pretty much instantaneous, as it resulted from a neck fracture and not from strangulation. Before the long drop was developed, people who were to be hanged used to get their friends to come and pull on their legs to speed their passing. But people who hang themselves seldom have a long enough drop or a noose capable of achieving this result - it all has to be correctly organised

There are two basic ways that hanging can go.

First, you have a well-fitted, non-stretch line tied around your neck and you have a fall of at least six feet before the line catches you. This results in a basal skull fracture; your head stops instantly but your body and neck keeps moving to the elastic limits of your soft tissues. This results in a basal skull fracture and the stretching of your spinal cord causes a sharp tug on the brain stem. I’ve never been able to ask anyone who was properly hanged if it was painful or not, but theoretically it should cause unconsciousness nearly instantly.

Second, you have the sort of hanging that bereaved people more commonly foist upon themselves, which is simply strangulation. They may stand on a chair, tie a rope around their neck, affix the other end to something that seems sturdy like a ceiling joist, then kick the chair out from underneath… It’s possible or probable that most people who do this are expecting a quick, relatively painless death… But that isn’t likely to be the actual end of life experience. If you were to have a change of heart while dangling from your neck in intense pain and starving for oxygen, there wouldn’t be much that you could do to take it back; you would just have to hope that it didn’t take too long to lose consciousness.

Here is why I answered this anonymously:

In 2012, my aunt asked me if I had seen my cousin (we lived fairly close to one another) because he wasn’t answering his phone. She sounded worried, so I told her I would drive by his apartment to check on him.

His Jeep was in his parking space, so I thought that he may be too stoned to want to talk to his mom. I went up the stairs to his unit and found his door unlocked. He didn’t answer when I announced my presence and I started to get a strong whiff of feces. I found him hanging dead in the common area where the ceiling was vaulted. His eyes were almost black from broken blood vessels and bulged from their sockets. His tongue was swollen out of his open mouth, lividity marks above the rope at his neck. I can see it now like I’m still in that room and the image will never leave me.

The fingernails on both hands were peeled back and torn and the area around his feet had urine and feces scattered all around and anything that he could touch with his toes was knocked over. He fought to live after he decided to take his own life, but he couldn’t take it back.

I called 911, then called my aunt. I think she knew what I was going to say. She and my uncle drove two hours to get there, but he was already with the coroner by that time.

I don’t know anything about you or what you are up against, but hanging is an ugly, ugly way to die.

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