The man who was killed by his own beard

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By Webdesk


There are two conflicting accounts of his death, although both end the same way. Most sources say that Staininger awoke in the night to find a fire had broken out and, rushing to warn his fellow townsmen, tripped over his loose beard and fell down a flight of stairs, breaking his neck. However, there is one version of the story told by a 19th century travel writer Joseph Kyselak – an interesting figure himself, whose habit of scribbling his name everywhere he went has led to him being dubbed the first “tagger” – has Staininger running to a prince passing through town to pay respect, and similarly tripping over his giant facial hair.

Regardless, Staininger’s death is one of the few documented “death by beard” cases in history. There are endless stories about it beards getting caught in industrial machinery and ripped out, and it almost goes without saying that a few deaths must have been a direct result of having a hella sick beard, but none have been directly attributed to it. In that sense, Dan Haggerty, the actor who played Grizzly Adams, once set his gorgeous beard on fire by drinking a flaming cocktail, but he survived.

After Staininger died, the townspeople memorialized him in the form of a statue on the outside of St. Stephen’s Church, and cut off his beard and kept it. It is still on display at the District Museum Herzogsburg in a long glass case and was the subject of a 1975 scientific article in the skincare magazine Dermatological Monatsschrift: “Iconography and morphology of the 400-year-old beard of advisor Hans Staininger from Braunau.” You can take a city tour with a guide with a pretty crappy fake beard pretend to be Staininger. (There are photos that claim to be of Staininger but aren’t – the man died in the 16th century. The photos that regularly circulate online claiming to be his are in fact of a Norwegian, Hans Nilson Langseth, born in 1846. His beard was used as a skipping rope in a Pathé newsreel.)

Considering how little is known about Staininger, it’s not a bad legacy: we just know that people liked him and he died in an interesting way. That was enough for photos of him to end up in the Louvre in Paris and the Wellcome Collection in London. Not too shabby.

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