Top 10 Disturbing Mass Suicides That Will Shock You

The 1993 raids upon the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas lasted from late February all the way through April 19th, and resulted in over eighty casualties at the Mount Carmel Center, thanks to gunfire, falling debris and multiple, separate fires. Some sources claim that the government did not fire any shots at all on the last day, suggesting that many deaths may have been caused by the Brand Davidian members themselves. Autopsy reports state that upwards of twenty Branch Davidians died from suicidal gunshot wounds, which were either self-inflicted or delivered by other sect members. Whether these were mercy killings to prevent the pain of burning death or suicide attempts by people willing to die for their faith has been hotly debated.

The Chittor Fort in India has been the site of three separate instances of Jauhar, a form of ritual suicide performed by women and children whose husbands face insurmountable odds in times of war. This Hindu custom involves intentional self-immolation to escape defilement and/or enslavement by their enemies. Knowing their families were dead, the men had nothing left to lose and could bloodthirstily attack, despite facing certain doom. The massive Chittor Fort was the site of many confrontations. In 1303, 1535 and 1568, with Muslim forces clearly bound for victory, the residents committed Jauhar so that they could obtain a death with honor.

The siege of Masada, an area in modern day Israel, was one of the last major conflicts of the first Jewish-Roman War. The Jewish historian Josephus chronicled the tale of a group of Jewish extremist called the Sicarii who made a valiant last stand against Roman forces at Masada. Josephus claims that when the Romans breached their barricades, the rebels opted for suicide rather than the disgrace of dying at their enemies’ hands. But since suicide is prohibited in Judaism, each rebel killed another rebel, with the last man standing taking his own life. Some question the veracity of Josephus’ writing, but it remains a tragic story.

The Pacific campaign of World War II was home to some of the conflict's fiercest battles, including the one fought on the island of Saipan in the western Pacific. The American forces succeeded in gaining ground during initial island skirmishes, the shame of which led Japanese Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito to commit ritual suicide for his failure. Saito's troops then followed through with a suicidal charge of their own, with some 4000 Japanese soldiers meeting their deaths in the feverish fight. When it was clear that the U.S. had triumphed, thousands of civilians hurled themselves over cliffs, believing Japanese propaganda which claimed that U.S. troops would kill and defile them.

The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God was a Roman Catholic splinter sect founded in Uganda during the late 1980s. Leaders of the sect claimed to have seen religious visions, and often spoke of an impending doomsday, with a specific eye set towards the year 2000. When the millennium came and went, however, faith in the movement began to falter, and Church officials set a new Doomsday date of March 17th. Ugandan authorities found hundreds of dead bodies scattered at compounds that had perished in the weeks leading up to this event. And on the 17th, over 500 parishioners and leaders died in what’s believed to be an intentional explosion at parish in Kanangu, ultimately leaving whether the cause was mass murder or group suicide up in the air.

The Dutch military met with some resistance as they invaded the Indonesian province of Bali during 1906, but nothing prepared them for the response they received in the province's capital of Denpasar. It started calmly, with a procession of Balinese natives clad in ceremonial religious garb marching into view. Upon a signal, the Raja demanded a priest kill him, after which the entire procession engaged in the traditional Balinese suicide ritual known as Puputan. As many as a thousand Balinese may have killed themselves, although Dutch forces soon started mowing down the remaining inhabitants. Adding insult to injury, the Dutch then took everything of value from their bodies.

As the Second World War was nearing its end, one small German town became the site of a notorious instance of mass suicide. Some 900 German citizens in Demmin killed themselves and their families in a last ditch effort to escape Joseph Stalin's rampaging Red Army. The Soviet forceswere cutting a swath across the area, looting and committing arson and rampant rape. Many Demmin families responded by drowning themselves in rivers, hanging, slitting their wrists or poisoning themselves to escape a fate they considered worse than death.

Marshall Applewhite was a former music professor who led the Heaven’s Gate cult, a religious group with a special twist. They believed that suicide was a means of transferring their human shells into an alien spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp Comet. In March 1997, that comet made its closest approach to Earth. Seizing the opportunity, Applewhite and his brethren ingested a poisonous cocktail of vodka and phenobarbital, a decision that ultimately caused the deaths of 39 members. When their bodies were found, they were all dressed the same: wearing black shirts, sweatpants and new Nikes, with armbands that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.”

The Order of the Solar Temple is a secret society that claims its religious beliefs and influences date to the Rosicrucians and the Knights Templar. In 1994, 53 members were discovered dead at separate locations in Switzerland and Canada, with at least 15 dead of what seemed to be suicide and the rest murdered. The next year, two OTS members shot 14 others and killed themselves in France. Then in 1997, five more members appeared to burn themselves alive in a house in the small Quebecois village of Saint-Casimir. Sadly, due to the mysterious nature of this secret society, it’s difficult to determine the total number of suicides versus murders in these cases.

As we’ve seen, there's sometimes a fine line between murder and forced suicide. The most notorious example of this was the Jonestown massacre of November 18th, 1978. Jim Jones, fanatical leader of the People's Temple Agricultural Project, an American religious cult commune in Guyana, arranged the assassination of U.S. congressman Leo Ryan, whose investigation into the cult was causing trouble. Jones then instructed over 900 members to commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking poisoned Flavor Aid. How many drank it willingly is something we’ll never know. It was the largest such event in modern history; with 300 of the over 900 victims being minors.