I just found out one more false story about a supposed ironic death of someone famous. I think I've run into more recently, but can remember only a couple:

Charles Drew, a pioneering physician who came up with the method of banking blood for transfusions, did not die the way I was taught in elementary school. The story was that, because he was black, he was refused a transfusion by the hospital treating him. He was in a serious car accident, but the hospital did NOT refuse him a transfusion. He was given blood but was too gravely injured to be saved.

Mama Cass Elliot did not die from choking on a ham sandwich, which I read long ago, and believed until last year when I read something debunking the tale. She'd actually had a massive heart attack after a rigorous musical performance. The ham sandwich thing was what a reporter decided to write, when bustling reporters trying to get the scoop were in her rooms and saw a sandwich on a plate. It was untouched, but he postulated in writing that maybe that's what got her.

And although not debunking, there was something I found out not long ago that made me really sad: Dr. Anthony Satillaro, who wrote 2 books on his own cancer vanishing because of his macrobiotic diet, died three years after the books came out. I read one of the books, and hadn't heard he died so soon. He'd had terminal testicular cancer, it had entered his bones -- which really means you're on your way out. Then one day while driving he picked up a hitchhiker, whom he talked with for a long time. He confided his medical condition, mentioning that he was dying. The young hitchhiker said, "You don't have to die," and went on to describe how a complete change of diet and lifestyle could save him. The physician was polite but thought he was a hippie crackpot. Two weeks later, Dr. Satillaro found himself in a commune eating brown rice -- just like a hippie crackpot. He said his pain, which was considerable, went away within 2 weeks, and months later his cancer disappeared. His own doctor confirmed this.

While sticking to this very careful diet regimen, and enhancing it with self-massage, exercises, and spiritual development, he also tried to research the scientific reasons why it had worked. He was a doctor, after all. (This was decades before now, the age of widespread alternative medicine practitioners.) He came up with enough to satisfy himself that the phenomenon he observed had a real basis, and this diet/personal development was responsible for his cure. His two books urge this on others suffering from grave illnesses. He felt it had importance for many different medical conditions and that Western medicine had ignored diet to its detriment.

Online, websites now list Anthony Satillaro as a cautionary tale against miracle cures.

My mom had cancer at the time we discovered his books, and we began to eat some of the recipes that were listed. But my mother had lost so much weight that we were supposed to be giving her stuff to fatten her up, including these incredibly thick milkshakes every day. Most foods made her sick to even look at, so we relied on those shakes to supply a lot of the nutrients she had to have. She just couldn't handle that diet. And at the time we wondered how her health would have gone if she'd been on it.

Now I don't have to worry about it. But I believe it relieved Satillaro of his pain, and would have done far more if he'd been on it before he was in a late stage of the disease.

Note: When I was trying to find the titles of his books, I found a list of medical topic books aimed at debunking conventional medicine. Two of them were on cancer: Limits of Medicine, and Medical Nemesis. The author is listed as Ivan Illich.

Ivan Illich? As in Chekov's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich?" The man who screamed for three days straight from pain as he lay dying of cancer? The character whose life had no meaning beyond his favorite card game until his last few days, when he actually began thinking about life?
That's one spooky pen-name.