Mirin Dajo - interesting post by Brian Dunning @ Skepticblog

[Kuko 4000]

http://skepticblog.org/2010/05/13/the-mysterious-case-of-mirin-dajo-the-human-pincushion/#more-8122

Wow.




This part was especially interesting to me:

With the foil stuck through him, Dajo walked to their X-ray lab, where they took shots verifying that there was no trickery. The foil did indeed pierce his abdomen all the way through, passing through and among major organs.

Interesting, didn't know that something like this was possible. Afaik, the inner organs are not that sensitive to touch (correct me if I'm wrong), so the no pain stuff is not too strange, but if this is true I guess they must've been lucky not to cause much damage in their shows!

...until of course when he died at 35 "from an aortic rupture, resulting from swallowing a long steel needle"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirin_Dajo

Nice claims there

Edit:

I see there's lots of videos on YouTube, here's another:

 

[JWideman]

"Completely unharmed, except for coming down with a slight case of death."

 

[Kuko 4000]

Jeff Wagg has written about this too:

http://weirdthings.com/2009/05/the-mystery-of-mirin-doja-by-jeff-wagg/

When I first encountered this video, I showed it to author and former magician James “The Amazing” Randi for his take on it. He agreed that it was real, and that they were carefully avoiding major organs.