For most of history, people assumed hanging was one of the fastest ways to die. But the longer physicians actually looked at the bodies, the clearer it became that it wasn’t ending lives. It was just starting the process of ending them. How long that process actually took would turn out to be far more disturbing.
The oldest known records of hanging as a formal execution come from ancient Persia around 500 BCE. Persian rulers used it to punish traitors and enemies of the state. There was no trapdoor, no platform, and no calculations. The condemned person was simply lifted off the ground with a rope tied around their neck and left hanging by their own body weight.
The defining feature of this method was that it was slow. Without a drop to create force, the rope tightened only under the weight of the body. The jugular veins, which carry blood away from the brain, were compressed almost immediately. The carotid arteries, which bring oxygen-rich blood to the brain, were much harder to completely block.
As long as some blood continued to flow, the brain remained active. The person could stay aware for several minutes while pressure built inside the skull and oxygen slowly ran out. The Romans later used hanging for slaves and lower-class criminals alongside crucifixion. Germanic tribes also used it in religious sacrifices as early as the 1st century CE.
This was recorded by the Roman historian Tacitus in his work Germania, written around 98 CE. After that, England built its first permanent gallows at Tyburn, just outside London, in 1196. For more than five centuries, it served as the city’s main execution site. What happened there was not a clean or efficient procedure. It was public entertainment, and the crowd expected a show.
The condemned person arrived on a cart. A rope was placed around their neck and tied to the beam above. The cart was then pulled away, leaving them hanging in the air. Their feet were often only inches from the ground, and sometimes their hands were left free. This method became known as the short drop. In most cases, it caused death through slow strangulation.
Witnesses who attended executions at Tyburn during the 1500s and 1600s described people kicking, twisting, and clawing at the rope after the cart was removed. These struggles could continue for several minutes. The sheriffs and constables nearby usually did nothing. This was considered normal.
What happened next was even more unusual. Friends and relatives often rushed forward and pulled down on the condemned person’s legs. Their goal was mercy. The extra weight might break the neck and shorten the suffering.
Whether it worked depended on the person’s weight, the length of the rope, and simple luck. Sometimes it helped. Often it did not. In many cases, the struggling stopped only because the brain finally ran out of oxygen, not because the neck had broken. The men who carried out executions at Tyburn usually became hangmen because nobody else wanted the job.
The pay was poor, around ten shillings per execution in the 1600s, plus whatever money could be made by selling the condemned person’s clothing. There was no formal training. Rope quality varied greatly. Because of this, survival, whether temporary, partial, or sometimes complete, was not uncommon. It was the predictable result of a system that had never been properly engineered. One of the recorded cases of the method was of a woman named Anne Green.
She was a 22-year-old servant from Steeple Barton in Oxfordshire. She became pregnant by Geoffrey Read, the teenage grandson of her employer, Sir Thomas Read. The baby was stillborn. Green hid the body in a privy and was later arrested. Under the 1624 law known as the Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children, she was charged with infanticide, convicted, and sentenced to death.
On the morning of December 14, 1650, Green climbed the ladder at Oxford Castle. She prayed aloud and sang part of a psalm. A rope was placed around her neck, and she was dropped. She remained hanging for about thirty minutes. During that time, a soldier struck her chest and stomach with the butt of a musket, while her friends pulled on her legs. Both actions were attempts to speed up a death that the rope was failing to deliver.
Afterward, she was cut down and placed inside a coffin. The coffin was delivered to two Oxford physicians, Thomas Willis and William Petty. They had arranged to receive her body for anatomical dissection, one of the few legal ways doctors could obtain human remains for medical study at the time.
When they opened the coffin, they heard her breathing. Willis and Petty immediately abandoned their plans for dissection and spent hours trying to save her life. They cleared her airway, warmed her body, gave her medicines commonly used at the time, and even bled her, a standard treatment in 17th-century medicine.
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By the next morning, Green was speaking. Within two weeks, she was eating normally. Authorities eventually pardoned her, ruling that her sentence had already been carried out. She returned to Steeple Barton, later married, had three children, and died of natural causes around 1665. The records Willis and Petty kept about her recovery are among the earliest documented examples of resuscitation in English medical history.
Another case involved a man named John Smith who was convicted of burglary in London and sentenced to hang at Tyburn on December 24, 1705. The execution seemed to go as planned. Smith hung for about fifteen minutes. Then someone in the crowd shouted that a reprieve had been granted.
A reprieve was an official order delaying or cancelling the execution. Smith was cut down and taken to a nearby house. A few minutes later, he regained consciousness. Smith later described what he remembered. He spoke of a rushing sensation, a bright light, then darkness. After that, he woke up in pain as blood flow returned to his head.
His account is one of the earliest known first-person descriptions of a near-death experience caused by hanging. He was officially pardoned and lived for several more years. People in London began calling him “Half-Hanged Smith.” Nineteen years later, a similar case happened in Scotland.
On September 2, 1724, a woman named Margaret Dickson was hanged in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket, the city’s main public execution site located below Edinburgh Castle. Dickson came from the nearby town of Musselburgh. She had been convicted of hiding a pregnancy after delivering a stillborn child.
After the execution, she was cut down, placed in a coffin, and loaded onto a cart for burial in Musselburgh. While traveling out of Edinburgh, the people accompanying the coffin heard noises coming from inside. They stopped the cart and opened the coffin. Dickson was breathing. A surgeon examined her and confirmed that she was still alive.
Dickson was released later. She returned to Musselburgh and remarried. Legally, her first marriage had ended when she was declared dead, even though the husband was the same man. She lived for nearly thirty more years and died naturally around 1753. Locals gave her the nickname “Half-Hangit Maggie.
” To understand why people sometimes survived hanging, we first need to see what hanging actually does to the body. There are three main ways a hanging can kill. The first is asphyxiation, where the rope squeezes the airway and major blood vessels in the neck, reducing oxygen to the brain. The second is cerebral hypoxia, where blood flow to the brain drops so much that brain cells begin to die, even if the airway is not completely blocked.
The third is cervical fracture, where the force of a fall breaks bones in the neck, damages the spinal cord, and immediately destroys the brain’s ability to control the body. The first two methods are slow. A person usually loses consciousness one to three minutes after blood flow to the brain drops significantly.
But losing consciousness is not the same as dying. The brainstem, which controls breathing, heartbeat, and blood pressure, can survive much longer without oxygen than the parts of the brain responsible for awareness and thinking. It may continue working for five to ten minutes after consciousness is gone. During this time, the heart can still be beating.
The person is still technically alive and may be revived under the right conditions. The third method is completely different. If the neck breaks at the second or third cervical vertebra, known as C2 or C3, the spinal cord is severed at neck level. The brain instantly loses connection with the rest of the body.
Consciousness disappears within seconds. The heart and lungs stop functioning within a few minutes because the body can no longer regulate itself. Once this happens, there is no possibility of revival. Almost every hanging carried out before the mid-1800s was a short-drop hanging. These executions almost always caused the first two forms of death rather than a broken neck.
The man responsible for carrying out the executuins most of the time was William Calcraft. He became England’s official executioner on April 5, 1829. He held the position for forty-five years, longer than any other English hangman before or since. During that time, he executed an estimated 450 people. He earned one guinea per week plus another guinea for every execution.
To make extra money, he also sold pieces of execution ropes to collectors for five shillings per inch. Calcraft relied almost entirely on short-drop hangings. His drops were usually between three and twelve inches long. That was barely enough to jerk the body downward and nowhere near enough to break the neck. As a result, many of the people he executed died slowly from strangulation.
One famous example was the execution of Franz M ller at Newgate Prison on November 14, 1864. M ller became the first person convicted of murder committed on a British railway. Witnesses reported that his body continued moving for several minutes after the drop. Calcraft was seen standing beneath the gallows and pulling down on M ller’s legs to try to speed up death. It was something he did regularly and had done for decades.
In 1868, the medical journal The Lancet published a formal criticism of Calcraft’s methods. The journal concluded that several people he executed had died from asphyxiation over five to eight minutes rather than from any quick or immediate cause. For those who had witnessed his executions, this was hardly surprising.
The only difference was that doctors had finally described the problem in medical terms. Calcraft retired in 1874. By then, hundreds of people had suffered through a system that remained largely unchanged for nearly half a century. After that came William Marwood. He was a cobbler from Horncastle in Lincolnshire. He was not a doctor or a scientist.
But he believed he had found a solution to the problem of slow deaths by hanging. Marwood argued that the answer was force. If a person fell far enough before the rope tightened, the sudden stop would create enough energy to break the neck instead of simply squeezing the airway. The challenge was finding the correct drop length.
Too short, and the person would slowly strangle. Too long, and the force could tear the head from the body. In the early 1870s, Marwood presented his idea to prison officials. In 1872, he was allowed to test the method at Lincoln Castle. The condemned man was William Frederick Horry. Witnesses reported that Horry died within seconds.
Medical observers noted that movement stopped almost immediately, and his pupils became fixed and dilated within about ninety seconds. Marwood became England’s official executioner in 1874. He created detailed tables that matched drop length to body weight and continued adjusting them as he gained experience. Someone weighing 140 pounds might receive an eight-foot drop. Someone weighing 200 pounds might receive a five-foot drop.
Medical observers soon began reporting something rarely seen in earlier hangings. The body often became still immediately after the drop. Witnesses believed consciousness disappeared within seconds. Official death was usually confirmed within two to four minutes. For the first time in the history of judicial hanging, the time between the drop and effective death was measured in seconds rather than many minutes.
Marwood died while still serving as executioner in 1883. The long-drop method he developed became the standard system used throughout Britain and its colonies. It later influenced execution practices in the United States, Canada, and Australia as well. But even after that long drop method, hangings still failed.
The same problems that had existed for centuries, including rope stretch, slipping knots, and differences in human anatomy, never fully disappeared. They just became less common. One famous case happened in Devon, England. John Lee was convicted of murdering his employer, Emma Keyse, and was scheduled to hang at Exeter Prison on February 23, 1885.
The executioner, James Berry, placed Lee on the trapdoor, fixed the noose, and pulled the lever. The trapdoor did not open. Berry reset it and tried again. It still did not open. He tried a third time, with Lee standing there and the rope around his neck. Again, nothing happened. The execution was stopped.
Investigators later discovered that rain had slightly warped the wooden trapdoor, causing it to jam when weight was placed on it. The problem was tiny but it saved Lee s life. His sentence was reduced to life imprisonment, he was released in 1907, and he lived until 1945. People called him The Man They Couldn t Hang, though in reality it was wet wood that saved him.
James Berry, the same executioner, was also responsible for one of the worst failures on record. At the execution of Robert Goodale at Norwich Castle on November 30, 1885, Berry miscalculated the drop length. The drop was too long, and the force tore Goodale s head from his body.
Berry later changed his calculations, resigned in 1892, and wrote that the work haunted him. In the United States, hanging practices varied wildly from state to state. Training and methods were inconsistent. On February 21, 1930, Eva Dugan became the first woman executed in Arizona. The drop was miscalculated, the rope was too long, and she was decapitated.
Several witnesses fainted. Arizona abandoned hanging within weeks and switched to the gas chamber. The last public hanging in the United States took place in Owensboro, Kentucky, on August 14, 1936. Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old convicted of rape and murder, was executed before a crowd estimated at ten to twenty thousand people.
The hangman, Arthur Hash, was a 70-year-old former sheriff who was reportedly drunk. Journalists described the scene as chaotic and degrading. The public reaction was so negative that public executions in America effectively ended afterward. From the 1880s onward, Britain kept detailed records of judicial executions. Doctors observed every hanging and recorded what happened afterward.
These records, now held in the UK National Archives, give the clearest medical picture of how the long-drop method actually worked. When the drop was calculated correctly, and the neck broke cleanly, witnesses reported that movement stopped within seconds and the pupils became fixed and dilated within about one minute.
Death, confirmed with a stethoscope, usually followed within two to four minutes. In these cases, consciousness was believed to disappear almost immediately. But when something went wrong, the process lasted much longer. Some records show death taking five, eight, or even twelve minutes, with the heart still beating and reflex movements continuing.
The records describe these failures in the same calm bureaucratic language as the successful executions, which makes the contrast even harsher. The Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, which operated from 1949 to 1953 under Sir Ernest Gowers, heard testimony from doctors about survival times in hangings. Forensic pathologist Dr.
David Bowen testified that a properly performed British hanging caused unconsciousness almost immediately, but full biological death still took several minutes in every case. The Commission accepted this conclusion, while quietly acknowledging that everything depended on the hanging being carried out correctly. The last executions in the United Kingdom took place on August 13, 1964.
Peter Anthony Allen was hanged at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans was hanged at Strangeways Prison in Manchester. Doctors confirmed death in about two minutes in both cases. Britain suspended hanging the next year and abolished it completely in 1969. Once judicial hanging disappeared from most Western countries, doctors began studying hanging almost entirely through emergency medicine, patients brought to hospitals after suicide attempts involving hanging.
These studies gave the clearest modern evidence for how long survival is possible. A major 1979 study in Annals of Emergency Medicine examined 32 patients who had been found hanging. The outcome depended heavily on how long the person had been suspended. People cut down within about four minutes often recovered well.
Those suspended for five to nine minutes had mixed results, including memory problems, cognitive damage, or movement disorders. Those suspended for ten minutes or more rarely recovered meaningful brain function. Most of these cases involved partial hangings, where the feet or knees touched the ground.
That reduced the pressure on the neck and slowed the damage. Complete suspension, where the full body weight hung from the rope, caused faster and more severe oxygen deprivation because the carotid arteries and jugular veins were compressed more strongly. A 1989 study from the University of British Columbia looked at 34 hanging survivors over ten years and found the same pattern.
Every patient who survived a complete suspension with a good outcome had been found within about three to four minutes. After that point, serious brain damage became much more likely. The longest well-documented survival after complete suspension appeared in a 1983 case report in the Journal of Trauma.
The patient had been hanging for an estimated eighteen to twenty minutes and survived, but suffered severe permanent brain damage and required lifelong institutional care. When we combine the historical record, British execution reports, forensic evidence, and modern emergency medicine studies, the conclusion is fairly clear.
A short-drop hanging usually caused death through strangulation and lack of oxygen over about five to fifteen minutes. A properly performed long-drop hanging usually broke the neck and caused loss of consciousness within about ten seconds. Whether a person experienced anything during those final moments is something science still cannot fully answer.
