Talk about bizarre stories. Surely "Civil War cannonball" is pretty far down on the list of probable causes of death in 2008. From MSNBC.com:

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CHESTER, Va. - Like many boys in the South, Sam White got hooked on the Civil War early, digging up rusting bullets and military buttons in the battle-scarred earth of his hometown.

But in February, White's hobby cost him his life: A cannonball he was restoring exploded, killing him in his driveway.

Experts suspect White was killed while trying to disarm a 9-inch, 75-pound naval cannonball, a particularly potent explosive with a more complex fuse and many times the destructive power of those used by infantry artillery.

Biemeck and Peter George, co-author of a book on Civil War ordnance, believe White was using either a drill or a grinder attached to a drill to remove grit from the cannonball, causing a shower of sparks.
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Yeah saw that yesterday. Definetly a freak accident especially for some one who has been doing that as long as he had

I find it funny that his last name was "White".

Ya know...Civil War and all.

Wow I live 15 min from there and never heard about it............I need to watch the news more often.

My dads buddy almost had the same thing happen to him when he found a German WWII artillery shell in a ship wreck. He thought that it was just water slowly draining from it after 4 years from finding it. But a friend who was a SWAT member saw it and call in the bomb squad. Turned out it was nitrogylcerin (sp?) sweating out.

City I lived near in England - Bristol, got bombed to crap in WWII - Rolls Royce and a bunch of aircraft industry there for Zee Germans to bomb. They dig up old 1000lb bombs all the time when they are doing construction in the City.

Yea same thing here. Every now and then we will hear about bombs washing up onto the beaches, I've actually found a bottle of medicine from the WWII era.. For some reason I'm not that interested in collecting cannon balls or artillery shells.

That kind of stuff is common around here. We live just outside of Richmond, an d Richmond was the capitol of the Confederate States. Battles happened all around here. On the other side of town there was a lot more battles. I remember finding a stack of cannon balls and a cannon on a friends property right next to the Malvern Hill battlefield.

What was left out of this report was that a grapefruit size piece of shrapnel flew several hundred yards and imbedded itself in the front entry of an occupied house!

And here I always thought that cannon balls were just cast iron with no exposives in them.

How come those things don't blow up in the cannon instead of the SECOND time they get jarred (when they land)?

Me too. Had to research it and found that by the Civil War, they were packed with explosives which were detonated by a fuse, of which there were several types. Apparently many were duds due to the crude fuses of the time. I didn't get the impression they were impact fuses but more of a time delay type thing.

And there probably were a lot of misfires and cannon explosions, we just weren't around to hear about them.

Darwin stroke again.

I would agree if this was just some Billy Bob who found a cannonball and decided to mess around with it. This guy did restoration work for museums and such and was an expert on Civil War artillery. If there was a millisecond of realization, he was probably quite surprised when the thing went off.