There are two conflicting stories of his death, although both end in the same way. Most sources say that Staininger woke in the night to find a fire had broken out and, rushing to warn his fellow townspeople, tripped over his unsecured beard and fell down a flight of stairs, breaking his neck in the process. However, one version of the story, recounted by 19th-century travel writer Joseph Kyselak — himself an interesting figure, whose habit of scrawling his name everywhere he went has led to him being dubbed the first “tagger” — has Staininger rushing toward a prince passing through town in order to show respect, and similarly tripping over his mammoth facial hair.
Either way, Staininger’s death is one of the only documented cases of “death by beard” in history. There are endless stories of beards getting stuck in industrial machinery and ripped out, and it almost stands to reason that a few deaths must have occurred as a direct result of having a hella sick beard, but none have been directly attributed to it. Along those lines, Dan Haggerty, the actor who played Grizzly Adams, once set fire to his magnificent beard by drinking a flaming cocktail, but survived.
After Staininger died, the townspeople commemorated him in statue form on the outside of St. Stephen’s Church, as well as cutting his beard off and preserving it. It can still be seen in the District Museum Herzogsburg in a lengthy glass case, and was the subject of a 1975 scientific paper in the skincare journal Dermatologische Monatsschrift: “Iconography and Morphology of the 400-Year-Old Beard of Counselor Hans Staininger from Braunau.” You can do a tour of the town with a guide sporting a pretty shitty fake beard pretending to be Staininger. (There are photos that purport to be of Staininger but aren’t — the man died in the 16th century. The pictures that regularly get circulated online claiming to be him are in fact of a Norwegian, Hans Nilson Langseth, born in 1846. His beard was used as a skipping rope in a Pathe newsreel.)
Considering how little is known about Staininger, it’s not a bad legacy: All we know is that people liked him, and he died in an interesting way. That was enough for pictures of him to end up in the Louvre in Paris and the Wellcome Collection in London. Not too shabby.