Biting a Bat and 5 Other Wild Moments From Ozzy Osbourne’s Life

Wild and memorable moments punctuated — and sometimes overshadowed — the long career of Ozzy Osbourne, the English heavy metal legend who died this week at 76.

He earned fame as the lead singer of Black Sabbath, a solo artist, and later through “The Osbournes,” the reality show about his family.

But the rocker known as the “Prince of Darkness” was also infamous for excess — much of it fueled by alcohol and drugs.

Here are some of the more outlandish moments:

Jan. 20, 1982: Bat Decapitation

It’s the first thing many people who aren’t metal fans think of when they hear the name Ozzy Osbourne, and maybe the only thing.

During a solo tour that year, the singer and his fans had taken to throwing animal parts at each other. (Ah, rock ‘n’ roll.) One night in January, a fan hurled a bat onto the stage. In a moment captured on video, Osbourne, who later said he thought it was a toy, picked it up and bit in.

It was not a toy.

Whether the bat was alive at the time of the chomping has been the subject of debate ever since, in part because of Osbourne’s own conflicting accounts. (At one point, he said he felt blood in his mouth.) The best current scholarship contradicts this especially disgusting version of the event.

Feb. 19, 1982: What a Way to Remember the Alamo

It wasn’t so much that Osbourne urinated in public. Nor that he did so while wearing a green dress that belonged to his girlfriend Sharon, whom he later married. (She had hidden Osbourne’s own clothes to try to keep him from leaving his hotel drunk.)

It was that the location he chose for that famous episode of micturition was the Alamo, the revered landmark in San Antonio. Couldn’t he have held it until he got to the nearest Denny’s?

It wasn’t clear if Osbourne knew where he urinating but, as always, he relished the notoriety in the aftermath: “The White House is next,” he injudiciously told a reporter.

He was arrested and barred from performing in San Antonio. A decade later, he issued a public apology.

March 19, 1982: A Deadly Plane Crash

A third episode within two months — and by far the darkest — occurred when Mr. Osbourne was asleep in a parked tour bus in Leesburg, Fla. His lead guitarist, Randy Rhoads, 25, went for a joyride in a small airplane with two other people they had been traveling with.

With the tour bus driver at the controls of the plane, the aircraft buzzed the bus twice. On the third pass, the plane crashed, killing all three people aboard.

Mr. Osbourne was inside the bus when one of the plane’s wings clipped it but escaped injury. Despite his youth and short career, Rhoads is often cited as one of metal’s most influential shredders.

Sept. 3, 1989: An Attempted Murder Charge

Osbourne had been on a bender, using “God knows what,” Sharon Osbourne said in “The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne,” a 2020 documentary. She said that she and her husband had had a few fights and that tension was building.

“I just knew it was coming,” she said.

One night after she put their children to bed, she encountered her husband in the living room, in a state of unusual calm. “I had no idea who was sat across from me on the sofa but it wasn’t my husband,” she said.

“He just said, ‘We’ve come to a decision that you’ve got to die,’” she said. Then he attempted to strangle her.

Osbourne woke up in a jail cell — with no memory of the night before — and was charged with attempted murder. Sharon Osbourne later declined to press charges.

Dec. 8, 2003: An A.T.V. Accident Leaves Him Comatose

Osbourne, by then 55, was severely injured while riding an A.T.V. on the grounds of his countryside home in England. He suffered multiple fractures and was in a coma for more than a week.

“I’d been taking lethal combinations of booze and drugs for decades,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but it was riding over a pothole in my back garden at two miles an hour that nearly killed me.”

July 5, 2025: Ozzy’s Last Waltz

At Villa Park in Birmingham, England, 40,000 headbangers turned up to see Osbourne for what was billed as his final show. He performed with the original members of Black Sabbath for the first time in 20 years.

Rock legends like Guns N’ Roses and Metallica were also on the bill. But Ozzy was the headliner. He performed nine songs from his time with Black Sabbath and his solo career.

The last song that night was “Paranoid.” He died 17 days later.