Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. Today's podcast features three stories that involve people who were trapped with no way out.
The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.
The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.
The first story you'll hear is called Shattered Glass, and it's about one of the worst disasters in sports history.
The second story you'll hear is called Minivan, and this story shows how quickly normal life can suddenly go sideways.
And the third and final story you'll hear is called The Tomb, and it's about what truly might be the worst way to die.
But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious Delivered in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, the next time you arrive at a four-way intersection at the same time as the Amazon Music Follow button, politely allow them to go first, but as soon as they start moving, immediately T-bone them.
Okay, let's get into our first story called Shattered Glass.
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Go to audible.com slash richgirlsummer. On Thanksgiving morning in 1900, an 18-year-old named Thomas Pedler told his mother that he was going out for a bit, but he'd be back in time for turkey that afternoon, and then he grabbed his jacket and his coat and he headed out the door.
Thomas lived in a very working class neighborhood in San Francisco, California, where generally speaking, nothing big really ever happened.
It was kind of a place where people just worked and that was it.
But on this day, something huge was happening in Thomas's neighborhood.
The big football game between Stanford University and the University of California was taking place at the stadium in Thomas' district, and they were expecting over 20,000 people to cram into this stadium.
And so Thomas was not about to miss this incredible spectacle, even though he didn't have enough money to buy a ticket.
But he knew he would find a way to watch this game.
And so Thomas leaves his house and he runs to the stadium, which was not far from his house.
And he waited in front of the front gate where all these people are streaming in to go into the stadium.
And around 11 a.m., Thomas's very close friend, Charles, who was also a young man, made his way to the front gate.
The two met up. And at first, their plan was to try to sneak in with the horde of people that were making their way into the stadium.
But even though they were still hours away from the opening kickoff of this big game, it was at 2.30 p.m., the stadium was packed.
I mean, there was nowhere to sit, there was nowhere to stand.
People that had tickets who were going in are looking around thinking, you know, where are we going to watch this game?
And so Thomas and Charles are kind of like, well, what's the point of sneaking in if there's nowhere to watch?
And so they decided, okay, we need to find another way to watch this game.
And so they began looking around and they noticed there was a huge fence that lined the perimeter of the stadium.
And they saw there was some people kind of climbed up on this fence, trying to get a view down onto the field.
And pretty quickly, when Thomas and Charles decided they would try to do that too, they saw that all the good spots on this fence were already taken.
The spots that were open provided no view onto the field.
And so that option as well didn't work. And so Thomas and Charles are frustrated.
They're starting to worry that they will not see this big game.
But when they walked back over to the front gates of the stadium, they happened to notice across the street was this group of people rushing over to this big white brick factory building.
And they were literally placing ladders up against the sides of this building and beginning to climb up it.
I mean, this is a five-story building and they are just basically free climbing the windows and the fire escapes.
And Thomas and Charles realized that the top of this factory was flat and provided a perfect view down onto the field.
And so all these people, they're trying to get a good seat to watch this game.
And so without any hesitation, Thomas and Charles decide they're going to do that too.
So they left the stadium, they ran across the street, and they began climbing up the ladders and climbing the windows and the fire escapes until finally they made it onto the roof, 55 feet off the ground.
And when they got up there, there wasn't that many people.
And so Thomas and Charles were able to run right over to the front edge of this building and claim a spot with an absolutely perfect view of the game.
A couple of hours later, at 2.30 p.m., when the game actually started, the rooftop that Thomas and Charles were on was now completely packed with people.
Hundreds of people have climbed up onto this factory.
There were some factory workers down below telling people, do not do this.
Do not climb on top of this factory. It's not safe.
But nobody listened to them, and the police either didn't notice this was happening or they didn't care.
And so there's all these people that are on this roof.
They're all super excited. And the game has begun.
It's 2.30. And as soon as the game started, it was like the crowd in the stadium, which could be heard very easily from this rooftop, just kind of erupted.
And there were all these bands playing in the stadium.
I mean, it was chaos down below. And it really caught on on the roof.
All these guys, including Thomas and Charles, they're getting amped about this game.
They're singing, they're chanting, they're screaming, they're yelling.
I mean, it's total chaos. And Thomas and Charles loved it.
But about 20 minutes into the game, as Thomas and Charles are enjoying themselves and the crowd is still going wild, a dull cracking sound could be heard coming from one side of this roof.
And so Thomas and Charles, they kind of spun around to see where this cracking sound had come from.
And when they began looking out across the sea of people, they noticed on the far side of the roof where the sound had kind of come from, they could see people scrambling to get off the roof.
But before Thomas and Charles and the other people around them who were watching this happening could figure out what was going on, there was a much louder cracking sound, and suddenly the floor underneath Thomas, Charles, and everybody else collapsed.
And immediately, people on this roof fell all the way to the bottom of this factory, 55 feet below.
There weren't loads of floors inside of this factory.
Instead, it was basically just one big building, 55 feet high, that housed this brick structure right in the center of the factory that was almost as tall as the entire factory.
It was almost like the factory was a shell around this brick, smaller structure right in the middle that was like 40 feet tall.
And so after the ceiling collapses, Thomas, he falls, but miraculously, he lands on a wooden beam that stretched across the entire factory, like a support beam, and he grabbed onto it, saving himself from falling all the way down.
And so Thomas, he only fell maybe five feet, so he was okay, but he didn't have a great grip on this beam.
He was holding on, but just barely. And so Thomas, he turns and he's looking around at what's happened below him and he's hearing people screaming and he's hearing the sounds of people running around trying to help those who have hit the ground on the bottom.
And Thomas immediately begins scanning for Charles and he finds him.
Charles was one of the other fairly lucky people, at least in Thomas's mind, Charles seemed lucky, because instead of falling from the roof all the way to the ground, Charles and 15 or 20 other people had fallen right onto that brick structure that kind of made up the main part of this factory.
And so Charles had only fallen maybe 10 or 15 feet onto the structure.
And so Thomas is thinking, oh, Charles and these other people, they've survived this fall.
They're okay. However, the second Charles and the others, who supposedly were saved by landing on this brick structure, the second they hit that brick structure, despite not suffering catastrophic injuries like broken bones and horrible internal injuries, these people on the brick structure began letting out these primal screams, these just horrible, blood-curdling screams.
And as they did, these loud popping sounds began coming out of their body, and then their bodies began contorting forward, almost like a bug rolling up onto itself.
It would turn out this factory was not a normal factory.
This was a glass factory. And in order to make glass, you need to heat sand and some other chemicals up to extraordinarily high temperatures.
You need a furnace that can literally burn hotter than lava.
And so that brick structure that was housed in the middle of this five-story tall factory was a glass furnace and it was on.
And so even though the inside of this furnace was the hottest place, it was over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the outside of this furnace where Charles and the others had landed, believing they were saved from this 55-foot fall to their death, was still extremely hot, so hot that the factory workers couldn't even go near the furnace, even with special equipment on.
The way they worked with this furnace was with these long metal pokers.
They would work the flames and the glass at a distance.
And so the instant that Charles and the others landed on the top of this furnace, they began to light on fire.
Those snapping sounds that were coming out of their bodies was the sound of them instantly igniting on fire.
And so Thomas and the others who had initially survived this horrible collapse watched as Charles and the others shrieked and shrieked and their bodies continued to contort and they continued to burn and smolder.
And Charles actually, he would roll up so tightly that his body began to roll down the curved side of this furnace.
And at some point his body slipped into a crack in the furnace and he actually fell into the flames inside, at which point he went silent.
Around the time that Charles and the others stopped shrieking, a number of people just out on the road heard the commotion and they came inside and one of them was Thomas's father.
And in a terrible twist of fate, he actually looked up and saw his son clinging to the beam, Thomas.
Except it was so hot inside of this factory that Thomas was sweating.
He was losing his grip. It was really hard to hold onto this beam.
And his father watched as Thomas lost his grip and fell the 10 more feet down onto the furnace exterior.
He landed feet first, then he fell onto his stomach and his face.
He immediately ignited on fire, began shrieking, and then went silent.
All told, 23 people would be killed during this roof collapse, and dozens and dozens more would be horribly injured and disfigured.
This collapse goes down as one of the very worst disasters in sports history.
However, on this day, the crowd inside the stadium was so caught up in the game that they actually didn't notice this horrible tragedy taking place just 100 feet away from where they were.
It wasn't until the end of the game when the winning team's fans carried their players in this kind of spontaneous parade out of the stadium to celebrate that they walked out onto the street and saw all these burnt up, rolled up corpses of the people who had landed on the furnace.
Wherever you go, Whatever they get into.
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Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. For the first time, my show, Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted for a special episode.
A Redacted Medical Mystery uncovers how routine surgery leads to classified government operations.
Listen now on the Medical Mysteries or Redacted feeds, or search A Redacted Medical Mystery wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey listeners, Mr. Ballin here. What if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories happening right now are all connected to what might be the biggest crime of our generation?
You know I'm always on the hunt for the most chilling and perplexing tales out there.
Well, I've discovered a new podcast that uncovers real-world mysteries unfolding right now. much like how another Ballin' Studios podcast, Redacted Declassified Mysteries, brings hidden government secrets to light, and it's called Lawless Planet.
Host Zach Goldbaum reveals how shocking tales of murder, cover-ups, and mysterious deaths are all part of something bigger. the systematic destruction of our planet.
From activists who vanish in the Amazon to whistleblowers uncovering billion-dollar environmental crimes, these aren't just stories about the environment.
They're real-life thrillers about people caught between powerful forces willing to kill to keep their secrets buried.
Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.
Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. I'm excited to tell you about something special.
For the first time, My show, Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted, Declassified Mysteries with Luke LaManna, to tell a story so complex it required our combined storytelling styles.
This special episode is called A Redacted Medical Mystery.
In it, unexplained symptoms after a routine surgery quickly unravel into something much darker, leading straight to classified government operations hidden for decades.
To listen and uncover the truth alongside us, head to either the Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries or Redacted show pages right now. or search for A Redacted Medical Mystery in the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're fascinated by unexplained medical stories, well, stick around on Medical Mysteries.
Every week, we dive deep into cases that will leave you questioning everything you know about the human body.
And if government conspiracies are more your style, Redacted is your go-to for stories that unravel secrets never meant to see the light of day.
Remember, you can listen to both shows early and ad-free by joining Wondery Plus.
Our next story is called Minivan. On the afternoon of April 10th, 2018, 16-year-old Kyle Plush had just finished classes at Seven Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He walked out the school's doors and began walking straight across towards the sophomore parking lot where his car, a minivan, was located.
Although Kyle had suffered from a spinal cord injury at a young age, he had made a remarkable recovery.
He not only walked after his injury, he ran.
He went downhill skiing, he biked, he swam, he played soccer.
But of all the sports he enjoyed playing, tennis was his favorite.
He had joined the high school tennis team and had become one of their best and most popular players.
That afternoon, he had a match scheduled, so he needed to get into his minivan and get out his tennis racket and his tennis shoes.
And so he made it to the vehicle a little bit after 3 p.m.
He slid open the door, he threw his backpack inside, and then he climbed towards the third row back seat of the van where his sneakers were sitting on the bench seat.
And so he got to the third row, he turned around and sat down facing the front of the minivan.
He took off his school shoes, put on his tennis shoes, and then he got up onto his knees and turned around.
So he's facing the back of the van. His knees are on the third row seat.
And he began reaching down into the trunk to reach for his bag that contained his tennis racket.
And as he was reaching, the third row itself, what he was kneeling on, flipped backwards, dumping him headfirst into the trunk.
Except all of Kyle's body did not just go tumbling into the trunk space.
Instead, his upper half made it about halfway down.
He tumbled with the seat. And then he got stuck upside down when the top of that third row seat caught his chest and pressed it up against the back hatch of the van.
And so Kyle's upside down, his hands are free in the trunk space, but they're too close to the ground where he can't really press himself out of this position he's in.
And this third row seat that's come loose and trapped him like this, it's not locked in position.
And so if he goes up at all, the seat goes with him.
If he comes down at all, the seat comes with him.
And so even trying to push himself back out again, he wouldn't be able to clear the seat because it would just come with him and then come back down again.
And so he probably looked for places to pull himself down, hoping that might be a way to clear the obstruction, but there was nothing to grab onto, and his lower half would not have been able to slip through that gap, even if the seat was stationary, because no person is supposed to get through that tiny little gap.
There was also no inside handle on the back hatch that Kyle could have grabbed and potentially opened to the back door.
And so he was entirely reliant on somebody showing up and opening the trunk to get him out.
But the scariest part of this situation was that that loose third row that came forward and trapped Kyle against the back of the van, it weighed nearly 100 pounds and was driving against his chest.
And so he would have had to fight with every breath he took in, pushing up that 100 pounds just to get a marginal breath.
But worse than that, if Kyle didn't constantly put air into his chest and keep it full and inflated and strong, that seat would literally crush his chest and kill him.
Kyle knew he had to find a way to signal someone that he was in this car.
He couldn't reach his phone because it was up in his pants pocket, and that meant getting up around the obstruction, and he couldn't do that.
But he had a smartphone, and he knew he could use voice-assisted calling.
And so at 3.14 PM, he used his iPhone's voice assistant, Siri, to call 911.
As soon as the dispatcher picked up, Kyle was frantic and he was yelling, help, help, help, I'm trapped in a minivan in the Seven Hills parking lot.
Someone needs to get me out. But the dispatcher couldn't really understand what Kyle was saying because you got to remember, Kyle is yelling from in the trunk space through this collapsed seat up to his phone in his pocket.
And the dispatcher was just having a hard time understanding what he was saying.
Although if you listen to the audio, it's plainly clear that Kyle is in distress.
You can hear that he's yelling and you can hear him banging, which apparently is him banging on the inside of the car.
And so they kept asking Kyle, where did you say you are?
What's going on? But Kyle, he can't hear his phone.
So Kyle just kept frantically repeating his situation, saying his name, where he was located, what was happening to him, in hopes that maybe somebody on the other end of the line would understand what was going on and would come save him.
Towards the end of the call, Kyle tells the dispatcher that he thinks he's going to die here.
And when the call does cut out, the dispatcher tries calling Kyle back, but it goes to voicemail. and his voicemail only indicated his name was Kyle.
It didn't give a last name or anything about him.
Not knowing if this was real or a hoax, the dispatcher wrongly labeled this call as unknown trouble when they broadcast it to police.
And the dispatcher did not communicate that Kyle was obviously in distress.
He was screaming and banging on something throughout the call and even referenced that he thought he was going to die.
Had the dispatcher given Kyle's call a higher priority, Fire and Rescue would have been alerted and they could have used their advanced mapping technologies to pinpoint where Kyle's cell phone was and they could have found him that way.
Instead, local police were sent to the Seven Hills High School area to go look around the different parking lots that this caller could have been in.
But there was nearly a dozen of these parking lots associated with the high school, making it a huge search area.
And again, these police officers were not even aware what they were looking for.
They were looking for unknown trouble associated with some caller somewhere around this huge high school.
And so the police show up and begin kind of meandering through all these parking lots, staying in their vehicle, just kind of looking around and they don't see any problems.
Although in reality, they were right near Kyle the entire time.
At 3.35 p.m., with the police still patrolling the parking lots around the high school, Kyle used Siri to call 911 again and a different dispatcher answered.
Now, at this point, it's been 21 minutes since Kyle's first 911 call, and so the weight of that third row is becoming unbearable.
His voice is very weak. It's very faint.
You can tell he has labor breathing, and every word is punctuated with a long silence as he tries to get out anything he can to try to help himself.
And one of the things he says to the dispatcher as soon as they answer is, if I die, I need you to tell my mother that I love her.
And then there's a silence. And Kyle asks them, can you hear me?
And there's still a silence. And he says, this is not a joke.
I'm trapped in my gold minivan in the Seven Hills sophomore parking lot.
If you don't get here soon, I'm going to die.
There's another silence. And then Kyle says, hey, Siri.
And then there's silence. He says, hey, Siri, again and again and again.
And then it goes silent. The second dispatcher had heard Kyle on this call, but for some reason did not relay to the patrolling officers in the area, Kyle's dire situation or his exact position that he was in this gold Honda Odyssey in the sophomore parking lot.
For some reason that was not communicated to those officers.
And so two minutes after the second 911 call ended, those two officers left thinking there's nobody here, there's no trouble.
And that was it, Kyle was left all alone.
Six hours later, Kyle's father went out looking for him after he didn't come home from his tennis match.
And he found his son's minivan parked in the sophomore parking lot at the high school.
And when he went up to it, it was too late.
His son was still trapped upside down in the back in the trunk.
And he had died after the third row had finally crushed his chest, causing him to asphyxiate.
The next and final story of today's episode is called The Tomb.
In August of 2015, 16-year-old Nacy Perez suddenly woke up in the middle of the night.
As she lay there scanning around the dark tiny room that she was in, it dawned on her that the most likely reason she had just woken up is because she really needed to use the bathroom.
And so she climbed out of her bed and she began carefully walking across the room where her other relatives were sleeping on the floor as she moved towards the back of the house.
Nacy lived in a town called La Entrada, which is located in one of the poorest and most dangerous countries in the world, Honduras.
But despite the harshness of her reality, Nacy was pretty happy.
She had recently married the boy she was in love with, his name was Rudy, and the two of them were both very excited about their first child, which was due in a matter of months.
So Nacy reached the back of her house, she pushed open the back door, and she stepped out into the hot night air, and then she made the familiar walk across her backyard toward the outhouse.
But Nacy would never reach the outhouse.
The next morning, Nacy's mother woke up first.
Her name was Maria. And as she passed by the back door, she looked outside and she saw Nacy lying on the ground.
And so Maria, she screams, she runs outside to her daughter and she flips her over and she's looking at her and Nacy is unresponsive and she's foaming at the mouth.
Now, they're in a part of the world where healthcare was not top-notch, not even close.
And Honduras is known for being an extremely religious part of the world.
And so Maria did not think, oh, I should send my daughter to the hospital or I should call a doctor.
Instead, Maria and the rest of Nacy's family, who had all streamed outside because of the commotion, they decided to call a priest to perform an exorcism because the belief was Nacy must be possessed with demons.
And so a priest was hailed to the residence and the priest would perform an exorcism on Nacy, but it wouldn't do anything.
And so at that point, Maria and the rest of Nacy's family would take Nacy, who was still totally unresponsive and foaming, to the local hospital.
But by that point, it was too late. Nacy was dead.
When Nacy's family asked the doctors what happened to her, they said they didn't know.
And so heartbroken and confused, Maria and the rest of Nacy's family brought Nacy back home.
They had an ad hoc memorial service, and then they buried her.
The following day, Nacy's husband, Rudy, who was totally distraught because he has not only lost his wife, he's also lost his unborn child.
He got up early and he just had to go to the cemetery to be with his wife.
And so he made his way over to the local cemetery and he found his wife's gravesite.
Nacy had not been buried under the earth.
Instead, she had been placed into a coffin, and that coffin had been slid into this big, hollowed-out cement block that was as big as a coffin.
And then once the coffin was slid inside, they walled up the opening.
So basically, her gravesite was this kind of freestanding, big cement block.
And so Rudy finds Nacy's cement block and he goes up right next to it and he leans up against it and he begins to quietly sob.
But just seconds later, he would hear something in that cemetery that would cause him to go completely silent, stand up and sprint away.
The day before, approximately one or two hours after Nacy's coffin was slid inside of that cement tomb and walled up, Nacy woke up.
She was never dead. It's unclear what originally caused Nacy to collapse outside of her house on the way to the outhouse, but the two leading theories are, one, she had a severe panic attack caused by a nearby gunshot,
Or two, she had a severe episode of cataplexy.
Cataplexy is the sudden uncontrollable loss of muscle function often brought on by very strong emotions.
A mild case could be just having your knees buckle for a second.
A severe case, which is what they believe could have happened to Nacy, would result in basically complete paralysis.
But whatever the case was, the doctors at the hospital got it wrong.
When Nacy was brought to them, she was not dead.
And so when she woke up inside of her coffin that was encased in cement, she began shrieking and trying to pound up against the inside of these tight walls that were pressed up against her.
And at some point she even managed to force her hands up near her head and she shattered the glass window that sat in her coffin that looked right down at her face. she broke the glass but it didn't help her at all because again it's just cement on the other side and so glass shards fell into her mouth and into her eyes and so she stayed like that screaming and trying to fight her way out for over 24 hours trying to get anybody's attention but nobody heard her until her husband, Rudy, he leaned up against her tomb and he put his ear right up against the cement and began to cry.
And that's when he heard through the cement, the sound of his wife calling out for help.
Rudy instantly ran and got help and he and his family came back and they broke open the side of this tomb and they pulled Nacy's coffin out.
And even though she was now unresponsive, she had a faint heartbeat.
And so they rushed her to the hospital, but by the time she got there, she really had died.
Nacy had finally just run out of oxygen, likely within minutes of her husband finally hearing her screams.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
If you enjoyed today's stories and you're looking for more bone-chilling content, be sure to check out the rest of our studio's podcasts, Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Bedtime Stories, and Run Full.
Just search Ballin Studios wherever you get your podcasts.
To watch hundreds more stories just like these, head to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin.
So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya. Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. And before you go, please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.
Hey, listeners, big news for true crime lovers.
You can now enjoy this podcast ad-free on Amazon Music with your Prime membership.
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No more wading through cliffhangers or dealing with ads, because let's be honest, ads shouldn't be the most nerve-wracking part of true crime.
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