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Today's podcast features three unique stories that all involve highway hazards.
The audio from all of these stories has been pulled from our 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 Bright Lights, and it's about an accident that has a major plot twist at the end.
The second story you'll hear is called Random, and it's a story about three college students who are confronted with one of the most unlikely scenarios imaginable.
And the third and final story you'll hear is called Goosebumps and it is one of the most viral so-called Glitch in the Matrix stories on Reddit.
But before we get into today's 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, please change the amazon music follow buttons.
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Okay, let's get into our first story, called bright lights.
From the director of It comes It.
Welcome to Derry, the chilling new HBO original series exploring one of horror's biggest terrors, Pennywise the Clown.
Set in 1960s Derry, Maine, the new HBO original series is streaming Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO Max.
Also, you can listen to the official It Welcome to Dairy podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
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On Wednesday, April 26th 2006, a bright, beautiful outgoing 18-year-old named Whitney Sarek began making her way across her campus towards her lecture hall where she had a class that morning.
Whitney was a freshman at Taylor University, which is an evangelical Christian liberal arts college located in Upland Indiana.
Upland is a little town that sits about two miles east of Interstate 69 and is situated right between the two much larger cities of Indianapolis and Fort Wayne.
As Whitney made her way along the pathway across campus and she passed by other throngs of students hustling to their own classes, she suddenly had a pang of anxiety as she realized the end of the school year was fast approaching.
And while Whitney was definitely excited to head back home to rural Gaylord Michigan, where she was from, to spend her summer vacation, she was also kind of bummed because she would have to say bye to all of her new friends in college that she wouldn't see again until after summer break in the fall, when the next school year started.
Whitney had made a ton of friends over the course of her freshman year and by and large they were other freshmen like herself.
But she did have a few friends that were upperclassmen.
Because early in Whitney's collegiate career she had discovered that upperclassmen were just as friendly as freshmen, and they came with the bonus of lots of experience and expertise.
And if you just asked them for guidance or advice, they'd be happy to give it to you.
And so over the course of the school year, anytime Whitney had an opportunity to interact with or be around upperclassmen, she would take it thinking you know, maybe I can learn something.
And in fact that morning, as Whitney was making her way across campus, she saw a sign that was asking for students to volunteer to the next day head out to this banquet hall to set up this big banquet for the school's new incoming president.
And so when Whitney walked over to the table and asked the people what this was all about, she would learn that the majority of the people that had signed up to be volunteers so far were upperclassmen.
And so as soon as she heard that, Whitney was quick to write her name down as well.
The rest of the day would go completely as normal for Whitney.
She would go to her classes, she would study, she would meet up with friends and then eventually, in the evening, she would make her way back to her dorm room where she would go to sleep.
Little did she know when she put her head down on the pillow that night, she was within 24 hours of her life changing in the most drastic way imaginable.
The following morning, Whitney got up early, she took a shower, she brushed her teeth and then she spent quite a while just staring at her wardrobe debating which outfit she was going to wear, and then finally, she chose the one she wanted and she got dressed.
Whitney was not vain, but she knew the whole day would be spent around upperclassmen and university staff, and so she wanted to look her best.
On her way towards her door to leave, Whitney would stop and look in her mirror one last time to make sure she looked okay.
And in this fleeting moment as she's looking herself up and down, she couldn't help but feel a justifiable sense of pride in this woman looking back at her.
She had gotten into a great college.
She had moved hundreds of miles from home and lived alone by herself for the first time, and her grades all year had been excellent.
And so, as Whitney's looking at herself, she thought to herself you know what i'm doing pretty good, whitney's gaze would move from her reflection up to the clock on the wall and she would see she was running late, and so she quickly grabbed her jacket, she threw it over her shoulder and she went out the door.
When Whitney arrived at the meeting spot in the parking lot nearby, she saw there was a group of what looked like students standing around a university van.
And so Whitney walked up to them, and sure enough, this was the group of volunteers.
It consisted of seven other Taylor students, most of which were seniors, and one university staff member.
And so Whitney didn't know any of them, and so she quickly introduced herself.
Everyone said hi, and then, because Whitney was the last person they were waiting on, very quickly after she arrived they were kind of ushered into the van and then the van pulled out of the parking lot and began heading north towards Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne was where the banquet hall was.
It was located about an hour north.
At some point during this drive north Whitney struck up a conversation with a 22-year-old senior named Laura Van Ryn, who was sitting right next to her.
Whitney and Laura were total strangers, but they looked so similar physically that when they first got onto the van, one of the other volunteers actually asked them if they were related.
But it wasn't just physical similarities that Laura and Whitney shared.
Once they got to talking, Whitney would learn that Laura had also grown up in a small, rural Michigan town.
It was called Caledonia and it was located only a couple of hours south of Gaylord, where Whitney had grown up.
After the van finally arrived in Fort Wayne, the volunteers got out, they went inside of the banquet hall building and for the next several hours they set up tables and chairs, they put out silverware, they hung up decorations, and the whole time Laura and Whitney just stayed close together, continuing their friendly banter.
And then, around 7 pm, when the banquet hall was ready for the next day's ceremony, the volunteers decided their work was done, and so they left the banquet hall building.
They piled back into the van and began heading south, back towards their campus.
For the first few minutes of the ride, Laura and Whitney would just continue to chat with each other.
But pretty quickly they, like the rest of the people in the volunteer group, just were tired from all the hard work of moving things around, and so they became quiet and began looking out the window, just kind of keeping to themselves.
About 30 minutes later, when the van was within a couple of miles of their campus, Whitney would turn and look next to her at Laura, just for a second.
And right as she did, Laura would actually look up and look at Whitney.
And so for a really quick second, they made eye contact.
And so Whitney kind of awkwardly smiled at her.
And as Laura was smiling back at Whitney, Whitney realized something very strange.
There was this bright light on the side of Laura's face.
And then, seconds later, that bright light had grown and the entire interior of the van was completely whited out.
And then a second later, someone towards the front of the van yelled, oh my God, no!
And then the van went completely silent.
Within minutes, dozens of 911 calls were coming in from motorists on I-69 saying that something terrible had happened.
When first responders arrived on scene, they were braced for the worst, but even still they were shocked at what they saw.
Scattered all over the northbound and southbound lanes of I-69, not far from Taylor University, were all these huge chunks of jagged metal.
There was glass everywhere and there were bodies everywhere.
That light that Whitney saw growing on Laura's face, that suddenly filled the entirety of the van, were the headlights of an 80000 pound fully loaded tractor trailer truck driven by Robert Spencer.
Robert was a truck driver and he was traveling north on I-69 when he fell asleep at the wheel, at which point his truck veered off the road into the grassy median between the northbound side and the southbound side of I-69.
His truck bounced up onto the southbound lane and crashed into Laura and Whitney's van.
And when it did, the impact literally peeled off the side of their van and sent the van spinning.
And so, as the van is spinning because of this huge opening in the side of it, the students inside were literally being violently thrown out of the van into traffic.
When first responders finally actually began surveying the crash site, they would find Robert still in his truck.
He was alive, but they would discover that of the nine occupants inside of that van, five were deceased.
A few hours later, in the early morning hours of April 27th, Whitney Sarek's family back home in Gaylord Michigan, woke up to the sound of a phone ringing.
When one of Whitney's parents answered the phone, it was the Grant County coroner telling them their daughter had been in a terrible accident and she was deceased.
At the same time, three hours south of Gaylord Michigan in Caledonia Michigan, the Van Ryn family also was woken up in the middle of the night to a phone call.
Except the call they got was that their daughter Laura, had been in that same crash but she had survived, although she was in critical condition.
In the days that followed, the Sarek family had Whitney's body transported to Gaylord, and then they began to plan for her funeral.
A funeral that would have to be closed casket because of the extensive damage to Whitney's body.
Meanwhile, Laura Van Ryn's family rushed to Parkview Hospital in Fort Wayne and they would find their daughter, bandaged head to toe, with a neck, brace on laying in a hospital bed in a coma.
Doctors would tell Laura's family that, even though Laura was now stable, there was no way of knowing if she would ever come out of that coma.
And even if she did, she had suffered a serious brain injury which likely would impact her ability to function.
And so, knowing that at best this was going to be a very long road to recovery, Laura's family decided to move her from Fort Wayne back home to Michigan, to a rehabilitation center in Grand Rapids that specialized in brain injury.
And so, while the Van Ryns were in the process of moving Laura back to Michigan, the Sareks were in the process of saying their final goodbyes to Whitney.
On April 29th, so three days after the accident, the Sareks would hold a visitation in their hometown of Gaelord.
A visitation is a time for friends and acquaintances to come together and pay respects and offer condolences to the people that the deceased have left behind.
For Whitney's visitation.
More than 1400 people attended, which was nearly half of Gaylord's total population.
The following day on April 30th, Whitney was buried.
At the same time, Laura's family, who had been taking turns keeping a 24-hour bedside vigil with Laura in the Grand Rapids facility, were given some incredible news.
Based on brain scans, it looked very much like Laura would wake up from her coma, although there was no timeline.
Over the next couple of weeks, Laura remained comatose, but her body would slowly begin to heal and all signs seemed to be pointing towards her eventually making a recovery.
And then on Tuesday, May 16th, so 20 days after the accident, Laura woke up from her coma.
And amazingly, at first, it seemed like her brain was functioning the way it should be.
The family could not believe their luck.
This was a miracle.
Over the next few days, Laura would slowly regain her strength to the point where she could move some limbs and she could sit up in her bed and then ask for her cognitive function.
It seemed like she was making strides, but then she would do something that would make doctors and her family and everybody around her start to question if her brain really was okay.
On Monday, May 22nd, so one week after Laura had woken up from her coma, she was sitting in her hospital bed with her physical therapist right next to her, and her family was in the room as well.
And at some point her physical therapist handed Laura a pencil, and then she put a pad of paper in front of her.
And then the therapist told Laura to write a word down that was very specific.
It was a word that Laura should know well and a word that Laura should be able to spell.
And so after Laura kind of gave a nod saying she understood the assignment, Laura took the pencil and very awkwardly and painstakingly wrote out a word.
But when she was done and the therapist looked at what she had written, it was wrong.
It didn't make any sense.
And so she asked Laura to do it again.
And so Laura with even more determination would try to write this word.
And once again, she wrote the same word, the same incorrect word.
And so it was at this point that the therapist and the onlooking family started to realize that, you know, her injury to her brain might be more extensive than we thought.
However, as everyone in that room would soon find out, that was not the case.
There was something much, much bigger going on.
Back on April 26th, just minutes after the car accident, first responders began moving about the crash site to figure out who was deceased and who was still alive.
When they found Laura, she was barely clinging to life on the side of the road.
And so they rushed over to her.
They put her on a stretcher along with her purse, which contained her driver's license.
They put that all together.
They put her on an ambulance and they sent her to the hospital.
Once Laura arrived at the hospital, doctors would use her driver's license inside of her purse to identify her, and then they began wrapping her head to toe in bandages and casts.
And when bandages began coming off over the following weeks, it was immediately obvious to everyone that this accident had significantly altered Laura's physical appearance, most notably her teeth.
They almost looked like they had been shifted to one side in her mouth.
However, to Laura's family, they didn't care how she looked.
They only cared that she was still alive.
But on Monday, May 22nd, when Laura was handed that piece of paper and a pencil and she was told to write her name, she did not write L-A-U-R-A Laura.
She wrote W-H-I-T-N-E-Y, Whitney.
It would turn out a colossal mistake was made and nobody caught it until that moment.
The woman sitting in the hospital bed with the pencil and paper was not 22-year-old Laura Van Ryn.
The woman sitting in the hospital bed was 18-year-old Whitney Sarek.
When Whitney was found on the side of the road clinging to life, the first responders thought the purse next to her was hers, and so they opened it up.
They found a driver's license.
They looked at it and they looked at the victim on the ground and they looked identical, and so they said okay, this is Laura.
And amazingly, Whitney's purse that contained her driver's license happened to land on the ground next to Laura's body.
And so Laura was misidentified as Whitney Sarek.
A week after Whitney had written her name down on that pad of paper, it was officially confirmed that this was a case of mistaken identity.
And so, once again, the Serick family received a call in the middle of the night from the Grant County Coroner.
Except this time, they were telling them that your daughter did not die in that car accident.
She's alive.
She's in Grand Rapids waiting for you.
And so the Sarek family, they were completely shocked.
They wanted this to be true, but it just seemed too good to be true.
They had had a funeral for Whitney.
They had buried Whitney, except because it was closed casket, they never saw Whitney.
And so the Sareks hopped in a plane, they flew to Grand Rapids and they walked into that hospital room.
And there on the hospital bed was their daughter Whitney, with her arms outstretched crying, calling for her parents.
While this, of course, was a miracle for the Sareks, it was, at the same time, a complete nightmare for the Van Ryns.
They had had their suspicions that something was off about their daughter, most notably her teeth, because they just didn't look like their daughter's teeth.
But they had been told by the doctors and by anybody who would talk to them, that it was perfectly normal for people involved in these very significant accidents to look completely different or even act completely different, and so the van rins just kind of put their suspicions to the side and focused on looking after their child and helping her recover.
A few days later, Laura Van Ryn's body, which had been buried in Gaylord Michigan, under the tombstone that said Whitney Sarek, was exhumed, and her body was flown to Caledonia, where the Van Ryn family was able to give their daughter a proper funeral and burial.
Even though Whitney and Laura had only known each other very briefly during that volunteer event in Fort Wayne, their families would forge a bond over this shared trauma.
And in 2008, two years after the crash, the Sareks and the Van Ryns would co-author a book about their experience in going through this horrible event from each of their perspectives.
That book is called Mistaken Identity, Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope.
Also that year on April 26th so the second anniversary of the accident Taylor University would dedicate a prayer chapel to the five victims.
Since the crash, Indiana has changed their state's protocols and procedures for identifying accident victims to ensure this type of mix-up can never happen again.
As for Robert Spencer, the truck driver who caused the fatal accident, he would be sentenced to four years in prison.
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Our next story is called Random.
In 2019, Meg Maurer was a 21-year-old senior at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.
She was studying ecology and evolutionary biology and planned to pursue a career in scientific illustration after graduation.
This was a field that combined her skill as a scientist, her incredible artistic ability and her general love of nature.
But despite her intellectual brilliance, what Meg was actually known for was her very uplifting personality.
When her mother was asked what her daughter was like, She said well, it's like trying to describe what it's like to feel the warmth of the sun.
There are not words to accurately describe what that feels like.
And that was Meg.
She was radiant.
She was joyous.
She was adventuresome.
She was kind.
She was really just a wonderful person to be around.
In March of that year, just two months before their graduation, Meg and two of her close friends decided to go on a trip for spring break.
This would be their last spring break as students and they wanted to enjoy it.
Because they were all in excellent physical condition, they decided they would spend the week hiking in Georgia.
When Meg told her family about her big plans, they could tell she was extremely excited and they just told her you know, be safe and we'll see you when you get back.
On the morning of their departure, which was March 5th, Meg packed her suitcase into the trunk of her small green sedan.
And then she drove over to her two friends' apartment building and they came out and they put their suitcases into the car.
And then once the car was all packed and all three of them were inside, they hit the road.
The drive from Tulane University to this area in Georgia where they'd be hiking took about eight hours if you didn't stop.
But none of them were in a particularly big rush, and so they figured they would just stop along the way, and if they got to Georgia super late at night, so be it.
After being on the road for two hours without stopping, they all needed to use the bathroom.
And so Meg decided to pull over at the first rest stop she saw.
And the first one she saw was in this residential town in Mississippi called Gautier.
So she pulls off the highway into this very nondescript rest stop and all three of them get out.
They go into the main building and they use the restroom.
Meg was the first one to be done.
So she came outside and she waited right near the bathroom door.
And then her two friends, they finished up as well.
They came out and then the trio began walking back towards the parking lot where Meg's car was.
At the same time, a man driving an 18-wheeler tractor trailer truck was bombing down the highway right outside of this rest stop.
And right before he was going to pass the area where this rest stop was, he heard something fall off the back of his truck.
He instinctively checked both of his mirrors to see if maybe he could see what had fallen off.
But he didn't see anything in the road, and so he just pulled over onto the shoulder and got out to see what was going on.
When he walked towards the back of his truck, he expected to see, you know, maybe one of the back doors had popped open, or something like that.
But even before he made it to the back of his truck and could even look at those back doors, he already knew what had fallen off the truck.
Two of his back tires were just gone.
This truck had what's called dual rear wheels, which meant on the axle there was not just one wheel on each side.
Instead there were two wheels on each side, so four wheels across one axle.
And so each of these two wheels were bolted together and would turn at the same time and kind of functioned like one big fat tire.
This gave the truck more stability and safety when it was towing.
The driver, in a panic, looked back down the road in the direction he had just come, hoping to just see the tires somewhere.
But they weren't anywhere to be found.
And so not really knowing what to do, he just instinctively called his boss and told him what was going on.
And his boss just said, hold tight, I will send help out to you.
This driver is left to just stand on the side of the road and wait for help to arrive.
As he's doing that.
He's just staring back down the road in the direction he had just come, as if these tires are just going to magically appear.
And as he's looking in this direction, he starts to notice on the other side of the highway there are police cars and ambulances streaming into a rest stop that he had just passed.
And it was the rest stop where Meg and her two friends had been.
It would turn out, when these two tires became dislodged from this truck, they went careening across the highway to the other side, across oncoming traffic, all the way up into this rest stop, and they crashed directly into Meg right as she was climbing back into her car.
These two tires combined weighed almost 1,000 pounds.
And so the impact killed Meg.
She was pronounced dead on the scene.
After an investigation, it was not conclusively determined what actually caused these tires to fall off.
The likely cause was they were missing a small part known as a locking washer that costs 3 and is very easy to acquire.
But regardless, at this point, the incident is considered a freak accident.
The next and final story of today's episode is called Goosebumps.
In 2006, a 20-year-old woman named Sarah started having some very strange dreams about a woman named Aurora.
She had a very striking face with sharp features and long black hair.
Now, her dreams varied.
Sometimes Sarah was in a crowd of people, or she was at her office, or she was just alone in a room.
But in all of her dreams, Aurora would always show up.
Either she would interact with Aurora and they would speak, but Sarah could never remember what they actually spoke about.
Or Aurora would just be in the crowd or in the background just watching Sarah.
Now she had these dreams enough that eventually Sarah began to think I must know someone named Aurora.
I must have come across this person, and now they're just kind of manifesting in my brain at night when I'm sleeping.
And so she began going through her older posts on social media to look in pictures of her and of her friends to see if there was a woman with striking features and long black hair that was this Aurora person in her dream.
But after looking through hundreds and hundreds of pictures, she couldn't find any indication that she had met this person, at least not according to her social media.
And so Sarah began just going on Google and typing in, Aurora, long black hair, striking features.
Has anybody dreamed about this?
To see if there were people talking about having this type of dream on the internet.
But she had no luck.
Eventually, after about three or four months of having these strange dreams that Aurora was in, Aurora stopped showing up in Sarah's dreams.
It was like it suddenly was all over.
And so very quickly, Sarah just kind of forgot about it.
A few years later, on Halloween night 2009, Sarah and a friend pulled off the highway into a gas station.
They had been out with some friends celebrating Halloween, and now they were making their way back home.
Sarah pulled into an empty spot right in front of the convenience store and after they were parked, Sarah and her friend got out, they went inside, they got some snacks and drinks and then they came back outside and climbed back into Sarah's car.
A few moments later, Sarah had turned her car on, she had backed out and she had driven past all of the gas station pumps and she was making her way towards the single lane strip of road that merged out onto the highway.
It was how anybody who got into this gas station got back out onto the highway.
And so as she's getting closer to the entrance of this short merge road, her phone suddenly rings.
What happens next occurred over a span of just a few seconds.
So it might seem like this is over several minutes, but this all happened pretty much simultaneously.
She's pulling up to the entrance of this merge road, her cell phone rings, and because there was no one behind her it was not a busy night Sarah decides to just stop her car, put it in park so she can safely take this phone call.
And so she stops her car pretty much right in front of the entrance to this merge road and she picks up her phone.
She looks at the number and she doesn't recognize it, but she picks it up anyways and she says hello, There was silence on her phone.
And as Sarah is saying, hello, is anybody there?
Another car from the gas station pulls up right behind Sarah's car and they start honking their horn immediately.
They're in a huge rush.
And so Sarah, who's totally embarrassed that she's blocking traffic, she hangs up the phone, she puts it down, she puts her car back in drive and she hits the gas.
But this driver behind her is apparently in such a rush, they're so impatient, that they actually swerved around her, driving on the dirt off to the side of the road just to get around her. and then they sped off down the merge road back onto the highway.
And literally seconds later, another car that was already on the highway a silver Honda Civic lost control and smashed into this car that had just passed Sarah's car.
So there's this huge car accident literally right in front of Sarah and her friend, who have now stopped the car.
They're right at the end of the merge road looking at this horrible accident that they narrowly escaped.
Sarah put her car back in park, she picked up her phone, and she called the police.
When the police showed up a few moments later, they took down Sarah and her friend's version of events, And then, a little while later, after the ambulances had left and after the two cars had been pulled off of the highway, one of the police officers pulled Sarah aside and told her that the driver of the Honda Civic and the driver of the car that had swerved around her had both been killed in the accident.
Shocked.
The only thing Sarah could think to do was to call back that number.
She didn't recognize that had effectively stopped her from getting onto the highway and maybe even stopped her from being hit by that Honda Civic.
And so she wanted to talk to this person and thank them for saving her life.
But when she called the number back, the person did not pick up.
However, it went to her voicemail, and it said, Hi, you've reached Aurora.
Leave your name and number after the beep.
Sarah could not believe it.
She said she had never felt goosebumps like that in her entire life.
The next day, Sarah tried calling the number again, and this time the woman Aurora, answered the phone.
The two got to talking and Sarah explained her crazy dreams and now this crazy car crash thing and how it's all connected.
And Aurora would tell Sarah, like, that's amazing.
This is a crazy story you're telling me.
Except I didn't call you last night.
I have no idea how you got my phone number.
And so, at the end of this phone call, the two women really had not reached any sort of explanation for how this came to be, how they came to be talking.
But they ultimately just said, OK, hey, you know, thanks and best of luck to you.
And then they hung up.
After the call was over, Sarah found herself just kind of sitting there, not really sure how to react to what had just happened.
It was such a totally bizarre thing that she had just been through over the past 24 hours.
And then if you include the dream, this has been a multi-year long thing.
And so on a whim, Sarah just opens up her Facebook account.
And she plugs in Aurora's full name, because Aurora had given her her full name on this phone call they had just had.
And when she looked at her phone, when the results came in, Sarah nearly fainted.
Right at the top of the results page was this woman, Aurora's Facebook account.
And her profile picture showed her face.
And when Sarah looked at her face, it was the exact same face she had seen so many times in her dreams.
It was the same Aurora with the striking features and long black hair.
The woman in her dreams was the woman who called her and saved her life.
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This podcast airs every Monday and Thursday morning, but in the meantime you can always watch one of the hundreds of stories we have posted on our main YouTube channel, which is just called Mr Ballin.
Consider donating to our charity.
It's called the Mr Ballin Foundation and it provides support to victims of violent crime, as well as the victims' families.
Monthly donors to the Mr Ballin Foundation, Honor Them Society will receive free gifts and exclusive invites to special live events.
Go to mrballin.foundation and click Get Involved to join the Honor Them Society today.
If you want to get in touch with me, please follow me on any major social media platform and then send me a direct message.
My username is just at Mr. Ballin, and I really do read the majority of my DMs.
Lastly, we have some really cool merchandise, so head on over to shopmrballin.com to have a look.
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 wonderycom slash survey.
