Hello and welcome to Missing Persons Mysteries
Today, we will be discussing two extraordinary
cases of people who were frozen solid and survived!
Let's get started...
Six hundred thousand people go missing in the United States alone every year.
Of those 600,000 between 89 and 92 percent of them are found, whether it be deceased or alive.
Many people will see those statistics and think that’s
quite a high rate of recovery and it just might be but think about this;
of the people found deceased, many are found under quite unusual situations and in inexplicable ways.
That's what we are here to discuss with you today,
of those people who are found, in those bizarre and precarious situations;
I’m talking about those unfortunate people who are found deceased who were literally frozen.
If you really stop and think about this you will be forced to consider the unimaginable.
Being lost in the wilderness, taking your last breaths of life, and thinking you are
slowly freezing to death and wondering if anyone is even going to find your body.
This is not only an absolutely horrific thought but an even more nightmarish fate.
The cases we are going to be reviewing today have had to face this nightmare for real.
Trying to imagine their horror and dread is a futile task.
So, let’s take a few minutes to hear their incredible stories of
survival, and thank goodness they were found in time.
Lengby is an extremely small town in Minnesota in the United States.
As of 2010, there were only 86 people, 44 households,
and 24 families living in this tiny dot on the map.
The city has a total area of .29 square miles and if you were driving through
it and happened to blink, you just might miss it.
There is one thing though that makes Lengby extremely interesting to folks like us in
this community; we who are the seekers of anything strange, odd, and inexplicable.
On the night of December 20, 1980, a 19-year-old young woman named Jean Hilliard was driving
along a winding road, heading home at around midnight from meeting some friends in town.
She decided to take what she thought would be a shortcut through a gravel road which, in the
middle of the winter in the dead of night in rural Minnesota, was also extremely icy.
Her car ended up slipping off the road and running straight into a ditch.
She was driving her father’s Ford LTD which had rear-wheel drive and no anti-lock brakes.
The temperature was pretty usual for that time of year, 20 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit.
Jean decided to get out of the car and walk, in her cowboy boots,
to where she thought a friend of hers lived, figuring she could get him to help her.
She explains that she was more frustrated than scared because she would keep on thinking her
friend was “just over that hill”, but once she would get to the top of it and look down,
she wouldn’t see anything familiar, including her friend’s place.
And so it went; Jean would keep on walking over hill after hill,
with every single step thinking help was just over this next one.
Finally, about two miles later Jean said she saw
her destination right ahead of her through some trees.
Then everything went black.
What she doesn’t remember, and later had to be told,
was that she DID in fact make it right to her friend’s doorstep.
Once she finally got to his yard though, she had tripped.
Being as cold as she was, she couldn’t stand back up and walk and so she crawled,
on her hands and knees, to his front door.
Before she could alert anyone to her presence, however, she lost consciousness.
There she lay, for six whole hours in the frigid
and below-freezing temperatures of a normal Minnesota night.
She was found, 6 hours later on that same friend's porch,
the same exact spot she had passed out on, with her eyes wide open, “As frozen as a log.”
Jean’s friend, Wally Nelson was a cattle rancher and part-time
butcher who had an accident when he was younger and was kicked in the head by
a horse which knocked one of his eyes loose, remembers that night and finding Jean there,
in that horrific condition, as if it were only yesterday.
He recalls, “I was so damn surprised when I saw that little hunk out in the yard.
I grabbed her by the collar and skidded her into the porch. I thought she was dead.
Froze stiffer than a board, but I saw a few bubbles coming out of her nose.”
Wally and Jean were friends because she was dating his best friend at the time, whose name was Paul.
As a matter of fact, he had just been hanging out with Paul and Jean the
night before when they went out dancing and drinking in a little hole-in-the-wall spot;
the only spot within driving distance considering the weather.
Wally had actually met a woman that same night and took her
home with him. Imagine how awkward the next morning when he had to ask her to help load
the frozen body of his friend they were just out having some fun with the night before.
But, that’s exactly how it happened, according to Wally.
The pair drove Jean to the nearby Fosston Hospital
where the doctors admitted they thought the situation was grim.
They couldn’t even get an IV into Jean’s arm because of how frozen it was.
The needles were actually breaking at the touch of her frigid skin.
Despite the doctors and hospital staff thinking she was pretty much as good as dead already,
they decided to take a chance, warm her up and pray for a miracle.
Literally. A member of the hospital staff decided to
call her pastor and get a prayer chain started for Jean Hilliard.
A miracle is exactly what it seemed to be too, as by the next morning Jean had woken up.
Her body was in excruciating pain all over and spasming but she was indeed alive.
By noon she was even speaking in coherent sentences.
In less than five hours she was feeling better enough that her biggest concern, remember she
was a teenager, that her dad would be angry when he found out she had driven his car into a ditch.
Minnesota professor of medicine and the man who worked on Jean says that
over the past ten years or so he has seen approximately 12 cases very similar to Jean’s.
He said, “We have patients you can knock on like wood. They feel rock-frozen solid. That in no way
dissuades us from the resuscitation attempt. And we do have a track record of success with that.”
He also stated, “The dictum is that no one is dead until they’re warm and dead.”
It became even more sensational when the doctors informed the
media and public that they were very close to amputating both of
Jean’s legs in order to avoid infection setting in from all of the frostbite;
this was unbelievable because she went home with nothing more than a few blisters on her toes.
Jean said she doesn’t know why this miraculous event happened to her,
as her life has been very normal.
She married and had children, divorced and works at Walmart.
She does however make sure she is never out driving at night
when the icy Minnesota winter weather kicks in for the season.
Justin Smith
26-year-old Justin Smith was walking home from what he thought was a typical night hanging
out and having some drink with friends when his life took a turn for the incredibly miraculous.
On February 20, 2015, at around 9:30 pm, the McAdoo, Pennsylvania native thought he was
just going home for the night. Unfortunately, however, he tripped and fell into the snow.
It was 5 degrees below zero and snowing pretty hard when his father
went out looking for him when he hadn’t returned home when he was supposed to.
As he was walking along the familiar streets of the route his son would
have had to have taken in order to have walked home,
he saw the boots first, peering out of a small snow mound that had collected onto his son’s body.
“I looked over and Justin was just laying there. He was blue.
His face- he was lifeless. I checked for a pulse. I checked for a heartbeat- but there was nothing.”
It turns out Justin had been laying on the side of
that empty and desolate road where he had fallen for a bit longer than 12 hours.
When emergency services first arrived,
they too could find no signs of life and made the assumption that Justin was dead.
They even went so far as to lay a white sheet over his frozen body.
As the state police took over and started to work the investigation into Justin’s death,
which admittedly seemed to be pretty cut and dry, the coroner was called out to the scene as well.
Justin’s father, Don Smith had even had to make the devastating phone call
to his wife, Justin’s mother and break the unimaginable and heartbreaking news to her;
the news no mother should ever have to hear.
Their son was dead, frozen to death on the side of a dark and lonely road.
However, when Justin’s body was transported to the hospital in the early morning hours of February
21st, the doctor on duty, Dr. Coleman had a completely different train of thought altogether.
He said, “My clinical thought was very simple; you have to be warm to be dead!”
The doctor then did something quite unorthodox and ordered the paramedics
to start performing CPR on a lifeless man who had no pulse or heartbeat.
He also had no blood pressure and it was presumed he had taken his last breath the day before.
According to the National Post online, “When a person’s body chills at the right rate,
the associated slowing of metabolic processes will protect them from the other effects of exposure.
Their lethargic cells don’t require as much oxygen, so the fact that their heart has slowed
and their breathing stopped is dangerous rather than deadly. These people hang in a state of sort
of suspended animation, seeming dead by all the standard measures, but not irreversibly gone.”
For almost two whole hours, paramedics and hospital emergency personnel,
going on doctor Coleman’s orders, continued to pump Justin’s chest and even gave breaths
into his open mouth until he was able to be flown, even in the treacherous snowstorm still
blazing outside, to another hospital more equipped to handle his unique situation.
Once he finally arrived at the hospital in Allentown,
Pennsylvania by lifelight helicopter, doctors pumped Justin full of warm,
oxygenated blood using a treatment called ECMO or “Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.”
Early on that evening, the same one where just as the sun was coming up he had been
found by his own father and pronounced dead by emergency workers and even a coroner,
Justin Smith’s heart finally began to beat on it’s own again.
Though a miracle in itself, no one,
not even the doctors treating him were prepared for Justin to make anywhere near a full recovery
as they were worried about what all of the lack of oxygen would do to his brain function.
However, as miracles sometimes go;
Justin made a complete and full recovery and is back to living his normal life again.
He had no long term or ongoing problems due to his accident and brush with death all those years ago.
What do you guys think about these miraculous stories of recovery?
Be sure to let us know in the comments down below!
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I'm your host Bob and I will see you in our next video!