On a long enough timeline,
the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Welcome to another edition of A Collection of Horrible Fates.
Today's final story is going to cover a particularly horrifying incident
where the victims were powerless to their circumstances.
As always, viewer discretion is advised.
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In 2003, a man named Hitoshi was working as a surgical resident at Christus St. Joseph hospital in Dallas, Texas.
Unlike many people who are simply clocking in and clocking out at the end of the day for a paycheck,
Hitoshi was really passionate about his work as a doctor.
He had been a member of the 2003 class of the University of Texas Houston Medical School,
where his classmates -- also aspiring doctors -- voted Hitoshi as the epitome of a good physician.
It was during his time in medical school as well
that Hitoshi had become a devout Christian and decided to become a missionary doctor.
After he finished his residency,
his intention was to travel around the world as a doctor, working in impoverished areas.
At 9:30 AM on August 16th,
a colleague of Hitoshi, Karin Steinau,
was heading up to her office on the sixth floor.
She pressed the button for the elevator and then waited patiently for it to arrive.
In the past couple of weeks, the elevator had been out of service
and so there was always a long wait time to use just the single working elevator.
The elevator dinged, the doors opened,
and then Karin stepped inside and pressed the button for the sixth floor.
At the last second, right before the doors closed,
Hitoshi quickly stepped into the elevator, trying to catch a ride with his colleague.
Under normal circumstances,
elevator doors don't shut when there's something between them,
thanks to sensors mounted on the inside of the doors.
There's also a set of contacts in the doors that are supposed to prevent the elevator from moving
if the doors aren't shut.
But the elevator that they were using was still supposed to be out of service.
The sign that indicated that it was out of service that had been there for the last couple of days had fallen off,
leading Karin to believe that it was working properly.
As Hitoshi entered the elevator, the doors that were already closing
closed on his shoulders, pinning him in place.
Then, the elevator started going up
with Hioshi still wedged inside the doors.
Karin frantically reached and pressed the emergency button to stop it
but it was already too late.
Hitoshi was partially decapitated by the ceiling of the next floor, as the elevator continued to rise.
The upper portion of his head that had been severed just above his lower jaw
stayed in the elevator with Karin
and Hitoshi's body fell down into the elevator shaft all the way to the first floor.
The elevator only finally stopped moving between the fourth and fifth floors,
leaving Karin trapped with the top portion of Hitoshi's head
until she could be rescued almost an hour later.
She was later treated in the hospital's emergency room for shock resulting from the incident.
Hitachi's corpse was retrieved from the bottom of the elevator shaft,
along with a few of his belongings
and his official cause of death was multiple blunt force injuries to the head and body.
It was ultimately found that just a few faulty wires were responsible for the elevator malfunctioning,
resulting in Hitoshi's tragic death.
Taphophobia is the fear of being buried alive.
And although this is extremely uncommon today,
before modern medicine, this fear was not entirely irrational.
Before the modern techniques used to check a person's vital signs,
there were a number of cases where bodies were exhumed later
and shown signs that the person tried to escape their coffin.
This happened frequently enough that bells were installed in coffins
so that if a person woke up, they could signal to people above ground they were not in fact dead.
One well-documented case of premature burial
was a woman named Alice Blunded in 17th Century England.
Alice drank a large quantity of poppy tea from unwashed poppy seeds
containing the opioids morphine and codeine.
The amount that she consumed caused her to pass out
and the doctor mistakenly pronounced her dead.
Alice's family quickly made the arrangements for her burial,
but then just two days later, kids playing near where she was buried
heard strange noises coming from the ground.
The noises they heard were the muffled screams of Alice,
asking for someone to rescue her.
The frightened kids told their headmaster what they had heard,
but instead of checking out the noises,
the kids were disciplined for telling lies.
The following day, the headmaster finally checked the grave out for himself
and heard Alice's cries for help.
For whatever reason,
the grave couldn't be excavated without proper permission
and so it wasn't until late in the day,
when the coffin was finally opened.
Alice's hands and arms were bloody from trying to escape her coffin
and because she had just spent two days buried alive,
she was actually now on the verge of death.
Noticing this, her family returned her to her grave and had a guard stand watch overnight.
That night when it started raining,
the guard left his post and went to the local pub instead.
The next morning, the coffin was opened once more
and found that Alice had woken up again
and tore her clothes and scratched at her body and face.
She did, however, pass away after the second time being buried alive sometime that night.
Alice Blunden remains one of the only documented cases of someone buried alive --
not once, but twice.
And although modern medicine has limited the majority of live burials,
every now and then, someone is still accidentally buried alive.
In 2011, a woman in Kazan, Russia collapsed at her home with chest pain.
Suspecting a heart attack,
she was rushed to the hospital where she was unfortunately declared dead of a massive heart attack.
Her family was devastated by the news of her passing
and organized her funeral to be held two days later.
Her funeral was open-casket
and as the woman was lying in her coffin at her own funeral,
she woke up to the sound of everyone crying and praying for her.
When she realized what was going on,
she started screaming and was immediately rushed back to the hospital.
Unfortunately, she lived for only another 12 minutes in intensive care before she was pronounced dead once again.
This time, she has suffered from complete heart failure
due to the shock to her already weakened heart.
On December 7th, 1941,
Navy crewman John Anderson was stationed on the USS Arizona with his brother Hank Anderson.
Just before 8:00 AM, John was in the mess hall eating breakfast
when a loud explosion shook the entire ship.
John looked around and asked what the explosion was
and saw that one of the cooks had his eyes glued to the port windows.
He called John over and then two of them went out onto the deck
and saw hundreds of planes in the sky, bearing the iconic red dot of the Japanese Imperial Army.
The two of them looked at each other and knew what that meant.
According to John, everyone had a feeling that an attack was imminent,
they just weren't quite sure when it would happen.
And this was the attack that they had all feared.
He ran back to sound the alarm on the ship,
but before he could, a bomb literally fell in front of him
and blew him inside a nearby hatch.
Now, the entire ship was being strafed by machine guns from the sky
and bombs were falling all around them.
All he could hear were the screams of his crewmates as they were torn up by the assaulting gunfire.
John sprinted over to a turret and jumped into the seat,
ready to fire back on the Japanese ships
but there were no ships in sight -- it was all planes.
The turret he was sitting in didn't have the mobility to fire up into the sky
and so he told the captain that he wouldn't be any use just sitting there.
Instead, he asked if he could go and join the fight with his brother on the upper deck of the ship
where he would be more useful.
The captain gave him permission
and so John quickly asked a few other crewmen if they would come up with him
so they all started climbing up a ladder through a trapdoor to the upper deck.
When they reached the top of the ladder,
there was a massive explosion and the shockwave that came from it knocked everyone across the deck.
John was knocked on his back by the shockwave
and when he stood up and looked around,
there was a man who was laying there unconscious and on fire.
So he grabbed the man and dragged him out of the fire
and patted him down to put out the, ultimately saving the man's life.
Small rescue boats started pulling up to the side of the ship to transport people to shore
and John was ordered to get into one of the boats,
but he refused.
His brother was still on the ship somewhere
and there was no way he was leaving without finding out if he was still alive.
Deep down, though, it's likely that John knew that the giant explosion a few moments ago had killed his brother.
And the USS Arizona was sinking rapidly now.
At any minute, it would be fully submerged in the Pacific Ocean.
John still refused the orders,
explaining to the officers that he wasn't going anywhere without his brother.
Then, another bomb exploded on the turret that John had been sitting in just a second ago.
The explosion sent it sliding off the side of the deck and down into the combat information center
where it also exploded, killing a bunch of the officers inside.
A lieutenant grabbed John and pushed him in the boat
and before John could react,
the boat was already moving away from the ship and toward the shore.
John cried out that he didn't want to leave, but there was just nothing he could do.
But after getting to the shore and dropping off some of the wounded soldiers,
John would actually convince the others to let him take the boat back to the Arizona.
When he got back to the Arizona,
he did manage to rescue three more crewmen who were right near the edge of the ship,
but it was clear that anyone else who had still been on the ship could no longer be reached.
Between the fire and the explosions,
It was just impossible to get onto the boat and look for anyone else.
John left the ship once again,
knowing that his brother had almost certainly already died.
Meanwhile, all of the bombing and machine gun fire was still going on all around them.
On the way back to shore, a shell hit their boat and exploded,
killing everyone but John.
After all of the trouble of navigating through the machine gun fire, getting back to the Arizona,
the mission ended up being in vain anyway.
John was thrown into the water that was now coated with flaming oil leaking from the ships
so he had to swim as far as he could underwater,
trying to surface outside of the radius of the oil.
He would eventually make it back to shore, trying to look for survivors as he went
and when he got back to shore, he was so exhausted from swimming,
he just collapsed onto the sand.
He looked up into the sky and there were so many Japanese planes still,
he assumed that a new wave had been sent.
As they got closer and closer to his position,
he had no choice but to get up and run for cover.
He took off running and luckily managed to find a rifle and some ammunition,
and then took cover in a crater that had been made by one of the Japanese bombs.
As he waited in the crater,
another survivor happened to go by and the two of them took shelter there for the night.
The following morning, search and rescue operations happened to pass by the crater
where John and the other survivor had taken shelter.
The two men joined the group and were eventually sent to a nearby base on Ford Island
where they were greeted by 200 other members of the Arizona crew who had survived the attack.
The attack that John and the others had just lived through
is known infamously as the Attack on Pearl Harbor.
This attack by the Japanese Imperial Navy
was actually a surprise attack on the still neutral United States during World War II.
353 Japanese aircraft were launched from six aircraft carriers stationed the Pacific Ocean
Near the island of Hawaii with the goal of crippling the United States Pacific Fleet.
Over the course of seven hours,
there was a series of coordinated attacks on the Philippines,
Guam, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
In the attack, more than 180 US aircraft were destroyed,
over 2,000 people were killed
and a further 1,000 were wounded.
A number of important military bases were destroyed,
all of the Navy battleships stationed in the harbor were damaged
and four of them were damaged badly enough that they actually sank.
One of the ships that sank was known as the USS West Virginia.
As with the Arizona, just before 8:00 AM,
a hail of torpedoes and armor-piercing shells rained down on the hull of the ship.
Due to the prompt damage control by its crew,
the West Virginia sank slowly,
giving most of the crew enough time to evacuate,
finally coming to a rest, half-submerged at the bottom of the harbor.
At some point, fuel leaking from the nearby Arizona caught fire and engulfed the West Virginia as it sank.
After the fires were finally extinguished,
103 men from the West Virginia were found to have been killed in the attack.
During the rescue efforts the following day,
the harbor was almost as noisy as it had been
the day prior between the sound of fireboats spraying the Arizona
and the hammers against the overturned USS Oklahoma.
There was also a rhythmic banging sounds coming from the West Virginia
that everyone assumed was just a piece of loose rigging that was slapping against the hull in the waves.
The following morning at dawn, when everything was quiet,
the rhythmic banging was still there.
Everyone soon came to the horrifying realization
that the banging was coming from men -- still trapped deep in the hull of the West Virginia.
At some point during the attack, as the West Virginia sank,
three men got stuck in an airtight store room.
With the ship firmly stuck in the mud at the bottom of the harbor,
they had very few options to rescue the trapped men.
Over the course of several days, rescue teams continued to hear the rhythmic banging, as they figured out what to do.
Marines stationed on the docks near the boat covered their ears.
The horror of the banging was just too awful,
knowing the circumstances of the trapped men.
Eventually, the rescuers also came to the realization that there was no way to save the trapped men.
They couldn't cut a hole into the room,
or it would flood the room and drown the men.
They also couldn't use any torches because the entire boat was covered in a slick, oily layer from all of the fuel.
A week went by and the banging could still be heard.
Then, at around two weeks,
the banging stopped and the hull was silent.
Six months later, the West Virginia was finally raised from the water
and the bodies of the three men were recovered.
They were identified as 18-year-old Ronald Endicott,
20-year-old Clifford Olds
and 21-year-old Louis Costin.
Tragically, the men had created a calendar on the wall of the store room to mark the days they lived.
It would take a total of 16 days marked by the red pencil found in the room
for the men to finally die of dehydration after their rations ran out.
Truly a horrifying ordeal.
If you made it this far, I just want to thank you for watching.
This is part four of the series A Collection of Horrible Fates
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