The stories you're about to hear should be a reminder that life is fragile.
Some people are profoundly unlucky, ending up at the wrong place at the wrong time
and sometimes, around the wrong people.
A warning before you continue.
Although this is the cold, hard truth of these events, it is still very disturbing
so viewer discretion is advised.
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On January 30th, 2016, a woman named Wu entered the elevator of her building in the Chinese city Xi'an.
She pushed the button for the 15th floor and then stood in the elevator, waiting for her floor.
Just after the 11th floor and before the 12th floor, the elevator malfunctioned and came to a stop.
Two maintenance workers were called to investigate the malfunction
and figured out it was a mechanical issue that required a specific part in order to be repaired.
They then banged on the door and called out to see if anyone was in the elevator,
but heard nothing from inside, and so they shut the power off.
This was a huge mistake.
They should have opened the doors of the elevator to physically check if anyone was inside first.
The building she lived in had two elevators,
and so residents were instructed to use the other one until the malfunctioning one could be repaired.
Inside the other elevator, Wu sat in complete darkness trapped, and with no one coming to help her.
The maintenance workers returned on March 1st to perform the repairs
and when they opened the doors, they were horrified to find the decomposing body of Wu.
On the inside of the elevator, they found scratch marks
from where Wu was desperately trying to claw her way out
and her hands were supposedly mangled from scratching at the doors, trying to escape.
Although it's unclear exactly how long Wu survived in the elevator,
it's likely that she died of dehydration a couple days after the power was cut off.
Wu also lived alone and seems to have had minimal contact with friends and family
because no one contacted the authorities in the month that she was missing to report her disappearance.
Foul play was ruled out
but the maintenance workers who negligently shot off the power
were charged with involuntary manslaughter because of their carelessness.
Wu was 43 years old at the time of her death.
On October 4th, 2007, a law known as Grant's Law was passed in British Columbia, Canada.
This law required gas stations in the province to make two critical changes to their procedures.
First, it required that drivers have to pay for their gas before filling up
and second, it required that all employees working between 11:00 PM and 6:00 AM
are accompanied by another employee.
The reason this law was passed was that had it been in place on March 8th, 2005,
it could have prevented something horrifying from happening.
That night on March 5th, 2005, Grant De Patie was working at a gas station in Maple Ridge, British Columbia.
At some point during his shift,
16-year-old Darnell Pratt pulled into the gas station to get gas.
Unbeknownst to Grant, Darnell was drunk and never intended on paying for the gas.
After he pumped his gas, he got into his car and began driving away.
When grant saw this, he tried to cut Darnell off in an attempt to prevent him from stealing the gas.
Grant, got in front of his car, thinking that Darnell would stop, but Darnell didn't.
He hit Grant and kept going.
Grant then got lodged somewhere underneath the car
and was subsequently dragged for 7.5 kilometers (4.66 mi) before Darnell finally stopped.
This ultimately resulted in Grant's death,
although it's unclear whether he was killed before or after the car stopped.
It's also unclear whether or not Darnell even knew that he hit Grant or not, as the details of the case are limited.
However, Darnell was charged as an adult and sentenced to 12 years in prison for manslaughter.
Public outcry from this tragedy is what eventually led to the passing of Grant's Law.
Isadora Duncan was born on May 26th, 1877 in San Francisco, California.
Her parents divorced soon after she was born, and so Isadora was raised primarily by her mother Dora.
Her mother was a piano teacher and fostered an appreciation for the arts in her children from a young age.
At just 6 years old, Isadora began teaching dance-like movements to the other children in her neighborhood.
By the age of 10, the class had become so large
that Isadora requested to leave school and teach dance full-time with her older sister Elizabeth.
She earned an income from that point on, and this sparked her career as a dancer and performer.
She went on to live in Chicago and New York, working as a performer before moving to Europe.
Her style was controversial for the time as it defied some of the common conventions of the more popular ballet,
but she has since become known as the mother of modern dance.
Despite her success, Isadora suffered a number of horrific tragedies throughout her lifetime.
First in 1913, her two children and their nanny drowned
when the car they were driving fell into the same river.
In 1922, she married poet Sergei Yesenin
but the marriage would soon fall apart due to Serge's worsening mental health issues.
Then in the mid 1920s, Serge would commit suicide as a result of these issues.
On the evening of September 14th, 1927, Isador was a passenger in the Amilcar CGSS.
This early car was a convertible with big spoked wheels, much like those of a modern-day bicycle.
That night, Isadora wore a long flowing scarf that was gifted to her by her friend Mary Desti.
Before leaving in the car, Mary had actually asked Isadora to wear a full cape because of the cold weather
and because the car they were going to be driving in was a convertible.
Isadora refused the full cape, but accepted the scarf.
As the car accelerated, Isadora's scarf got wrapped up in the spokes of the wheels
and ripped her from the vehicle, killing her almost instantly.
Reports from the incident indicate that she was either killed from the force of the scarf pulling on her neck
or from how violently she impacted the ground after being thrown from the vehicle.
In either case, it was determined that she died from a broken neck
After the incident, her remains were cremated and placed next to those of her children in a cemetery in France.
51-year-old, Ronald McClagish lived alone in a bungalow in Cambridgeshire, England.
He hadn't always lived alone, however.
In fact, he had barely lived alone for two weeks when the events of this story took place.
Ronald had recently hit a patch of bad luck.
He was already a divorced father of two, and then he and his current girlfriend decided to break up
and so she moved out of his bungalow, leaving him to live alone.
About two weeks later, he was cleaning a large walk-in wardrobe in his home.
The doors of this wardrobe opened outward and perpendicular to this wardrobe
was another free-standing dresser.
While he was inside, the free-standing dresser somehow toppled over
and wedged itself in front of the door of the walk-in wardrobe.
With the doors now closed, he was in complete darkness.
So he went over to try to push the doors open, but they wouldn't budge.
He likely tried to shout for help, but again, he lived alone so no one was able to hear him.
In the dark, in the wardrobe, he felt around to find something to help free himself
and found a pipe that ran along the wall.
He pulled on it and it broke off the wall,
but that caused freezing cold water to begin spraying all over the wardrobe.
Now in the dark with freezing cold water spraying all over him,
he started smashing the pipe against the doors and the walls of the wardrobe.
Apparently, his neighbors even heard digging noises coming from his house
but they never pursued it any further.
Eventually, the digging stopped and Ronald went silent.
On February 15th, two officers went to his home
after friends and family reported not having seen or heard from Ronald in about two weeks.
It would take the two of them to remove the heavy wardrobe
and inside, they discovered Ronald's body.
It was determined by the coroner that Ronald had died roughly a week earlier from bronchitis.
It's unclear whether or not he had developed it during the instant,
or if it was an existing bout that was worsened by the conditions inside the wardrobe.
On April 10th, 1917, 18-year-old Grace Fryer started a job as a dial painter at the United States Radium Corporation.
World War I had started four days prior and with two brothers serving in the army,
Grace wanted to help out the war effort in any way she could.
Hundreds of other women also flock to this job to help out in the war effort
and because it paid three times more than the average factory job at the time.
Working as a dial painter put these women in the top 5% nationally based on their wages.
Their task at the studio was to use the newly discovered element radium to paint watches and military dials.
In addition to the wages, the radium itself was part of the appeal of the job.
Workers soon became known as Ghost Girls
because they would literally glow in the dark after work because of the radium.
They would even wear nice dresses to the factories, so they could go right to the dance halls after work
and glow miraculously to everyone's amazement.
Some workers even went as far as to paint their teeth with the radium paint to really stand out.
At the studio, they used a technique known as lip pointing,
where they would slip the paint brushes between their lips and create a fine point.
Each time they would do this, they would ingest a small amount of paint.
Naturally, prior to starting work there, girls would ask whether or not this was dangerous
and managers always reassured them that it was perfectly safe.
This of course was not true.
Radium had been known to cause harm since its discovery by Marie Curie 20 years earlier.
Marie Curie herself had suffered radiation burns from handling the radium
and a number of people had already died from radium poisoning.
People in the plant even knew it was dangerous
because the men who handled it in large quantities wore lead aprons and handled it with ivory tongs.
The dial painters on the other hand, never even got a warning.
This is because the thinking at the time was that radium was not harmful in small amounts.
It was even touted as health-promoting and was used in all sorts of products
like radium tonic, cosmetics, butter, milk, and even toothpaste.
Newspapers even claimed it added years to your life.
This false perception was based on research conducted by the radium firms
who had built an industry around the lucrative product
so they ignored all the danger signs in favor of profits.
In 1922, a friend of Grace's named Mollie Maggia had to quit because she came down with an unknown sickness.
It started off as a simple toothache, and so she went to the dentist and ended up having the tooth pulled.
Then, it happened to another tooth and then another, and each one that fell out
was replaced by a dark, oozing ulcer.
Her limbs then began to ache and it got so bad that she was eventually unable to walk.
By may of that year, Mollie had lost almost all of her teeth
and the infection had spread to her lower jaw, the roof of her mouth, and even the bones in her ears.
When she went to the dentist, the dentist was poking around her mouth
and he literally pulled her jaw bone out with his fingers because it was so brittle and decayed.
Mollie was literally falling apart
and Grace was beginning to have issues now too.
She started getting pain in her jaw and feet, and soon,
many of the other girls began to have issues as well.
On September 12th, 1922, the infection spread to Mollie's jugular vein
and at 5:00 PM that day, blood began to fill her mouth.
With no way of stopping the bleeding, Mollie would pass away at the age of 24.
Doctors were puzzled by her symptoms and death and had no idea what to make of it
and one by one, Mollie's colleagues began dying as well.
Their employer denied any responsibility for almost two years
but as news continued to spread, the business suffered.
In 1924, they hired an independent expert
who had confirmed the link between the radium and the health issues suffered by the workers.
The president of the company was outraged and paid for new studies to be conducted
to confirm findings that denied any link.
They then went on to lie to the department of labor about the previous findings
and denounced the claims made by the women
as simply trying to have the company pay for their medical expenses.
By now, it was obvious to the women that radium was dangerous
but the public still thought radium was perfectly safe.
In 1925, a man named Harrison Martland performed a number of tests
that confirmed the link between radium and the health problems.
He discovered that although it was dangerous to be around radium,
ingesting it, even in small quantities, was many thousands of times worse.
The radium built up in the bones of the women who ingested it and emitted radiation 24/7.
The radiation would literally cause the bones of the women to decay
to the point of being like a honeycomb.
Grace's back eventually decayed to that point and she needed to wear a steel back brace all day long.
Other women's leg shortened or even spontaneously fractured
and many of them suffered from horrible cancers.
Once they ingested enough of the radium, they would actually even glow permanently.
Most of them wouldn't notice until one day randomly,
they would see themselves in a mirror at nighttime and notice they were glowing.
And from the time that they made that awful discovery, it was already too late.
There was no way of removing the radium.
During this time period, the radium industry repeatedly tried to discredit the work of Harrison Martland.
Over this time period as well, the workers afflicted by radium poisoning would go on to band together
to lead a movement against the radium industry.
This was an uphill battle, unfortunately, and most lawyers wouldn't even take the case.
They either didn't believe the women or were scared of the legal weight possessed by the radium firms
or simply didn't think they could overcome the existing legislation.
Because at the time, workers who received radium poisoning in a workplace
did not receive any compensation.
In addition, the statute of limitations was only two years,
whereas many of the women didn't start to show symptoms for up to five years
after they began ingesting the radium.
Finally, in 1927, a lawyer took the case for Grace and four of herr colleagues.
The women would eventually settle out of court because they had limited time to live at that point
and the company seemed content to drag out the proceedings for as long as possible.
Although this wasn't a perfect outcome,
it did finally give credibility to their movement and the case spread like wildfire in the media.
Soon plant workers at radium factories countrywide were outraged and company meetings became riots.
Continuing to deny responsibility,
the company took out ads to deny health issues
and went as far as to interfere with the autopsies conducted on these women.
It was later revealed that they even stole some of the radium-riddled bones to cover up their culpability.
One by one, dial painters died of the same jaw problems and other huge cancerous bone tumors.
One woman named Irene La died of a massive pelvic tumor
that was reportedly the size of two footballs.
In the mid 1930s, following the death of Grace Fryer,
a woman named Catherine Donohue continued the fight for the workers.
Catherine went on to develop a grapefruit-sized tumor on her hip and lost all of her teeth
and then eventually her jaw bone.
This culminated in her attending court from her deathbed against her doctor's advice to give testimony.
The case was finally won by the workers and some semblance of justice was served.
The case of the Radium Girls would go on to become a historic case
and one of the first that held a company responsible for the health of its workers.
This case also led to the implementation of many life-saving regulations
and the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration also known as OSHA.
Prior to its establishment, 14,000 people died annually of work-related causes
and that figure is only 4,500 people today.
With a halflife of 1600 years,
the bones of the women who met their horrible ends from the poisoning
will continue to glow for hundreds of years.
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This is the second video of the series Horrible Fates
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