Chicago.
November 16, 2018.
Six people are on the 95th floor of the 875 North Michigan Avenue building.
They’re all in good spirits, having just eaten in the restaurant at the top of the
building, a place that affords some fantastic views of the city.
The doors close.
A pregnant woman looks at her husband with concern as the elevator begins its descent.
It’s making a weird clicking sound.
The other occupants now also look a bit worried.
The next thing they hear is a loud snap.
The elevator goes into free fall.
Everyone is screaming as it plunges into the abyss.
One man is praying as he holds on to a crying stranger.
That viewers, is a true story, but we aren’t going to tell you how it ended just yet.
Instead, we’re going to describe to you in gruesome detail other elevator accidents
so you can make an educated guess as to what happened to those six ill-fated diners.
The elevator in that case went into freefall, which is perhaps the most nightmarish thing
that can happen in one of those metal boxes.
Nonetheless, as you’ll now see, there are many other ways to die in an elevator.
We’ll start with something we imagine none of you would ever think could happen.
That is, starving to death in an elevator, like something from an apocalyptic Hollywood
movie.
It happened in 2016 to a woman in her 40s in the city of Xi’an, China.
Just after celebrations for the Chinese New Year had ended, some elevator maintenance
guys were back at work at an apartment building.
No sooner than their shift had started they smelled something nasty emanating from one
of the elevators.
They opened the door and what greeted them was the decomposing body of a woman.
She wasn’t looking too good since she’d been stuck in there a month.
How the hell did this happen?
Well, reports said that maintenance workers had turned the elevator off before the holidays.
They’d been told to check if anyone was inside, but all they did was shout, “Is
anyone in here?”
Either the woman shouted back, and the guys couldn’t hear her, or she didn’t hear
the call.
You can only imagine how she felt after an hour or two.
But imagine how she felt after a day, two days, three days.
She likely died after that from dehydration.
But before she did, she fought for her life.
When she was found her hands were mangled from trying to pry open the doors.
Her family reported her missing, but it seems not much was done about it.
It also seems others in the large apartment complex didn’t hear the woman’s screams.
One of them later said, “There’s now a shadow across my heart.
It’s scary, and it gives me shivers to pass by.”
The death caused public outrage.
One person was charged with negligent homicide.
If that’s not a worst way to die, we don’t know what is.
Now we’ll focus on something a little more grisly.
It involved the death of a teacher in the USA, an accident described by the press as
“horrifying.”
The victim was a 38-year teacher at Boston University.
There were witnesses, too, with one of them describing in detail what she saw and heard.
“It wasn't a cry.
I can't even describe what it was,” she said about the sound the victim made before
her life ended.
She’d been moving boxes into the elevator, but the thing was, once something was inside,
it would trigger a sensor, and the elevator would start to move.
It must have thought the box was a passenger, and that’s why it began to ascend.
As it began to move though, the woman was only halfway in the elevator.
She was trapped and crushed by the unstoppable force of the machine.
When people die in elevators, this is one of the major reasons.
In 2019, a man went almost the same way in New York, although in this case, the elevator
suddenly dropped as he was stepping inside.
He didn’t have a chance.
Soon after, spokespeople for the safety of elevators came out and said such accidents
are very rare.
The media talked about how bathtubs are more dangerous and how elevators are one of the
safest forms of travel.
About 25 to 30 people a year die in them in the US, but most of the deaths happen when
people are fixing them.
Still, the deaths are usually so gory they’re hard to forget.
Take for instance the death of Dr. Hitoshi Nikaidoh in 2003, which wouldn’t have looked
out of place in the Final Destination movie franchise.
One day he was working on the second floor of a building at the Christus St. Joseph Hospital
in Houston.
He was a surgical assistant just going about his day.
He was getting in the elevator when the doors closed, which trapped him by the shoulders.
The elevator then started going up, to the sounds of screaming onlookers.
What they saw was the doctor losing his head from above the jawline.
One of those witnesses actually filed a lawsuit after claiming she had post-traumatic stress
disorder.
We actually found a few stories of people losing their heads in elevator accidents.
The oldest one we could find happened in New York City to a 15-year old boy.
A headline in the New York Times on December 15, 1883, read, “Decapitated by an Elevator.”
The author of the story didn’t mince his words.
He wrote: “Emil Mueller, age 15, was caught and instantly
killed this evening in the elevator at Lincoln's furniture warehouse.
He was found dead with his head lying in a box which he took up with him.”
We guess the Tiimes didn’t pay its copy editors much back then.
At least his death was likely painless, seeing as he died before he had time to think about
anything, although, as we’ve stated before, there is a chance people remain conscious
for a while after decapitation.
An Australian former politician wasn’t so lucky in 1973.
His name was Dugald Munro.
He was 43-years old when he got into an escalator in a Bridge Street building in Sydney.
A newspaper article said the escalator, or lift as Australians say, just started moving
when he was only partway inside.
Maybe the elevator wasn’t so powerful this time, because he didn’t die instantly.
He was crushed, while his brother and some other people tried their hardest to pull him
out.
It was impossible, and the man died from crushing injuries.
We don’t have to tell you just how traumatic this is while the victim is still conscious.
Crushing and having bits chopped off you are certainly bad, but you could argue worse things
have happened.
In 2006, in Houston, an elderly gentleman died at the Galleria-area condominium complex
where he lived.
The elevator he was traveling in got stuck quite high up in the building.
There were a few occupants in the cabin at the time, and they all managed to squeeze
out except for him.
When it was his turn to get out, he didn’t quite make it.
He slipped and fell down the shaft, falling 12 stories.
What’s more upsetting is his grandchildren had been in there with him, but he helped
them get out first.
We don’t know exactly how he died, but it’s hard to survive falling from such a height.
If his head hit first,brain trauma would have killed him instantly.
If his legs hit the ground, the trauma would have done so much damage to his internal organs
that death would have been fast.
His spine would also have likely been fractured, and that would have interrupted blood flow
to the brain.
The last shaft fall we’ll talk about happened in Spain in 2017.
In a highly unlikely tragedy, two teenagers got in an elevator and as it traveled down
the floor just gave way beneath them.
Both of them died on impact with the bottom of the shaft.
Ok, but what about freefalling in an elevator?
That’s the thing people really worry about.
It doesn’t happen that often because there are a lot of safety features inside elevators.
You have a much greater chance of being crushed by one than falling in one.
But it has happened.
In fact, one fall made it into the Guinness Book of Records.
On May 28, 1944, a woman named Betty Lou Oliver was working in New York City’s Empire State
Building as an elevator attendant.
Suddenly there was a massive explosion and everything went dark.
That was because a plane had hit the building, causing considerable damage.
The B-25 service bomber had been on a training exercise when the pilot became disoriented
in thick fog.
14 people died, including 3 people in the aircraft.
As for the 20-year old Betty, she had the fright of her life.
After the crash, she was thrown from where she was working.
She suffered terrible burns as well as a broken pelvis, back, and neck.
When rescuers found her, she was lying on the floor in agony.
They put her on a stretcher and into the 79th floor elevator.
What they couldn’t have guessed was that the thing was on its last legs.
The elevator she was in plunged after all the cables holding it up snapped.
She went down like a rocket, down 75 stories.
That was about 1,000 feet (300 meters).
She miraculously survived, though.
There were so many cables that had bust beneath the elevator that before she could hit the
bottom she landed on four floors worth of a mass of snapped cables, which kind of acted
like a bed of springs.
She survived with some nasty injuries but made a full recovery and lived to be an old
woman.
In 1987, a mineshaft elevator fell after an explosion at a mine in South Africa.
It fell slightly less than a mile down the shaft.
All 52 men on board died.
In 2012, 19 men and women died in China when cables snapped on an elevator at a construction
site.
It was an exterior elevator used to get the workers up the building they were working
on.
News reports said the elevator went up a bit too fast, and then when it got to the 34th
floor, it came crashing down.
Workers were thrown everywhere.
One report said, “Body parts of the victims were scattered around the scene.”
But if we’re not talking explosions or dodgy elevators used on construction sites, freefall
accidents just don’t seem to happen that often.
The reason is the safety cables wouldn’t all snap at once, and even if they somehow
did, the brakes would come to the rescue.
Modern elevators have something called a “speed-sensing governor”, so if the sensors detect the
car moving too fast the brakes are quickly activated.
Unfortunately for miners and construction workers, they sometimes travel in less safe
elevators.
If it did happen to you by some chance, the likelihood of survival from a great height
is between nil and next to nil if you weren’t fortunate enough to have a pile of cables
below you near the bottom.
Without something to cushion your fall, you would be splattered on the floor of the cabin
with whoever else was with you.
Please don’t think that jumping at the end would save you.
That kind of thinking is why so many we ‘Fail’ videos circulate online.
If you could somehow manage to jump just at the right time, the speed you fall might be
slightly slower.
Nonetheless, you’ve already been hurtling down a long way.
On top of that, if you don’t time the jump just right, you will smack your head on the
roof, and that will mean goodnight Vienna.
Time the jump wrong, and you just hit the floor and die.
We looked at what the experts said about this, and they agreed that the last-second jump
would be about as effective as spitting on yourself while trapped in a raging house fire.
However, one person did say that there would be more chance of survival if you laid down
and spread your body over the floor of the cabin.
Still, in a busy elevator, you might have to fight for floor rights.
That will have to be a very short debate.
Even if you win, you’ll still likely die, maybe with the bones of the person you just
argued with sticking into your face.
Just to give you an example, we’ll tell you about a couple of fatal freefall accidents
we found that didn’t involve a mine or a construction site.
One happened in Spain in 1989.
A newspaper headline translated into English read, “Seven dead in a Barcelona hospital
when the elevator in which they were traveling fell into space.”
The story said the elevator plunged seven floors at the Príncipes de España hospital
in Barcelona.
In this case, the safety brake didn’t work due to a malfunction.
Witnesses heard the thing go into freefall, with one of them saying, “It sounded like
the noise of a train at full speed and a subsequent explosion.”
Six people died on impact, and one person died later in hospital from her injuries.
Maybe she was the one that got the floor space, but this scenario is highly unlikely.
In 2019, six people died in India when they got into an elevator after attending a New
Year’s Eve party.
Indian news media said a belt broke, and the cabin plunged 100 feet (about 30 meters).
The accident happened in one of the towers at a farmhouse of a wealthy businessman.
He and five of his family were killed.
While free falling in an elevator is about as likely as a piano falling on your head,
it has happened.
That should make some of you sleep better at night, but this won’t.
We mentioned rockets earlier, but rockets generally go upwards at high speeds, not downwards.
In Chile in 2014 a man got the real rocket experience.
He got in an apartment elevator and the thing just started flying upwards.
CCTV shows him getting into the cabin with a bunch of shopping bags.
Everything looks fine.
But when the doors close, the elevator shoots up.
He starts frantically pressing buttons in what would be comical if it didn’t end so
badly.
He ascended 30 floors in just 15 seconds, after which the elevator smashed through the
roof, but perhaps not as gracefully as Willy Wonka’s glass elevator.
The man suffered some serious injuries to his head and legs, but reports said he would
live to see another day – plus he has the best story ever.
Now for another accident you just would never imagine could happen.
In 2020, a young couple died in Tel Aviv in an elevator.
During heavy rainfall, the elevator they were in malfunctioned, and they were unable to
open the doors.
Little by little, the thing started to fill with water.
Rescue services tried their best to get them out, but they both drowned.
As for those folks in Chicago we talked about at the start, the elevator plunged all the
way from the 95th floor to the 11th floor, but it stopped there.
One of the occupants later said she was sure she and her fellow passengers, some Northwestern
law students, and a couple of tourists from Mexico, were all going to die.
It was a bit of a bad trip for everyone involved, but they were saved because only one of the
cables snapped.
No one was even hurt, although a guy was so shaken up, he had to be treated for anxiety.
It took three hours for firefighters to get them out, and all the time they weren’t
sure the thing was going to plunge again.
As we have shown you today, the risk of freefalling is so small you probably have a higher chance
of being killed in an elevator by a serial killer.
In fact, statistically, driving is way more dangerous than riding elevators.
As for escalators, they’re veritable death traps.
Maybe one day we’ll tell you about the girl whose hair got stuck in an escalator, or the
woman who was eaten alive by one, but for now, we’ll leave you in peace.
Now you need to watch,”Worst Ways to Die (Compilation)”.
Or, have a look at...