No Way Out Vol. VIII

0:00Hello fans of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious. I'm here today to tell you all about what it actually means now that we've moved over to the SiriusXM family. Big picture, it means we are going to make more content for you. Right now, you get one YouTube video a week on Saturday. Well, what we're going to do now is we're going to have the Saturday upload be the same, but then also the MrBallen podcast. Well, we've begun already filming those episodes like a YouTube video. So that's a second piece of content every week. Then there's two other shows that you guys don't even know about yet, which means on any given week, you could have up to four new video pieces of content on the Mr.

0:39Bolland channel. And also all these pieces of content will double as podcasts as well. This new content schedule is going to start early next year. Also, there's one other thing I want to clarify, which is the state of Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries and Redacted. Those shows were created in collaboration with Wondry, But now we're partnered with Sirius, and so we're not going to be making any new episodes of either of those shows. For now, if you want to hear my podcast episodes one week early and ad-free, make sure to subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts, or visit SiriusXM.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.

1:19Keep on the lookout for more announcements in the coming weeks. Thank you. Today's podcast features four stories that all involve people who got trapped with no way out. The audio from all four of these stories has been pulled from our main 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 Frozen in Fear, and it's about a grisly discovery made by a landlord. The second story you'll hear is called Runaway, and it's about a runaway teenage boy who's later spotted on CCTV footage. The third story you'll hear is called Balloon, and it's about a fun tourist attraction that becomes a death trap.

2:00And the fourth and final story you'll hear is called The Package, and it's about the dangers of old elevators. 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 show, because that's all we do. So if that's of interest to you, please ask the follow button to give you a ride. And then when they say okay, sit directly behind them and repeatedly kick their seat and ask them over and over again, are we there yet? Okay, let's get into our first story called Frozen in Fear.

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4:05On the evening of February 1st, 2009, a 32-year-old man named Luo Jinfa stood in the doorway of his apartment in Taiwan, waiting for his landlord to finish lecturing him about being late on his rent. Luo had just moved into this apartment two months earlier in December, and this was not a very nice apartment. It was a cramped downstairs unit with no air conditioning, so it was really sweaty and awful in there most of the time, but it was all Luo could afford. He wasn't working right now and knew this was the best he was going to get. As the landlord continued to berate Luo about how he was totally within his rights to evict Luo if he didn't pay him, how he'd already given Luo an extension, and you know, what's going on here, you got to get your act together.

4:46As all that was happening, Luo just was totally quiet and just was waiting for the landlord to be quiet. Because at this point, Luo didn't really care about the rent side of this discussion. He just wanted his landlord to be quiet so he could ask him a very strange but important question. And finally, after about five minutes of the landlord just ranting, the landlord stopped for a second to try to calculate how much interest he could potentially charge Luo. And as the landlord began scribbling notes on his notepad, Luo saw this opportunity. And he said, excuse me, I don't mean to interrupt, but I actually need to ask you something.

5:20And the landlord was sort of caught off guard by the way Luo was approaching him. You know, the landlord thought he was intimidating Luo, so the idea that Luo was now going to, you know, interrupt him and go a different direction with this conversation felt sort of disrespectful. But the landlord looked at Luo like, what question could you possibly have? And Luo just said, um, do you know if anyone's been murdered inside of my apartment? After Luo asked the question, the landlord just stared at Luo like he didn't really know how to process this question at all. But then after a moment, this look of shock disappeared.

5:50And once again, the landlord was just annoyed with Luo and said, you know what? I know what's wrong with you, but I'll be back in a month and you better have your rent. And then the landlord just turned around and walked away without answering Luo's question. Now, Luo was pretty stressed out about paying the rent. I mean, he had no money and had no idea how he was going to pay his landlord in a month. But the much more pressing issue in Luo's life were the very strange things happening inside of his apartment, which is what prompted him to ask that strange question to his landlord. And so not getting an answer to that question just made this whole situation that much more stressful for Luo.

6:29So after the landlord disappeared down the hall, Luo kind of hesitantly turned back around and went back inside his apartment and shut the door, and immediately he just felt terrified. One month later, on March 2nd, 2009, a day after the rent was due, Luo's landlord had still not received rent from Luo, and so he spent that entire day, March 2nd, calling Luo, trying to get him on the phone to be like, where's my money? But Luo wasn't answering his phone, and so eventually the landlord went to Luo's apartment and knocked on the door. Eventually, when Luo didn't come to the door, the landlord just used his own key to let himself in.

7:09Now, the landlord didn't really know what to expect when he walked inside of Luo's apartment. All he knew was that Luo was kind of a weird guy, and he certainly wasn't paying rent, and his general impression of Luo was definitely a bad one. And so he kind of expected the apartment to reflect the negative things he thought about Luo. But when he stepped in there, even the landlord was shocked at what he saw. I mean, the apartment was in total disarray. Furniture was all over the place and stacked up against the walls and weird arrangements, and there were all these bottles of empty alcohol all over the place.

7:40There was a freezer that Luo had moved to the middle of the living room floor. I mean, the place just was a total mess and just kind of all over the place. But the thing that really creeped the landlord out the second he walked in there was that all over the walls were these yellow and red pieces of paper with prayer written on them that had been stabbed into the wall with individual knives, like Luo had taken a prayer and stabbed it to the wall over and over and over again all over the apartment. Now, the landlord had no idea what to make of any of this. He just knew he was done with Luo. He was evicting him.

8:14And so he quickly searched the apartment just to make sure Luo was not really in here. And he wasn't. The apartment was empty. And so after that, the landlord just left the apartment. He locked the apartment. He went and got a new lock at the hardware store. came back, replaced the lock, and was determined to never let Luo ever come back. And in fact, Luo would not come back. The landlord never had to worry about, you know, telling Luo to stay away. He just never came back. And for months, Luo's old apartment just sat empty. Fast forward seven months after the landlord went inside of Luo's apartment, and the landlord's brother approached the landlord and said, hey, can I rent out that apartment?

8:54No one's using it. And the landlord said that was fine, but the brother would have to clean up the apartment because nobody had touched it since Luo had lived there. So a couple of days later, on October 18th, the landlord's brother, along with the landlord, met at Luo's apartment, they went inside, and they totally cleaned it out. Basically all the furniture and the lamps and everything in there, some of Luo's old clothes and things he had left behind, they took it all out of the apartment and they loaded it into a truck and they drove to a nearby recycling facility where they sold whatever they could and then dumped the rest and then they left.

9:28However, when the workers at the recycling facility began processing some of the junk that had been left behind by the landlord and the brother, they made a discovery that immediately made them stop and contact the police. It would turn out Luo had not actually abandoned his apartment. In fact, he had never left his apartment. Luo had become totally convinced that his apartment was haunted by a ghost. At night, he would hear walking around above him, even though he knew nobody actually occupied the apartment right above him, and so the footsteps didn't make any sense. And then sometimes he would claim that he would see these shadowy figures wandering around inside of his apartment.

10:08Now, it's worth noting that Luo did have mental health issues and he was a drug user, but he was absolutely adamant to the people he spoke to that there was something strange happening inside of his apartment. And so he began to wonder if, you know, maybe somebody had been murdered in his apartment and their ghost was now haunting him, hence the question to his landlord. And so this haunting, or whatever it was, just continued night after night, day after day for Luo, and it was driving him absolutely mad. But Luo discovered there was actually one place he could go in his apartment that would sort of protect him from whatever was happening inside of there.

10:45and that was to lock himself inside of his bedroom. However, his bedroom was not a real room. His bedroom was that big freezer the landlord found sitting in the middle of his living room. Luo had been climbing in there and shutting it to protect himself from this entity at night, but he would always prop the lid open just enough so that air could come in and out of there, because it was airtight. However, shortly after Luo's conversation with his landlord about being laid on rent, Luo had gone back inside his apartment, gotten really drunk, climbed inside of his bedroom, shut the lid, and forgot to prop it open.

11:23And so as he lay there, he slowly suffocated to death because there wasn't any circulation. And after he died inside of his freezer, nobody found him. And then seven months later, after Luo's landlord and his brother emptied out Luo's apartment, they brought that freezer along with everything else to the recycling facility where the workers there would open up the freezer and they would find Luo.

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14:56Our next story is called Runaway.

15:14On December 20th, 2019, 14-year-old Harley Dilley was on his way to school. It was the last day before vacation, and he was furious with his parents. The night before, he had gotten into a huge fight with them and as punishment they had confiscated his phone. That afternoon, Harley did not come home, so his parents called the school to say, hey have you seen our son? And they said, well we know he was here today, but we don't know where he went after that. So the parents called some of Harley's friends and none of his friends had seen him after school. His parents were worried, but they had seen this kind of behavior before.

15:47When Harley got really mad, he had a history of running away from the house and staying out overnight. He usually crashed with some friend and they would cover for him or sometimes he would even sleep in abandoned buildings. And so that day the police were not called. The next day when Harley still didn't show up, the parents started to get a little bit more worried and because their son didn't even have his phone, they had no way of getting in touch with him. And so they finally said, we got to go to the police. And so the police launched a formal search for him and right away there was no leads.

16:18Nobody knew where he was. Weeks went by and the family was putting up posters all over town, telling their son that you're not in trouble, please come home, and everybody in the community is out there looking for Harley, but there was just no sign of him. Finally, almost a month after he had gone missing, the police received a tip. The house across the street from Harley's house was a vacant home because the owners were actually renovating the property, so they weren't living there. But they had cameras set up on the outside, and one of their cameras, when they reviewed it, picked up Harley walking towards their property on the day he went missing.

16:51And so the police show up at this property, the owners show up, they give them the key, the police go inside, they're yelling for Harley, they check all the doors and all the windows and everything is locked, there's no sign of a break-in. They go upstairs and in one of the bedrooms they see there is a jacket lying on the ground and it would turn out to be Harley's. It was the same one he had on when he went missing. And next to the jacket on the ground is this weird metal plate. And so after seeing this, the police believe Harley must be up on the second floor somewhere. He must have been hiding out in this vacant house the whole time.

17:20They don't know how he got in, but clearly this is his stuff. And so they start yelling for him and walking around the second floor, and it's silence. There's no sign of Harley. And so they go back in the room where his jacket and his plate is, and they look up on the wall, and pretty high up, there's a hole in the wall. And it looks to be about the same size as this metal plate, and they realize this plate is actually a vent cover, and that is a vent. Suddenly, police believe this could be a lot more sinister, that perhaps someone had harmed Harley and then taken evidence and stuffed it into a vent inside of a vacant house.

17:53So one of the officers gets a stool, they put it in front of this vent, they climb on top and they reach in to feel around for more evidence. And as soon as they reach in, they touch something and they pull their hand back out. And they say, there's a person in there. And it would turn out the person inside of there was Harley and he was deceased.

18:12Although no one knows exactly what happened to Harley, the leading theory is he climbed onto the roof of this vacant home on the day he went missing, and he looked down the chimney. There was no cap on it, and from his perspective, it looked like he'd be able to fit all the way down to the bottom. But what he didn't know was this chimney was wider at the top, and then as it went down, it got narrower and narrower and narrower, and in fact, the most narrow section towards the lower half. He never could have got through. This was an impossible thing he was trying to do. But regardless, he went in feet first and he began making his way down.

18:46And then about the halfway point, he started to get stuck. And he believed it was because of his big bulky jacket. And as it happened, he was right in front of this hole in the wall, which was the vent. And so he managed to punch the metal plate off of the vent. He got his jacket off and he forced it through this hole, thinking that would give him a little bit more room. And it did. He began to sink a little bit further, a little bit further, and then he decides to put both arms over his head to try to make himself as narrow as possible. And it works. He starts to move down, but at some point he gets completely stuck.

19:17And he's struggling to breathe because the chimney is tight on his chest, and he's got his arms over his head, and he's starting to panic, and he lets out a scream. But as soon as he does that, the air coming out of his lungs causes his chest to compress, and he sinks just a little bit lower into that tight section of the chimney. And as soon as he comes to a stop, he tries to breathe back in again but his chest can no longer expand to its full size so he can't get a full breath and so over and over and over again as he's screaming and yelling for help he's compressing his chest and sinking farther and farther into this inescapable trap until he reaches a point where he cannot go any lower and his chest is crushed by the chimney he can barely catch his breath his arms are stuck over his head and his feet are dangling off the ground and that is how he would stay until he's suffocated to death

20:18Our next story is called Balloon

20:35On July 30th, 2016, Janice Stewart was at home in College Station, Texas, preparing for a wedding she was going to be photographing the following week. Her 34-year-old daughter named Sunday Rowan lived a few hours away in San Antonio, and she was planning to go with her to help her take these pictures. As Janice worked, her cell phone kept buzzing. Since sunrise, Sunday had been Snapchatting her photos of her and her husband Matt, who was also 34, as they got ready for their hot air balloon ride that day. 18 months earlier, Sunday had bought Matt the tickets as a birthday gift, but the trip kept getting delayed because of bad weather.

21:10But on this July morning, the weather had cleared up and the trip was finally happening. Sunday and Matt often sought adventure to balance the demands of their jobs. Matt was the chief of clinical trials at the Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio and was a rising star in the field of burn research. Sunday worked at Crazy 8, which was a kid's clothing store, and she was devoted to her young son from a previous relationship. At 6.58 that morning, Janice received an image of the balloon's ground crew prepping the wicker basket that would hold her daughter, her son-in-law, and the rest of the other passengers.

21:42Around 7.30, Janice received another image. This one was a selfie of Sunday and Matt posing inside of the wicker basket. They were up in the air. There's a beautiful field below them. They're smiling and they're hugging. After that, the message is stopped. 10 minutes later at 7 40 85 year old buddy miller was making breakfast in his ranch when he heard two loud explosions the first one actually rattled his house when he looked out the window he saw this massive plume of black smoke on another rancher's land off in the distance alarmed he jumped in his pickup truck and raced past his cows to the blaze a half mile away commotion like this rarely occurred in Maxwell, Texas, a quiet rural community about 40 miles south of Austin.

22:27At her home just up the road was 66-year-old Margaret Wiley, who heard the explosions too. She said the first one reminded her of the sound her 20-gauge shotgun made. When she stepped onto the porch, she heard the second explosion, and she said it sounded like a loud pop, followed by a whooshing sound, like the sound a gas stove makes when it ignites. When she looked out towards where the sounds had come from, she saw this massive fireball explode in the distance, and she immediately called 911. When Buddy and the other first responders arrived at the scene, they saw this huge fire at the base of a power line tower, and at first they couldn't figure out what was actually burning.

23:03They heard the sound of hissing propane tanks and thought maybe it was a tractor or a baler that had caught on fire, but upon closer inspection, they saw a wicker basket and they saw bodies. This was a hot air balloon accident. It would turn out the pilot of that hot air balloon was 49-year-old Skip Nichols, and he had elected to fly that day despite a low cloud cover that had grounded the other hot air balloon companies in the area that morning. Also, Skip was on a mixture of prescription and over-the-counter drugs that impaired his ability to fly the balloon safely. After being in the air for eight miles above the clouds, Skip decided it was time to land, and so he blindly descended through the clouds, and he immediately hit a power line.