Stranger Than Fiction Vol. XI

0:00Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and today's podcast features three stories that demonstrate that. The audio from all three 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 Family Dinner, and it's about a man who was preparing dinner for his family when he realized he was missing a key ingredient for the meal. The second story you'll hear is called Table for Two, and it's about a woman who spots something very odd about her neighbor's dinner party.

0:33And the third and final story you'll hear is called Lucky Day, and it's about a man who stumbles into two highly unlikely scenarios when he goes surfing in Africa. And it may sound made up, but it's not. 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 podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to make the Amazon Music Follow button a friendship bracelet using the little beads with letters on them.

1:06But make sure you spell on their bracelet, nobody likes you, before you hand it over. Okay, let's get into our first story called Family Dinner.

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2:46On August 23rd, 2013, inside of a little home in a Russian suburb, eight-year-old Maria Chelyesheva was hard at work at her kitchen table drawing a picture of a horse. Maria's parents had recently brought her to a farm where she was able to do some pony riding, and ever since then she had become obsessed with horses and ponies. And so as Maria was hard at work on her drawing, her father, 42-year-old Mikhail, was right nearby at the kitchen stove dicing up onions. And as he did, his eyes were kind of watering from cutting the onions. And so he was making a show of turning around and looking at his daughter pretending to cry.

3:22And Maria thought it was very funny. And then at some point, as Mikhail was doing this, he realized he was missing a key ingredient for the dinner he was preparing. So he kind of threw up his hands in exasperation, and then he yelled out into the house to his wife, you know, hey, do we have any potatoes? And from somewhere in the back of the house, Maria's mother called back, yes, we do. They're down in the cellar, but they're pretty old. And so Mikhail finished chopping his onions. He threw them into a hot pan, and then he walked out of the kitchen, poking Maria playfully as he walked by, and she kind of laughed at him.

3:53And then Maria watched as her father walked through the living room, past Maria's grandmother and brother, and he walked over to this door that was right at the beginning of this hallway, and that door led down into the cellar. And so Maria, she stopped for a moment and just watched as her dad opened the cellar door, began walking down the steps, and he shut the door behind him. And then Maria just went back to coloring in her horse. But after a few minutes, Maria started to smell something really bad, and she looked up, and she saw the onions that were on the burner were starting to burn, and smoke was going up into the ceiling.

4:27And then suddenly the smoke alarm went off. And as this commotion is happening, Maria's grandmother runs into the kitchen and begins fanning the smoke. She turns off the burner and moves the onions. And then Maria's mother comes running into the kitchen and she's seeing what's happening. And she's looking around. She doesn't see her husband. And so very frustratedly, she yells out, Mikhail, you burn the onions. Come in and deal with this. But Mikhail was not on the first floor. He was still down in the cellar. And so Maria's mother knew that. and she was kind of annoyed that he was taking so long down there.

4:57And so after muttering something under her breath, she stormed out of the kitchen, walked over to the cellar door, opened it up, went downstairs, shutting the door behind her. Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, Maria's grandmother was now going through the burned onions, looking for any that were salvageable, and Maria had gone back to her horse drawing. But after about five minutes, it dawned on Maria that her parents had still not come out of the cellar yet, and it just felt like too much time had passed. They should be up by now. And so Maria stopped working on her picture and just stared down the hall at the cellar door.

5:31And at the same time, Maria's grandmother had stopped with the onions and she too had come over and was watching from right next to Maria down the hall at the cellar door. Both of them just expecting the parents to emerge any second. But as the seconds ticked by, nobody emerged from the cellar. And so finally, Maria's grandmother said, okay, I'm going to go see what's going on. And so Maria watched as her grandmother walked through the living room past Maria's brother who was playing a video game. And then Maria's grandmother, right in front of the closed cellar door, just yelled out, Hey, are you guys okay down there?

6:03But there was no response from the cellar. And so with this, Maria's grandmother turned around and told Maria's brother to turn off his video game because it was so noisy. You know, maybe they were calling from the cellar and they couldn't hear them. And so the brother, who was just totally frustrated by this whole situation, he paused his game. and then Maria's grandmother called out again, you know, hey, are you guys okay down there? And this time when there was still silence, Maria's brother, he just stood up and said, okay, why don't we just go downstairs and make sure they're okay? Why aren't we doing that?

6:33And so without waiting for a response from his grandmother, Maria's brother just walked right over to the cellar door. He opened it up and he looked down and he goes, look, they're right there. And then the brother began walking down the steps, yelling to his parents, hey, come on, when's dinner? What's going on? And as he did, he shut the door behind him. And so after this, Maria's grandmother walked back into the kitchen and sat with Maria as the two of them stared at the cellar door, expecting their family to return any second now, but they didn't. And so at this point, both Maria and her grandmother were really starting to panic.

7:05They could tell something was wrong. And so Maria's grandmother grabbed her phone and called a neighbor and just said, hey, can you come over? I think something's wrong. I don't know what it is. And then after Maria's grandmother hung up the phone, instead of waiting for the neighbor to come over, Maria's grandmother just got up and walked right over to the cellar door, then opened the door and began walking down the stairs. But this time, the grandmother left the door open. And so Maria was able to listen from her seat in the kitchen to the sound of her grandmother's footsteps making their way down the stairs.

7:36And then at some point, Maria heard what sounded like a distinct thud and then silence. Now, at this point, Maria is terrified. The neighbor has not come over yet. And so without knowing what else to do, she just got up and walked over to the open cellar door and just stared down into the darkness down below. She couldn't see anything, but she was too scared to even call out to her family. And then finally, she just began descending the stairs herself. Ten minutes later, the neighbor, who Maria's grandmother had called, finally arrived over at their house. He knocked on the front door, but there was no answer.

8:14And so he tried the doorknob, found it unlocked. So he opened it up and he stepped inside. And right away, you know, he looked around and it was totally quiet. There was nobody on the first floor of the house. But the neighbor immediately heard crying and he walked around the first floor listening for where it was coming from. And he realized when he got to the top of the open door leading down into the cellar that the crying was coming from down there. And so without a thought, the neighbor just ran down the stairs and he couldn't believe what he found. He found Maria, the eight-year-old, just crying on the ground and all around her was her entire family just laying on the ground.

8:51Now, the neighbor had no idea what was going on, but sensing clearly there was some sort of emergency based on the call he got and what he was seeing now, he just scooped up Maria, ran upstairs and ran out of the house and began screaming for help. When help arrived, they would search the house and make their way down into the cellar, and they would discover that Maria's entire family, her grandmother, her brother, her parents, they were all dead. And what had killed them were the very potatoes that Mikhail had gone down to get.

9:26It would turn out Maria's mother was right when she warned Mikhail that the potatoes they had downstairs were very old. In fact, they were so old, they had begun to rot, and as they rotted, they produced this toxic fume that did not ventilate out of the cellar. The cellar was totally enclosed, there was no windows, and the family had this habit of always shutting the door whenever they went down into the cellar. And so over time, this fume had totally filled the entire cellar, and one by one, as family members went down into the cellar, sealing the door behind them, they passed out from these fumes and then died.

10:02Maria was the only one who survived going down into the cellar because her grandmother, who had gone down right before her, had left the door open. And so by the time Maria had gone down, a lot of the toxic fumes had found their way up the stairs and escaped into the rest of the house. And so when Maria went down there, it was not nearly as toxic.

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12:04Tennessee 2012.

12:10Our next story is called Table for Two.

12:29On the morning of August 2, 2017, two men sat together laughing inside of a bar in a tiny village in northern France. The men were named Lucien Perrault and Olivier Boudin, and even though there was a massive age difference between them, Lucien was 69 years old and Olivier was 38 years old, the two were totally inseparable, to the point where the people in the village referred to them as father and son. Lucien had spent his whole life working in manufacturing in a nearby city, but just four years earlier, he had finally retired and he had moved into a small home inside of this northern French village.

13:05But when he had first moved into this new home, he had been very lonely and sad. You know, Lucien was divorced, he struggled with alcohol, and he had had a really tough life and he just wasn't doing well. But when he met Olivier, his whole life turned around. When the two met, Olivier also was kind of like a down-on-his-luck guy. He was struggling with some health issues that made it hard to work, and so for years he had been bouncing between the nearby city and this village in northern France, looking for work somewhat unsuccessfully. And so when these two happened to connect, it's like they bonded over having kind of difficult lives.

13:40And for Lucien, what really mattered to him was Olivier, despite being so much younger than him, did not treat him, did not treat Lucian like he was this dried-up, worthless old man. He treated Lucian like a peer. And so together, these two very unlikely best friends began kind of orchestrating their lives around the other. And before long, it was like their lives had all this new structure and routine and meaning to them, because again, the two men got to be together basically all day long. So, on this particular morning, as Olivier and Lucian were together at this bar, they began talking about what they wanted to do that night.

14:16and they settled on having a barbecue at Lucian's house. Lucian would cook up some beef and they would sit out on his back garden patio and just spend the night together. It sounded like a wonderful plan. And in fact, the bartender would say that when Olivier and Lucian finally left the bar that day, that he recalled overhearing them being so excited about this particular barbecue. And so that evening, Olivier and Lucian arrived at Lucian's house and they went out to the back patio where Lucien had already draped a nice tablecloth over this small round table. It was a red and white checkered pattern tablecloth, and on this table was an open bottle of wine and some cheese and a baguette.

14:55And so Olivier, he sat down and began enjoying some wine and bread, and Lucien walked over to the grill and began cooking up the beef. Lucien had a neighbor. We're going to call her Marie because we don't actually know her real name. And Marie's second floor window overlooked Lucien's garden patio, where the two men were having this cookout. And so that night, Marie did glance out and saw the two men kind of listening to music and goofing around. And she was used to them spending lots of time together. And she was also used to them staying up late at night. And so she figured, you know, tonight's going to be another one of those nights where these guys are up late, having wine, celebrating, whatever.

15:33You know, she was just going to shut the window and try to ignore the noise coming in and just let them do their thing. And so eventually, Marie would do that. She would go to bed to the sound of music coming from next door and the sound of men talking. And then the next morning when Marie got up around 6am, she looked out that window again and frankly was not that shocked at what she saw. Lucien was still just sitting at the table looking like he could be eating some bread or still drinking wine and Olivier had clearly passed out on the ground. Now Marie didn't judge, she knew these two liked to stay up late and drink and do stuff like this and so she thought, you know what?

16:09None of my business. Then at 9 a.m., so three hours after Marie had first woken up, she left her house to go to another neighbor's house to feed their chickens while they were away for the day. As she passed by Lucian's house, she glanced into his back garden patio, and she saw Lucian was still just sitting at the table, and Olivier was still passed out on the ground. It was like they hadn't moved for three hours. But again, Marie's thinking, none of my business. And so she just kept on going, went to her neighbor's house and fed the chickens. But when Marie came back to her house three hours later around noon, she looked again into Lucian's backyard and she saw the two men still had not moved.

16:51Lucian is sitting at the table and Olivier is laying on the ground. And suddenly Marie's thinking, wait a minute, you know, the sun is high in the sky right now. These guys aren't moving. They're going to get heat stroke. You know, we got to do something about this. And so she yelled out to Olivier and Lucian, but she got no response. And so Marie just walked into Lucian's backyard. And as she got closer and closer to the two men, she realized that they were not moving at all. Like they were not breathing. Something was horribly wrong here. And so Marie, she just turned and ran to another neighbor's house.

17:23She told them what was going on. And they got these big pots of water and they ran back and doused Olivier and Lucien with water, trying to get them to snap out of their drunken stupor. But the two men did not move at all when the water hit them. Clearly, they were dead.

17:42The next day, the local prosecutor announced there was going to be an investigation into the two men's deaths, which were being classified as criminal acts. And the prosecutor also said that it seemed like Lucien and Olivier died at the same time, and so most likely this was either a double homicide or a murder-suicide, and the primary theory as to what killed the two men was poison put in their food. And so police sent off the canned beans the two men were eating to this institution in Paris to test it for something called botulism, which is a deadly toxin that will grow inside of canned foods, but it came back negative.

18:20and then also police sent off the rest of the food the two men were eating to various other laboratories to be tested for poisons and again, all of it came back negative. There was nothing that the police could detect in any of the food they ate. And so for a minute, investigators kind of scrambled because they're like, okay, if it wasn't poison in their food, what else could have killed these guys? There was nothing at the scene that would give away what could have killed them and so they were just stumped. And so police were kind of confused for a minute But then the autopsies came back for Olivier and Lucien, and everything changed.

18:55Lucien and Olivier were not murdered. This was not a murder-suicide. They didn't die from botulism or from some poison in their food. They died because of a set of very particular circumstances. Both Lucien and Olivier suffered from non-fatal minor medical issues. Lucien had bad dental health and so was missing a couple of teeth, and Olivier was suffering from a heart condition called cardiomegaly, which means his heart was slightly enlarged and somewhat fragile. However, his condition was totally being monitored by doctors and was under control. But just for a second, on the night of August 2, 2017, when Lucian and Olivier were having that cookout in Lucian's backyard, their non-fatal minor medical issues suddenly became a really, really big deal.

19:46Lucian cooked up a big plate of beef rib. Now, beef rib can be difficult to chew, even when you have all your teeth and take your time. But Lucian was missing teeth, and he loved this beef rib so much, he was wolfing it down really quickly, and so he wasn't chewing it enough. And at some point, he swallowed a particularly big, unchewed bite, and he began to choke. And when that happened, his best buddy, Olivier, sitting across from him, he stood up to try to help his friend, who's basically dying right in front of him, and the stress of this moment caused his heart to seize up, his heart which is already enlarged and fragile, and he had a heart attack and died.

20:27And then Lucian, who now has no one to help him, continued to sit at the table trying to get this beef out of his throat, but he couldn't, and he eventually asphyxiated and died as well, hunched over at the table.

21:10We'll see you next time. Mr. Ballin, and see promo details. See ahs.com slash contracts for coverage details, including service fees, limitations, and exclusions. Traditional home security only alerts you after a break-in, and that's too late. SimpliSafe is changing that. Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way. We don't just alert. We stop crime before it starts. SimpliSafe. Plan starting around a dollar a day. Save 50 % on your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com slash SXM or with promo code SXM. Outdoor deterrence requires a SimpliSafe Active Guard outdoor protection plan starting at$49.99 a month.

21:49Visit SimpliSafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012.