A Collection of Horrible Fates | Horrific Accidents Edition

Incredible Ambient Songs:
By CoAg
https://www.youtube.com/@co.agmusic1823

Intro Theme by Swift Junai:
https://www.instagram.com/swiftjunai/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6hf5nMJ8s6LJJfFR4OQ3lg
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PoG2b18MHocWZA8zQgWjO

Writers and researchers: Jay Adams
https://instagram.com/jayadamsdigital?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ==

Jordan Gottschick https://www.youtube.com/@DerpsWithWolves/playlists

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Scary Interesting. In this video,
we're going to over three stores of people in totally
ordinary situations until something extraordinary would happen, and in each
case would end up being absolutely horrific. One of the
stories is simply one of the saddest and most disturbing
things ever covered in this channel, so as always, viewer

(00:20):
discretion is strongly August October eighth, nineteen ninety nine was
going to be a big day for thirty six year
olds Anna. Not only would she be meeting with a
job matching service that afternoon, but it would be only

(00:41):
her second or third visit to Chicago's bustling downtown area.
The Windy City had been Ana's home for the past
two years, but she had never had much cause to
hop on the eltrain and head to the skyscrappers known
as the Loop. This busy area is known in Chicago's
Central Business District, and in the back of Nne's mind,
she was a little apprehensive, like what if she got
law what if she missed her stop on the train.

(01:02):
None of these words could be entertained in her mind
for long. Though her three year old daughter would be
joining her on her downtown adventure, so Anna need to
get both of them ready to go. As the morning
were on, they were finally ready to go, so the
pair left their apartment and headed for the nearest train
station to get on the l It was a short
ride into the city, maybe about twenty minutes, which gave
them the opportune to marvel at the many sizes and

(01:23):
shapes of the buildings in Chicago's downtown in the distance.
At the proper station, Anna and her daughter got off
the train and headed for Van Buren Street. The weather
that day was also typical of fall in Chicago land, gray, gloomy,
and drizzly. The mother and daughter then moved north along
Wabash Avenue, but where they were going wasn't exactly clear.
Anna's appointment wasn't for another forty five minutes or so,

(01:45):
and the two were walking in the opposite direction of
Anna's scheduled meeting. Whatever the reasoning, it didn't really matter.
They had time to kill in a completely unfamiliar world
that needed exploring. All around them, the city was alive
and humming with traffic and people rushing to lunch as
the roaring monolith the CNA Center loomed over it all.
This forty four story skyscraper and its bright red exterer

(02:06):
made it one of the most recognizable buildings in all
of downtown Chicago. On ground level, walking across the street
from the CNA Center with her daughter was Anna. They
walked past a parking garage entrance along Wabash Avenue. Close
to the east side of the CNA building. A construction
canopy stretched above the sidewalk, there to act as a
shield for pedestrians while workers above painted the building steel exterer.

(02:28):
Bananna and her daughter were on the opposite side of
the street, just outside the canopy's reach. The painting project
had been going off for months, but little did anyone
know that there was a much more ursient issue that
Cruise should have been addressing. As time near to twelve
thirty pm, what happened next was fast, too fast to
react and too fast to comprehend. High above the street,

(02:48):
a window on the twenty ninth floor sumes the pressure
of the wind and broke free from its frame at
about two feet by two feet and three quarters of
an inch thick. The section of window then began to plumb,
but it didn't just fall. It cut through the air
gradually angling downward in a vertical dive, transforming into a blade.
Soon enough, it was like a guillotine, with no sound

(03:10):
and no warning. No one saw it in time to shout.
One moment, Anna was walking down the street with her
daughter hand in hand, and the next and it was gone.
The glass struck the top right side of her head
with merciless force. It sliced through everything afterward. Her passing
was immediate, so fast, in fact, that she likely didn't
even register that anything was wrong. Anna then clapped sideways,

(03:33):
her body crumbling beneath these sudden, silent violence. The glass
then hit the pavement and exploded around her, with shards
scattering across the stretch of sidewalk nearly twenty feet or
six meters wide. Her daughter, still clutching her mother's hand
when the glass came down tugged it Enna's shirt. Confused
and frantic, over and over afterwards, she screamed out mommy
and Spanish, begging her mother to stand up, but it

(03:55):
was clear to the gathering crowd that there was absolutely
nothing that could be done to save Anna. In the moment,
her daughter's tiny voice grew louder and more desperate, until
one of the nearback. Construction workers rushed to scoop her up. Still,
the three year old kept calling out for the woman who,
just moments earlier had been right beside her. Bystanders also
froze at the terrific site in the sidewalk, and in fact,
a woman who had been walking just ten steps behind.

(04:16):
Anna would later recall the surreal, almost cinematic horror of
the moment, how something so large and so lethal could
fall from the sky with no warning. The panel had
fallen from a height of three hundred and forty feet
or one hundred and four meters, and it's unclear how
long it took to fall. Some mastermates suggested as little
as five seconds, others up to twenty five seconds, but
the exact timing didn't matter. The result was the same.

(04:40):
What physically sent the window hurtling toward Anna was the
wind that day, but the real cause was soon to
be uncovered, as Chicago's citizens demanded answers as to how
something like this could have happened. In the days following
Anna's death, the truth would come out, and a sense
of outrage and unease would settle over the city. What
fell on Anna that day wasn't just a pane of glass.
It was the cumulative weight of deck kades of neglect.

(05:01):
The SNA building had actually been shedding glass since the
day had opened its doors in the nineteen sixties. For
twenty seven years, windows had been fracturing across it. Some
were repaired, some replaced, and others were simply patched and forgotten.
The twenty ninth floor window that killed Anna had actually
cracked in June. For seventeen weeks afterward, it sat behind
a thin white adhesive film, its damaged hidden from the street.

(05:22):
Far below. A piece of plywood was pressed against it
from the inside to keep the wind from entering the building. Essentially,
all that was holding the crack window and place was
a bit of duct tape and a wish. What's even
more tragic is that the wind had been howling through
the broken windows so much that employees on the twenty
nine floor called to inform building maintenance just two hours
before the piece broke free. It's not that building management

(05:42):
didn't know the risks. It did, but when repainting crews
moved into touch up the steel exterior, that window cracked
and three others also due for replacement, were replaced on hold.
According to the chairman of the CNA Corporation, the scaffolding
needed to replace the windows was already in use for painting.
He told city officials that they'd planned to wait until
the painting was done. In other words, the window could
also wait. As it turned out, obviously it couldn't, and

(06:05):
it costs Anna her life. In the hours after Anna's death,
city building inspectors began coming through the CNA tower. They
found a series of poor colocking jobs, long standing cracks,
and a pattern of slow and shoddy repairs, during which
at least four more questionable windows were immediately flagged and
ordered removed. The media then descended, as did public outrage.

(06:26):
This wasn't just about one building. This was about every
glass covered high rise in Chicago's dense downtown. How many
other crack panes were out there, how many other maintenance
jobs have been put off, and how many other tragedies
were quietly waiting their turn. The city then scrambled to
assess the scope of the problem, But for Anne and
her family, it was already too late. The shock of
Anna's death reverberated far beyond Wabish Avenue In the hours

(06:47):
and days that followed, the story dominated local headlines. A
mother killed by falling glass while holding her child's hand.
The horrific nature of it was impossible to ignore, and
the preventability made it unforgivable. In the years that followed
the tragedy, it was determined that the temperature differences were
to blame for the windows stressing and cracking at the
CNA Center. The insurance giant was finned two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars and agreed to invest nine million dollars

(07:09):
into replacing three thousand windows around the skyscraper. In two
thousand and two, CNA Insurance agreed to an eighteen million
dollar settlement with Anna's family. Keswick, England, is a charming
market town nestled in the heart of the Lake District
National Park in Cumbria. The town itself has a quaint
traditional field with cobblesot streets, independent shops and a market

(07:31):
square that's been a hub of activity for centuries. Then
just a stone's throw from the Keswick Markets, it's a
much more modern option for recreation. The Kong Adventure Center
has a state of the art climbing wall with roots
for beginners and advanced climbers, and bouldering errors, and even
an escape room, all of which make it a popular
spot for rainy days and parties. In spring of twenty
twenty three, a forty nine year old man made his

(07:52):
way to the Kong Adventure Center to celebrate his niece's birthday.
Family members knew the man as a loving, devoted parent
who had a particular soft spot in his heart for
the nero diverse community. He was dedicated to helping those
in the spectrum learn from and adapt to life's many challenges.
The man also happened to be an avid and experienced climber,
so he was very much looking forward to get together
that day. One of the Kong Adventure Center's main attractions

(08:14):
among its many indoor and outdoor climbing options, was its
completely man made indoor cave. It was about two hundred
and thirty feet long, and the cave was marketed as
an exciting activity designed to mimic the twists and turns
of real caves, and began at the base the main
climbing wall. As the party got under way, several of
the kids wanted to check the cave out, and the
man was eager to see it himself, so he accompanied
them to the reception desk, where they were all given

(08:36):
helmets and flashlights. Then, once everyone had their helmets buckled
and the lights turned on, the group ducked under the
indoor cave entrance and climbed into Kong's Den. It wasn't
long after they disappeared inside, though, that some of the
kids re emerged from the entrance and made their way
over to the adult attending the party. The children then
informed them that the man had slipped on his way
through a narrow tunnel and was stuck in a tight restriction.

(08:57):
The adults then relayed this information to the Adventure Center staff,
and immediate efforts to reach the man got underway, but
it quickly became clear that they weren't gonna be able
to free him, so around three pm, a call to
emergency services was placed, which was responded to by the
Fire department in paramedics. When they arrived, they found the
climbing Wall staff and some customers taking apart sections of
the wall to helped rescuers access the tunnel where the

(09:18):
man was trapped. Incredibly, though, after assessing the situation, Emergency
Services knew they needed more help. Mountain and cave rescue
specialists were then called in, and soon there were more
than fifty people among six rescue crews from various disciplines
working to get the man unstuck. With growing concern for
the man's health due to his prolonged static position in
a confined space, rescuers continued to dismantle the climbing wall

(09:39):
and parts of the man made cave systems reach him.
For horrifying four hours, the man remained a place in
the dark tunnel, likely hearing the urgent activity all around him,
before rescuers were finally able to get him out. Afterward,
there was initially a wave of relief that came over
his loved ones and the Adventure Center staff, but emergency
personnel knew that the consequences of the predicament the man
was just in hadn't shown themselve yet. The man was

(10:01):
then placed on a stretcher and rushed to the hospital
so he could be treated for what were termed as
crush injuries. Now, your first thought upon hearing this might
be of shattered bones and cracked ribs, but it's actually
the body's muscular system that can threaten the life of
someone who has been crushed by a heavy weight or
squeezed for any prolonged period, and crush injuries like those
demands sustained are among the most dangerous physical traumas These

(10:22):
often result in severe and life threatening complications. This occurs
when intense pressures applied to the muscle tissues for prolonged periods,
leading to cellular damage. The disruption releases substances like potassium
and myoglobin into the bloodstream, and while both are normal
and controlled amounts for healthy cellular function, they're both toxic
once they hit the circulatory system in large amounts. Potassium

(10:44):
itself can cause life threatening cardiac arrhythmias, and myoglobin can
overwhelm the kidneys and cause acute renal failure. Symptoms can
also progress rapidly, starting with muscle pain and swelling and
escalating to fever, pneumonia, shock, and multiple organ failure, and
despite appearing stable immediately after rescue, victims of crushed syndrome
often deteriorate quickly as their body struggled to cope with

(11:05):
the overwhelming talks glowed. The complex nature of these injuries
also require swift and specialized medical intervention, usually in the
form of fluids to counteract the release of toxins. And
stabilized kidney function, along with other therapies to manage cardiac irregularities.
And in fact, even with the most timely care, the
prognosis is often poor. Apparently, only but ten percent of

(11:25):
people who experience crushingdom go into recover at the hospital.
The man's worst thing condition was consistent with crush syndrome,
and despite the best efforts of the medical team attending
to him, there was little they could do the injuries
he suffered, which is too great for him to overcome,
and a week after he became trapped in the indoor cave,
he died at the hospitals, surrounded by family. In the
aftermath of his death, reporters covering the story came across

(11:47):
a set of online reviews and learned that this wasn't
the first time someone had gotten stuck in the indoor cave.
A review dated six years prior to the man's incident
was published to Trip Adviser by women who recounted her experience.
The woman, her twelve the old daughter, and her partner
inquired about going caving when they visited the Adventure Center.
According to her review, a staff member at the reception
desk asked her partner how tall he was, and he

(12:08):
told her that he was five foot ten. This staff
member then allegedly replied that her partner would be fine
to enter the cave system as long as he was
under six feet tall. The family then received their helmets
and lights before they were led to the cave entrance,
and once there, the woman wrote that they were on
their own to explore the cave without supervision. Her partner
then went in first and became stuck in a tight
restriction almost immediately. This immediately frightened his stepdaughter, but he

(12:30):
did his best to remain calm as he tried to
wiggle his way forward to believing there was a way
out ahead. As he continued on, however, it became clear
that this wasn't the case, and he had to begin backtracking,
which required significant effort that kept the woman and her
daughter extremely concerned for his well being. Fortunately, he was
eventually able to make his way back to the entrance
without further incident. It's unclear what, if any precautions have

(12:51):
been put in place in the wake of the man's death. However,
as of this video, there is no mention of the
indoor cave on the adventure center's website, and while the
center still offers indoor and out climbing activities, it's also
unclear if the indoor cave is still in operation. May
twenty second, twenty thirteen, was field trip day for two
fourth grade classes from an elementary school in Saint Paul, Minnesota,

(13:13):
and the kids were in for a good one. The
students were bound for Lilydale Regional Park, a destination that
was a favorite among local school groups. This is a
place where you can see all the layers of ancient
earth and maybe, if you're lucky, find a seashell or
leaf imprint fossilized in stone. And one of the kids
on that trip, of ten year old have been counting
down the days. In fact, just the night before, he'd
rushed up to his dad and told him how excited

(13:34):
he was. The park itself sits along the Mississippi River
and is known for its dramatic bluffs. It used to
be home to a brickmaking company, and the clay pits
left behind had become fossil gold mines. So every year
hundreds of school groups came in to walk those same trails,
dig around in the dirt, and try to unnerve something ancient.
That Wednesday, the bus is pulled up, the door slung open,
and excited kids poured out. As the kids made their

(13:56):
way up one of the bluff trails. However, not far
from where the clay pits curved in a horseshoe shape
beneath the trees, something was shifting. The morning soon worned
to early afternoon, but the excitement of the elementary school
kids hadn't waned at all. On dirty hands knees, the
fourth grid is poked and part of the soil where
fossils were known to be. After a brief break for lunch,
the kids got right back to digging around and that's

(14:16):
when it happened. One moment, the students were poking around
the hillside, crouched slow with their classmates, and the next
the earth above, below, and around them gave out. There
was no warning before the earth gave way. It just went,
taking several students with it. Just after one pm, a
call came into the fire department with the reports of
a landslide at Lilydale Regional Park. Somewhere along the bluff side.

(14:37):
The ground, which had been saturated for days with heavy rains,
had slumped and then collapsed. The heavy rainfall that had
soaked the hillside had turned the clay and soil into
something like westment, and as the kids moved along the
unmarked rall, the ground finally gave way. The slide came down,
with forest, carrying with it dirt, sand, rock, and everything
else in its path. Minutes after the emergency call came in,

(14:59):
a police officer was one of the first to arrive,
and the scene was absolute chaos. There was mud everywhere
and the earth looked like had melted in place. There
were calls for help, panic voices, and the terrible realization
that some of the kids weren't accounted for. The officer
and her partner didn't hesitate. They parked the cruiser and
rushed to the collapsed air it dropped into their knees
and digging bare hand into the unstable soil. But the

(15:19):
consistency of the earth was unlike anything the officer had
experienced before. It was like quicksand, and the more she dug,
the more the earth swallowed her, and soon she was
even buried up to her waist somewhere in the slurry
of sand and water. Though the officer felt a small
hand a sense of even greater urgency overcame her as
she dug desperately trying to pull the boy free with
the help of her partner, but it was too late.

(15:40):
The nine year old was already gone even worse. As
far as they could tell. In these early stages, there
were still three students unaccounted for. One of the boys
was luckily found bared waist deeep, and crews were able
to extract him rather quickly once he was located. Another boy, however,
was totally submerged in the sand and water, and it
took ninety minutes to free him before he was rushed
to the hospital checks injuries. And the third and final

(16:02):
missing student wouldn't be found until the next day. The
moment the family heard about the accident, they rushed to
the scene, hoping and expecting to be reunited with their son.
All they received instead, though, was the crushing news that
he was still missing. By this point, lights were being
set up around the impacted area as rescue crews planned
to search throughout the night for the lost boy. But
then the weather changed. Rain swept back into the area

(16:24):
and fell relentlessly, creating an even more unstable environment and
one that was unsafe for rescuers to work in this city.
Would then announce that the search would be called off
for the day and resume the next day. What they
didn't tell the public was that they already considered this
to be a recovery mission and not a rescue, meaning
all hope of finding the boy alive was gone. When
the search resumed the fallen day, rescuers found him lifeless
under tons of sand and water, as his parents helplessly

(16:46):
watched from a safe area in the bluff. After his
body was freed from the soil, he was placed on
a stretcher and carried out of the hole. Once he
reached the top of the bluff, his mother rushed over
and kissed her son as she left that day. She
was so distraught that the father would almost have to
carry her back to the car. In the days after
the tragedy, investigator's launched an independent review, coming through records,

(17:06):
environmental data, and the terrain itself. What they concluded was
maddening in its vagueness. The collapse, they said, was simply
a natural disaster. It was a tragic convergence of spring rainfall,
unstable soil, and heavy foot traffic on the bluff already
prone to erosion. The area where the collapse occurred, known
as the East Claypit, was a remnant of old mining operations,
already carved into a horseshoe shape. Additionally, the spring of

(17:28):
twenty thirteen had been unusually wet. The soil was rain saturated,
soft beneath the surface, and riddled with groundwater from more
than three and a half inches of rain that fell
over the course of a single week. From a geological standpoint,
the East Claypit in Lilydale was a landmine just waiting
for the right pressure. But here's where things got really uncomfortable.
City officials already knew that erosion was an issue along

(17:49):
those bluffs. They had seen landslides before, most notably a
big one in twenty eleven that occurred just fifty yards
or forty six meters from the sun of the fatal collapse.
It was the same park, same slope, and the sea,
same kind of spring rain. Despite that, though, the area
remained open to the public and school groups were still
given permits to explore there. This city issued about four
hundred of those fossil hunting permits every year, each one

(18:10):
accompanied by a waiver acknowledging the risks. Risks obviously that
until that day in twenty thirteen, no one had fully
grasped the report, even from the twenty thirteen collapse, as
something no one could have foreseen. It was the perfect
storm of conditions and a terrible act of nature. But
others weren't so sure. Critics pointed to the twenty eleven
landslide as a clear warning that went unheeded. To them,

(18:31):
the idea that nothing could have been done felt like
a convenient way to sidestep accountability. In the months that followed,
permits were suspended and remained so even to this day.
Trails were reviewed, and Saint Paul officials brought in consultants,
including engineers, environmental experts, and erosion specialists to figure out
how to make the error safer. It would take years,
but in twenty nineteen the city had completed a suite
of changes that included better stormwater management, slope stabilization, and

(18:54):
new trees planted to restore it would have been lost.
This was something, but to the families who lost their sons,
obvious it would never be enough. In twenty fourteen, the
Saint Paul City Council approved a one million dollar settlement
to be split between the families the two deceased and
one of the surviving injured boys.