Transcript of Unreal

Today's podcast will feature three stories that sound just impossible, moments that were so unlikely that they really should never have existed. Yet somehow they did. 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 Just a bit cramped, and it's about a horrifying accident that has a very unlikely outcome. The second story you'll hear is called Scenic Route, and it's about a who gets into a car accident on her way to work, but not everything is as it seems. And the third and final story you'll hear is called Out with a Bang, and it's about a funeral that ends with a deafening roar and chaos. 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 come to the right podcast because that's all we do, and we upload four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays. So if that's of interest to you, please install hidden cameras all around the Like Buttons house and then livestream that footage to Facebook.

Okay, let's get into our first story called Just a Bit Crammed. At 4: 45 AM on Saturday, January 17th, 2015, a 27-year-old farmer named Caleb Whitby drove his pickup truck down a highway in Southeastern, Oregon.

Caleb knew conditions for driving were not great. In fact, they were awful. The road was icy, it was foggy out, the sun wasn't up, so it was pretty dark out, but he felt like he didn't really have a choice. He had to go pick up a shipment of cattle for his family's farm. After driving for another 10 minutes or so down this road, so it's just before 5: 00 AM at this point, Caleb found himself right behind this big semi-truck who was going under the speed limit. Caleb's cruising along here getting frustrated, and he's thinking about passing the truck. But when he peaked around the side and looked up ahead of the truck, he saw there was a very sharp turn coming up, and He didn't really have enough runway to make the pass, at least not safely. Caleb just throttled back and decided he would make the pass after making the turn. And so the semi-truck, which is right in front of Caleb, it ends up making this turn and gets out of sight of Caleb. And then a moment later, Caleb makes the same turn, and as soon as he does, he sees something that he couldn't have seen before.

He's seeing it right now that sends a jolt of panic through his body. And reflexively, he jams on his brakes, he loses control of his truck, it starts to slide, and all Caleb can do is just brace and pray that he doesn't get killed. And then a second later, he heard a loud crunching sound, and then his truck stalled, and everything went quiet. But the silence was broken when suddenly there was another crunching sound, and at the same time, Caleb suddenly felt his lungs it and crushed together and all the air was just pulled out of his body. Moments later, a different semi-truck driver was going down the same stretcher highway that Caleb had been, and he rounded that exact same turn, and when he did, he saw the same thing that had horrified Caleb and caused him to swerve out of control. Except this semi-truck driver, when he hit his brakes, he was able to basically maintain his truck, and he gently hit the guardrail and crashed, but it didn't cause any damage to him or really to his truck. So after composing himself, this semi-truck driver got out of the cabin and he looked out at this unbelievably horrific scene in front of him, and instinctively he knew if he goes forward and inspects this, he's just going to see dead bodies.

And he didn't know if he could even handle that. And so he's just standing there in utter shock when he hears this sound, and he knows this sound is something that he has to go investigate. And so even though he was terrified of potentially seeing dead people, he walked towards the sound and suddenly he saw where it was coming from. And he just couldn't believe what he was looking at. It would turn out when Caleb Whitby rounded that corner and then saw this horrible thing that caused him to crash, well, what he saw was a massive pileup of over two dozen cars just completely blocking the road. And so he smashed on his brakes and he tried to stop himself, but ultimately, he smashed into the semi-truck that just moments before he had been driving behind. The semi-truck had also crashed. And so Caleb has now crashed into the side of the semi, and everything's silent for a second, and then another semi-truck comes around the corner. Caleb can't go anywhere, and that semi-truck blasted into the back of Caleb's car. After that, the other semi-truck, the third semi-truck, if you will, rounds the corner, sees the pile up, hits the brakes, but this guy, he manages to crash into the guardrail, avoiding major injury and damage to his truck.

And so he gets out of his truck, and he's surveying this horrific scene, and he hears a sound. And he follows that that sound right into the crash, and eventually he finds it, and that sound was Caleb. Somehow, when Caleb's truck was smashed from both directions, it created this perfect pocket of space just big enough for Caleb to fit inside of. And so despite being smashed together by two semi-trucks in this huge pileup, Caleb was basically unhurt. And so when this third semi-truck driver found Caleb, he actually was able to pull Caleb out of the wreckage, and minus a bruise and a couple of cuts on his face, Caleb actually was just fine and ultimately walked away. And in fact, after first responders showed up and cleared the wreck, it would turn out that incredibly nobody was killed.

Our next story is called Scenic Rout.

At 8: 40 AM on July 7, 1967, a 17-year-old girl named Nancy McKeown was driving along a highway in Brooklyn, New York. She was on her way to her job as a secretary at her dad's office in Brooklyn, and she was coming from her home in Long Island, New York. Now, the commute to her office took about an hour, but Nancy didn't mind because her dad had just got her this beautiful, brand new yellow Camaro, and she loved driving it. The highway she was on had this amazing view of the beach and ocean down below. So that day, Nancy rolled down her window so she could feel the ocean breeze as she drove. Then she took in a deep breath and she smiled. At the same time Nancy was doing this, a police lieutenant was driving in his car, a couple of cars back from Nancy. As he was just driving along, he suddenly sees this yellow Camaro that, to this point, had been driving completely normally, suddenly veer off the road, miraculously missed the oncoming cars, and then smashed into a tree on the side of the road. And so the police lieutenant instinctively jammed on his brakes and veered over to the shoulder and stopped behind the Camaro.

And as the lieutenant got out of the car, he was thinking, clearly the driver must have just had some medical emergency because he didn't see any obstacles in the road. And the car, the Camaro, had been driving completely normally to that point. So what would cause them to veer and crash into the road at such a high speed other than a medical emergency? And so the lieutenant jumps out of the car, runs over to the driver's side window, and he looks inside, and he sees this teenage girl, this blonde teenage girl, and she's slumped over the wheel. She's not looking up at him. She's not making any sounds. She's just sitting there. He opens up the door and he asks her, Are you okay? She didn't say anything, but she did moan. And so she was breathing, she was alive, and there weren't any obvious physical injuries. Clearly, she's just crashed into this tree at high speed, so she's definitely shaken up. But there weren't any obvious grievous injuries that have occurred here, at least none that he could see. And so he asked her again, Hey, are you okay? What's going on here? And she just continued to moan.

Again, considering he's looking at her and she seems basically okay, all things considered, he thought, Maybe she's drunk. I mean, that would explain the sudden veering off the road. At this point, the lieutenant radioed for backup and also called for an ambulance. While he waited, he began searching the car, just basically looking to see if maybe there was some clue in the car as to what happened here. Like, for example, containers of alcohol. He's looking around and he doesn't see any empty bottles and he can't smell any alcohol in the car. But still this whole time, the girl is not responding. She's just moaning and just slumped over there. Then a couple of minutes later, he hears sirens and he looks up and a bunch of first responders came over. They pulled the girl out of the car, got her in the ambulance, and off to the hospital she went. Once Nancy got to the hospital, medical staff was able to determine that she was not drunk, but she did clearly appear to be having some medical emergency, but they didn't know what it was. Again, there was no visible injuries on her. I mean, she just basically looked really shaken up and was non-responsive.

Quickly, after Nancy was at the hospital, her condition only got worse, to the point where doctors were giving her shots of adrenaline to try to keep her alive, but it didn't work. At 11: 30 AM, roughly two and a half hours after Nancy crashed into the tree, she died. It was only then, after Nancy was dead, that the medical staff made a discovery, something they had totally missed when Nancy had first came in. And that was on the back of her head, hidden amongst her hair, was a small circular hole. It was a bullet wound, and for some reason, it didn't bleed at all. Clearly, Nancy did not just randomly veer off the road and smash into a tree. No, she had been shot. About 30 minutes after this discovery was made, a detective named Albert Seedman was standing next to Nancy's crashed car on the side of the highway. Seedman had a reputation as being this totally no-nonsense detective who effectively would stop at nothing to try to solve a case. By this point, he'd already spoken to Nancy's parents, who obviously were devastated and very confused by their daughter's death. They said that Nancy never got in trouble and certainly didn't have any enemies, and so it made no sense that somebody had just shot her as she was driving.

And Detective Seedman had to agree, this was not an average murder case. But regardless, he knew the best place to start this investigation was Nancy's car. The car was actually in pretty good shape. I mean, despite striking this tree at high speeds, the body of the car basically remained intact. Seedman began going inside the car and looking all around it, looking for bullet holes to see where this bullet came in and struck the driver, but he found none. Really, there was nothing in the car that gave any information away about what actually happened here. Also, adding to the mystery here is Seedman knew there had been that police lieutenant who just happened to be driving a few cars back from Nancy when she suddenly veered off the road and crashed. He would say that he did not hear any gunshots, although admittedly, he wasn't really listening for gunshots, but he said everything was normal, and then the car just veered and crashed. He couldn't understand it. Detective Seedman had briefly considered that maybe Nancy had been shot by somebody inside of her car. But because of the presence of that lieutenant who immediately was on the scene and was basically looking at the car from the time it crashed all the way until the ambulance arrived, he said, There was nobody else in the car, and I did not witness anybody fleeing the scene.

The whole situation was very bizarre, but Detective Seedman, thinking logically, thought, Okay, well, we know she's been shot. So even though nobody knows how that happened, well, there has to be a shell casing somewhere for the round that struck her. And so for the rest of the day, Seedman and his team canvassed that whole highway all around that area, looking for a shell casing or really any clue that a gun had been fired in the vicinity, but they found nothing. By the end of the day, Detective Seedman was beginning to feel pretty disappointed about how the investigation was going so far, but he thought to himself, Okay, well, I know I haven't found anything promising yet, but remember, she was shot not in some secluded area. She was shot on a major highway in Brooklyn, New York, a city of over two and a half million people. I mean, someone somewhere must have seen or heard something. And so instead of continuing to look for a shell casing, Seedman abandoned that idea and decided to go find witnesses. Over the next five days, Detective Seedman and his team scoured Brooklyn and interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people looking for anybody who had any information about this shooting.

They also put out a public plea for information and were fielding tips that way. But at the end of those five days, despite the huge number of interviews, they really hadn't gotten anywhere. As Seedman began to feel his frustration rising because once again, it just felt like they were hitting another dead end on this case, he told himself, They must have missed something. They've talked to a ton of people, but maybe they were too quick. Maybe they weren't asking the right questions. And so on July 12th, he gathered up his team and he circled some spots on a map of Brooklyn and said, Look, guys, we're going to go back to these key areas that are positioned in the best angles to have maybe heard or seen something with this shooting, and we're going to ask some more questions and just see if maybe these people have something we didn't catch. In one of those circled areas, the police discovered a gas station that was owned by a guy named Theodore Delecey, and it was located only two blocks away from where Nancy had been shot. On the morning of July 12th, when the police officers rolled up to this gas station, Theodore was working and he saw the police coming towards him, and right away he knew this had to be about Nancy McEwen.

Theodore had been following this case really closely as it was developing for two reasons. One, Nancy had been shot really close to his gas station, so there's that proximity bias. And two, Theodore was actually friends with Nancy's father and had known Nancy growing up, and so this case really hit close to home. When the police walked inside the gas station, Theodore immediately asked them, Are you hear about Nancy? And they would say yes. And that's when he would tell them his connection to Nancy and how he was following this case really closely. But despite his proximity to where she had been shot, he said, Unfortunately, he hadn't seen or heard anything. But then, Theodore Theodore quickly followed that up and said that while he had been at the gas station in the morning for a little bit, he did take off at some point to go fishing out on the water in his boat, which was not too far away. But even from there, too, he still said he didn't hear or see anything, but it was noisy out on the water anyway, so he really wouldn't have heard anything out there anyhow. The police nodded and asked some simple follow-up questions to Theodore about, Still, take us through what happened that morning.

What did you see? Were there other fishermen out there? When you were at the gas station, did you see anything unusual? Just seeing if there was anything that would jog his memory. And Theodore was answering every question as truthfully as he could. And at some point, he began to think really hard about what he actually saw when he was out on the water fishing, and suddenly, it all clicked. Theodore knew who killed Nancy. It would turn out at 8: 40 AM on July seventh, the exact moment Nancy was shot, veered off the road and crashed, Theodore was in fact out in his fishing. Except at 8: 40 AM, he wasn't actually fishing. Instead, he had a can, and he threw that can into the water. Once he saw the can, he kept staring at it, and then he raised his rifle and he fired a shot at the can. But he missed, and the bullet, by some fluke of physics, ricocheted off the surface of the water, went up into the highway, right as Nancy had rolled her window down, struck her in the head, and killed her. Theodore knew he had been shooting his gun out on the water, but what he saw was the bullet hit the water.

He didn't think for a second he could have fired up towards the highway.

It was when police began asking questions that he thought, Oh, my goodness, it is possible a ricochet could have struck her in the head.

Theodore was charged with homicide, but ultimately, a grand jury chose not to indict him, citing that this truly was an accident.

Theodore did not serve any jail time, but he was fined $100 for firing a rifle within city limits.

The next and final story of today's episode is called Out with a Bang.

On the morning of June 20th, 2005, a 40-year-old man named Wong Deung, stood just inside the doorway of a little home in rural northeastern China. Outside, it was pouring rain with all this crazy thunder and lightning, and also there were these hailstones coming down the size of golf balls, smashing into everything. I mean, just the impact on the roof must have been so loud. And so as Wang was standing in the doorway, he was actually looking out in the direction of the storm because all these people were running towards him to come in the house. Wang was actually hosting a wake for a friend, and he was hosting this wake at this man's home. And all the people running up to him were all the mourners coming to pay their respects. Now, by this point, most of the mourners had already made it inside the house, and so Wang was basically just waiting for the last few stragglers to make their way inside. From his post at the door, Wang is watching the storm and all these people, and he also took stock of the fact that as he looked out to the big tobacco fields that were all over the place in this town, that was the primary way people made money in this town, he noticed that there was nobody out there tending the crops.

Even in rainstorms, people would tend these crops because this was their livelihood, but Wong understood why nobody was out there. Yes, it was the storm, but specifically, lately, there had been these crazy lightning strikes in storms like this that struck the field. And so these workers that were normally out in the fields every single day, they weren't doing that anymore. Finally, the last couple arrived, and Wong greeted them and brought them inside, and then he shut the door and then began making his rounds inside the home, making sure all the guests have what they needed, and also just making sure the wake was Overall a positive experience, all things considered. Now, to be clear, Wang was not a monk or a priest or even a relative of the person who was deceased. Instead, he was just the guy that emceed virtually all events in this town. If there was weddings, he was the guy who officiated the weddings, and if there were funerals or wakes or things of that nature, also, Wang was often tapped to emcee that as well. He was like the village elder, if you will, even though he was only 40 years old.

Wang, he really treasured the fact that he was the guy that got to do these things, and so he put a lot of time and energy into making sure they went extremely well. So on this day, as he was making his rounds, checking in with all the mourners, nobody really needed anything. And so Wang felt like he didn't have a role, and he scanned around the room looking for something else he could do that would be productive. And he noticed the incense near the casket was going out. And so Wong walked over, he pulled out the extinguished incense. He got a new stick of incense, put it in, and he lit it. And then he just stood over the casket and closed his eyes. And began saying a silent prayer for the dead. And as Wang did this, suddenly there was this deafening roar, and then everything went black. A few seconds later, that deafening roar fated, and it was replaced by the sound of all the mourners in the house basically screaming and trying to figure out what just happened. And so as people began trying to size up the situation, they saw there was all this smoke near the casket, and there was all these wooden debris everywhere.

And then people looked up at the ceiling, and they saw there was now a pretty good sized hole that had blackened char around the edges of the hole that was smoldering. And then, unfortunately, once the smoke really had dissipated, Wang was laying right underneath this hole in the roof, and half of his head was gone. It was very clear he was deceased, and it didn't take long for mourners to figure out what had happened. Wang had, unfortunately, been struck by lightning. Two days later, Wang's family held a funeral for Wang, and basically, the entire village showed up for this funeral because remember, Wang was really a central member of this community, and so it was a really big loss that he was now dead. And candidly, this only stoked the fears that everybody had about lightning strikes. I mean, this was really becoming a huge issue. But after the funeral ended and Wang had been placed into a hearse and driven off to the crematorium to be cremated, the people at this funeral who were making their way out began talking a little bit more candidly about what had happened to Wong. I mean, it was obvious he was struck by lightning, but in this town, there was a lot of superstition around deaths like this when it seems like how he died is almost like an act of God.

I mean, how many people get struck by lightning? Even if you're scared of being struck by lightning, that is a very rare phenomenon, and everybody knew that. And so the mourners couldn't help but suspect that maybe Wong was not this incredible person that everybody loved. Maybe he had deep dark secrets, and the way he was killed was like God's punishment, smiting him for the terrible things he was hiding. But nonetheless, the mourners who had just left the funeral followed tradition and actually walked over to the local crematorium where Wang would be cremated. Basically, it's the absolute final goodbye, and typically the family will stay there and wait for all the people to come by and pay their final respects. Then at that point, the family hands off their loved one in their casket to the manager of the crematorium, and the cremation process begins. And so all that happens. All the mourners go to the crematorium, they pay their final respects. And then before long, Wang's family was brought inside the crematorium with the manager, and they were placed in this quiet room to wait for this process to happen. And then the manager left them and went down the hall to the furnace room where Wang's casket was waiting for him.

So the furnace room inside of this crematorium is basically like this big industrial space where in the middle is this huge, intimidating metal furnace, which is actually where the bodies are slid in and burned until they're just ash. And so picture the biggest oven you've ever seen with a big metal rectangular door and these rails that slide directly into this furnace, and the casket is placed on those rails and then fed into the furnace. They seal the door, and then, of course, ignite the furnace, and then the cremation begins. And so the manager, who had done this many, many times, walked up to Wang's casket, which was already placed on the rails. Workers had already set it up for this process before he came in. The manager walks up to the casket, he opens it up, he sees Wang's body, and he confirms that Wang is just wearing a robe with a belt, and he did not have any jewelry or metal on him or anything like that, which was not allowed during the cremation process. We're feeling confident that this was all good, he shut the casket and then slid the casket into the furnace.

He shut the door, the big metal door, locked it, and then started the furnace. As soon as he hit it, the manager heard the familiar sound of gas histing as the gas filled up the inside of the space, and then the familiar wooshing sound of the flames igniting. But as the manager stepped away from the front of this furnace and was making his way back towards the door, he noticed there was another sound coming from inside of this furnace. It was a histing sound, but different than the gas sound. This was something else. Then before long, the histing got louder and louder and louder. Then finally, there was this massive explosion inside of this furnace, and so smoke is pouring out of the sides. It was unbelievable that the furnace itself even held its shape. I mean, something massive had detonated inside of this thing. And in fact, even though that door that seals the furnace shut, even though it had not been blown off, the force of whatever detonated inside of there was so strong that the manager actually was knocked backwards from the blast. And so in a panic, he got up and there's smoke filling the room, and there's flames dancing out of the edges of this metal door in front of the furnace, and he hits the emergency stop, and the flames cut, but it's still all It's smoky and it's totally chaotic, and workers are rushing into the room to figure out what's going on, and the manager had no idea.

This was something he had never, ever seen before. Just minutes later, firefighters arrived and basically extinguished the remaining flames that were residually burning inside of the furnace and slightly outside of the furnace. Remember, this was a significant explosion, so there are cracks and breaks all over the furnace where some flames were still lit. But finally, the firefighters did extinguish all the flames, and then after it was safe to be in there, an investigation was launched as to what the heck happened in there. And so police officers went into this room and began sifting through all the debris in this room, both inside of the furnace itself and also outside where it had cracked and things had shot off in different directions. And for a while, they found nothing. I mean, all they found were basically pieces of long ash and some bone and some tissue from him, but there was nothing else that was unusual. But at some point, one of the officers did find something that was unusual. He found a piece of metal that was inside of the furnace that clearly should not have been there. Because remember, it's not allowed to have metal or jewelry or anything on the deceased when they're brought into the furnace.

And considering what happened, they're like, Okay, does this have something to do with the explosion? And so the officer's to hull around this metal, and they began cleaning it off to see if there was anything written on it. It's not a very big piece of metal. And eventually, they had cleaned it off enough that they realized there was something written on it, and it absolutely explained what had happened here. So to understand of what happened, you need to have an understanding of how the Chinese government responds to severe storms like the one that was going on on the day that Wang was struck by lightning. So remember, Wang's village had all these tobacco fields all over the place, which was not only how the villages made their living, but also China as a whole, they need these crops to be bountiful. And these huge storms that produce those golf ball-sized pieces of hail, those can severely damage tobacco crops. And the Chinese government doesn't want that to happen. And so the Chinese government has set up these things called weather bureaus, which are these government agencies all across the country whose job is to try to weaken these storms.

And the way they do that is very interesting. They use a chemical called silver iode that they put into the actual storm clouds. What silver iode does is it attracts ice particles and water. And so with this chemical up in the clouds, it breaks up the hail a little bit and either makes them really small. And sometimes this chemical can actually completely destroy the hail and convert it from hail to just plain old rain, which is great. So how do these weather bureaus in the Silver Iode have anything to do with what happened to Wang? Well, unfortunately for Wang, the way these weather bureaus in China actually get this Silver Iode up into the clouds is they basically take a rocket launcher and fire a literal foot long rocket, like an explosive device that contains this silver iode inside of it, and the rockets get fired up into the sky the clouds where they detonate, and then the Silver Iode is sprinkled all throughout the clouds. Unfortunately, on the day Wong was killed, one of those rockets were fired into the sky, and this rocket, it goes up, it goes into the cloud, but it doesn't detonate.

It turns around and falls straight down, and it just so happens to go straight through that roof into Wong's head, blowing off a portion of his head. Then the rocket itself, this foot-long rocket, got embedded in his torso and did not detonate. Then when he was wheeled off to the crematorium and slid into the furnace and that manager turned on the furnace, that histing sound he began hearing right before the explosion was the sound of that rocket inside of Wong's torso heating up and then finally detonating. When the police officers found that little piece of metal, what they had found was actually a piece of the rocket itself. And when they cleared it off, they saw there was a serial number for that particular weather bureau rocket. And so that was how they were able to solve this mystery. Three years after Wang's death, the Chinese government came out and said, Yes, this is our fault. We did this. And so they compensated Wang's family 80,000 Taiwan, which is equal to about 12,000 US dollars. And while that's a pretty underwhelming settlement to be paying for somebody's life, what is significant that came out of this case is following Wang's death, the Chinese government altered their rockets that they fired into these clouds, and they added this feature where if for some reason the rocket goes into the cloud and doesn't detonate, it will automatically deploy a parachute and will safely fall to the ground and not detonate.

A quick note about our stories. They are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballen podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive-produced by me, Mr. Ballen. Our head of writing is Evan Allen. Our head of production is Zack Levet, produced by Jeremy Bone. Research and fact-checking by Shelleyshue, Samantha Van Hoos, Evan Beemer, Abigail Shumway, and Camille Callahan. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen E. Ar. Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacassio, Jordan Stidham, and Cole Lacassio. Mixed and mastered by Brenda Cain. Production coordination by Samantha Collins, production support by Antonio Monada and Delaina Corley, artwork by Jessica Clogsdon-Kyner, theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugdon. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballen podcast. Just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballen podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballen YouTube channel that very same day. Trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballen. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad-free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts, or visit siriusxm.

Com/podcastplus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So that's going to do it.

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