The Most Horrifying Ways People Got Trapped

0:00Jeff Bush. It was the night of February 28th, 2013, in Seffner, Florida, just east of Tampa. Jeff Bush, 37, lived in a small one-story house on Faithway Drive with his brother Jeremy and a few relatives. He had work in the morning, so at 11:00 p.m., he lay down in his own bed and drifted off on what he thought was solid ground. But the ground under that house was already giving way because of what Florida is built on. The state sits on soft limestone, and over the years, water eats away at it, leaving hollow gaps underground. Those gaps can sit under a house for decades, held up only by the dirt on top, until

0:35too much of the rock dissolves and there is nothing left to carry the weight. That is what happened under Jeff's bedroom that night, and because it opened directly beneath him, he had nowhere to go. In seconds, the whole bedroom dropped straight down into the earth, taking the bed, the dresser, the walls, and Jeff with it. But the fall did not kill him. He was alive, buried in the pitch dark beneath his own house, awake and aware of what was happening to him. On the other side of the house, Jeremy heard the crash and his brother screaming his name, so he ran over and threw the door open. The room was gone,

1:06replaced by a churning pit of dirt, and rising up out of it was Jeff's voice, begging for help. So Jeremy jumped in and started clawing toward the sound with his bare hands, but the collapse was not finished. For every handful of dirt he pulled out, more slid right back in, and the hole only widened. The whole time, he could hear his brother down there, alive, just a few feet away and completely out of reach. Little by little, Jeff's voice grew fainter, and then it went silent. And Jeremy had to listen to it happen. By then, the whole

1:35house was being pulled toward the hole. So a sheriff's deputy had to drag Jeremy out before it took him, too. Everyone else inside had gotten out safely, and Jeff was the only one who didn't. After that, all anyone could do was watch the sinkhole keep growing. By the next morning, it had grown to about 30 ft across and maybe 100 ft deep. Engineers said the house should have already fallen in, and since it hadn't, no one could risk getting near the edge to look for Jeff. On March 2nd, 2 days after the collapse, they called off the search,

2:03and Jeff Bush was never brought back up. Because the ground was too unstable to leave open, the county tore down his house and the two beside it, then filled the hole with dirt and gravel, with Jeff still inside it. They fenced off the spot, and it quietly became his grave. But the same hollow rock was still down there, so the ground never really settled. And in 2015, it tore open again in the exact same place. They filled it back in, and years later it opened once more. Each time they just poured more

2:31dirt on top of Jeff Bush. Larry Murillo Moncada. On the night of November 28th, 2009, the day after Thanksgiving, a blizzard was blowing through Council Bluffs, Iowa. Inside one house, 25-year-old Larry Murillo Moncada was not doing well. For days, he had been hearing voices telling him his heart was beating too hard, and that he needed to eat sugar to slow it down. He had just started a new medication, but it was not working yet. And that night, around 6:15, it all became too much. He ran out the front door into the storm, barefoot, and in nothing but a hoodie, with no keys and no phone, and vanished

3:06into the blowing snow. His family called the police, but the blizzard had already covered his tracks, so there was nothing to follow. Officers checked the places he might go. One of them was the No Frills grocery store where Larry worked, less than a mile from his house. But he was not on the schedule that day, and when his boss said he had not seen him, the police moved on. What none of them

3:24knew was that Larry was already inside. At the back of that store, a row of tall coolers stood against the wall, each about 12 feet high. Because they did not sit flush against it, there was a narrow gap behind them, only about 18 inches wide. The staff there had a habit of climbing up on top of the coolers to store things, and take a break away from the managers. That night, Larry had gone to that store and climbed up on top of the coolers, the way the staff often did. But somewhere up there in the dark, he lost his footing and dropped straight down into that 18-in gap. The fall

3:55barely hurt him, which meant he was still alive down there. He was awake, pinned upright in a slot too narrow to move in and too deep to climb out of, and all he could do was call for help over and over into the dark. But the coolers ran huge fans day and night to stay cold, and the police believed those fans were so loud that no one out in the store heard a sound. A few feet away, life went on as normal while Larry stayed stuck in the black gap behind the wall. A fall he had survived turned into a slow, lonely death in a space barely

4:25wider than his own shoulders, and it did not end there because no one knew he was there. His body stayed wedged behind the coolers for years while shoppers walked past, grabbing their milk and their groceries. In time, people began complaining about a smell near the back of the store, strong enough that some turned around and left. That smell was Larry, but no one realized it. No one ever thought to look behind the coolers,

4:47and the search for him slowly went cold. His mother always said she never believed he had left that store, but there was no way to prove it. Then, in 2016, the No Frills closed for good. Three years later, in January 2019, a crew came to tear the old store down, and only when they pulled the coolers away from the wall did Larry's body fall out. He had been there for almost 10 years, less than a mile from the home he ran from that night. It took another 6 months and a DNA test to confirm it was him, and his death was ruled an

5:17accident. The Two Rogers. On the morning of August 29th, 1973, two men climbed into a tiny submarine called Pisces III and were lowered into the Atlantic Ocean, about 150 mi off the coast of Ireland. Roger Chapman was 28 and Roger Mallinson was 35, and their job was to sit on the seabed and bury a big telephone cable that ran along the ocean floor. They had done this kind of dive plenty of times,

5:43so nothing about that day felt unusual. The sub was barely bigger than the two of them. A cramped steel ball with just enough room to sit side by side. They finished the job after about 8 hours and the sub was being lifted out of the water when something went wrong. A hatch at the back was torn open and seawater

5:59came pouring into the rear compartment. All that extra water made the sub heavy at one end, so it flipped over and started to sink. With nothing to hold it up, it dropped all the way to the seabed, 1,575 ft down, and came to rest in freezing pitch black water. They were alive down there, but in serious trouble because they only had about 72 hours of air and they knew exactly what would happen when it ran out. Without any choking or panic, they would simply drift off to sleep and never wake up. So, to buy themselves more time, they did

6:30everything they could to use less air. They lay as still as possible in the dark and barely spoke since moving and talking burn oxygen. Cutting the power saved the batteries, but left them in total blackness with the cold slowly creeping into their bones. And since the machine that cleaned their breath also drained power, they held off on running it as long as they could, which meant the poison in the air kept building until their heads were pounding. And so, they waited hour after hour with nothing to see and nothing to do but wonder whether help was coming or whether the air would run out first. Far above them,

7:02a frantic rescue was coming together from three different countries. Ships raced to the spot and two other mini subs and a robot were sent down to try to hook a line onto Pisces 3, but one try after another failed as a rope snapped on one sub, another ran out of power once it got to the bottom, and the robot hit problems of its own. Every failed attempt cost hours the men did not have and the two Rogers rationed a single sandwich and one can of lemonade between them with no idea how much longer they would need it. Finally, after almost 4 days, the robot and one

7:33of the mini subs managed to tie ropes onto the sunken sub and slowly they started pulling it up through more than a quarter mile of water. Because the sub was swinging and jolting the whole way, the two men held on tight, knowing they were closer than ever, and that if a rope snapped now, they would drop straight back to the bottom. The ropes held, and after 76 hours stuck on the seabed, Pisces III finally broke the surface. It still took the crew another half hour to force the hatch open, and when they did, Chapman and Mallinson climbed out alive. When engineers checked the sub afterward, they found

8:06the two men had surfaced with about 12 minutes of air left. It is still the deepest submarine rescue ever pulled off. Sean Doyle. Around Christmas of 2002, a young man named Sean Doyle was out drinking in New York City with his friend Michael Wright and Wright's girlfriend. Sean was in his 20s and worked as a bartender. At some point that night, Michael got it into his head that Sean was flirting with his girlfriend, and because they were both drunk, that suspicion blew up into a real argument, which spilled out onto the sidewalk and turned into a shoving match. What neither of them noticed was that a few feet away, a manhole in the

8:40street had been left open. Its heavy cover pulled off to the side. So, when Michael shoved him, Sean stumbled backward into that exact spot, lost his footing, and dropped about 18 feet straight down through the hole. A fall like that might normally have meant a few broken bones, but this hole led somewhere far worse. Under the streets of New York runs a network of pipes carrying steam used to heat thousands of buildings, and that steam runs well over 300° hot enough to kill a person in seconds. That night, one of those pipes had sprung a leak, and because it had nowhere to vent, it filled the tunnel

9:13below with scalding steam and boiling water, which was exactly what Sean had dropped into. The fall itself did not kill him, which left him alive and awake at the bottom, standing in the water in a thick fog of steam that burned him with every second. He could see the opening above him, the way out, close enough to make out the people gathering around it, so he screamed up at them for

9:33help, but no one could reach him. Emergency crews got there within minutes, but the heat blasting up out of that hole was so intense that they could not even get near it, let alone climb down. All they could do was call the power company to shut the steam off at the source, and then wait for the tunnel to cool. So, while they waited, Sean stood down there in the boiling dark, calling up to a crowd of people who could do nothing but listen. His cries kept coming up out of that hole for a long time, growing weaker as the minutes passed. No one knows exactly how long he

10:03stayed alive and aware down in that heat, only that it was not quick. By the time the steam was finally shut off, and the tunnel had cooled enough for crews to go in, Sean was long gone. And in all it took about 4 hours just to bring his body back up to the street. The medical

10:17examiner who later examined him, Dr. Judy Melinek, had seen thousands of bodies over her career, and in a memoir years later, she wrote that Sean's was the worst case she had ever come across. Michael Wright, the friend he had been arguing with, was arrested and charged with murder, but it was never really clear whether he actually meant to send Sean down there, or whether one stupid drunken shove had simply found the one

10:40open manhole on the street. Harley Dilly. On the morning of December 20th, 2019, 14-year-old Harley Dilly left his house in Port Clinton, Ohio, and started walking to school. It was only a few minutes away, the kind of trip he made every day. But that morning, Harley never made it to class, and when he did not come home that afternoon either, his family reported

11:01him missing, and a huge search began. Police went door-to-door, checked security cameras all over the neighborhood, and searched everywhere for any sign of him with help from state investigators and local volunteers. The last camera to catch Harley had filmed him moments after he left home, and after that, there was nothing. With no trail to follow, days turned into weeks, and the case slowly went cold. In fact, Harley had never left the neighborhood at all. Sometime that first morning, instead of going to school, he had gone to a house across the street that had sat empty for years. For reasons no one will ever really know, he decided to get

11:34inside, and the only way in he could find was the chimney. So, he climbed an old antenna tower bolted to the outside wall, pulled himself onto the roof, and lowered himself feet first down into it. At the top, it was just wide enough to fit through, but a chimney is not a smooth, straight drop. As Harley slid down, it kept getting tighter until it

11:53shrank to a gap only about 9 by 13 in. Smaller than his own body. He dropped into that gap and jammed to a stop. And with his arms pinned and nothing to push against, he could not climb back up or force his way down. Being wedged that tightly is far deadlier than it looks. There is plenty of air, but when your chest is squeezed so it cannot expand, you cannot pull that air in. Worse, every time you breathe out, your body settles a little lower and the squeeze tightens, leaving even less room to breathe back in. Doctors call it compression asphyxia, and it does not take long. Harley almost certainly died

12:27within hours, alone in the dark, inside the wall of that house. And there he stayed. Because the house was locked up and long abandoned, it was low on the list of places to search, and no one thought to look up inside the chimney. So, for more than 3 weeks, his family, his neighbors, and dozens of searchers looked everywhere for him, never knowing that he had been gone almost from the very start, only a short walk away, sealed inside that narrow space. It was not until January 13th, 2020, that police finally went back into that house. Inside, they came across Harley's jacket and glasses, and that led them to

13:01check the chimney, where they found him, still stuck fast in the exact spot where he had dropped weeks earlier, no more than a football field from his own front door. Three American sailors. On the morning of December 7th, 1941, three young American sailors were aboard the USS West Virginia, a battleship tied up at Pearl Harbor. Clifford Olds was 20, Ronald Endicott was just 18, and Louie Costin was 21. That morning, out of nowhere, Japanese planes came screaming in over the anchored ships, and she was one of the first they hit. Torpedoes and bombs tore into the side of the ship, water poured in, and within minutes the

13:37huge vessel was going down. When a warship starts taking on water like that, the crew does something that saves the ship, but can trap the men inside it. To stop the flooding from spreading, they shut the watertight doors between rooms, sealing off each section so it cannot move from one to the next. It is the only way to keep it from rolling over and sinking completely. But, it also means that anyone caught in a sealed room is locked in with no way to

13:59open those heavy doors from the inside. Somewhere deep in the ship, in a storeroom near the bottom, Olds, Endicott, and Coston got sealed in exactly that way. The West Virginia came to rest upright in the mud, and the three of them were trapped below the waterline in the dark. But, they did not drown, and they did not die quickly. Their storeroom happened to hold emergency food, and it sat right next to a tank of fresh water, which they managed to open. So, they had something to eat and something Air was the one thing they could not get. Shut inside that steel room, all they had was what was trapped in there

14:31with them, and once it ran out, there would be no more. In the days after the attack, sailors and marines working near the wreck started to notice a sound. From somewhere down in the sunken West Virginia came a faint tapping, a steady banging on the steel over and over. It was the three men still alive trying to signal for help, but there was nothing anyone could do. The ship was too torn up and too dangerous to cut into, and no one could find a way to reach them in time. So, the men up top could only stand there and listen as the tapping went on day after day until at last it

15:02stopped. It was not until the spring of 1942, months later, that the Navy raised the West Virginia to fix her. When crews finally opened that storeroom, they found the bodies of the three sailors along with something that told the whole awful story. On the wall was a calendar, and the days had been crossed off one by one in red pencil. The marks started on December 7th and ran all the way to December 23rd. For 16 days, Olds, Endicott, and Costin had been alive down there in the dark, marking off the time and slowly running out of air at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The Navy told

15:34their families they had died on December 7th, and for years, that was the only mercy anyone could give them. If you'd like to see more videos like this, make sure to subscribe and feel free to drop suggestions for the next video in the comments.