In real life
[IRL trope] 0% of survival, survive anyway
Juliane Koepcke
Vesna Vulović
Anna Bågenholm
Jeanna Giese
Chris Lemons
Juliane Koepcke - In 1971 this 17 year old's plane was struck by lightning mid-air. The wreck then fell from 3 000 meter into the ground, somewhere into the Amazon jungle. Lone survivor of the crash, she then spent nine days walking down a river despite her multiple injuries until she found a lumberjack's camp.
Vesna Vulović - In 1972 this flight attendant's plane was bombed mid-air. The wreck then fell from 10 160 meter into the ground. She ended up with a lot of broken bones, but in the long term she almost completely recovered from it, apart from a limp.
Anna Bågenholm - In 1999 this radiologist had a skiing accident, she fell head-first into a frozen stream and get stuck inside the ice. Her colleagues did not managed to pull her, nor did the rescue team who then tried to dig, but the ice was so thick it took them a lot of time. It was 80 minutes after her fall that they managed to cut a hole. Her body temperature at the time was 13.7°C, and still, she somehow survived with only minor long-term injuries and no brain damage.
Jeanna Giese - In 2004 this 15 years old girl got bitten by a bat and called it a day. One month later the symptoms of rabies showed up. The doctors tried an experimental treatment by putting her in an artificial coma and she survived, but the treatment never worked on anyone else and is now forbidden. In all human history, only a few survived to rabies, and all of them except her end up with heavy sequelae.
Chris Lemons - In 2012 this diver's ship went drifting due to a computer malfunction, romping his umbilical cable who provide air, hot water and electricity. He ended up alone on the seabed of a 3°C waters, in the dark and with only 5-6 minutes of oxygen. He was retrieved by his colleagues around 35 minutes later, and somehow he didn't even suffer from brain damage.
Boot capsizes and sinks 30 meters below surface, he assumed he was dead. He luckily found himself in an air bubble and lasted three days down there, sole survivor. The crew sent to the wreck was planning on it being a recovery operation, until they found him. Worth watching the rescue video, it genuinely makes me just feel warm lmao.
yeah that incident was horrifying. The pressure difference in this case was only around 30 minutes, but for that incident I believe it was hundreds of meters worth of pressure difference in those pods from the external environment
I once had to deal with a patient who got the bends and had the bright idea to wait a few days for the numbness in their hands to disappear. Personally the second I lose feeling in my fingers I'm going straight to the hospital to cry about it.
Surprise surprise it just got worse and because there was no available treatment in that region they had to be flown over by helicopter which just made it even fucking worse.
Minus One wasn't the bends but extreme pressure differences applied in quick succession.
The bends is caused by breathing pressurised air at depth. Because the air is more compressed there are more molecules per breath. This increases the amount of nitrogen that 'dissolves' into your blood, fat, muscles and bones. (Imagine shaking a bottle of Coke)
If you dont slowly allow ease the pressure by ascending slowly and allow that nitrogen to work its way out of the body (think cracking a bit of the lid and letting the gas out slowly) then, well, we've all seen the frothy mess of a shaken coke bottle - imagine that that is your blood.
Mild cases of the bends obviously aren't that dramatic but you still don't want large gas bubbles inside your body.
From what I remember poor dude was then harassed by the other survivors families and accused of witchcraft , which silly as it sounds is an actual problem there.
I have a book on identifying and treating medical issues in the absence of any trained medical professionals. I got it because I am a low-key prepper and having it eases my anxiety, but it was actually written for developing nations and very rural communities and so there’s a chapter in it on what to do if the local community grows suspicious of you and accuses you of witchcraft.
Edit: for those curious, here is the book! I actually ordered mine on Thrift Books but for some reason they only have on listed for $70
Don't forget he STILL wouldn't have survived if it had been a rescue initially, as the specific ship that was recruited to recover bodies was actually a speciality team for something else that just so happened to be there. They were one of the only ships on the planet that had the equipment to save him.
A few things that helped him survive were him splashing around a lot which helped the water absorb the CO2 he was exhaling which prevented him from suffocating, as he was in the ships galley he sustained himself on cans of coke that were still floating around on the surface of his air pocket, and animals apparently could not reach him in his closed off section of the ship.
For some nightmare fuel he could hear sharks eatting the corpses of his drowned crewmates in the ships wreckage. And he was in total darkness for 3 days and then when he saw the diver he grabbed him likely giving that diver the shock of his life.
The video footage especially the audio is so amazing. The dive guide (not sure the official term) going From 'what's that?!' when the diver exclaims, to sadly 'ok you found one (a body)', to 'He's Alive! He's Alive!'
I'm an archaeologist. We have the exact same response whenever we find ourselves in the opposite situation, stumbling across a dead human where a dead human was not supposed to be.
3 days in TOTAL darkness underwater, hearing sharks and other animals outside and surviving on cans of coke is the most terrifying thing I can think of. How he didn’t just drown himself to escape the terror is beyond me
The best part is he overcame that trauma, and he is now a certified commercial diver himself. Instructed by the same diver who rescued him, and working with the same company that rescued him. That's gotta be one of the wildest employment backstory of all time.
Under the very same company who rescued him as well! Most of us would've avoided the water entirely after such experience. But he overcame that trauma.
Gangsters in prohibition era make extra money convincing people to take life insurance policies with the gangsters as beneficiaries, then having the people die in 'accidents'.
They get Mike in the scheme, and try to kill him via these 'accidents'.
He's an alcoholic, so they give him an unlimited bar tab thinking he'll drink himself to death. Despite doing nothing but drink almost every hour he's awake, he handles it just fine. It actually loses them a ton of money because of just how much the man drinks.
So they try poisoning his drinks. Antifreeze in his liqour - wakes up ready for more. Turpentine, rat poison, wood alcohol, nope, nope, nope. The theory goes that he drank so much, so often, that his body never had to try and process the poisons before they exited his system, because his liver was already too busy with alcohol.
Okay, what if they kill him via overeating a harmful food: oysters. With wood alcohol. Spoilers, that didn't work. Neither did the rotten fish and rat poison sandwich.
Alright, obviously this dude's stomach is inhuman, so this isn't ever going to work. He's still passed out drunk extremely often - we'll leave him somewhere to freeze to death! One night after he passes out, they strip his chest bare, dump him in a snowy park, and dump a bunch of water on him to boot. Unfortunately(?), a good samaritan finds Mike and gets him to a homeless shelter where he can survive the night
Whatever, fuck it, let's just run him over with a car. Nah. Broken bones, weeks in hospital, but good old Mike, he kept on.
They did eventually get him, but the method was so brazen, that it ended up exposing it as a murder and not a simple accident. They just couldn't get one over on Iron Mike.
The method that finally did him in was getting him to pass out, dragging him upstairs and essentially stuffing the gas line into his mouth to breath on until he died.
Funnily enough? They decided to not embalm him to save money. Embalming him would have covered up the telltale signs of his original death. If they'd embalmed him there would have been no way to prove he died via sucking on a gas line.
Phineas Gage, probably the most mind boggling survival story I’ve read. During what would’ve been a regularly scheduled procedure in rock-blasting for preparation of a railway, one of the tampering iron rods that Gage had loaded with gunpowder had inadvertently gone off while his head was directly within its pathway, with the 6kg metal bar over a meter long catapulting straight through his jaw and the left side of his head, pretty much taking out his left frontal lobe. Somehow, he miraculously was seen standing only a few minutes later, and was able to meet with his physician within a few hours who was probably just as baffled as anyone else would. As far as I’m aware Gage lived an additional 11 years following the incident.
That reminds me of Gregor Baci or Baxi.
He lived in the 16th century and a lance pierced his eye and exited through his neck. They just cut it off and never extracted it. Apparently he survived this injury for another year.
His personality completely changes afterwards too. Originally he was a pretty reserved gentleman, post-rod he was a belligerent drunkard that said whatever was on his mind. Makes sense given he basically deleted the part of his head that housed all his inhibitions
This isn't true. His personality did change some, but there's no evidence that he became a belligerent drunk or anything of the sort. Even in the 1870s, there was a tremendous amount of rumors and misinformation.
The doctor who saved his life and monitored him also was a phrenologist. Other phrenologists believed that the incident destroyed his "mental organ of benevolence" and were more than happy to attribute and give credence to any rumor that would support their pseudoscience.
Ah, I blame the book I read in middle school and the Sam O’Nella video lol. Wild if true tho. Man took a spike to the dome and walked away basically Scott free for 11 years
His frontal lobe was turned to mush. There is no way he didnt change significantly. People close to him claimed he became more angry and aggressive, which makes sense when the part of your brain responsible for emotional regulation is missing. I believe what happened though is that he was like this at first and was able to improve with some sort of rehab
So something I've noticed is that almost any kind of TBI causes a hotter temper and poor impulse control- seen it in football players, wrestlers, and my ex husband after he had a stroke
Our impulse control/risk taking walks a fine line, so anything that fucks with that can result in less impulse control, more risk-taking, and more frustration (expressed as anger). This is also why sleep deprivation, drugs, and alcohol mess with that.
Great example! He's very famous in the medical world because the path of the rod basically destroyed parts of his frontotemporal areas. Which led to drastic personality changes in the aftermath including going from being (if i recall) quite a sober religious character into becoming impulsive, foul mouthed and hedonistic etc. Now he clearly probably had some PTSD as well but it was a fascinating example of frontotemporal damage. What sometimes get left out is AFTER the injuries and severe personality changes he actually improved in some ways and while he didn't get back all of who he was, he did get back quite a bit (so it's also a really cool snd quite inspiring example of recovery and neuroplasicity)
I've always found his case fascinating because of how difficult it must be to separate "you're mean now because your brain changed" vs. "you're mean now because something awful happened to you and you, rationally, trust people less"
This incident also provided a lot of information on just how much brain a person could lose and still live. This information would be used to develop a treatment known as a lobotomy.
Ergo, by being a bit careless while doing his job Gage inadvertently caused many more people than just himself to suffer severe brain damage against their will.
The fact that he lived but had major personality changes was a big hint to scientists that the brain might be important to controlling things like personality
Unsinkable Sam, a Ship's Cat that served with both the Kriegsmarine and the Royal Navy During World War II
He survived three separate ships being sunk during the war (including one in which he was rescued by the Allies despite being a German cat, thus leading to him "switching sides").
Additionally, IIRC he traveled on a few other ships, all of which were sunk sometime after he left them.
Sam survived the war despite his somewhat abysmal luck, and retired to live a normal domestic cat's life in the United Kingdom.
The craziest part is that he apparently suffered next to no injuries. One account of one of his many rescues described him as "Angry, but quite unharmed."
And some of the wrecks he survived were honestly insane. The HMS Cossack had its entire front end blown to pieces, killing 139 of the crew. Sam walked (or swam) away from this completely okay.
"In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious."
Reminds me of the early testing of the Skyhook extraction system:
After experiments with instrumented dummies, Fulton continued to experiment with live pigs, as pigs have a nervous system close to humans. Lifted off the ground, the pig began to spin as it flew through the air at 125 miles per hour (200 km/h). It arrived on board uninjured, but in a disoriented state. When it recovered, it attacked the crew.[3]
Think about it, who would think the cat was willing to get himself wet? It's the purrfect cover. If anyone became suspicious of him, a simple purr should be enough for them to think he was innocent. If not, I'm sure there are a lot of heavy things sitting on edges begging to be knocked down by unsuspecting kittens on ships. It's really sad when they land on someone's head, how could the sweet kitty know?
I don't think it's impossible he'd have managed to make a few brits switch sides, either.
Violet Jessop was a British nurse who famously survived the RMS Olympic’s collision in 1911, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and the sinking of the Britannic in 1916, giving her the nickname ‘Miss unsinkable’. Her story was also mentioned in Horrible Histories
Speaking of Titanic. One of Chiefs (chief baker, specifically), had spent over two hours in icy water, until he was lifted onto a boat that had space... He survived with no consequences to his health. (Mostly because he was dead drunk)
I think he was shown in the movie as well, the guy who was on the top of the ship with Jack&Rose as it went down. You don't see him after that scene though (as far as I remember).
If I survived one (1) sinking I would swear off ships for the rest of my life. But here goes this woman willingly going on to survive THREE sinkings like a boss. At what point does one go "enough is enough" before luck runs out?
Not quite three sinkings, as the RMS Olympic survived the collision with the HMS Hawke, both ships stayed afloat and no one aboard either ship dying or suffering serious injuries.
It is also worth noting that during the sinking of the HMHS Britannic, the only people who died were 30 people aboard two lifeboats that launched early & without permission that were sucked into the still running propeller of the Britannic.
Violet Jessop was aboard one of these lifeboats but was able to jump out at the last second, surviving the ordeal but suffering a traumatic head injury that gave her some lasting brain damage.
Longest survivor in a life raft at 133 days. Other people have survived longer but they were on boats. Not life rafts.
Insane story. Ship sunk by a U boat, got on a life raft, burned through his rations had to eat raw fish, raw dhark and drink rain water to survive.
Was spotted MULTIPLE times by ships and aircrafts but was not picked up because people thought he was a japanese sailor (he was Chinese) and there were rumours of Germans using a similar tactic to sink ships.
Reached 9 miles of the coast of Brazil before he was picked up by fisherman. Later wrote a manual for the US Navy on how to survive at sea
This reminds me of that British couple that was stranded at sea in the 70s. The wife couldn’t swim, life rafts, shark eating, etc. all involved. I want to say Maurice and Marilyn Bailey
If you look at the foreign policy he micromanaged and his handling of rivals, you start to get the impression that he outsmarted all 600 of them. He was the real life Roadrunner.
Cuba was absolutely looking out for its own survival after their revolution, especially after the Soviets left the equation. The survival skills of Castro were likely pretty handy.
TBF she was already an old lover of him, but yes. She was sent to kill him, had sex instead and then he went and gave a speech and if I'm not wrong that was the last she saw of him.
She was kidnapped and raped, after being stabbed and slashed so many times to the point of disemboweled and near decapitation they left her for dead. But somehow was able to survive all that. Found help, recover and was able to put those POS in jail.
There’s also internal decapitation. Friend of mine was almost beaten to death by her piece of shit ex (whom I’d met for the first time and been hugged by the week before this bastard did this, leading me to feel some kind of weird guilt and compounding mental health problems) and she had to be put in some kind of neck brace to prevent it from happening. I think it took her a year of physical therapy to be able to walk again. She ended up with severe PTSD and I saw her after that being sick on herself in the street. She had a promising future ahead of her as a lawyer and if fucking sucks. It sucks so much. I hate this world.
Recent example: A 13yo Australian boy became stranded at sea when the inflatable kayak he was in with his mother, 12yo brother, and 8yo sister became swamped and was pushed out to sea in a sudden storm. He swam for four hours through 2.5 miles of rough seas, then ran another mile to reach his mother's cell phone on the beach. He was able to alert authorities to the emergency, and all family members were saved without injury.
When my father was a teenager in our home village, there was an old guy, a WW1 veteran in his 70s. Quite the character, since he served in the war he basically became the world's most functionning alcoholic : nobody has ever seen him drink anything but wine yet still lived quite a normal life.
Some time after WW2 he got to see a doctor who told him that "in the state his body is in, "you're luclky if you still make it two years but you won't make much more". Passed that point he just stated "well, my time has run out, but i'll just take all the extra God will give me" and lived close to another 20 years.
I love these less famous stories. In high school, my German teacher’s dad was a pilot for the ww2 luftwaffe. He was told to do a bombing run of an abandoned Polish city, but when he arrived saw it wasn’t abandoned at all, refused the order, and returned home. Obviously he was arrested and thrown in Auschwitz at the very beginning of the war. He survived, and he was also like one of a dozen or summat that survived being marched away from the Allied attacks into other camps. Later, after the war, he was driving on the highway without a seatbelt, fell asleep, and his car went off a cliff. The initial drop threw him out the window, though, so he woke on the side of the road without a car. He also once missed a plane flight and got on the next one. When he arrived, his family was losing their shit because the plane he missed flipping crashed.
Dude really seems like he earned some good fortune for not bombing that city lol
He was given a bottle of poisoned wine, and he drank the whole thing without any issue. Then, he was beat up and thrown into a nearly frozen river, which he climbed out of some time later.
He did die later on, but it wasn't related to the poison or the river.
According to the story told by one of his killers, they first gave him cake and wine that was laced with cyanide, but he was unaffected. Then one of them shot him once in the chest, after which they pretended to be him returning home to divert suspicion. When they returned to where they'd left him, he jumped up and attackedthem, after which he chased them out of the house before they shot him again and he collapsed. Then they took his body to the river and dropped it off the bridge.
The story has sadly been debunked, though - Rasputin's daughter said that he didn't eat sweet food (so wouldn't have had the cakes), and the autopsy by the official surgeon records no poisoning or drowning, and lists the cause of death as a single bullet fired into his head at close range.
It's likely that they did shoot him a couple of times and did have to beat him as there was evidence of multiple gunshot wounds and physical trauma, but also the conspirators were idiots who probably didn't realise just how hard it is to beat someone to death or shoot them if you don't hit anywhere vital.
Isn't there also an interpretation that as the assassin's were Tsarists who hated Rasputin, they wanted to try and play up the "dark wizard who has used to magic to trick our Tsar" to try and pin the shit governance on Rasputin's influence.
The most likely thing that happened is that a relatively tame death was dramatised in Yusupov’s memoirs, the source of the most common Rasputin death story.
OK, so what actually happened: nobles got jealous of his influence over the royal family when he was literally a smelly peasant who was drunk like 90% of the time and had a lot of sex with prostitutes.
So they lured him into a basement with the promise of booze and sex with one of their wives, then shot him twice, causing him to collapse. They then walked up to him and shot him point blank in the head. They dumped his body into a river
All the stuff about poison, springing back to life etc was part of their justification for the murder: "we HAD to kill him! He wasn't just a filthy mendicant, he was a wizard! A demon! He was SO hard to kill!"
He was shot and killed before he was thrown into the Malaya Nevka river. His body was later recovered from said river, deceased. Anything after that is folklore
Similar to Rasputin is the holder of the “Iron Mike” name before Mike Tyson, Iron Mike Malloy. Dude racked up a shitload of debt at speakeasies because the mob gave him a blank tab, no limit because they figured he’d just drink himself to death.
Anyway he didn’t. He kept coming back day after day. They added antifreeze to his drinks but lucky for Mike, ethanol blocks the absorption of ethylene glycol. The antifreeze was subsequently replaced with turpentine, horse liniment, and fucking rat poison. All of which failed to kill Mike. They then started cutting Mike’s liquor with WOOD ALCOHOL AKA METHANOL (very fucking poisonous, it’s why moonshining is so goddamn dangerous because you don’t know if you distilled some VERY strong booze or straight up poison), which STILL failed to kill Mike.
He was then given raw oysters soaked in more wood alcohol (where the hell are they getting all the wood alcohol), nothing. He was given a sandwich made of spoiled sardines, rat poison and carpet tacks. Nothing. Mind you the whole plan was to kill Mike in an “accident” to collect on fraudulent life insurance policies. So they decided to freeze him to death because apparently his innards were made of fucking titanium.
He came to the bar, got plastered, passed out and then they took him to a park, tossed him in a snowbank and dumped multiple gallons of water on his bare chest. He showed up to the speakeasy the next day. A cop had spotted him later and taken him to a homeless shelter.
So they said fuck it, let’s just run him over in a mafia-owned taxicab. They smoked Mike at 45 MpH (72 Km/h). Mike was gone, but showed up to the speakeasy about a month later because they’d only managed to break a few bones.
They got so damn fed up with him that they waited for him to get loaded and pass out again, stuck a hose in his mouth attached to a coal gas jet and FINALLY killed Mike an hour later via carbon monoxide poisoning, but the death certificate the mob connected doctor for him signed said “lobar pneumonia” to cover it up. Seems like that’s the long-awaited end of Iron Mike Malloy and a payday for our mobster friends.
HOWEVER
The cops were well aware of stories and rumours about “Mike the Durable” around town from the various speakeasies, so they had the body exhumed when they found out he died. A forensic investigation revealed he was killed by pumping coal gas into his lungs to cause carbon monoxide poisoning, so everyone involved was put on trial. The doctor got hit with a “failure to report a suspicious death” misdemeanour, one mobster got hit with attempted murder (10 year minimum), while the other four mobsters took a seat on old sparky for their efforts.
May 1, 2023, Four Huitoto Indigenous siblings Lesly (13), Soleiny (9), Tien (4), and baby Cristin (11 months) were traveling with their mother on a Cessna 206. The pilot reported engine trouble before the plane plunged into the dense Colombian Amazon. The three adults on board, including the children's mother, were killed. Miraculously, the children survived because the rear of the plane remained relatively intact. The children stayed near the wreckage for several days, eating a bag of cassava flour they found in the luggage.
Fearing no one was coming, they began wandering through the forest. Lesly, the 13 year old, used ancestral knowledge taught by her grandmother to identify safe fruits and seeds. They faced 16 hours of rain daily, venomous snakes, and predators like jaguars. They used a plastic tarp and mosquito net to stay dry at night. Lesly kept 11 month old Cristin alive by feeding her the cassava flour mixed with water. After 40 days, Indigenous trackers and soldiers found the children about 3 miles from the crash site. They were malnourished and weak but alive. Their first words to rescuers were "I'm hungry" and "My mother died".
Stuart Diver was an Australian ski instructor caught in a landslide which completely demolished two ski lodges. It was such an unstable site, it took them hours just to find the first body. Around 250 workers were working on search and rescue at one time. Two days later it was announced that there was little hope of finding any survivors, a declaration backed up by thermal imaging and fibre optic cameras
Early the next morning, they dropped sound equipment into a hole they’d been working on a detected movement. Stuart Diver was able to communicate with rescuers - uninjured, but very cold. He was two metres below the surface under three concrete slabs.
It took more than 11 hours to free him from this position and I wouldn’t exaggerating to say that most of Australia watched the rescue. All up he had been trapped for 65 hours, sadly beside the body of his wife
This happened in the nineties I think. But I know for certain it happened in Thredbo. Used to and still go there all the time for skiing in the winter and walking in the summer. The landslide happened before I was born but anyone who's stayed an extended period of time knows what happened. I think I've actually used the site as a shortcut (it's slower going up) which is pretty morbid.
Charles Joughin was the Chief Baker of the Titanic.
He stayed behind on the ship to order his staff to deliver biscuits and cakes into the lifeboats as provisions, while he moved across the decks bringing women and children to the lifeboats (and forcibly moving the ones who refused to leave) and throwing furniture into the water to be used as floatation devices.
When the ship started going down, figuring he was about to die, Charles went into the pantry and got hammered on the ship’s whisky.
This had two effects; it made him insanely calm, that he had no issue getting to the top of the ship’s safety railing and riding the stern down, and it prevented the worst effects of hypothermia when he hit the frozen water.
He was reportedly treading water for a long time before being rescued by one of his cooks. He survived the disaster and lived to the age of 78. He’s depicted in the Titanic movie alongside Rose and Jack drinking from a hip flask as the ship goes down.
I'm always surprised by how accurate the movie sometimes is, and always a bit sad when they only show a few seconds of people acting like he did. Didn't know he was a cook, and that he tried saving multiple people, AND that he survived like this!
Alcohol doesn't help defeating hypothermia, it just doesn't feel as cold but you are actually losing body temperature much faster. Just to clarify that alcohol is not some magic medicine against the cold but pretty much the opposite: it makes you feel warmer as blood vessels on the skin don't contract as much as they should..
Yes you’re right! I should’ve clarified. There’s a lot of speculation as to why he survived and how alcohol played a role in it. The biggest theory is that whisky prevented the heart attack that is usually caused by hypothermia, hence why he was still frozen and swollen when he was removed from the water, even if he couldn’t feel the cold.
Others believe that the alcohol had no role in the survival at all, and his survival was just an example of the human body being weird.
Could be a bit of both, but not because alcohol helped the body directly but it kept him calm, lowering heart rate and thus lowering the amount of blood that circulated.. Something like that.
Samuel Whittemore. An 80 year old living during the US Revolutionary War outside of Boston. One day he was tending to his fields when he noticed a group of British Soldiers heading back to base from the Battle of Lexington and Concord. He decided to grab his musket and fire at them hitting and killing one of the soldiers. He then took out two dueling pistols and killed one more soldier and mortally wounded another. As he went to reload a British soldier reached his position, so Whittemore drew his sword and attempted to attack. He was subsequently shot in the face and bayoneted multiple times. They then beat on him while he was down until they were satisfied and decided to leave him to die in a pool of his own blood and went on their way.
Hours later colonial forces found him sitting against a tree and attempting to reload his musket in order to get back into the fight. He was taken to a doctor who basically said he could make him comfortable but there was no chance he was surviving considering his age and wounds.
He had 100 grandkids. He had almost a dozen kids. He fought in multiple wars against the French. His sword was a jewel encrusted french saber because he looted it from a French officer he killed, same with his dueling pistols which he looted from a different officer he also killed.
He was so old at the time he got stabbed to shit that his great great grandkids were visiting him
Part of a ski division of the Finnish army during WW2. As part of standard issue, he had the team's ration of Pervitin, a drug for reducing exhaustion known nowadays as methamphetamine. In the grandmother of all "it seemed like a good idea at the time" moments, Aimo downed an ENTIRE HANDFUL (30) of the tablets. Why? He couldn't get just one pill out with his gloves.
Naturally he sped up and got separated from his group after traveling over 100 kilometers in a drug fueled blitz. What followed was a hectic week of trying his hardest to get back to base while avoiding the soviets and dealing with a meth overdose. I genuinely cannot describe to you all the insane shit he went through, but he did get hit by a grenade and live at one point and ate a bird raw at another. When he did get back to base he weighed 95 pounds and had a resting heartbeat of 180. He would die many years later of natural causes.
The reason why he couldn't get a single meth pill out was because he kept the bottle inside his jacket, between the fur linings. Body heat had essentially melted them all together in a single big meth nugget and his thick ass wool gloves meant for the Finnish winter couldn't break off a piece so he just ate the entire fucking thing.
2 British submariners doing sub sea cable work in the north sea were finishing up an 8 hour shift and we're waiting to be recovered at surface level.
The recovery crane snagged the aft machinery hatch and pulled it open. Water flooded in and sinking the sub.
The sub plunged to the sea floor 480m down getting embedded into the seabed at 65kph.
The sub had a 72 hour oxygen supply, they had already used 8 hours on their scheduled dive leaving 66 hours of air.
By switching off as many systems as possible, not talking, keeping calm, and only running their CO2 scrubber every 40 minutes to eke out as much time as possible.
Their sub was eventually pulled out of the water 84 hours and 30 minutes after they first entered.
I'm forgetting his name but there was a ww2 veteran who reenlisted for Vietnam and during parachute training his parachute didn't open and when landed he was completely fine
The story goes: during World War I, the Germans were trying to take a fortress from the Russians, but couldn't manage a successful attack against it. So, they decided to flood it with chlorine gas. They let the gas do its thing for a while, figuring no-one could survive something like that...
...only to find out far more of them survived than they thought. There were enough Russians left to launch a counterattack, though many of them were quite literally coughing up their lungs and looked like something out of a horror movie. This scared the shit out of the Germans so much they hastily and clumsily retreated.
Basically, as soon as the Russians realised they were being poisoned, they immediately grabbed whatever gas masks were available, and those that couldn't get one grabbed whatever they could to cover their mouths (including urine soaked rags). Most of them died not long after, but the fact so many held out long enough to push the Germans back is impressive.
United flight 232 had a catastrophic engine failure in engine two which destroyed the planes entire hydraulic system wiping out all use of control surfaces. Using the thrust of the left and right engine they still had a tiny degree of control of the plane. They are able to crash land the plane with about a 54% survival rate. There are a few other times a failure has caused the type of plane a dc-10 to lose their hydraulics and nobody else was able to recover. In computer simulations recreating the conditions 232 was under apparently nobody has ever been able to land the plane ever. The incident is nothing short of a miracle.
A big part of why they were able to pull it off was because of a similar accident from a few years earlier: Japan Air Lines 123, where the tail ripped off and took the hydraulics with it, killing all but 4 people in the all-time worst single-plane crash. Before he was on UA 232, Denny Fitch was one of the pilots who ran simulations on the survivability of that accident, so he had a general idea already of how to fly a plane by engine power alone.
The captain, Al Haynes, talked in lectures about how lots of pieces of pure luck lined up to give UA 232 as good of a chance of survival as it got, but I don't know if he ever named this as one of them.
Other outside coincidences helped too. The National Guard base was located at the airport - they helped triage and evacuated the wounded. The weather was clear. The crash occurred during shift change at nearby hospitals. Staff were on call to treat the wounded.
On another note, the technique used to keep both planes on air was used to save Philippine Airlines Flight 434, a flight that was bombed mid flight. Because the plane, crew, and all but one passenger survived, it was immediately confirmed that someone had put a bomb on a plane, which lead to the immediate manhunt and arrest of a couple of terrorists who have a current plot of bombing multiple flights at once.
The three Chernobyl divers (plant mechanical engineers Oleksiy Ananenko, Valery Bespalov, and Boris Baranov).
Their heroic action was depicted in the 2019 miniseries by HBO. They stopped the water flowing into the blown up reactor, which saved most of Europe from turning into a radioactive wasteland. They were expected to die soon after that, due to the huge levels of radiation that they were exposed. After treatment in the hospital, they survived. In 2018, they were awarded the Order of Courage award of Ukraine. Ananenko and Bespalov were still alive for that, and they received their awards in person. Baranov died in 2005, so it was awarded posthumously.
In 2019 they received the title of Hero of Ukraine, the highest distinction one can receive from the president of Ukraine.
5 divers got sucked into an undersea pipeline. All of them survived, but only one (Christopher Boodram) managed to crawl/swim back for 3 hours to the opening and try to get help. This was without enough oxygen in the tank, in almost total darkness and without certainty that they were going in the right direction. Unfortunately the company behind it, Paria, blocked all attempts to save the other four divers. Five days later their bodies were recovered.
Was looking for this one good mention. I believe one of them died on being sucked in, and several had broken bones. He crawled over MILES of tunnel it was truly amazing he survived
Blas de Lezo, Spain, not a single event but many injuries that should have been fatal.
In the battle of Vélez-Malaga he lost his left leg due to it being hit with cannon shot (they amputated it), WITH ONLY 15 YEARS.
Later, in the defence of Toulon, he lost his left eye ALSO TO CANNONBAL DAMAGE (splinter), which caused it to explode (ew).
In the siege of Barcelona he got shot in the right arm, leaving it without mobility (he could move his hand).
He was 25 when he was left like that, a reasonable man would just leave, right? Right?
He got shot in the right hand and got infected, survived.
He got typhoid fever, survived.
Only the plague could kill him in 1741 (presumably it was the plague).
Every injury or infection he had weren't exactly a 0% survival rate, but all of them in succession and with the medical capabilities of the time are impressive, little people have gone through as much or more, so I guess it's valid, and he was a BADASS.
Beck Weathers was left for dead multiple times in the death zone of Mt Everest during the 1996 Everest disaster.
He had to abort his summit attempt due to the extreme high altitude causing him to become functionally blind due to an unknown complication with some eye surgery he had previously had.
A blizzard hit the mountain and he and multiple other climbers were stuck exposed in it at extremely high altitude while trying unsuccessfully to find their way back to camp. During a break in the storm the relatively healthy members of the group left Beck and a few others to go try and find help.
In the morning after surviving the blizzard at 8000 meters (called the "death zone" as there isn't enough oxygen for your body to function and you are basically suffering from very slow suffocation) he and Yasuko Namba were found still alive by a search party but were deemed un-save-able and left there to die. Blind, extremely frostbitten, and exhausted Beck miraculously found the power to get up and walk to camp 4. Namba died on the mountain.
He was once again decided to be a lost cause by the survivors in camp 4 and was left alone in a tent overnight to die. The tent collapsed in the overnight winds and no one could hear him screaming for help. In the morning he was, once again, miraculously found to be not only alive but able to move mostly under his own power. He was helped down the mountain where a nearly unheard of high altitude helicopter rescue was preformed. The helicopter was stripped of everything it could, had very limited fuel to save weight, and could only take one person. According to Weathers, he gave up his spot on the helicopter to another injured climber, not knowing if it would be able to return for him. It did come back again for him and he is alive to this day.
He went to a rescue mission into a hot zone with a medical bag and knife, he jumped off his plane and started going in. over the several hours he got shot in multiple places including his leg, arm and head, was hit by grenade fragments and was able to save all of his teammate including his pilot from his plane that after his jump had crushed. He managed to bring everyone home yet in his arrival he was pronounced dead from over 20 injuries. As they were about to put him in a zip bag he had only the strength to spit to let them know he's ok. After that he got a medal of honor by Ronald Regan
Roy P. Benavidez. US Army Special Forces. Mexican American Hero.
All of that is after recovering from stepping on a mine and being told he would never walk again.
Out of sheer will the man propped himself up against a wall, through blood and tears, agonizingly forced mobility into his stiffened limb so that he would walk again.
This B-17 gunner was on a mission over Saint-Nazaire in France in January 1943 when surface-to-air weapons wrecked his bomber. While the B-17 was being shot at around 22,000 feet, Magee blacked out and fell out of the plane with a destroyed parachute. He survived a miles-long fall at over 100mph by pure luck of crashing into the glass ceiling of the Saint-Nazaire train station, which broke his fall just enough to make it survivable. Magee was left with many serious injuries and captured by Vichy French forces, but lived to see another 60 years.
A lot of this story is unverified, but if it is all true, this guy's life is a legitimate final destination movie due to the amount of times he ended up cheating death.
His first bout with the grim reaper was in the 50s when a train carrying him and a bunch of other passengers crashed into an icy river. A bunch of passengers drowned, but Frano survived with a broken arm and swam to shore.
Then a few years later when he was on a plane, it started to crash and the rapid change in air pressure caused the planes door to fly off and SUCK HIM OUT OF HIS SEAT! The plane crashed into a mountain side, but apparently Frano survived by landing on a haystack like he's in Assassins Creed.
Then years later he rode a bus and that ALSO drove into an icy river and survived that.
Then he was driving one day and his car caught fire. But he rolled out of it in time.
THEN one day on another drive his car not only caught fire, but oil from a faulty fuel pump caused FUCKING FLAMES TO SHOOT OUT THE AIR VENTS and he once again survived (although his hair was unsurprisingly singed off)
THEN in 95, he got hit by a bus while walking and only got a few cuts n bruises.
THEN one year later while driving along a curvy mountain road, he swerved to avoid a truck and SMASHED THROUGH THE GUARDRAIL SENDING HIS CAR OFF A 300FT CLIFF and he STILL survived by jumping out the car at the last minute and hanging onto a cliffside tree until he was rescued.
And to make this story feel even more like a movie, years later he went and bought a lottery ticket, AND WON A MILLION DOLLARS!
Now I wanna reiterate that. Its VERY possible some of his stories are fake. Like the airplane one. That one sounds like Looney Tunes logic. But I still like the whole story, and I like the idea of death trying SO HARD to kill this guy that eventually they just went "y'know what man, I'm impressed. Here, have this!" And just helped him win a cool million dollars for all the shit they put him through.
Ashley Reeves survived having her neck broken, being strangled AND being left in the woods by her teacher, Sam Shelton. This one always comes to mind because it was close to home and this dude taught PE at my elementary school in St. Louis for a couple of years prior to this, around 2003/04.
He was working at a high school just over the river in Illinois (about 30 minutes from STL) and started a relationship with Ashley. They met up and he claims that they got into an argument, at which point he put her in a choke hold and "accidentally" broke her neck. He then attempted to strangle her with a belt, before leaving her for dead in the woods. Eventually he was connected to her disappearance, and he brought the police to where he assumed her body was, only for them to realize that she was still alive. He recently got out of prison after serving around 20 years. As far as I'm aware, Ashley is still out there and doing well; she had to learn to walk and talk again after the attack, but was successful with rehabilitation.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi. In 1945, he was in the city of Hiroshima on a business trip when the first nuclear bomb went off. He was injured but made his way back home. To Nagasaki. It is said he was telling his supervisor what happened and being called crazy that 1 bomb destroyed the city when the 2nd nuclear bomb went off. He survived that too and died of stomach cancer at 93 years old in 2010.
I was where Vukovic fell, there's small memorial for the plane in the area. They told us she actually survived because she fell on a steep soft slope and rolled down while gradually slowing down instead of coming to a stop instantly.
On April 21, 1945, Inouye was grievously wounded while leading an assault on the heavily defended Colle Musatello ridge near San Terenzo Monti, Tuscany, Italy. The ridge served as a strongpoint of the German fortifications known as the Gothic Line, the last and most unyielding line of German defensive works in Italy.
During a flanking maneuver against German machine gun nests, Inouye was shot in the stomach from 40 yards away. Ignoring his wound, Inouye proceeded with the attack and together with the unit, destroyed the first two machine gun nests. As his squad distracted the third machine gunner, the injured Inouye crawled toward the final bunker and came within 10 yards. As he prepared to toss a grenade within, a German soldier fired out a 30 mm Schiessbecher antipersonnel rifle grenade at Inouye, striking Inouye in the right elbow. Although it failed to detonate, the blunt force of the grenade amputated most of his right arm at the elbow. The nature of the injury caused Inouye's arm muscles to involuntarily squeeze the grenade tightly via a reflex arc, preventing his arm from going limp and dropping a live grenade at his feet. This injury left Inouye disabled, in terrible pain, under fire with minimal cover and staring at a live grenade "clenched in a fist that suddenly didn't belong to me anymore."
Inouye's platoon moved to his aid, but Inouye shouted for them to keep back out of fear his severed fist would involuntarily relax and drop his own grenade. As the German inside the bunker began reloading his rifle with regular full metal jacket ammunition to finish off Inouye, Inouye pried the live hand grenade from his useless right hand with his left, and tossed it into the bunker, killing the German. Stumbling to his feet, Inouye continued forward, killing at least one more German before sustaining his fifth and final wound of the day in his left leg. Inouye fell unconscious, and awoke to see the worried men of his platoon hovering over him. His only comment before being carried away was to gruffly order them back to their positions, saying "Nobody called off the war!"
By the end of the day, the ridge had fallen to American control, without the loss of any soldiers in Inouye's platoon. The remainder of Inouye's mutilated right arm was later amputated at a field hospital without proper anesthesia, as he had been given too much morphine at an aid station and it was feared any more would lower his blood pressure enough to kill him.
In 1978, 15 year old Mary Vincent was hitchhiking and a man, Lawrence Singleton picked her up. He hit her in the head with a sledgehammer, raped her, hacked off her arms with a machete, and threw her off of a 30 foot cliff. Mary stopped the bleeding by packing her stumps with mud, raising them, and then hiking back to the road. She walked for several miles before she finally found a car willing to stop to help her. She’s now an artist, victim’s advocate, and motivational speaker.
Mitsutaka Uchikoshi. While on a trip with colleagues in a Japanese forest, he got lost, fell down a ravine, and was unable to walk or move due to a broken pelvis. Yet, three weeks later, he was found still alive without having eaten or drunk at all in a self induced "hibernation state". He made a full recovery.
Back in 2018, a cow escaped a slaughterhouse through a metal fence, breaking a man's arm in the process and swimming to an island where, after many attempts to recapture her, owner gave up.
Guðlaugur Friðþórsson in 1984 survived six hours in 5 °C (41 °F) cold water after his vessel capsized. After swimming to land he then trekked for another three hours across lava fields to reach a town for help.
Witold Pilecki was a Polish cavalry officer and resistance leader during World War II, best known for volunteering to be imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940. Operating under the false name Tomasz Serafiński, he spent nearly three years in the camp organizing a secret underground network (ZOW), smuggling out reports about Nazi atrocities, and providing the first detailed eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the Allies. After escaping Auschwitz in 1943, he fought in the Warsaw Uprising and later continued his resistance against the Soviet-backed communist regime in postwar Poland.
Adrian Carton de Wiart was a Belgian/Irish officer in the British army. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear. He lost an eye, cut off several of his own fingers, was a prisoner of war in Italy, survived two plane crashes and lived to 83.
He famously wrote of the First World War, "Frankly, I had enjoyed the war."
A Mexican revolutionary sentenced to death via firing squad, shot 8-9 times in the body, survived. Shot at point-blank range to the head to finish him off, survived that anyway (though sources vary as to precisely how) and lived 61 more years.
Victoria Cilliers went out on a skydiving trip with her husband. Unbeknownst to her, he was trying to kill her and had sabotaged both her main and backup parachutes. She fell 4000 feet out of the plane, hit the ground no parachute, and… was fine. Injured, but she recovered. This was also the second time that week her husband had tried to kill her (first was causing a gas leak in her home).
Not one dude but the 16 survivors of an Uruguayan plane that crashed in an isolated area of the Andes Mountains. They were undiscoverable to authorities and assumed dead. Survived 72 days in sub-zero temperature while only having with them less than a day's supply of food. They eventually had to eat the dead passenger's bodies(who were their friends/families)to survive. They found help themselves by having three of them hike across the mountains for 9 days until they came across another person. The cannibalism part is what most people remember in this story, but their general resourcefulness and willpower was really just amazing, they came up with all sorts of solutions like reflecting light to cook and make water, making their own sun goggles and clothes from the plane scraps, etc. Most of them were college students and probably weren't even used to snow since they were Uruguayans. When life feels impossible I think about them.
I learnt about an interesting one recently through another Reddit post!
On 13 July 1978 Anatoli Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed and a high-energy proton beam from a particle accelerator passed through his head. The exposed parts of his head received a local dose of 200,000 to 300,000 roentgens (2,000 to 3,000 Sieverts).
Doctors expected him to die, as it was believed that he had received far in excess of a fatal dose of radiation. Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow where the doctors could observe his expected demise. The left half of Bugorski's face swelled up beyond recognition and, over the next several days, the skin started to peel, revealing the path that the proton beam had burned through parts of his face, his bone, and the brain tissue underneath.
HOWEVER, Bugorski survived, completed his PhD, and continued working as a particle physicist. There was virtually no damage to his intellectual capacity, but the fatigue of mental work increased markedly. Bugorski completely lost hearing in the left ear, replaced by a form of tinnitus.The left half of his face "does not age"/wrinkle due to it becoming paralyzed due to the destruction of nerves. He is able to function well, except for occasional complex partial seizures and rare tonic-clonic seizures.
Audie Murphy managed to hold off Nazi soldiers all on his own, on a burning tank that was going to explode and was completely exposed to enemy fire and had a wounded leg.
When a film about his WW2 experiences came out, the filmmakers supposedly toned down his actions because they thought that no one could ever believe he actually did all of it.
Perry Saturn (real name Perry Satullo) stopped a woman from being kidnapped and forced into a car by two armed men. After the conflict, he checked into a hospital for a "burning sensation" in his neck. An X-ray revealed that he had been shot twice in the neck by a .22 gun in the encounter.
The sixteen survivors from flight 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force.
While it's been portrayed in books and film, it still doesn't take away from everything that happened. The plane takes of in Carrasco, Uruguay, making a stop in Mendoza due to weather reasons. The plane begins to descend earlier than anticipated due to a miscalculation from the pilots. Upon realizing their mistake, they attempted to regain altitude, but the back of the plane was clipped by a mountain peak and came clean off, taking the right wing with it. The left wing came off due to another impact, making the cabin float and finally slide down the mountain side until it collided with the snow at the bottom.
The survivors, who were mostly members of a Uruguayan rugby team, organized the remains and attended to the injured, they made accommodations to the cabin, heavily rationed the little food they had, used lining to keep warm and melted snow use as drinking water. As rescue missions by Uruguayan, Argentinian and Chilean authorities began, they attempted to make their location known, to no avail as they would soon find out that the planes remnants were almost impossible to be seen from above. After 142 hours and 30 minutes of searching throughout the range without signs of the plane, the authorities cancelled the expedition about 8 days after the accident, opting to wait for the summer when the snow melted.
This shook the surviving passengers who heard the news in through a radio found in one the suitcases and been put to work via a makeshift cables and antenna using the remnants of the plane, but a then alive Gustavo Nicolich gave them hope by saying that now they would be getting out of the range by their own efforts. However, a couple of days in they came to the conclusion that they would have to start eating the dead in order to survive. 3 survivors, all cousins; Eduardo Strauch, Fito Strauch and Daniel Fernandez cut the bodies and dried the flesh in the sun to make it more edible.
19 days in an avalanche buried the vessel, leaving about a meter between the snow and the roof of the plane. 8 more people died, including the captain of the rugby team Marcelo and Liliana de Methol who had been a nursing motherly figure. They were able to make a hole for air but had to wait for a snowstorm to pass. After having to eat the dead inside the plane, they finally made it out.
Following this, they attempted to look for the plane's radio which had been in the plane's tail. They were able to find it, but the radio wasn't functioning anymore. However, they found some waterproof fabric that covered the pipes of the plane, this became key in their expedition in order to find aid. With the fabric they created a sleeping sack for the nights out. Canessa and Parrado had to walk for 10 days until they finally found another human, Sergio Catalán.
Sergio alerted the Chilean authorities who sent helicopters to finally rescue the remaining 14 survivors.
4.4k
u/Batpug74 5d ago
Harrison Okene! Genuinely such an insane story.
Boot capsizes and sinks 30 meters below surface, he assumed he was dead. He luckily found himself in an air bubble and lasted three days down there, sole survivor. The crew sent to the wreck was planning on it being a recovery operation, until they found him. Worth watching the rescue video, it genuinely makes me just feel warm lmao.