0 Days Since Last Accident (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

Today, I'm going to share three stories about people who expect it to have a totally normal day at work, however, their days were anything but. 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 place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, the next time you're over the follow button's house, go ahead and unplug their refrigerator, okay? Let's get into our first story called Where's Jim? On the evening of Monday, June 21, 2004, a woman named Tracy Dunnelly was sitting in her parents' kitchen near Auckland, New Zealand, anxiously staring at the landline telephone, waiting for her husband's friend, Stephen, to call her back. So earlier that day, Stephen, the friend, had called her and said that he had tried to reach her husband, Jim, at the Glenbrook Steel Mill where he worked. But Jim's coworkers had said he wasn't actually at work. Apparently, he had arrived at work around 6.30 a.m. like usual. He had dropped his lunch on his desk and changed into his work uniform like he's doing all the normal things, but then at 9 a.m., he had inexplicably missed a pretty important meeting. And so the assumption amongst colleagues was, well, Jim must have just gone home. However, Stephen had called Jim at home. He had called his landline phone and Jim didn't answer and Tracy, she was at her parents' house and, you know, Stephen didn't know that, so he's calling this number, nobody answers. And so because he's, again, starting to get worried about Jim, Stephen had just gone to Tracy and Jim's house to effectively do a welfare check. And when he got there, he confirmed that Jim was not there. So now, basically, nobody knew where Jim was. And Tracy knew that right at this moment, Stephen was actually calling the mill back to see if maybe by now he had turned up, or if there was just more information about where he went. And Stephen had obviously told Tracy that as soon as he hears back or as soon as he learns anything, he would call her because he had learned she was at her parents' house, he would call her there and keep her up to date. And so she's sitting here waiting for the update. Just then, the phone finally rings and Tracy immediately answers it and it's Stephen. And Stephen did have news, but it was, you know, neutral to bad news. So he said they had discovered that Jim's car was still in the parking lot of the steel mill. So theoretically, that meant that he was still at work. But the other part of the update was, you know, his co-workers literally couldn't find him, like nobody knew where he was at the steel mill if he was really there. And so at this point, Stephen told Tracy that considering, you know, the situation, she really ought to consider reporting her husband missing. And at first, Tracy's hearing this and it was like she couldn't actually process what she was being told. Jim had worked at this mill for 19 years as an engineer. And nothing like this had ever happened before. And so right away, Tracy goes to worst case scenario and she's thinking he's gotten, you know, hurt on the job. He's trapped somewhere. There's been an accident, you know, that's why no one can see him. And then on top of that, Tracy's thinking like the past couple of nights, she knew her husband had not slept well. He was tired, including this morning when she briefly woke up and she saw him leaving for work. He was definitely tired, like he had had another bad night's sleep. And again, you know, he's been doing this job forever. She didn't really think twice about it. But now, thinking about the situation they were in, she's like the mill is the last place you want to go and work if you're not totally focused, if you're if you're tired. I mean, there's huge heavy machinery there to be pretty easy if you're not paying close attention to have an accident, you know, and she's thinking, man, like what if somebody else had an accident and it like affected Jim and like nobody noticed and he's trapped somewhere or what if he, you know, because he was tired, made a mistake or something, but she's just thinking somebody could have just not seen what happened to him and he needs our help, like right now, like what are we going to do? And so after speaking to Steven, you know, she thanked him for the update, she hung up and she sort of flustered here, but the first thing she did is she ran to her parents, she's at their house and she told them what's going on, you know, as best as she could understand it, and then asked them to look after the kids, you know, her kids, well, she figured out what to do next. After that evening, Tracy was now sitting in the boardroom of the Glenbrook Steel Mill and she was totally nervous, her heart's racing, her hands were trembling. She had ultimately done what Steven had suggested and she did report Jim missing, and now she was at the mill to see if there had been any updates. The boardroom she was in was crowded now with police officers, with mill personnel and search and rescue coordinators, and they were all telling Tracy that right now we don't have anything new, we can't find Jim, we've looked and we still can't find him. But they assured Tracy that they had people searching the property, and it would be slow going for sure, so this is not that unusual. I mean, the mill itself was enormous with multiple huge buildings across two square miles of land. Now, for the searchers, this was meant to be sort of reassuring to Tracy that there's still places we haven't looked yet. And for Tracy, it was scary to imagine this huge space like how are we sure we're going to find him like in time in case something's happened? Like what if there was an accident, you know what if he needs our help now? But she knew all she could actually do right now in terms of helping anyone or anything here was just to try to provide any additional context, any additional information to investigators about Jim as she possibly could. And you know, in particular, to provide them with any context about the last couple of days, like leading up to what amount to do his disappearance. Was there any indication that, you know, he could have been acting funny or anything, you know, they kept asking her and the truth was Tracy, you know, she thought about it and she knew he hadn't slept well the past couple of days, but there actually was something else. You know, now it was coming into focus because of his disappearance, but she couldn't help but think back the last couple of days and she told investigators like, Jim was acting really weird. And so Tracy explained to the police officers how two nights ago on Saturday night, she and Jim had had a date night plant away from the kids, but Jim had abruptly canceled saying he had a meeting. And when Tracy had just asked for details about this really important meeting, Jim had refused to tell her anything. And he just said that he needed to wear a suit for this meeting. And then about an hour later, when Jim came home after this strange, you know, secretive meeting, he never said what it was about. He was like really tight-lipped about it when she asked some simple probing questions. And then she noticed that he had stayed up late, pacing around pretty anxiously and he just seemed really agitated for the rest of the weekend, like clearly something happened in this meeting that was, that was not good for Jim. After Tracy said this, some of the employees from the mill backed her up about Jim's odd recent behavior. They said, you know, he'd been acting pretty weird at work like this morning. There were multiple employees who came forward saying they saw Jim before he disappeared, like at the mill they saw him there. And they all said he was acting very, very cagey, like he was being very quiet and sort of, like going to the corner of the room, almost like he was trying to avoid being seen, like he was just acting a little bit different and they knew him well enough to know that just it seemed off. And so at this point, some people in the room as this discussion was happening, they began suggesting that Jim, you know, maybe he had some kind of mental breakdown here, and maybe he wandered off somewhere in the mill or maybe he even ran away. I mean, it sort of seemed like something was going on with him and that's got to be connected to his disappearance. But even though this did become sort of a running theory, everybody in the room basically agreed that whatever happened to him, they would find him. The search for Jim continued over the next few days with dozens of police and rescue workers and volunteers and mill personnel scouring the mill and its grounds that were even like helicopters and search dogs involved, like this was a really serious search. But the mill was in a really rural area and its property included hundreds of acres of farmland and there was a nearby river that led to a large harbor. And if that wasn't difficult enough to search, the property also had these incredibly hazardous areas, like highly corrosive ponds full of sewage and burning slag pits, where the mill dumped all its molten steel debris. But they searched these expansive, sometimes very dangerous areas for the rest of that week but they just couldn't find Jim or really anything at all that explained where he might have gone. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 26th, so five days after Jim went missing, a supervisor at the Glenbrook Steel Mill walked through one of the mill's main hallways towards a cluster of these large industrial bats. Now, at this point, the search for Jim was still out in force. However, the mill itself and its employees, for the most part, were carrying on with work as usual, and given that basically the entire mill and its extended property had been searched repeatedly at this point, and there was no sign of Jim or foul play, you know, lots of people, including the supervisor, now wondered if Jim had disappeared on purpose. The supervisor figured that if someone like Jim, who knew the mill really well, wanted to disappear, he could have pretty easily snuck across the grounds and made his way to that nearby harbor, and from there he could have hopped on a boat, and really gone anywhere. Now, the supervisor saw the vats right up ahead, and as he got closer, he noticed there was something sort of on the top of the vat that shouldn't be there. And so he hurried right over there, and as soon as he saw what it was, like he couldn't believe what he was looking at. So shortly after this discovery, the police swarmed the area, and they searched the vats in the surrounding space, and what they ultimately found was a bunch of new evidence in Jim's disappearance, really like the first evidence that had been found since the search actually began. But this new evidence did not provide really any sort of clarity around what happened to Jim. It just made whatever happened to Jim a lot weirder. What that supervisor found inside the vat that prompted this reaction was a yellow hardhat. It was sitting at the top of this vat. And this hardhat was like the same one that everybody at the mill was required to wear when working at the mill, but this particular one had Jim's name written on it. So it clearly belonged to him. After finding the hardhat, the police promptly drained the huge industrial vat that it was found inside of, which happened to be filled with acid. And when they looked inside of this drained vat, they found more of Jim's belongings, including his credit card, his safety glasses, his work key, and his ID. So obviously people began to think that, well, here's what happened to Jim. He fell into the acid, and all that's left are these items because his body and his clothing had dissolved in the acid. Like this is a horrible outcome, but it seemed like that's what they were looking at. But that theory didn't last long because investigators didn't find any trace of human remains inside of this empty vat. And they soon discovered that the acid that had been in there was relatively weak and couldn't actually dissolve much of anything aside from rust. So it was certainly not capable of dissolving a human body. Also, it was like, well, wait a minute, it would have dissolved Jim's body and his clothes, but didn't dissolve like his ID card and glasses. Like that also was a pretty big discrepancy. But the really weird part about this new evidence was actually more just about where the evidence was found, not so much the vat, but like this literal section of the mill. This area had been searched repeatedly by all these different search teams. And it was in an area that employees walked through and passed all the time. So even though it's entirely possible that Jim could have like fallen into the acid without somebody noticing what wouldn't have gone unnoticed is a bright yellow hard hat with Jim's name on it, literally just floating at the top of this vat of acid. Somebody would have noticed it. So now it seemed entirely possible that someone had actually staged the hard hat and the other items found in the vat, and they placed them there very likely days after Jim went missing. And so this could really mean two things. First, it could mean that Jim did disappear on purpose. Maybe he hits somewhere inside the mill for a while and evaded searchers and then snuck out and left a bunch of his belongings in and around the vats to confuse investigators. Now that would explain why the hard hat was left in such a conspicuous spot, you know, Jim, if he did this, he wanted somebody to find it. And then also it would explain why the items were found in a vat of acid because, you know, presumably Jim would want people to think that he must have fallen in here and was killed and dissolved in this acid. That's why there's nobody. But he may not have known that this particular batch of acid in this vat was not actually strong enough to dissolve him. Maybe Jim normally expected that that type of acid in those vats was strong enough and it was just an oversight by him. But Jim's wife, Tracy, she never bought this theory because she was certain that her husband would never leave his family, especially not his kids. He loved his kids. So to her, the second possibility made more sense that this was a clear case of foul play. And whoever hurt Jim after they presumably killed him must have dumped some of his belongings in that vat of acid to give the impression that he had died and been dissolved in this acid, but sort of similar to the first theory, maybe the perpetrator was not aware that this acid was not actually strong enough to dissolve a body. And so that was an oversight by them as well. But you gotta ask yourself like, who would do this to Jim? But unfortunately, now decades later, we still don't know what happened to Jim. We had still not found his body. His family still does not know like where their husband or where their father went. And so today, this case has become one of the most confusing and talked about missing person cases in New Zealand's history with dozens of conspiracy theories and endless rabbit holes on the internet. But all of this stuff about this case floating around still just boils down to one question that everybody wants an answer to. And that question is, where's Jim? (upbeat music) Our next story is called Making Soaped. On the afternoon of August 27th, 1904, a factory foreman named Jacob Beck stepped off an elevator onto the ground floor of the Babet Soap Factory in New York City. So this factory was an old, massive five-story brick complex that produced roughly 100,000 pounds of soap a day. And the elevator, which was pretty rudimentary with no doors to close in the front and nothing in closing the elevator shaft, was located right in the center of this factory. So basically, this elevator car was in full view of everyone as it went up and down all day long between the upper floors where the soap was actually made and the basement, which was General Storage. And here on the first floor, the ground floor, so above the basement where Jacob had just arrived, was where the shipping took place. As soon as Jacob stepped off the elevator car, he immediately stepped aside, so a group of four workers who were on this floor could file onto the elevator and take it back upstairs. And so Jacob, he sort of sees these guys get on the elevator and then he walks over onto the busy factory floor. Happy to see that everybody was hard at work. He checked in with the shipping office where some men were loading crates of soap into horse-tron wagons and then he pulled out his pocket watch and saw that it was 120 PM, putting them right on schedule. But then, after checking his pocket watch, Jacob heard this loud metallic screeching noise and the sound of woods splintering, followed by a loud roozing sound and he turned around and he saw the elevator car, which again is in plain sight of everyone. It's right in the middle of the factory, there's nothing encompassing the actual shaft itself. You could just see it. He saw the car with those four workers who he had stepped aside to allow to get on the car. He saw their car falling. It was like in freefall, tumbling down the shaft and it was breaking wood along the way. And just for a second, Jacob could look into the car and he saw the four men. He could see their expressions and they're all so surprised. Like this is happening so suddenly and then a second later, he sees the car disappear through the floor and it crashes down into the basement below. And so Jacob at this point, all he's thinking is, oh my gosh, are they even alive? That's a huge fall he runs over with everybody else and he gets to basically the side of the shaft like where you would enter the car from the first floor. Then he looks down into the shaft and he sees their splintered wood. The car is wrecked at the bottom and he's holding his breath like waiting to see signs of maybe movement, like maybe they've survived this horrible fall, but he's looking down and at first there's nothing. It's just like rubble and kind of dust getting kicked up from the crash. But then he sees clearly there are people moving within the rubble and like for a second, Jacob is just thrilled that somebody survived. Maybe all of them survived. And more and more people from the first floor are coming over to see what's going on. Like they're wondering how to get down there to help them. And Jacob, his first instinct is go take the stairs, go down and try to be a part of the rescue effort. But as he's turning to run away from the shaft where he had been looking down into the basement, he and everybody else in that factory began to hear these blood-curdling screams coming from down below, coming from, very likely, the men who had been in that elevator car. They had survived the fall, but as Jacob and the others would learn, they experienced a far worse fate than anyone could have imagined after the crash stopped. It would turn out those four workers had been using the elevator to transport soap-making materials, not soap itself, but the stuff you used to make it up to the mixing vats on the third floor. And while soap is obviously safe to be used on the human body, you know, keeps us clean of germs and bacteria, the chemicals used to actually make the soap are extremely corrosive. And in this case, the workers were literally transporting 200 gallons of hydrochloric acid in large glass jars, like extremely corrosive acid, that even a little bit, if it got on your skin, could like melt through your skin. Well, this car, this elevator car, it crashes to the basement. And the men survived the fall. They were badly beaten up by it. But all those glass jars with all that hydrochloric acid, Will the glass jar shatter? and the acid sprayed all of them, and so they're trapped under the rubble, they're very likely badly hurt just from the crash, and as they're trying to be pulled out, their skin is being melted off the bone, their eyeballs were reduced to mush in their eye sockets. And so in the end, these four poor workers, they miraculously survived this fall because apparently the cable car, no one even really understood why it broke free, it just malfunctioned and all the safety mechanisms didn't stop it, they smashed into the basement, and they miraculously survived only to then, post-crash, slowly and horribly, each of them would die from the acid. The next and final story is called Sinking Feeling. On the morning of Monday, September 3rd, 2001, a 35-year-old man named Mike Lobasso was sitting on the couch watching cartoons with his two kids at their home in Long Island, New York. It was Labor Day, so Mike had off from work, and he was trying his best to just relax. Because during the week, I mean, he worked really hard, he was a DEA agent on a task force that took down major drug rings, so his job was very intense, very dangerous, very stressful. And then normally, when he was home on the weekends, you know, he really couldn't fully relax because his house was old and constantly needed repairs and he was always doing landscaping and there's just always work to be done at home. But for this weekend, Mike and his wife Don had decided that Mike was really gonna just push like all responsibilities aside and just be a husband and a dad to just focus on family for one weekend. And so now, Mike was actually really enjoying just sitting here, relaxing, you know, with his kids watching TV while his wife Don was out running errands. This is like exactly what he was hoping for. And so they're sitting on the couch for a little while, and eventually Mike's seven-year-old son asked him if they could go outside and play soccer in the backyard. And Mike said, yeah, of course, he got up to put on his shoes. But as Mike was kneeling down to tie issues, he heard this really weird sound coming from out back in their backyard. It was like, it almost sounded like a groaning sound or maybe even a grinding sound, but he couldn't place it. But it was loud enough that it got his attention, so Mike shot to his feet and he ran over and looked out the glass patio door, but he couldn't see any indication of what was causing the sound. But you know, he did know that in virtue of being a DEA agent that he probably had upset a lot of criminals out there who he had taken down their drug rings and taken down people they worked with. And so he always had in the background this fear that someday, like his, his address was gonna get leaked and people would come here and seek revenge against him. And so even though again, he has no idea what the sound is. He can't help but like fear that like, oh no, is this a sign that someone's here doing something to me and my family, like he's hyper vigilant. But again, he can't see anything outside. He just hears this weird sound that seems to be coming from out there, but just out of an abundance of caution. Mike just told his kids like, hey, just stay in the couch for a second, I'll be right back. And Mike decided he would just go outside, he would look around, make sure it was safe, you know, determine what this noise was and then he'd get his kids. So Mike opened up the door and he stepped outside. A couple hours later, around 12.30 pm, Mike's wife Dawn came home from running errands and so she comes inside, she's got all these groceries in her arms. And she starts calling out for Mike to, hey, would you mind coming over and helping me with these groceries? But Mike didn't call back, he didn't come to the door to help. And so she wound up walking into the kitchen and setting the bags down and she's sort of calling out for Mike, you know, trying to figure out where he is, still can't find him, but she sees the TVs on so she looks over into the living room and she sees their voice. They're sitting on the couch watching TV alone like Mike's not here. And so she's looking around and she's like, hey, guys, where's your dad? And the boy's just sort of shrugged and they're like, I don't know, and so Dawn's like, that's so weird, he would never leave the kids unattended like this, where did he go? And so she began looking around the house, there's no indication of where he went. And then at some point she gets to the back of the house where the door that leads out to the back patio in the backyard was, and it was a glass door and so she looks out into the back yard and at first she can't even process what she's seeing, but then when it clicks, she just starts to scream. It would turn out that sound that drew Mike into the back yard was work related, but not related to his work as a DEA agent. The sound was related to some of the repairs that Mike had been handling around his house. So the day before Mike had a company come out to his house and drain an underground sewage tank that was buried in the family's back yard, which had been causing some plumbing problems. But the tank was so old that it had slowly disintegrated over time, and the pressure of pumping out the sewage had caused it to collapse. And so there's all this waste that was leaking out of it and it had created a massive sink hole right in their back yard, tunneling about 25 feet into the ground. And so the sound that Mike was hearing was the sound of like the upper layer of the ground basically that the surface of the back yard slowly being sucked into this underground sink hole. And so when Mike stepped out into the back yard, it hadn't collapsed yet. It was like there was a thin crust of just the grass in the back yard and there's these sounds coming out of the ground and the second he stepped on the grass, it collapsed underneath him and it sent him falling into a 25 foot deep pit of concrete and sewage. Unfortunately Mike would die from this accident and it would take 18 hours for rescue workers to finally recover his body from the sink hole. 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. Bowling podcast, Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Bowling. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone and Cole LaCasio. This episode was written by Kate Murdoch, Andrew Keller, and by Kate Gallagher. Story editing by Karris Pash Cooper, and Luke Baratz. Research and fact-checking by Shelley Shoe, Samantha Van Huss, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fassiano. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear, audio editing and post-produced by Whit LaCasio and Jordan Stidem, production support by Antonio Manada and Delana Corley, artwork by Jessica Clogston-Kiner, theme song "Something Wicked" by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Bowling podcast, and just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Bowling podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Bowling YouTube channel that very same day, and trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Bowling. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and add 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 gonna do it, I really appreciate your support, until next time, see ya. [MUSIC]