Against All Odds Vol. II

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Today's podcast features three stories about people who, by all accounts, should not be alive.

The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.

The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.

The first story you'll hear is called Harrison O'Keen, and it's about a fisherman who truly endures a living nightmare.

The second story you'll hear is called I Got This, and it's about a woman who wakes up in a death trap.

And the third and final story you'll hear is called Candy, and it's about a girl that somehow survives two horrific ordeals back to back.

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 Write Podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.

So, if that's of interest to you, please invite the Amazon Music Follow button over to your house for Oreos and Milk, but replace all of their Oreos cream filling with Play-Doh.

Okay, let's get into our first story called Harrison O'Keen.

1988.

A small New Jersey town is shaken by horror.

A devoted mother brutally murdered.

Satanic symbols scattered throughout her home, and her teenage son vanished without a trace.

Was it demonic possession, or something even worse, something more sinister?

Based on the Hit Wondery podcast series The Devil Within, comes Let the Devil In, a four-part documentary that unravels this haunting true crime.

Through never-before-heard interviews and shocking revelations, we will explore a case that divided a community and exposed the dark underbelly of America's satanic panic.

Executive, produced, and hosted by horror maestro Eli Roth, this chilling investigation will make you question everything you believe about fear, faith, and the monsters we create.

Let the Devil In, now streaming, new episodes on Sundays, available exclusively on MGM.

In the very early hours of May 26, 2013, three tugboats were towing this massive Chevron oil tanker in the Gulf of Guinea.

They were about 32 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria.

Two of the tugboats were pressed up against the sides of this huge tanker to provide stability as it gets towed.

The third tugboat, which was called the Jaskone 4, sat way out in front and had the main tow line strapped to the front of the tanker and was doing all of the actual towing.

On board that lead tugboat, the Jascon 4, were 12 crew members who had all been hired by a company called West African Ventures.

It was a Nigerian-based company.

They owned the ship and they had contracted them to come out and be a part of this towing operation.

One of the crew members was a man named Harrison O'Keen.

He was from Nigeria and he was was the ship's cook.

At around 4.45 that morning, Harrison was in his quarters.

He had been sleeping, but he had woken up because the ship was swaying pretty dramatically.

It was very rough seas, but he, like the rest of the crew, were accustomed to rough, choppy water.

So he gets up, he unlocks his bedroom door, and he goes out into the hall.

When he looks down the hall, he sees that all of the other doors are shut and locked.

The crew of the Jascone 4 had a policy that whenever they slept or were in their rooms, they would shut and lock the doors because piracy is a really big threat.

After Harrison looked down the hall at all of these locked doors, he started making his way down the hall in the other direction towards the bathroom.

He kind of stumbled down the hall as the ship rocked from the very rough seas.

He gets to the bathroom and shuts the door at 4.50 in the morning.

We know this because at 4.50 in the morning, a rogue wave hit the side of Jaskin 4 and almost completely flipped it upside down.

Snapped the tow line, the ship is completely on its side and it's sinking very fast.

He tried to push open the metal bathroom door, but already a surge of water is coming down the hall and pressing him into the bathroom.

Pushes against that surge of water and gets the door open, and now he's standing on the ceiling of the hallway that he was just in a moment ago because the boat is now completely inverted.

And he's looking down the hall.

Three of the crew members have managed to come out of their locked rooms and in a panic are trying to make their way up to the exit.

He sees them as another surge of water blasts in through one of the windows and literally sweeps them away.

And he knows they're dead.

The power cuts out right as another surge of water is coming down the hall to him.

He turns his body and this rush of seawater, this freezing seawater, comes pouring down the hall and it takes Harrison and throws him down this little hallway and slams him into yet another bathroom.

It was actually an officer's bathroom.

It was connected to an officer's room.

And so now he's inside of this other bathroom, and he's kind of like clamoring naturally, instinctively, to go up to try to get to air, because that's what anyone would do if you're underwater in a panic.

And as he's swimming up, he couldn't believe it when he gets to air.

His head clears the surface in the bathroom, and he's in an air pocket, but it's pitch black.

all the power is out the ship is rapidly sinking the water is freezing harrison has only got his boxer shorts on he doesn't have a light source he doesn't have food he doesn't have water and he has this couple cubic feet of air that any moment he's waiting for it to collapse he knows these are his final moments and he remembers a prayer that his wife had texted him before he started this particular job and he started reciting the prayer in his head as he waited to die.

The ship slams into the ocean floor, but the air pocket doesn't collapse.

So Harrison is in this tiny little air pocket 30 meters below the ocean's surface.

At this point, even though Harrison has no idea how he just survived the shipwreck, he now has to deal with the fact that he's eventually going to run out of air.

He'll die of dehydration.

He'll die of exposure.

He's in freezing water up to his neck.

And most terrifyingly, sharks and other animals are going to start converging on the ship to look for food.

And he is in a bathroom that, although there's the air pocket, the door is open into the main hall and his entire body is inside of this bathroom.

Meaning if a shark were in the hallway swimming down the inside of this hall and it made it to the bathroom, He's completely exposed with no way to shut the door.

It was wedged open.

So his lower half is completely completely exposed to whatever wildlife is inside of this ship.

So he literally is just waiting to die.

He just doesn't know how he's going to die.

After sitting there for quite a while, he started to feel very cold, and he knew that if he didn't find a way to get his body a little bit higher into the air pocket, basically get his upper body out of the water, that he was certainly going to die soon, just from hypothermia.

Even though he knew he was doomed, his will to live was just, it was bubbling through.

He did not want to die yet.

And as he's sitting there thinking, how is he going to get himself up into this air pocket?

Because he had nothing he could step on or kind of stand on, he realized that right next to him, there was the officer's room.

This was the officer's bathroom.

And the door was open.

If he wanted to, he could dive down and swim through the door and go into the officer's bedroom and look for supplies.

And in his mind, he thought he could probably pull off some of the paneling because it's going to be pitch black in there if he just swam straight to the far side of the room.

He could get to some of the fake wood paneling or whatever it was and he could yank it down.

And as he's building up his courage to dive into pitch black water, he starts hearing this horrible sound of large sea creatures smashing into the boat.

They were basically looking for entrance points into the boat.

And then they would come into the boat, sharks, and he could hear them bumping up against the insides of the ship.

And all he's thinking thinking is, I'm completely exposed.

I'm doomed.

I gotta go.

I gotta go in there.

I gotta at least make an attempt to save myself.

And so listening to sharks and other animals searching for things to eat, he takes a deep breath and in total darkness, he dives down and swims into the officer's bedroom.

And as he's swimming, because he's just going straight across to the far wall to start yanking off that paneling, he's bumping into things that he believes are bodies.

He doesn't know, but he thinks they are.

He gets to the far wall and he yanks off a piece of paneling, he swims back.

One successful trip.

He goes back down and he makes a number of trips until he's able to fashion that little raft he had in mind, like a little step stool that pushed him up into the air pocket to where half of his upper body was now out of the freezing water.

Also, while he was in the officer's room, even though it was pitch black, he was kind of like feeling around for things and he wound up finding a bottle of soda and a flashlight.

So he turns on his flashlight and he drinks his soda and he just takes a breath.

Even though he's still in the same terrible situation, he's thankful for that little victory.

About 24 hours would go by where he has this light on and he's nursing the soda.

He knows he's either going to die from sharks, hypothermia, dehydration, something's going to kill him.

But part of him is thinking, maybe if a a dive team is able to locate this ship, they're going to come down to retrieve bodies.

And maybe they'll find me.

Maybe I can hold out that long.

And so as he's thinking about this, he's getting a little flicker of hope, two horrible things happen.

His light goes out, flashlight doesn't work, at the same time that he describes hearing the large sea creatures make their way into the officer's room right next to him.

So I want you to think about this.

You're at the bottom of the ocean.

You're in a ship that has sunk.

You're in a little air pocket.

You really don't have any supplies to last longer than a few days.

It's total darkness.

You had your flashlight, it's gone out.

It's totally dark.

A shark that has been eating your friends, or more than one shark, is now literally feet away from you and you can hear it.

eating the bodies that apparently are in there.

You are exposed to them because there's an entrance to that room and there's an entrance to the hall.

The fear must have been indescribable.

For the next 36 hours, Harrison sat there listening to a shark slam into the wall but never attack him.

He heard sharks in the main section of the ship bumping around, waiting at any moment that if the ship were to just tilt a little bit, his air pocket's going to collapse.

It's unfathomable how terrible those 36 hours must have been.

At the 60-hour mark, he hears what sounds like something metal banging on the outside of the ship.

He notices through the hallway, because he has a bit of a vantage point through the water down the hall in front of him, he sees a flicker of light.

And there's no light down here, so it really stood out.

Without even thinking about it, he takes a deep breath and swims right into the hallway.

the one place he had not been since he had gone into the bathroom because there are sharks and he starts swimming farther and farther and farther away from his air pocket and he's running out of air he can't find the light he doesn't even know if he saw a light he thinks he might be hallucinating and he's realizing i'm almost out of air you know he's looking around and he decides i got to go back to my air pocket and he turns around he's trying to swim back he's looking for his bathroom he's swimming as fast as he can he's about to run out of air and he makes it to his air pocket his head goes up and he takes a big breath and he's not sure if he really actually saw the light or not and he's thinking that was it i thought i was going to to be rescued but i was just imagining it and then a miracle it was a diver and the diver had come back

the diver was part of a crew that had been sent down to recover bodies no one lives for three days underwater so the diver comes down his way and harrison knew that he was going to scare the daylights out of this diver And so he gently touched him on the back.

And the diver reacts really violently because he's expecting it to be an animal of some kind.

And Harrison reaches out and just grabs the diver's hand and squeezes it gently and shows him his hand.

And the diver's got a big light on his head, pokes his head up into this air pocket.

You see, this man that, for the past 36 hours, has been in total darkness with absolutely no way out.

He was done for.

And the look on Harrison's face is just, it's priceless.

They fitted Harrison with a dive mask and they brought him up.

He did not immediately go to the surface because he had been at depth for so long, he had to go through something called decompression.

If he had just breathed air at normal pressure, he would have died.

So they put him in a decompression chamber for 60 hours before actually bringing him to the surface.

And so ultimately, Harrison was okay, but the trauma of this experience was so extreme that to this day, Harrison's wife says that basically every night he wakes up thinking he's on a sinking ship.

The show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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What if I told you that the crime of the century is the one being waged on our planet?

Introducing Lawless Planet, Wondry's new podcast exploring the dark side of the climate crisis.

Uncover shocking tales of crime and corruption threatening our world's future.

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Dive into uninterrupted true crime stories today.

Our next story is called, I Got This.

In 1983, 23-year-old Tammy Ashcroft was engaged to 34-year-old Richard Sharp.

The couple had bonded over their shared love of sailing, and generally they spent more time on the water than on land.

In October of that year, a friend approached the couple and asked if they'd be willing to take their 44-foot yacht from Tahiti to San Diego.

Though the trip would be over 4,000 miles long, significantly longer than any one trip either of them had ever taken on the open water, they both felt very confident in their seafaring abilities and so they agreed to do it.

The journey started out fine, but at the two-week mark when they were just north of the equator, they heard about a hurricane that could be making its its way up to where they were going and so even though they anticipated it would kind of peter out and actually not even hit them they decided it was still in their best interest to try to sail completely away from the path of the storm to safer waters but over the next couple of days the storm only intensified and continued to change directions making it really hard to predict where safer waters was going to be And so Tammy and Richard kept desperately trying to get farther and farther away from the storm, but it was like every time they would change course and get farther away, the storm would speed up and change directions and still be coming straight for them.

And so finally, it got to the point where Tammy and Richard realized they could not actually outpace this storm, that they would have to weather it.

And so on the day it was going to hit them, they donned their rain gear and they boarded up the windows and then they stood on the deck of their yacht looking out at the horizon as this category 4 hurricane is just barreling straight towards them.

Tammy would go on to say that she never fully appreciated just how terrifying being in a hurricane is out at sea until she was in one.

She said it was a constant barrage of 50-foot waves that would literally launch the yacht.

It would become airborne, then it would come crashing down.

And each time it landed, she felt like the boat was going to break in two.

And then, as soon as it did slam down, another wave would land on top of them.

And so it just felt like at any moment, the ship was just going to be consumed by the ocean.

But Tammy and Richard were excellent sailors, and Richard was up up in the cockpit and he was doing everything he could to keep the boat from not flipping over and after a little while he had figured out a way to kind of ride the waves in such a way that they would not get totally tossed each time.

And after a couple hours of just absolute chaos, it started to seem like they had made it through the worst of the storm and that more than likely they were going to make it out of this thing relatively unharmed.

And so around this time as the storm was beginning to calm down, Richard is anchored in place in the cockpit.

He's a safety line attached to him to the ground, so he's not going anywhere.

And Tammy is just exhausted.

It was just so stressful being through the storm.

And Richard noticed, he says, Tammy, I got this up here.

Go down into the cabin and just try to get some rest.

And Tammy was very grateful and she agreed.

She opened the doors to the cabin and she had made it all the way downstairs when she hears Richard yell out from up in the cockpit, oh my god!

before a rogue wave comes crashing into their boat head-on, flipping the boat backwards like a backflip onto the top.

So it's upside down in the water.

And Tammy would say it felt like someone ripped the boat out from under her feet.

And then she came crashing down and smashed her head and was knocked unconscious.

When Tammy woke up 27 hours later, she was laying in the cabin against a chair and half on the ground.

And she opens her eyes, and the cabin she's in is half submerged, and everything inside of it has either been thrown on the ground or it's been broken.

There's papers, there's tools.

I mean, the place is just a disaster down there.

And she can tell the cabin is also slowly filling with water.

After the boat had backflipped and Tammy had been knocked unconscious, it continued to get thrown around by waves before miraculously landing upright.

Tammy could barely remember what happened and she's totally overwhelmed by what she's seeing.

She's in shock and all she knows is she has to go up on deck to find Richard.

And so she gets up and wades through the water.

She gets to the stairs.

She's yelling for Richard.

She goes up on deck and she looked around and the boat was just ruined and she's yelling for Richard.

She's looking around.

He's nowhere to be found.

And then she looks up at the cockpit where she last saw him and she can see his safety line that was attached to him, keeping him anchored to the boat, was now dangling off the back of the boat.

She ran to the back, she looked, and the safety harness had actually come undone.

It had been broken in the storm and Richard was gone.

He had been swept into the ocean and he was not wearing a life jacket.

And Tammy would say he had actually taken it off earlier in the storm and left it down in the cabin.

And then when the storm was raging again, he was back up top, anchored in place, and just didn't think to go down and get it.

And they both were just not thinking about it.

It was just one of those things in a really chaotic situation that got overlooked.

And while Tammy wanted to grieve the loss of her fiancé, it was like she couldn't.

Her survival instincts were kicking in.

And she knew if she didn't act quickly to fix this situation, she too would die.

And so she began robotically taking stock of the boat's condition, and she saw the masts had broken clean off, the sails were now dragging in the water, the engine, the radio, the electronic navigation system, the emergency position indicator device, all of it was ruined.

And so all alone in the middle of the ocean with nothing in sight, no ships, no land, no anything, on a ruined ship that is gradually sinking, After finding out your fiancé has been swept out to his death in the middle of a storm, Tammy managed to stay composed and she built a makeshift sail and began sailing the ship and she also began slowly pumping the water out of the cabin.

She went back into the cabin and she discovered some of the almanacs were still in there and she discovered there was a current that she thought she could get to and so using just a sextant and a watch she manually navigated this broken down ship using this makeshift sail into this current and then for 41 days she survived on canned food and peanut butter and she sailed 1500 miles to Hawaii.

And the whole time, she's thinking to herself, if my calculations are off, that this is not the current I'm supposed to be in, I will sail past Hawaii out into the open water and I will run out of food and water and I will die.

But she didn't die because her calculations were spot on.

When Tammy finally stepped foot on land in Hawaii, she was relieved that she had made it and that she was going to live.

But at the same time, she had this flood of emotions where she was suddenly so sad about the loss of Richard.

It was like she really hadn't had a chance to grieve his loss because that whole time after the accident, she was focused on survival.

And although Tammy would make a full recovery, it would take her six years to learn how to read again because of the head injury she sustained when the boat capsized.

But when she did regain that skill, she finally stopped and she wrote her and Richard's story in a book called Red Sky and Morning that became an international bestseller and was converted into a movie called Adrift.

The next and final story of today's episode is called Candy.

In 1971, Julianne Kepka was a bright-eyed German teenager who had just graduated high school.

On Christmas Eve of 1971, she and her mother were at the airport in Lima, Peru, waiting for a flight to Pacopa to visit her father, who was a zoologist working in the Amazon.

She and her mother and everybody else waiting for this flight were really annoyed because the flight was seven hours late due to bad weather.

Finally, it arrived and Julianne, her mother, and everybody else who had been waiting boarded Lansa Flight 508.

And immediately after takeoff, they started hitting some pretty bad turbulence because of the bad weather.

But Julianne really liked flying, so she didn't mind.

Her mother, on the other hand, was white-knuckling the armrests.

But after 10 minutes or so, as they were getting nearer to cruising altitude, the turbulence was not getting any better.

In fact, it was getting much worse.

And Julianne was starting to get worried herself.

And then, when the plane started shaking so violently that all of the overhead bins opened up, and luggage and wrapped presents and Christmas cakes started pouring out, Julianne now began white-knuckling the armrest.

As she's sitting there, she looks out the window and she sees all this lightning right outside their window and it was clear they were literally flying through a lightning storm.

And so Julianne and her mother are just looking at each other, unable to speak because they're so scared and they're listening to the other passengers screaming and yelling and everyone's starting to panic.

And then the plane starts really shaking up and down like it's being lifted 50 feet and dropping 50 feet over and over.

And then all of a sudden, there's this bright flash inside of of the cabin, and then lights go out.

And then they look out the left side and they see smoke and flames coming out of the engine that sits on the wing.

And then the plane felt like it was just falling from the sky before it dipped into an aggressive nosedive and just started bombing straight down toward the ground.

It turned out that big flash in the cabin was lightning striking the engine.

Julianne would say, despite this unbelievable chaos, the worst moment imaginable, her mother grabbed her by the hand hand and said, this is it, it's all over.

And that was the last thing her mother ever said to her.

After that, all Julianne can remember is the sound of other passengers screaming and crying and the awful grinding sounds that the engines were making.

And as she's listening to these horrible sounds getting ready to die, all of a sudden the noise just stops and she's outside of the plane.

She's still strapped into her seat, but now she's in free fall away from the plane.

And she remembers thinking how unbelievably lonely she was.

And then she looked down and she saw the canopy of the jungle fast approaching and she knew she was about to die and then she passed out.

She remembers nothing of the actual impact but she would later find out the plane broke up two miles up.

So she was in freefall for two miles in that seat before hitting the ground.

She woke up the next day looking upwards towards the jungle canopy and the first thing she said out loud was, I survived.

And she's looking around and she yells for her mother, but there's no one around her, no one yells back.

And that's when she realizes I'm all alone and probably everybody, including my mother, is dead.

She had somehow managed to not only survive, but only have a broken collarbone and some deep cuts in her leg.

She could hear planes overhead that were most likely looking for the crash site and potentially survivors, but she couldn't see them because the canopy was so thick, so they couldn't see her.

She was wearing a very short, sleeveless mini dress and flip-flops, but in fact, she had lost one of her flip-flops, but elected to keep the other one on because she had lost her glasses in the crash, and she was incredibly nearsighted, and so she would use this one flip-flop to test the ground ahead of her before committing with her barefoot.

Before the crash, she had spent a year and a half at her parents' research station out in the Amazon.

and in that time she'd picked up very valuable survival skills for being in the rainforest.

So the first thing she did was stand up and go looking for a stream because her father had told her wherever there's a stream, that stream will oftentimes lead to civilization.

And so she began walking and sure enough, she found a stream.

And instead of just walking next to the stream, she got in it and began walking directly in the middle of the stream because her parents had told her that you're less likely to get attacked by a predator if you're standing in the water versus standing on land.

She only walked a little ways before she came across the crash site.

There was no bodies, it was just debris, and all she could find that was useful was a small bag of candy.

So she took the bag of candy and continued walking down the stream.

And for several days she trudged along and she would say during the day it was incredibly hot and miserable and at night it was very cold and since she only had the small dress on it was particularly miserable.

But she said the scariest part of the whole ordeal was at night when you're trying to sleep, it's totally pitch black and you're in the middle of the Amazon and there's predators all around you.

She said it was horrifying.

On the fourth day of being in the jungle, as she walked down the stream, she heard the sound of a landing king vulture, a sound that she recognized from her time spent at her parents' Amazon Reserve.

And the sound of this vulture was just around the corner, so she couldn't see it, but she knew these huge vultures only showed up if there's a ton of dead meat.

And so she knew as soon as she rounded that corner, she was going to come face to face with the bodies from the crash, potentially even her mother.

But she kept moving forward, she turned the corner, and sure enough there were bodies.

The vulture took off and what she was left looking at was a bench with three passengers on it still buckled in and all three of their heads had been rammed underneath the earth.

They had clearly landed headfirst.

Immediately she had an intense sense of panic because she had never seen a dead body before and she thought one of them was her mother.

But when she went over to examine this particular corpse, she saw her toenails were painted pink and her mother never painted her toenails.

And so she had this intense sense of relief that it wasn't her mother, but at the same time felt very ashamed of that thought.

There was nothing on the three bodies or near them that could help her survive.

And so she said her goodbyes and she continued walking down the stream.

By the 10th day of this ordeal, she could barely stand straight because of a broken collarbone and the pain in her leg.

And so she began drifting down the river in one of the deeper sections.

And then she thought she was hallucinating when she saw this big boat docked up against the side of the river.

But when she went up to it and touched it, it was real.

She went up on shore, she looked inside, there was no one in the boat, but it looked like a boat that was used, and there was a path that led back into the jungle.

And so she followed the path, and it led to this hut, and no one was in there, but outside was a jug of gasoline.

And she had this wound in her arm that was full of maggots.

And she remembered her father using gasoline to get maggots out of a wound in their dog.

And so she took the gasoline and dumped it in her arm.

And she said it was excruciatingly painful, but she was able to pull out 30 maggots and felt very proud of that accomplishment.

After that, she fell asleep inside of the hut and just hoped that whoever lived here eventually showed up.

And sure enough, the next day she woke up and she heard two men talking outside that were walking towards her.

And she said the sound of their voice was like the sound of an angel.

And when the two men came up the path and saw her, they were obviously very shocked.

And they initially thought she was like this water goddess from a local legend that involved a half-mermaid, half-woman that was light-skinned.

And she would tell them in Spanish that she's not a water goddess, that in fact she's a girl, and she had just survived a plane crash, and she really needed their help.

It was getting late that day, so they couldn't bring her out of the jungle right away.

So they helped treat her wounds, they gave her some food and water, and the next day they brought her back to civilization.

The day after her rescue, she was reunited with her father, and apparently he was so overcome with emotion because he believed she was dead that for several hours he just couldn't speak.

Julianne was the sole survivor of the 91 people who boarded Lancash 508.

Her mother actually survived the crash but then died several days later because she couldn't move.

This is something that haunts Julianne and her family because they think about how horrible those last few moments for her mother must have been.

Julianne ultimately recovered from all of her physical injuries but to this day deals with significant emotional trauma.

Thank you for listening to the Mr.

Ballin podcast.

If you enjoyed today's stories and you're looking for more bone-chilling content, be sure to check out all of our other studios podcasts.

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Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Bedtime Stories, and Runfool.

Just search for Balin Studios wherever you get your podcasts.

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