In the Grips of Death

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Today's podcast features two stories about people who survived seemingly certain death scenarios.

The audio from both 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 Lifeline, and it's about about the Earth equivalent of being lost in outer space.

The second story you'll hear is called The Torngots, and it's about a group of hikers who went into a forbidding wilderness.

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've come to the right 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, the next time the Amazon Music Follow button needs a phone charger, offer them your broken one that only works when you bend the chord at a certain angle.

Okay, let's get into our first story called Lifeline.

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The extreme pressure on their bodies from being so deep will cause some of the mixed gas they breathe to get trapped inside of their body.

Now this is harmless while it's happening, so while they're down at depth, this doesn't matter.

But when they ascend, they have to do what's called decompression stops, where they basically stop in the water column at certain depths and just wait and allow these trapped gases to naturally come out of their body.

Now if they skip these decompression stops and just rush to the surface, those trapped gases will not leave their body and they will expand inside of them, causing a condition called decompression sickness or the bends, and it can be fatal.

Now these decompression stops get longer and longer the deeper you go.

And in the case of saturation divers, they'll go as deep as 2,000 feet.

And for reference, in order to safely ascend from 2,000 feet, it would take you about 33 hours.

And so these oil and gas companies can't afford to have their divers taking 33 hours in between dives.

And so they came up with a clever workaround.

They built a pressurized chamber system on board ships and oil rigs where their divers would live in between their dives.

And what this did was by keeping their divers constantly under pressure, either literally underwater or in this system, the trapped gases inside of them didn't have a chance to expand, and so their divers couldn't get the bends.

The divers would live inside of this incredibly cramped chamber for weeks at a time, getting transported to and from the seafloor inside of this small pressurized sphere that's called a dive bell that could detach from the chamber without totally depressurizing the whole system.

At the end of these divers' multi-week shifts, they would do one long decompression stop inside of the chamber.

And then when they were done, they'd step out of the chamber and they'd be fine again.

In September of 2012, a 32-year-old saturation diver named Chris Lemmons was on board a dive ship in the middle of the North Sea.

He, along with 11 other divers, had just started a four-week long saturation shift.

On the 12th of that month, Chris, along with two other divers named Dave and Duncan, were scheduled to perform routine maintenance on an oil platform 330 feet below the surface.

The North Sea is notorious for terrible weather, but this day the weather was especially bad, and they considered not doing the dive, but ultimately they decided to do it anyways.

As Chris, Dave, and Duncan put on their diving equipment and climbed from their living chamber through the tunnel into the dive bell, the captain of the ship navigated directly over this oil platform and then flipped on autopilot mode, which activated dynamic positioning.

Now, dive ships rely heavily on dynamic positioning, which is really just this high-tech computer that makes sure as soon as you turn it on that the ship does not move from a particular spot in the water.

So regardless of the swells and the wind, the ship stays steady.

And this is really important when you have divers in the water because the dive bell is connected to the ship and the divers are connected to the dive bell.

And so if the ship is moving all over the place, so is the dive bell and so are the divers, making it impossible for the divers to do their job.

Once the captain had the dynamic positioning up and running, the three divers sealed the door of the dive bell behind them, and then the dive bell was detached from the chamber and then lowered through a hole in the middle of the ship into the ocean.

Once the bell got down to 330 feet, Chris opened up a hatch on the bottom of the dive bell that led directly into the water.

Now because the pressure inside the bell matches the pressure outside the bell, water does not come in through this hole.

Duncan was the bell man for the night, so he would not be going out and doing any diving.

He would be staying in the bell to support Dave and Chris.

And so he helped them get their big helmets on and connected their umbilical to each of them.

Sat divers, when they're outside of the bell, are completely reliant on their umbilical.

It's this long stretch of tubes and wires that are connected directly to their suit and to their helmet, and it provides air as well as heat and electricity to their lights, and it provides radio communication up to the people on the boat.

Once Chris and Dave were all set up, they slipped through the hole at the bottom of the bell, which brought them down to this little platform that was suspended right below the bell.

and from there they leapt off all the way down to the seafloor.

Now sat divers will say that leap from that platform is both amazing and terrifying because once you leave the bell, it's completely pitch black all around you, so there's no reference point of how fast you're going or even how close to the ground you are.

And so it feels like you're just sinking into this endless abyss before you crash into the ground.

Once Chris and Dave did hit the ground, they stood up and began walking, and they were directed by the radio in their helmet which direction they needed to go to reach this oil platform.

The oil platform was 11 meters tall and it looked like a sort of pyramid of these big steel pipes.

They climbed up the the side until they reached their respective working area and then they settled in to do their job which they expected to take about six hours.

At first everything was going to plan but about an hour into the job something went terribly wrong on the surface.

The dynamic positioning computer failed.

Now the captain immediately saw it and just expected the backup computer to kick in and take over.

But in a terrible turn of luck the backup computer also failed.

And so very quickly, this huge dive ship began drifting in the rough seas, dragging with it the dive bell and the divers 330 feet below.

While the captain struggled to try to fix the system and get it back online and get the ship back on station, another crew member hopped on the radio and called down to Dave and Chris, who were outside of the dive bell, and told them to abandon the structure and get back in the bell ASAP.

And Chris and Dave could tell from the urgency in this person's voice that this was no drill, this was serious.

Chris and Dave were both positioned on the south side of the structure about halfway up, and their umbilicals were running straight up the structure and then northward because the ship was drifting northward.

So neither Chris nor Dave could go around the structure.

They needed to go straight up before being able to climb their umbilicals back up to the bell.

And so both men began climbing, but they could feel the tension on their umbilical was getting tighter and tighter, and Dave managed to get all the way to the top and he cleared the lip, and as soon as he was on top, he started getting pulled away from the structure.

And he looked to see if Chris was also getting pulled, and all he saw was Chris's umbilical, impossibly stretched, still draped over the south side, and he could not see Chris.

And that's when Dave, Duncan, and all the people on the surface heard Chris come over the radio, frantically saying he was stuck on the underwater structure.

His umbilical had gotten wrapped around one of the pylons.

And so through the radio, Chris asked Duncan to give him more slack.

But Duncan said, there is no more slack.

We are completely tight here.

You have to get it free.

And Chris would say, I can't unfree it.

It keeps getting tighter and tighter.

I can't get it off the pylon.

And so Dave jumped down onto the platform and tried to pull himself over to Chris, but his own umbilical was getting pulled towards the dive belt, and so he could not help Chris.

And so Dave knew he couldn't do anything, so he turned and began crawling up his umbilical towards the dive belt.

And as he's climbing, he hears behind him this extremely loud explosion.

It sounded like a shotgun going off.

And what it was was Chris's umbilical snapping under the tension.

As soon as the umbilical snapped, it sent Chris flying backwards off the structure, falling towards the ocean floor.

Without his umbilical, he wouldn't have had light, he wouldn't have had a radio to talk to anybody up on the boat, he wouldn't have had heat, and the water was just barely above freezing, and so he would have been very cold, very fast, and he would not have had an air supply.

Although he would have had two backup canisters on his back that would automatically turn on, however, they only gave him five or maybe six minutes of air.

And so when Chris hit the ocean floor, it would have been eerily quiet and totally, completely pitch black.

He stood up at some point and looked around him and didn't see anything, but knew he had to get back to the underwater structure.

It was his only chance of anybody finding him again.

And so he had to make the impossible decision of just choosing a direction and blindly walking, not having any idea what you're walking towards.

Choose wrong and you might walk over a cliff.

But at some point Chris made up his mind and just began walking in a single direction and miraculously he walked into the underwater structure.

He climbed up the side until he got to the top, which was a flat metal grate, and there he looked around and saw there was no dive bell, there was no sign of anything.

It was just him.

He was completely all alone.

And he must have known at this point that he was running out of air.

He probably had maybe one or two minutes left, and so he would have been acutely aware that even if they're looking for him, they're not going to find him in time.

He's going to die.

And at some point, breathing would have become extremely difficult until there was no more air, and then he would have passed out and killed killed over.

Back on the surface, the captain was desperately trying to use manual controls to pilot the ship back over where Chris was, but because of how rough the seas were, it was proving to be nearly impossible.

As the captain struggled, other members of the crew launched a remote-controlled vehicle into the water to at least go down and try to find Chris.

And so they decided they would just pilot straight to the underwater structure and begin looking around that area.

And so for a few anxious minutes, the crew on board the ship watched the camera, which was the live feed coming from this underwater vehicle, as it went through totally dark water.

And then at some point on the screen, the structure just appeared, and the vehicle, as it went up towards the top, it got a look at the very top of the structure.

And on the screen, they saw Chris lying on his side, totally motionless.

At this point, he had been without air for at least 20 minutes.

In a last-ditch effort, the captain decided to completely power off the ship and its computer and just do a hard reset, something that you would never do, especially in rough seas, because if it doesn't come back on again, you are dead in the water.

But when they turned it back on again, the ship came on and the computer system came back online, including the dynamic positioning computer.

And so the captain immediately threw it on autopilot and the ship navigated right over where Chris's last position was.

After Chris's umbilical had broken, Dave had managed to climb back up to the bell and he was just standing underneath that platform right beneath it.

And so when the ship got right back over Chris's position, Dave leapt off the platform, got to to the seafloor, climbed up the structure, grabbed hold of Chris's body, and hauled him back up into the bell.

Once Chris's body was inside the bell, Duncan, the bellman, removed Chris's helmet and he saw that his face was blue and he was totally lifeless.

But Duncan immediately just gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

And after giving him two big breaths, Chris came back to life.

He started gagging and coughing and he's looking around wide-eyed.

And Duncan and Dave are looking at him like, you gotta be kidding me.

You're supposed to be dead.

And after about 30 seconds, the color in Chris's face had totally come back, and he was looking at Duncan and Dave and asked them, you know, what happened?

And Duncan and Dave didn't have an answer for him.

And so instead, all three men just started laughing and hugging.

They could not believe it.

Once Chris was brought back up to the ship, the dive medic looked at him and concluded that nothing was wrong with him.

He was perfectly fine, despite the fact he had been without an air supply for over 30 minutes.

And three weeks after the incident, Chris was back down saturation diving again.

Today, scientists don't know how Chris survived.

The leading theory is that it was just so cold, it slowed his heart and his brain down, and that somehow kept him alive.

But the reality is, his survival is a total mystery.

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Our next and final story is called The Torngots.

On July 19th, 2013, 49-year-old Matt Dyer climbed on board a tiny, 19-seat twin-otter airplane that was parked on the tarmac of the Montreal International Airport in Canada.

Matt was about to take off on the first of two flights that would take him and seven other adventurous people deep into one of the most remote and wild regions in North America.

For Matt, this trip was going to be the most amazing journey of his life.

He had seen the ad for this two-week-long expedition about a year earlier when he was looking through a magazine put out by an environmental organization called the Sierra Club.

Now, even though Matt was a lawyer, he didn't make much money.

He lived in this tiny town in central Maine, where he made a living by offering either free or very low-cost legal assistance for some of the state's poorest residents.

But Matt was an avid outdoorsman, and when he saw the opportunity to explore one of Canada's newest national parks that was so far north it was practically in the Arctic Circle, he decided the hefty $6,000 price tag was well worth it.

Two and a half hours later, after flying over 900 miles due north away from the airport in Montreal, The Twin Otter airplane that Matt and the others were riding on touched down on a narrow gravel landing strip situated between this huge forest on a mountainside and a river on the other side.

After climbing off the plane with all of their equipment, Matt and the seven others hustled their way over to the stretch of flimsy plywood buildings that lined the runway.

These buildings and this entire area they were in was not a part of this new national park they were going to.

This was like their staging area to prepare and get ready before catching another flight that would bring them into the park.

And so Matt and the seven other people he was with, which included the two trip leaders from the Sierra Club, they would stay at this temporary base camp for the next couple of days, going over their hiking routes and talking about emergency procedures and protocols.

And then after those two days were up, the group felt like they were ready.

And so the group packed up all their things and they boarded the tiny float plane out on the water that would take them to their final destination, this new Canadian national park, better known as the Torngot Mountains.

45 minutes later, the pilot of the float plane began to descend through the clouds to make their landing on a little water inlet.

And as the pilot did that, Matt and the seven others were able to look out the window and actually see the Torngot Mountains for the first time.

Now, all of them had seen dozens and dozens of pictures of this area, but seeing it for the first time in person was still shocking.

The area looks like an alien planet.

The wilderness in and around the Torngots is not the same kind of wilderness we think of when we think about going hiking in the forest or going camping or something.

No, the wilderness in the Torngats is primordial.

It's like you're looking out at a place from the very beginning of time, like dinosaurs should be walking around this area.

As far as Matt could see in any direction were these huge, jagged mountains that had been carved out of the earth by glaciers hundreds of thousands of years ago.

And those same glaciers had created hundreds of waterways between the mountains called fjords that almost looked like blue-veined fingers.

And even from high up in the plain, Matt could look down and the water of these fjords were so clear that he could see the speckled backs of brown trout swimming beneath the surface.

But while this landscape was undoubtedly spectacularly beautiful and pristine and totally incredible, it was equal parts unwelcoming to people.

There are no roads in the Torngats, there's no campsites, there's no facilities, there's no internet, there's no cell phone, and the weather is unbelievably harsh.

It's freezing cold and wet most of the time.

And then even when it's a little bit warm and a little bit nice there, the weather can change in an instant and become freezing cold and wet all over again.

And so, as such, the handful of visitors that go into this area every year are expected to be 100% self-reliant because this really is one of the most dangerous wild regions in the world.

But for Matt, as he looked out his window and surveyed this landscape, he wasn't second-guessing his decision to go into this hostile environment.

No.

I mean, the reason he was willing to fork over all that money to go on this trip is because he really wanted to experience extreme wilderness firsthand.

And so finally, the pilot of the float plane came into land on this little water inlet, and then the pilot ferried the craft over to this beach, and then Matt and the seven others piled off onto land with all of their things.

And then as the pilot turned around and left, the two Sierra Sierra Club trip leaders, a 61-year-old man named Rich Gross and a 60-year-old woman named Marta Chase, told the group to pick up their things and follow them.

And so Rich and Marta led the hikers about 500 feet away from where they had just been dropped off up to this slightly elevated, mostly flat area that kind of overlooked the fjord and had this incredible view of all the mountains around them.

Now, unlike the temporary base camp they had been at for the past couple of days, this camp was nowhere near any forests.

They were basically on a wide open plain that kind of went right up into these mountains.

So it's very wide open where they're staying.

And so after Rich and Marta instructed the group where to set up their tents, Matt and the others got to doing that.

And then after they were all set up, Rich and Marta put a small electric fence around the perimeter of their tents to keep any nosy animals out.

And then the group headed up a little bit higher on this mountain near them to take their first group photo.

And in this photo, they all look so happy and so excited for what's to come.

And over the next couple of days, their trip would go exactly to plan.

During the daytime hours, they would hike all of their pre-planned hiking routes all over the mountains and down near the water.

And at night, they would eat their food and drink fresh water from the fjord and swap stories from back home.

But their perfect trip was about to become a nightmare.

In the early evening hours of Tuesday, July 23rd, so two days after the group arrived in the Torngot Mountains, Matt and the others returned from one of their hikes.

Now, the day had been cold and rainy, but the group was in good spirits.

This was their last day at this particular camping spot.

The next morning, they were going to pack up and head farther inland to their next camping spot.

After Matt and the others had put their gear back inside of their tents, they came back out to see that Rich and Marta, the two trip leads, had organized a special feast for the group to celebrate the successful beginning of their trip.

And so the group all sat around eating salami and crackers and drinking rum mixed with lemonade as they talked excitedly about the next couple of days and what they could expect.

At some point during the festivities, Matt was tired and so he broke away from the group, he climbed back inside of his tent, got inside of his sleeping bag, and before long, he was fast asleep.

A few hours later, around 3.30 in the morning, Matt suddenly woke up.

He had no idea what had woken him up, and so for a second, he just lay there listening to the outside world and just kind of staring straight up.

Now, the moon moon was out that night, so there was some illumination.

And as he looked straight up at the underside of his tent, he sees this huge figure move across the side of his tent and then stop right on top of him.

And then before Matt's brain could process what was happening, this huge figure began pressing down on the fabric of Matt's tent.

And so he's seeing his tent collapsing in on him.

Matt's not doing anything.

He's not saying anything.

He's just watching in horror.

And then suddenly the tent rips open and these two arms arms reach into the tent and they grab at Matt.

And Matt threw his hands up in defense and screamed out for help.

And as he did that, he suddenly felt this vice-like grip on the top of his head.

And then before long, he was being pulled out of the hole in his tent out into the night.

And as Matt is being dragged along on the ground, having no idea what's going on, he can't move.

All he can hear is this crunching sound, which he would later find out was the sound of his skull and jaw breaking.

And he started to smell this horrible rotten fish smell.

And then he felt what felt like saliva coming over his face.

And then Matt began kind of trying to look around because he couldn't really move his head.

And he noticed all he could see was white fur.

And it was then that Matt realized he was in the jaws of one of the world's most powerful and deadliest predators.

Standing 10 feet tall on its hind legs and weighing as much as 1700 pounds, the North American polar bear sits right on top of the Arctic food chain.

And now this apex predator was dragging Matt by the skull down to the beach where Matt knew he would be eaten, even if Matt was still alive when the eating began.

When the bear first ripped open Matt's tent and bit down on the top of his skull, Matt let out that scream and it actually woke up the entire camp.

And one of the first people to emerge from their tents to see what was going on was one of the trip leaders, Marta.

And so she jumps out of her tent and just three feet away from her, she sees this huge polar bear on its hind legs diving into the tent to get after Matt.

And so Marta instinctively yells out to Rich to get his flare gun and she dove back into her tent to retrieve her own flare gun.

But by the time she and Rich had both emerged gun in hand, this polar bear had already dragged Matt 200 feet away from the camp.

And by this point, the other hikers in the group had also emerged from their tents.

and after realizing what was going on, they just stood there, absolutely paralyzed with shock, staring at this bear, dragging one of their companions down to the beach to be killed.

Then, after Rich fired his flare gun generally in the direction of the bear, it kind of snapped the group out of their paralysis, and then moments later, they were all screaming and banging pots and pans to try to terrify the bear into releasing Matt from its jaws.

Matt couldn't hear the sounds of his companions calling out to try to save him, nor did Matt feel any pain.

He was in shock.

The only thing going through Matt's head as he was being dragged along the ground to the beach was, I'm going to die.

I'm either going to die on the way to the beach, or when I get there, then when the bear starts eating me, I'm going to die.

And when he thought about this, it was with a kind of eerie, calm detachment.

Like he wasn't sad or mad.

It was just kind of a fact.

This was going to happen.

But as Matt was kind of making peace with his reality, Rich fired that flare gunshot, and that ball of chemical fire exploded basically right in front of the polar bear's face.

And the polar bear, who was startled by the flare, instinctively whipped its head to the side, up and then down again, and it didn't let go of Matt.

And so Matt was whipped like a ragdoll up and then was slammed down into the ground.

And when Matt hit the ground, he heard the sound of his neck breaking.

But as Matt was laying there, the bear released released him from its jaws and then behind Matt, the bear turned around and began walking away.

And so Matt could hear the sound of its big paws moving away from him and suddenly Matt's thinking, oh my god, I might survive this.

And so he tried to lay as still as he possibly could so as not to attract any attention and he began repeating in his head over and over and over again, please bear, go away, please bear, go away.

But as if out of a horror movie, as Matt is laying there repeating this phrase, he hears the sound of this bear stopping, turning around, and start moving back towards him.

And so Matt's just thinking, okay, it's going to come back over here, it's going to bite my head, and that's the end.

But luckily, Rich by this point, one of the triple leads, had run down closer to the beach, reloaded his flare gun, and right as this bear was going to bite Matt again, Rich had fired that flare, and once again, the chemical fire had kind of exploded right near the bear, causing it to get startled, it turned around, it ran off, and this time the bear did not return.

It would turn out Rich and Marta, the two trip leaders from the Sierra Club, had chosen a location for this campsite that was so heavily trafficked by polar bears, it was referred to as a polar bear highway.

When all of the hikers, which included Marta and Rich, had been given their safety brief when they were staying in those plywood structures at that base camp near the runway, well, part of the brief was whenever you make camp in the Torngots, you want to be at least a quarter mile away from water, go way inland, because the polar bears hunt and fish and walk around right along the edge of these fjords.

But despite all seven members of this Sierra Club expedition being experienced wilderness backpackers, none of them really appreciated just how dangerous it was to be camping or even hiking around in known polar bear territory.

And so this is why they ultimately ignored the safety brief and set up their first camp just a couple hundred feet away from the water's edge.

And even prior to the attack on Matt, when the group literally saw polar bears wandering around near their camp and even at one point had to fire their flare guns at the polar bears to get them to leave, the group still decided it was best to stay at this particular campsite.

Perhaps they believed their electric fence they had set up around the perimeter of their tents would protect them from these polar bears.

But obviously, that had not been the case.

The bear that attacked Matt had been totally unaffected by their fence.

Matt would survive this attack, but really only because one of the members of the expedition happened to be a medical doctor, and so they were able to stabilize Matt until help arrived.

Matt's injuries were extensive.

They included a broken skull, a broken jaw, he had slash marks and puncture wounds all over his head and his neck, and all of those wounds got horribly infected.

And also his voice was permanently changed as well, because the bear also slashed his vocal cords.

Following the attack on Matt, Parks Canada, which is the agency that oversees all of Canada's national parks, including Torngots, has mandated that any organization going into Torngots National Park has to have a polar bear protection plan in place.

As for Matt, he does not make a big deal about his near-death experience.

In fact, he kind of makes light of it and sometimes even makes jokes about it.

As for the polar bear that attacked him, Matt holds no ill will.

If anything, the attack has made him more interested and appreciative of the apex predator.

In August of 2014, so 11 months after Matt's brush with death, he returned to the Torngoths and even visited the actual site of the attack, perhaps to get closure.

Except this time, he was in the company of an armed polar bear expert.

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