Professional Hazards (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

and they end it up facing an extremely unexpected and dangerous professional hazard.

“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, go ahead and leave the fall button at the supermarkets check-out line and tell them you're just going to get one more thing. But then just take your time strolling through the store and just leave.

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

On the evening of July 27th, 2000, a 35-year-old woman named Esther Penn held a folder full of financial documents as she wrote an elevator down to the basement level of an old office building where she worked in New York City. Esther was exhausted because it was really getting late. I mean, the work day had actually officially ended hours ago, but today had been abnormally busy, so she had had to put an overtime to finish everything up. So, the company that Esther worked for was a very prestigious financial firm that managed investments for really wealthy clients.

“And it was Esther's job to make copies of stock certificates and other important financial documents and file them away in a big vault in the building's basement.”

And today, there had just been a lot of files to get through, and in fact, this was going to be the latest that she'd ever had to go into the vault, like during a work day.

Since she had been working here, she'd been here two years. I mean, this was like her longest day ever, and so she was just sort of over it. But now, as the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened, Esther stepped out onto the basement level, she reminded herself that she was almost done here, and she'd be able to go home soon. Like, this is not that big of a deal. And so, she walked over to the vault entrance, which was this massive, two-ton metal door. The employees went in and out of the vault constantly. This door was kept unlocked during the day, and just swung wide open. This is huge metal door.

And right now, it was standing wide open as usual. So, Esther walked through the open door into this massive vault.

You got to picture this is like a portion of the basement. You're not walking into like a little closet that they keep safe.

This is like a massive walk-in vault with rows of filing cabinets. I mean, there's all these cabinets on the walls. I mean, this is a serious space. And so, she goes in there, and she walks to the very far end of this vault, where the filing cabinet she needed was. Esther stayed there for over 15 minutes, carefully filing the copy she'd made, and then when she was done, she turned and hurried back toward the vaults. Exit, excited to get out, go upstairs, and go home. But when she got to the massive metal door, it was no longer open. It was closed.

“Now, at first, Esther was just surprised that she hadn't heard this door shut. I mean, it's a big metal door. It's kind of, you know, somehow shut. She would hear it, right?”

But she's thinking, okay, you know, I'll just, I'll just push it open. Yeah, it's a huge door, but assuming it's not locked, you can just push it right open. But when she tried to open it, she quickly became quite alarmed, because it was locked. For a little bit, she just panicked and thought this is going to be a mistake. It's not really locked. Like, I'm not really trapped inside of here, but after a few minutes, desperately trying to open this door and not being able to, because if it's really locked, you can't unlock it from the inside.

That point, after a few minutes, of sort of realizing the situation she was in, she just stood back and her mind is reeling like, what does she even do? I mean, number one, she was just completely bewildered at how this had even happened. I mean, she and her colleagues came in here all the time, and no one, at least in her mind, had ever even briefly gotten locked in before, like this didn't happen. But then again, she knew she was working in the vault later than usual, like the latest she ever had. And so Esther wondered if maybe the door was on some sort of auto lock timer to keep the vault safe after hours, like maybe this just happened automatically.

But however this had happened, Esther knew she was in a bad spot here, I mean it was late. Her colleagues were gone for the day, nobody was coming in tonight to save her. And so the earliest anybody would open this vault up again would be tomorrow, which meant she'd be stuck inside of this metal vault all night. And so Esther, it's like she's panicking here, like she doesn't want to stay in here all night, this is like a nightmare.

It was useless, I mean even if anybody was still with the building, no one's gonna hear her through this door, like she's stuck.

“So finally, she stepped back and she took some calming breaths, and then she began looking around the room for, you know, some kind of solutions, some kind of panic button maybe.”

But you know, one, there weren't any windows, there in the basement, this is a vault, there's no other way out besides this door. But then, she saw on one of the vault walls, was a fire alarm. And when Esther saw that, she almost laughed with relief, because now, it didn't matter that nobody could hear her screaming. She could just pull the alarm and immediately alert both the fire department and the building's own security. And so, therefore, people would come down here, she'd be rescued, prom solved.

So, Esther ran over, and without any hesitation, she pulled it. And right away, the alarm starts wailing, it's so loud, and Esther, she walks over to the vault door, and she's covering her ears, it's so loud.

“But she's thinking, you know, any minute now, the fire department or somebody's gonna show up, they're gonna open the door.”

And so, she's just relaxed at this point, generally speaking, alarm's going off, and she's just waiting for the door to open. Several minutes goes by, and the alarm's still going off, but the door doesn't open, like nothing's happening. And as several more minutes went by, and still, the door wasn't opening, Esther went from being relatively calm to really starting to panic again.

And then finally, it's like the panic was growing so much inside of her, it was almost unbearable.

Now, she was really feeling anxious, almost like uncontrollably so, to the point where she found herself hyperventilating. Meanwhile, a lieutenant with the New York City Fire Department hopped out of a truck in front of a towering office building in Lower Manhattan. His department had just gotten an alert that a fire alarm had just been pulled inside of this building's basement vault. And right the second, you know, as the lieutenant is standing outside of this building on the sidewalk, he didn't see her smell any smoke, but he obviously needed to go into the basement to be sure.

So, he hustled into the building with a few members of this team behind him to see what was going on. And soon after that, the lieutenant and his team were downstairs in the basement standing in front of the closed vault door, while the building security guards tried to help them get inside of the vault.

And as the lieutenant waited, he actually finally did smell something, because to this point he still is not seeing any sign of a fire or anything.

But he started to smell something, except it wasn't smoke. He actually couldn't quite place what the smell was, but it stirred this feeling inside of him that something wasn't right here. And then suddenly, he had this overpowering urge to cough and his head started to ache. And all at once, he realized exactly what that smell was, and he screamed at the security guards, not to open that vault door.

“So, Esther was right to think that by pulling the fire alarm, that would be the fastest way to call attention to herself in the situation. Because there were many very important files and documents in that vault.”

And so the alarm system that she triggered was programmed to notify the fire department and building security instantly, and they were known to have a very fast response. But in addition to quickly calling attention to authorities to come to the vault, this alarm system did another thing very well. That Esther didn't know about. This alarm also activated something that was designed to put out any potential fires inside of the vault. And so in addition to sending out an alert that would presumably bring in the fire department to put out fires in addition to building security, the alarm that Esther pulled, also released a bunch of carbon dioxide into the vault, which sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Fire's need oxygen to burn. And so by dousing the room with carbon dioxide, it should extinguish all the flames. But humans need oxygen too. And when Esther started having trouble breathing and hyperventilating, it was not because of panic. It was because literally the room she was in, the air was being sucked out of it. Carbon dioxide is actually odorless, but an artificial scent is sometimes added to these fire suppression systems. And so that lieutenant, what he was smelling outside of the vault, what he couldn't quite place it first, was that artificial smell, which he eventually realized, was a signal that there is a dangerous chemical inside of this room.

And they should not go inside, they need to get a hazmat team to go in and handle this. But unfortunately, when they did get the hazmat team and they went inside the vault, Esther was dead. She had suffocated to death.

Our second story is called The Shuttle.

“Around 530pm on Monday, May 16, 1977. 39-year-old David Tumey stood outside the Pan Am Building, which was a 59-story skyscraper right in the center of New York City.”

David checked his watch, and he sighed. The Shuttle, he was supposed to take to the airport, had just arrived, but now he had to wait for this Shuttle to unload, and then he, along with a bunch of people that he was in line with, could then finally get on, and then finally he could make his way. He was just thinking, "I'm going to be late here." David knew by taking this Shuttle at this time, he was sort of cutting it close to get to the airport and get just flight on time, but he wasn't too worried yet, because he had paid a lot of money to take this particular Shuttle to get to the airport.

I mean, anytime he needed to get to the airport quickly, this is the Shuttle he would take, because it was very high-end and much faster than the regular boss or train, and you know, it always got him there on time, at least so far it had, and so he's seeing this potential delay and he's thinking, "It'll be fine. I'll get there. I'll have enough time. I'll catch my flight."

“And so after a few minutes, all the folks who had been on the Shuttle when it arrived, they made their way off, and the Shuttle just stayed running as it waited for David, and the people he was in line with, to make their way on.”

And so as David and this queue of people he was with began marching their way onto the Shuttle, David, who was a lawyer, and he spent a lot of time in the office, head down in books and in court, he just took a moment to, you know, look up and look at the sky, and so can this last bit of the outside time he would have before basically hours of travel where he'd be back in the books. But as he was staring upwards, having this moment of solace before kind of miserable day, he heard this loud metallic groaning sound followed by a deafening bang, and then before he could even begin to figure out what was going on, he saw there was this large piece of metal spinning through the air directly above him.

At the same time, this was all happening with David and the folks over at the Shuttle, on a street next to the Pan Am building, a woman named Anne Barnakat stood at a bus stop waiting for the next bus, and all around her, the sidewalk was packed with the city's rush hour foot traffic, with people leaving work and hurrying to get to the next thing, and there's people everywhere, and Anne, I mean, she's part of this rush too, she's trying to get home.

“But she still had at least another hour on the bus before she'd finally be back in the Bronx, and it might even be longer if traffic was bad.”

But, you know, despite how miserable this commute was, she did it every day, so she was used to the slog.

But now, as Anne waited for the bus, she suddenly heard all this screaming, and then there was a series of, of sounds that just didn't make sense. There was this booming noise, then there was a series of sharp cracking noises, and then a roaring sound, and then what sounded almost like thousands of tiny little bells being rang all at once. Instinctively, she just threw her arms up over her head, as everybody around her started running around in a panic and Anne, she was just trying to protect herself, you know, just standing there shielding her head and her body.

But it didn't help, because pretty much immediately, her arms and her head exploded with sharp pain, and she fell to the ground, and the last thing she would have seen as she, she laid on her back, having no idea what was going on here, was that the air itself appeared to be glittering. What happened to Anne and to David outside of the Pan Am Building would go on to change travel in New York City forever, because the shuttle that David paid all that extra money for was actually a very large helicopter that took off from the top of the Pan Am Building.

The company that operated it was focused exclusively on always being able to get there, usually very wealthy customers, to the airport as quickly as possible, and so to do that, to save time, whenever they landed the helicopter on the top of the Pan Am Building, for example, they always left the helicopter running at full bore, while its passengers got off and on.

It was highly efficient, but also pretty hard on the helicopter's machinery, and that particular afternoon right before David got on board.

One of the helicopter supporting struts, which holds the landing gear in place, gave out.

Then the props went over the side of the building, and fell 59 stories, and on the way down they smashed into the building's windows along the way, and caused this lethal shower of glass rain and metal shards to rain down on all the folks down below.

“Four people on the roof, including David, were killed by the out-of-control helicopter blades, and the fifth fatality was Anne, who was down below on the ground, and she was killed when one of those helicopter blades fell onto her.”

As a result of this tragedy, the rooftop helicopter pad on the Pan Am Building was immediately closed permanently, and New York City, ultimately again as a result of this tragedy, banned commercial helicopter landings on all skyscrapers.

The third and final story is called Taking Shelter.

On the morning of March 26th, 1940, a 35-year-old farm worker named Miller Taylor ran through a heavy rainstorm towards this old fruit warehouse in Santa Rosa, California. His teeth were chattering from the cold, and he was really eager to get to shelter here.

“Though Miller didn't actually live here in Santa Rosa, for most of the year he lived on this indigenous reservation in another part of the state.”

But he, along with thousands of other workers from all around the country, came to Santa Rosa each year to make money during harvest season, and like most of those workers, when Miller was in town for the harvest, he was essentially homeless. He was forced because he had noor else to go to sleep inside of this large encampment along the railroad tracks. Now, most of the time, this less than ideal living situation was actually fine. It did get pretty cold at night this time of the year, but Miller and the other workers had created tons of makeshift fire pits along the tracks that kept them warm.

And these fires basically burned all night long, since it was so easy to find lots of quality firewood nearby, and so all the workers just took turns collecting it and adding it to the fire.

“But whenever there was like a really bad storm like this one they were in now, building a fire wasn't an option, and camping outside suddenly became miserable.”

And so just now there was this big flash of lightning in the sky right as Miller reached the warehouse, but instead of going into the warehouse to seek shelter, he ducked down underneath it and began to crawl under the warehouse. So the warehouse itself was locked because it was the main storage space for the prunes that they were here to harvest, and so they didn't have access to it. But the warehouse itself was this 200 foot wide structure, and it was raised up off the ground by these big support posts, and so there was space underneath it that was actually big enough that you could sit up underneath this structure.

And the company wasn't using it, it was just off the ground to presumably protect the prunes, but Miller and the others, they would go under there like to relax into seek shelter from storms. And so Miller, he crawls down below and he takes a spot underneath this warehouse alongside several other warehouse workers that were also waiting out the storm. And they had a jug of wine they were passing around just drinking and just waiting for this thing to pass. But this storm just did not let up. The rain kept on coming in the wind, the thunder and lightning it just kept getting more and more intense.

And so hours later, Miller and the others were still waiting out this storm underneath the warehouse, but now in addition to just being freezing cold and out of wine. They'd begun to notice that the water outside that was pooling from the storm had begun coming down underneath the warehouse, like it was flooding all around them. At the same time this was happening, just a few feet away from the warehouse in one of the fruit company's offices, and employee named Gordon Boyd was inside doing some paperwork.

When he suddenly heard this loud crack and then a rumbling sound, he stopped what he was doing, and as soon as the noise it stopped, he ran outside into the storm to see what was going on. And when he got out there, he was completely shocked to see that the warehouse had completely collapsed.

Now Gordon, who was shocked by this, the first thought he had is like this doesn't make any sense.

But there had been plenty of actually way stronger storms in this area before, and the warehouse had always been fine.

“So it's like he has no idea how this storm could have caused this to happen, but more than that, he just had no idea what to actually do about it.”

So he just stood there, gaping, but then he looked off in the distance towards where the workers in camera was, and he noticed there weren't any fires burning like usual. Now he knew obviously there's a storm, it's very difficult to make a fire in a storm, but the workers would do that sometimes. In the fact that there were not no fires burning whatsoever for all the workers that lived there, that was sort of unusual. And it made him realize that very likely most or all of the workers had very likely sought out shelter somewhere else, and he knew one of the places they would go for shelter was underneath that warehouse.

“And so he snapped his vision back to the debris of the wreckage of the warehouse, and he noticed a single human hand sticking out of the debris.”

So the seasonal workers in Santa Rosa, they relied on those fires to keep the warm at night and to cook food.

And there were thousands of workers, so there was like a constant need for lots of quality wood to keep said fires going. We would turn out many of the workers got this wood from the fruit warehouse, where Miller had been taking shelter with the others. For basically the entire harvest season, the workers at the encampment had been going under that warehouse, and taking parts of its wooden support system to use for firewood. Workers were specifically taking out the buildings sway braces, which run horizontally and are used to help support and stabilize the floor above.

“They don't look essential, but they are. And by the time this particular storm rolled through, so many of those braces had been removed, that when Miller and the others took refuge down there, the structure was incredibly weak.”

And it just could not withstand the weight of the hundreds of tons of prunes on the floor above, and the battering winds from the storm and the rain, and so eventually it caused it to collapse. When Gordon saw the human hand coming out of the rubble, he immediately called the sheriff, who put together this huge rescue effort that was launched pretty much right away to pull anybody out of the rubble. And they would find all nine workers who had been under there, including Miller, but they had all been crushed to death.

Ultimately, these deaths were ruled to be an accident, and nobody was found criminally negligent.

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. Ballem Podcast, strange dark and mysterious stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballem. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone in Cole, the episode was written by Kate Murdock, story editing by Evan Allen and by Luke Beratz. Research and fact-checking by Shelley Shu, Samantha Van Hoos, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fassiano.

Research and fact-checking supervision by Steven Eir, audio editing and post-produced by Whitley Casio and Jordan Stittam. Production support by Antonio Minata and Delana Corley, artwork by Jessica Klogston-Kiner, theme song "Something Wicked" by Ross Bugden.