The Craziest Accidents that Should Have Been Fatal

The human body is generally thought of as being pretty weak and fragile compared to other animals. And yet there are countless stories of people walking away from events that seem impossible to survive. You’ve probably heard more than one story of someone falling thousands of feet from a plane with no parachute only to survive. It’s not exactly a common occurrence, but it happens often enough that there’s even a Guinness World Record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. The record fall is over 33,000 feet, and please do not attempt to steal this record.

But sometimes the events people survive are not only dangerous, but downright bizarre. Today we’ll be looking at some of the strangest freak accidents people have ever survived.

The Human Lightning Rod

Born in 1912, Roy Sullivan spent much of his life as a park ranger in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. He also spent much of his life running away from clouds and carrying a can of water in case his hair caught fire. But he had a good reason, and it all began in April of 1942.

Roy was in the park’s fire lookout tower, trying to wait out a thunderstorm. The tower, which didn’t have a lightning rod to protect it, was struck seven or eight times by lightning and caught fire. Needing to escape the flames, Roy ran out of the tower. But he only made it a few feet before being struck by lightning himself. It burned the skin on his right leg and burned a hole through his shoe, but otherwise he was fine.

For years, it seemed like it was just a freak accident. The lookout tower would have been placed on the high ground, making Roy more susceptible to a possible lightning strike than somebody in the park normally would have been. By itself, this wouldn’t have been an amazing story. Lightning strikes are only fatal to humans about 10% of the time, though the fact that Roy didn’t suffer any permanent injury or disability as a result is quite a bit rarer.

Fast forward to the summer of 1969, and things began to take a bizarre turn. Roy was driving on a mountain road during a storm when a lightning bolt hit a nearby tree and ricocheted towards his truck, entering through the open window and striking him. The jolt burned off his eyebrows and eyelashes, set his hair on fire, and knocked him unconscious with the car still in gear. Fortunately the car stopped moving just before falling off a cliff.

The next year Roy was struck again, this time in his front yard. Lightning hit a nearby transformer then jumped to his shoulder, burning him. Two years later lightning would again hit Roy while he was working inside a ranger station at the park. It set his hair on fire so he ran to the bathroom, but his head couldn’t fit under the sink’s faucet. He was able to eventually put the fire out with a wet towel, but this fourth total strike (and the third in four years) caused Roy to become justifiably paranoid.

From then on Roy always carried a can of water with him and would drive away from storm clouds, though he often felt that the clouds were chasing him. He may have been right, because barely a year later it would happen again. And again three years later. And then one final time the following year.

The seventh and final time Roy was hit by lightning was when he was out fishing in a freshwater pond. A bolt of lightning struck the top of his head, lighting it on fire before traveling down his body and burning his chest and stomach. He turned to run to his truck and grab the water, only to be stopped when he felt something on the other end of his fishing rod. Attached to his line was a trout he had just caught, and attached to that trout there was now a hungry bear.

Roy hit the bear with a stick to chase it off before running to his truck to get the can of water for his head.

In addition to the seven times Roy was struck by lightning, his wife was also once hit while they were in their yard hanging clothes out to dry. There’s no record of anything like this happening before or since, so while being hit by lightning once usually isn’t fatal it’s difficult to estimate the odds of surviving it seven times. But what is truly remarkable is that Roy suffered no permanent physical harm from the numerous unfortunate incidents. The only negative consequence was loneliness, as people didn’t want to hang around the guy known as a human lightning rod.

Self-Decapitation

At the age of 74, Forthman Murff had been a lifelong lumberjack. He was alone in the woods of Gattman, Mississippi one day while cutting down trees for a local timber company, something he had done so many times in his life before. But on this day, things weren’t going to go according to plan.

Murff felled a tree as normal, but on its way to the ground it knocked a branch off another tree that flew towards Murff and knocked him off his ladder and into a ditch. The falling tree managed to strike a second tree as well, this time sending that entire tree crashing down onto the poor man’s leg, crushing it and breaking his foot.

The whole ordeal briefly knocked Murff unconscious, but he woke up to discover that he had fallen on top of his chainsaw, which was still running. The saw had nearly cut clean through his neck, only stopping once it hit his spine. All that remained to keep Murff’s head attached was his spine and a small bit of flesh at the back of his neck, which fortunately included his carotid arteries.

Murff angrily threw his chainsaw to the side, pulled his crushed leg out from under the tree, and managed to stand up on his one good foot. He hopped on his good leg towards his pickup truck, periodically stopping to readjust his head so as not to drown by pouring too much blood into his windpipe. This was 1984, so there weren’t any cell phones. Instead, Murff had to drive to his nearest neighbour’s house half a mile away while holding his head in place.

The neighbour then drove him the additional 17 miles to the hospital. He had to hold his head the entire way there, as all of the muscles that would hold it in place had been severed.

Defying all expectations, Murff managed to make a full recovery after six surgeries and a couple infections from all the sawdust in his neck. According to Dr. Roger Lowry, one of the surgeons that helped save Murff’s life, “You shouldn’t be able to cut your head halfway off and drive out of the woods… It could have happened to someone out here in the [hospital] parking lot and they could have died.”

Murff lived another 18 years after this accident, passing away in 2003 at the age of 92. However, it doesn’t seem that Murff actually learned anything from his near death experience. When a local reporter interviewed him ten years after the event, he was quoted as saying that the three big loves of his life were “music, Jesus, and chainsaws”.

Dead on Arrival

It was the first warm day of spring in Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, with warm being a relative term. Children still bundled up to go outside and play, but rain the day before had melted most of the snow on the ground. Gary, Greg, and Gardell Martin, who were 11, 7, and less than 2 years old respectively, went outside to play together. The older boys were looking after their younger sibling, when Gardell suddenly disappeared.

Greg ran into the kitchen crying to tell his mother that Gardell had vanished. She and her two eldest daughters joined the boys outside to search for the missing toddler, but there was no sign of him. There was a river that ran through their back yard, and they were running up and down the river shouting Gardell’s name.

Their neighbour, Randall Beachel, saw the commotion through his kitchen window while washing dishes. The family looked frantic, and one of the girls was barefoot with no jacket on. He knew something had to be wrong, so he came outside to offer help. Upon hearing what was wrong, he grabbed his wife to join him and search further down the river.

Over 600 feet downstream, Randall saw Gardell’s body in the river. His body was lodged on an underwater knoll which fortunately had positioned him face up and with his face turned away from the rushing current. Randall rushed into the river to retrieve the boy, but not before tripping and falling into the water himself. It was a frigid 35 degrees and Gardell had been missing for over 20 minutes.

He turned the boy over in an attempt to empty any water out of his mouth and lungs while waving over the paramedics that had just arrived.

Paramedics immediately placed a mask over Gardell’s mouth so they could hand-pump air into his lungs while performing CPR, then they rushed off to the nearest emergency room. When the family arrived at the hospital, they were informed that Gardell was going to be airlifted to Geisinger Medical Center 15 miles away. But CPR had been going on for a while already. By the time Gardell made it to Geisinger, CPR had already been performed for over an hour; more than twice as long as it usually takes for rescuers to give up.

Once at Geisinger, Dr. Frank Maffei and his team got to work trying to warm up the boy’s body. The freezing cold water had cooled his internal temperature to only 77 degrees, and they began IVs of warm fluids to try to slowly raise it. One medical resident, understandably believing that the boy was a lost cause, asked at what point they were going to stop.

Dr. Maffei said they would keep going until the body was still unresponsive once it was warmed up to 90 degrees. The resident then asked about his blood pH. A normal pH for blood is between 7.35 and 7.45, and anything below 6.8 or above 7.8 is considered incompatible with life. Gardell’s blood pH was 6.5. By every metric the boy was dead, and had been for over an hour. But Maffei wasn’t ready to give up.

Gardell was moved to an operating room so he could be hooked up to a heart bypass machine. This machine would warm up and circulate the blood to raise his internal temperature. As a surgeon began preparations to cut open his chest and attach the machine, Dr. Maffei decided to check his pulse one more time.

They had been performing CPR for an hour and 41 minutes, the blood pH had fallen below a lethal level due to oxygen deprivation, and the body had suffered severe hypothermia. But against all odds, he now had a pulse.

Dr. Maffei immediately went to speak with Gardell’s mother and try to manage her expectations. Brain damage can begin in as little as one minute after being deprived of oxygen, and her son had been dead for nearly two hours. There was no telling when or if he would ever wake up, and if he did wake up he would likely have severe neurological problems.

Late that night, Gardell’s father returned home from his job as a trucker and joined the rest of the family. He walked into the boy’s hospital room and said to his son, “I came back from trucking to play with you. Do you want to play?” Upon hearing his voice, Gardell shocked everyone by opening his eyes and turning to his father.

It took a couple more days before he could be released from the hospital, but Gardell made a complete recovery. To the astonishment of the entire medical staff, he hadn’t suffered any brain damage. It’s known that hypothermia can delay the effects of brain damage, but something this extreme was truly extraordinary. Not only did he defy expectations by making a full recovery, but he recovered far quicker than they expected.

Rocket Launcher to the Torso

Whether it’s from movies, video games, or the news, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Rocket Propelled Grenades, or RPGs. These weapons are designed to take down armored vehicles, and depending on the model the explosive ammunition can be over 4 inches wide and weigh over 10 pounds. An RPG is designed to pierce a few inches deep into the metal armor of a tank or Humvee, and then to detonate.

Seeing as these weapons are intended to take down armored vehicles, the idea that a person could survive a direct hit from one seems beyond impossible. But thanks to a lot of luck and some violations of military protocol, that’s exactly what happened to US Army private Channing Moss.

Channing was serving in Afghanistan in 2006 during Operation Enduring Freedom. The Humvee he was riding in was struck with two RPGs before a third came crashing through the windshield and lodged directly into his body. The explosive entered through his right abdomen and pierced all the way down to his left thigh. When a helicopter came to evacuate the team from the area, Channing’s commanding officer had to lie and say that he had just been hit with some shrapnel.

Since bombs have a tendency to explode, it’s against Army policy to evacuate a person with a bomb lodged in their body.

After being transported to the nearest Afghan hospital, Channing was prepped for surgery while doctors tried to figure out how the Hell they were going to remove this explosive from his body. But despite how unlucky it is to be struck by a rocket, Channing did still have a couple strokes of luck.

First, the rocket managed to miss his major arteries. He was still bleeding heavily from the injury, but it was enough to keep him from bleeding out. Possibly even more importantly, the explosive warhead had become detached from the rocket and detonator inside his body. There was still a live explosive trapped inside him, but they could remove the detonator with much less fear of it triggering the warhead. There was still the matter of how to get the bomb itself out without triggering it, but this was a major win.

It took 30 major surgeries over the next 18 months, but surgeons were able to remove the RPG, close the massive hole in Channing’s torso, and perform numerous reconstructive surgeries for the damage he had sustained. Despite being told he would never walk again, Channing worked hard to rehabilitate his body and ensure that he would be able to walk across the stage to receive his purple heart.

Though Channing was able to mostly recover from his injuries after the extensive reconstructive surgeries, he did lose a substantial chunk of his intestines that hindered his body’s ability to absorb nutrients. He had to be put on a daily regimen of vitamins to ensure he didn’t suffer any deficiencies, but that’s a small price to pay for having survived something that should have been fatal.

The Exploding Toilet

Before the movie Lethal Weapon 2, few people would have ever considered the possibility that their toilet might suddenly explode. And seeing as that movie scene involved a bomb targeting a police officer, an explosive toilet was not the sort of thing that was going to make anybody lose sleep. But in 2013, this bizarre and improbable scenario was about to become an extremely painful reality.

The apartment building where IT specialist Michel Pierre lived in Brooklyn, New York was undergoing some standard renovations. A plumber had been called into the building to install a backflow prevention valve, and residents had been alerted that the water would be turned off for the day while the plumber did his job.

At around 11 pm, Michel decided to check if the water had been turned back on yet by pulling the handle to flush his toilet. But when he did, the entire toilet exploded into hundreds or thousands of pieces like a shrapnel bomb. The explosion propelled the ceramic shards at Michel cutting his face, arms, and legs and briefly knocking him unconscious.

After regaining consciousness, he was taken to the hospital where he received 30 stitches. It’s hard to say exactly how unlikely it was to survive such a one of a kind accident, but we can guarantee you would not want to experience a ceramic shrapnel bomb exploding at close range. Though Michel survived without any permanent injuries, he suffered both physical and mental scarring.

Following the incident, he was understandably afraid of pressing the lever to flush the toilet. Instead, he tied a rope to it so that he could flush from outside the bathroom at a safe distance. But as dangerous and terrifying an experience as this was, it could have been much worse. Michel stated that, while the entire ordeal had traumatized him, he was still grateful that he wasn’t sitting on the toilet when it exploded.

Key Takeaways

• Roy Sullivan survived being struck by lightning seven times over his lifetime.
• Forthman Murff survived a chainsaw nearly cutting his head off and drove himself to the hospital.
• Gardell Martin was revived after being submerged in icy water for over 20 minutes.
• Channing Moss survived an RPG lodged in his torso, requiring 30 surgeries over 18 months.
• Michel Pierre survived a toilet explosion, resulting in 30 stitches and mental trauma.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: The Craziest Accidents that Should Have Been Fatal

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