Original subtitles

When disaster strikes, it can set off a chain of events no one can explain,

like a tsunami that leaves behind more than rubble.

So he asks her, "Are you sure you wanna go to Minamihama?

Because there's not much left there."

She replies, "Am I dead?"

And somewhere along the ride, poof!

They disappear.

Or a lightning strike that unlocks a strange superpower.

Dannion says that he can hear people's thoughts.

A secret divorce, fantasies of committing a crime.

Just stuff you wouldn't know by just looking at a person.

How about a train crash

where the most unsettling thing isn't the impact?

They find Charles Peck's body in the wreckage.

Minutes later, Chuck's brother's phone rings.

Instead of hearing Chuck's voice,

it's just this cold, hissing static.

These are the stories of strange encounters

that emerge in the wake of tragedy.

Events so shocking, they can only be described as unbelievable.

You expect eerie encounters in graveyards or abandoned buildings,

but what if they occur somewhere you work?

In Galveston, Texas, one of the strangest stories begins

in the deserted aisles of a big-box store.

It's 2004 in Galveston, Texas.

Denise Sandoval works the graveyard shift at the local Walmart.

It's a quiet night,

and Denise is stocking the shelves, doing her thing.

All of a sudden, some bottle falls off the shelf.

She spins around and sees a bottle of aspirin lying on the floor

that wasn't there before, and nobody else is around.

But it's far from the last strange incident

Denise experiences at work.

During another one of her shifts,

the temperature starts to drop drastically.

She shivers, but it's more than just a chill.

Suddenly, she claims that she feels something yank her hair from behind.

And then a shopping cart slams into the shelves behind her.

Denise is relatively new, so she does sort of wonder,

"Is someone punking me? Is someone messing with me here?

Am I being hazed?"

Denise's coworkers insist

they haven't been anywhere near the pharmacy section,

but they do tell her

she's not the first person to experience this kind of activity.

Automatic doors open and close without any trigger.

The cashiers have experienced the cash registers glitching out.

The lights have been seen to be flickering.

Those who work in the toy section also report

that sometimes the electronic toys activate all on their own.

And even sometimes they hear kids crying.

According to the employees,

these eerie events ramp up during storms.

And they think they know why.

September 8th, 1900,

a storm looms on the horizon.

By the early afternoon, the winds are fierce.

The waves are pounding the shore, the storm surge is coming,

and the city is only 10 feet above sea level.

With no seawall to protect them,

Galveston's beachfront properties begin flooding,

including St. Mary's orphan asylum.

There are only like 10 nuns who are working at this orphanage,

and there's like 90 boys and girls.

And they're all absolutely terrified

because everything is falling apart around them.

Fearing they may need to flee,

the nuns devise a desperate plan.

They come up with this idea of taking clothesline,

wrapping it around their waist,

tying a kid to each clothesline,

so each nun has eight or nine kids attached to them.

The dormitory is being pummeled by not just water,

but water full of debris.

And it is chipping away at the building.

Then a big wave hits,

wall cracks, the roof caves in.

They're pulled under.

They become literally dead weight.

By midnight, the storm passes.

And when the sun rises the next morning,

the city looks like a hellscape.

We're talking 3,500 homes and buildings destroyed.

We're talking about more than 6,000 people dead.

All 10 nuns and 90 of the kids from the orphanage all die.

Just a sad, sad scene to find all these kids tied together,

some holding each other.

Nearly a century later, in 1994,

the Walmart where Denise works is built in the exact spot

where St. Mary's orphanage once stood.

From the moment this Walmart opens,

rumors of strange activities begin to spread.

Up to this point, it's all been hearsay.

So in 2022, Denise is determined to finally get some actual proof.

She wants evidence,

so she decides that she's gonna use her cell phone camera.

Twenty!

Happen to be walking through the toys,

and all of a sudden, all the dolls are turning on, acting crazy.

How do you explain that?

She sees what appears to her to be the toys

responding to her requests.

Put some music on for me.

- Oh my God! - No, no, no, no.

No, no.

Is it possible the ghosts of the children

lost in the storm are still here?

For Denise, it's clear that even decades after,

remnants of this tragedy are still lingering,

and some of these orphans never left.

Whatever Denise experienced in that Walmart,

it wouldn't be the last time a disaster seemed

to leave something behind.

One night, a cab driver is flagged down by a young woman.

And he pulls over, she gets into the back seat,

and when he looks in his rearview mirror,

he notices that she's wearing a heavy winter coat,

even though it's summer.

And that strikes him as odd.

You know, he's a cab driver, so he's definitely seen stranger things.

He pulls out his pad and he asks her where are they headed.

In a quiet voice, she says,

"The neighborhood of Minamihama."

Now that takes him aback

because that place has been wiped off the map for months.

Months earlier, a massive 9.0 earthquake ruptures the seafloor

off the northeastern coast of Japan.

About 20 minutes later,

a 133-foot tsunami slams into Japan's main island, Honshu.

The water surges six miles inland and obliterates everything in its path.

The death toll in Japan after this disaster is nearly 20,000 souls.

Most importantly, the tsunami completely wiped out

the neighborhood where this young lady just asked to go.

The driver thinks it's an odd request,

but a fare is a fare.

In a polite, deferential way,

the cabbie asked the woman,

"Are you sure you want to go there?

There's nothing in Minamihama."

There's a long pause.

And then she replies in that same quiet voice,

"Am I dead?"

The cab driver looks in his rearview mirror

to see if she's okay.

And the woman is gone.

He's looking all through the back seat.

Maybe the woman passed out, maybe she fell onto the floor.

The doors are locked and the windows are up.

There's nowhere for this lady to have gone.

It just doesn't make any sense to him,

so he pulls over and he's thinking like,

"Is my mind playing tricks on me?"

So he checks his logbook,

and there is the destination written in his own handwriting.

And the meter is on.

The driver doesn't tell anyone.

He doesn't want them to think he's losing his mind.

But eventually, he mentions his encounter to a few other cabbies.

So he's starting to think, "If I tell these other individuals this,

they're gonna laugh at me."

Not only do they not laugh at him

or make fun of him,

they say that they've had very similar experiences.

Soon, more accounts start spreading online,

catching the attention of a sociology grad student named Yuka Kudo.

She wonders if there's some sort of psychological bridge

between the dead and the living,

especially where trauma is concerned.

So she sets out and starts hopping into cab after cab

at no small expense,

asking these drivers,

"Have you ever experienced a passenger that has simply disappeared?"

Incredibly, seven different drivers

report strikingly similar rides.

The story's always the same.

Someone gets inside of a cab,

and they request to be dropped off at an area

that's been devastated by the tsunami.

And somewhere along the ride,

poof, they disappear.

Interestingly, one driver from Japan says

that despite his eerie encounter,

he'll still happily give a ride to any other lost soul

who climbs into his cab,

even if they ghost him on the fare.

Coming up, a surprising call from beyond the grave.

Chuck's phone isn't calling his dentist.

It's calling the people that he cared about in life.

Over the next 11 hours,

Chuck's phone makes 35 calls to his family,

each one nothing but silence.

When someone dies without warning,

what hurts most are the words you never got to say.

But what if the conversation wasn't over?

In the hours after a terrible accident,

one family is certain it wasn't.

It's 2008.

Charles E. Peck, or Chuck for short,

is cruising along the Metrolink 111 train in Los Angeles

feeling pretty good about himself.

He just nailed this job interview that he just got out of.

He'll get a new gig and he'll be able to move to LA

to be closer to his fiancée.

Things are looking up for the guy.

But fate has other plans for Chuck.

At 4:22 p.m., passengers on board the 111

hear the frantic blast of the train's horn.

A freight train is on the same track as them,

heading straight towards them.

You can't just slam on the brakes of a freight train.

I mean, you can, but it's still gonna take two minutes

for the freight train to come to a complete stop.

A freight train doesn't have two seconds.

These train cars are crushed like soda cans.

Glass shatters, passengers are flung out of their seats like rag dolls.

As rescue crews rush to find survivors,

news of the crash spreads.

Within the hour, Chuck's fiancée, Andrea Katz, arrives at the scene.

There's just twisted wreckage and metal everywhere.

Chuck's fiancée, Andrea, is still holding out hope

that Chuck has somehow survived.

Suddenly, her cell phone rings.

This overwhelming sense of relief just floods her.

But instead of hearing Chuck's voice, it's just this cold,

hissing static on the other end of the line,

before the call drops out.

Only minutes later, Chuck's son, CJ,

gets a call from him, too.

But nobody's on the line either.

Chuck's brother's phone rings, then his sister's,

his stepmother's.

All calls from Peck's number.

But Chuck never says a word.

Over the next 11 hours, Chuck's phone makes 35 calls

to members of his family.

But whoever or whatever is on the other end never speaks.

They assume this means

that Chuck is alive somewhere in the wreckage,

that he's trying to use his phone to make contact,

but maybe his phone's mic is damaged due to this accident.

Rescue crews attempt to trace the signal,

but have no luck.

Finally, 12 hours after the accident,

around 4:30 in the morning,

they find Charles Peck's body in the wreckage.

The severity of his injuries leaves no room for doubt.

Chuck died on impact.

So how was he able to make these postmortem phone calls?

Of course, the theories roll in.

Maybe there's just a glitch with the phone in the crash

or cell towers were rerouting calls and so on.

Some people even think maybe his phone

just automatically started dialing numbers in his contact list.

Chuck's phone isn't calling his dentist or the plumber

or, you know, the utility company.

It's calling the people that he cared about in life.

Even stranger,

the calls stop

an hour before rescuers recover Chuck's body.

To this date, no cell phone expert, engineer, investigator,

no one can explain how this phone made all those calls

to those specific people after Chuck's death.

As for Chuck's phone,

the one that made those phantom calls,

it's never been found.

A century earlier, in England, another departed soul

didn't need a cell phone to reach his family.

It's 1915.

And the Great War, what we know as World War I,

is raging literally all across Europe.

Raymond Lodge is a 25-year-old second lieutenant

of the British Second Battalion.

On September 14th, they are under heavy shelling,

and he's directing his men to move to a safer area of the trench.

Suddenly, there is a loud explosion and Raymond falls.

Help comes quickly, but his wounds are fatal.

Back in England, Sir Oliver Lodge receives the telegram

he's been dreading since saying goodbye to his son Raymond

a few months earlier.

Sir Oliver is shattered.

He just doesn't wanna accept the fact

that he's never gonna be able to speak to his son again.

And then he thinks, "Well, maybe I don't have to accept that."

With all the death and destruction that happens during World War I,

the psychic medium business is booming

because there are so many grieving families

that are desperately trying to connect with lost loved ones.

A bereaved but curious Oliver, and his wife Mary,

decide to meet with one of the most renowned psychics in Britain,

Gladys Osborne Leonard.

As a man of science, Sir Oliver is 100% determined

not to be taken in by any charlatans,

so he devises a scientific method

to basically call out these psychic mediums

on their methods.

So he decides he's not gonna give them any information

about his family, his friends, or any loved ones associated with him.

As the medium goes into her trance,

she claims to connect with the afterlife through her spirit guide.

She says that there is a young man eager to speak with him.

Gray eyes, oval face,

in military uniform.

It sounds just like Raymond.

Sir Oliver is no dummy.

What she's describing could be the description

of any one of the millions of British soldiers.

So Sir Oliver's BS meter, sitting pretty high at this moment.

Sir Oliver tests the medium with a trick question.

He asks, "What is the name that his brothers referred to him by?"

There's this brief pause.

But then she says, "Pat."

Sir Oliver's heart jumps because she nailed it.

She got the nickname.

Now, if your name is Raymond,

the obvious answer that you would say for someone's nickname

would be Ray, but Pat?

Encouraged, yet skeptical,

Sir Oliver reaches out to another respected psychic.

They meet with a man named Alfred Vout Peters,

a London clairvoyant.

Peters closes his eyes

and says he senses a recent death of a soldier, their son.

The soldier mentions a photograph, a group shot.

He's sitting on the bottom row with a walking stick across his lap.

Sir Oliver and his wife have no such photograph.

They've never heard of this photograph, so as far as Sir Oliver's concerned,

this is just a fishing expedition for the psychic.

Months later, a stunning surprise is delivered,

not by a psychic, but by their neighborhood mail carrier.

In the package, there's a letter from the mother

of Raymond's captain along with a group photo.

And when Sir Oliver takes a look at this photo,

the hair on the back of his neck stands at attention.

It's exactly as described.

There's the group of soldiers.

There's his son.

And he's got the walking stick across his legs.

For this man of science,

the photo is not a coincidence,

but evidence that Raymond is reaching out from beyond the grave.

Raymond's siblings are less convinced.

Sir Oliver's other children come up with a question

that's intentionally designed to trip up the psychic and her spirit guide.

So the kids ask very casually,

"Um, ask Raymond about Mr. Jackson."

She seems confused when giving them Raymond's reply.

Something about a very fine bird.

Little does the psychic know she's exactly right.

Mr. Jackson isn't a person.

It's the family's pet peacock.

Even if you're a skeptic, it's really hard to come up

with an explanation for that.

As far as Sir Oliver's concerned,

he fully believes that he's contacted his son.

Raymond also says this, he has one last mission.

He encourages Sir Oliver

to continue his life after death research,

sharing it with the public,

because people need to hear that their loved ones live on.

Oliver takes Raymond's final message to heart

and pours all his energy into writing a book,

which he publishes in 1916.

Coming up, a terrifying encounter

that brings new meaning to the phrase "raining cats and dogs."

They can hear banging and scratching at the church doors.

This force at the door causes the church doors

to burst wide open.

Church should be a sanctuary.

But when a major storm slams into a 16th century house of worship,

something far worse than lightning comes with it.

It's August 4, 1577.

On the east coast of England in a small town called Bungay,

a huge storm is sweeping in from the sea.

There's lightning, it's dark clouds,

torrential rain, the whole nine.

The parishioners of this particular town

are all seeking refuge inside of St. Mary's Church

to wait out this incredibly strong, incredibly violent storm.

Then there's a massive flash of light

along with a giant, loud crack.

And suddenly...

the building shakes.

They can hear banging and scratching at the church doors.

This is a force at the door

that is causing the church doors

to rattle on its hinges before finally,

the doors just burst wide open.

The people report seeing a canine-looking creature.

But at that time in 1577, wolves were already extinct in England.

Parishioners are desperately trying to scatter

to get away from this massive dog.

And at one point, the dog leaps into the air

and jumps on two parishioners so hard

both of their necks break.

It attacks a third man.

Almost immediately, the attacked man's skin

begins to shrivel like leather.

At almost the same moment,

several miles away in the village of Blythburgh,

terror strikes inside another church,

Holy Trinity.

The events go down almost in the same way.

The storm is raging.

The doors burst open and there again is that giant black dog.

In the second church, two people are killed,

and that creature disappears just like at St. Mary's.

But this time, it leaves behind physical evidence.

Upon close inspections,

the doors themselves retain the scratch marks

from this hound on the outside.

Believe it or not, they're still visible today,

four and a half centuries later.

The parishioners are convinced that it is an actual hellhound

that was sent by Satan to destroy their lives.

They call it Black Shuck, from the old English word "succa,"

meaning devil or fiend.

The locals have a theory that during especially violent storms,

the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural begin to break down,

and something from the other side is able to break through.

Stories about Black Shuck continue into the 20th century.

Even today, some locals insist that when a storm gets big enough,

you might still hear howling from the cliffs near Bungay.

Now, of course, not every lightning strike

releases a hound from hell,

but for one man in South Carolina,

a storm seems to unleash something

just as strange inside him.

A storm is rolling over Aiken, South Carolina,

and 25-year-old Dannion Brinkley is on the phone with a friend of his.

The storm outside becomes so thunderous

and so loud that Dannion has to literally shout

into the phone to be heard.

Before he can hang up the phone, the line gets hit with a lightning strike.

It pumps 180,000 volts

right down the line and into Dannion.

This impact is so massive

that it melts his shoes on the floor.

His heart stops and, according to him, he leaves his body.

He watches as his wife

desperately tries to save him through CPR.

He watches as the ambulance arrives

and he gets carted off and taken to the hospital.

He's still hovering over his body, as ER doctors declare him legally dead.

Dannion then begins what he describes

as a very strange journey.

Dannion describes going down this tunnel of light,

and in this tunnel emerges some sort of being.

He is then shown his entire life, from when he was a kid to the day he died.

And then there are multiple spirit guides that appear and reveal things to him.

And what they're revealing are events that are gonna happen on the Earth

in the not-so-distant future.

Twenty-eight minutes after being pronounced dead,

just as he's being wheeled to the morgue,

Dannion falls back into his body.

He can't move a muscle, so all he can do

to let people know that, "I'm not dead, I'm alive,"

is to exhale...

as hard as possible.

Considering that he's got a sheet that's over his body,

so if he breathes out heavy enough, hopefully they see the sheet move.

After his recovery, Dannion discovers

that his near-death experience has left him

with a unique new ability.

Dannion says that he can now predict the future.

This manifests in a number of different ways.

Some of it is as simple as being able to say

what football team is gonna win a given game.

Dannion also says he remembers every single vision

from his time between life and death,

one being the collapse of the Soviet Union,

another being the war in the Middle East.

He's also shown a new president of the United States in 1980

that has this cowboy persona and the initials RR.

So help me God.

Dannion says that he can actually

kind of hear people's thoughts,

almost like a home movie run when he interacts with somebody

where he can see their past and even their future.

In 1994, parapsychologist Dr. William Roll

invites Dannion to take part in an experiment

to test his psychic powers.

Roll takes eight different people that Dannion has never met.

One by one, Dannion takes their hands,

and according to the results of this experiment,

he is suddenly able to glean

all sorts of insights about these people.

Things like a secret divorce,

fantasies of committing a crime.

Just stuff you wouldn't know

by just looking at a person or by holding their hand.

All of this has led Dr. Roll to believe

that he is really an extraordinary psychic.

Today, Dannion spends much of his life volunteering in hospices

and nursing homes,

hoping that the story of his own brush with death

might bring comfort to others.

Coming up, nuclear disaster leads to an out-of-this-world encounter.

She finds a tiny 10-inch-tall being with almond eyes

and oddly shaped head.

If it's a human, it's one that's very deformed.

Nuclear accidents can create panic, paranoia,

and terrible mutations caused by radiation exposure.

But in the aftermath of one Soviet disaster,

locals start telling stories about something far more unsettling.

In the early 1950s

in the rugged Ural Mountains in Western Russia,

there is a secret nuclear facility called Mayak,

just next to the city of Kyshtym.

And here, they produce weapons-grade plutonium

in order to build atomic bombs.

There's a large tank of spent uranium fuel,

and the cooling system breaks down.

Pressure builds up, explodes,

and becomes, what was at the time,

the worst radiological disaster in human history.

The radioactive cloud that follows

contaminates nearly 20,000 square miles around Kyshtym.

Right away, the Soviet government moves to cover up the accident.

It hides the evidence and gives no official statement.

So now people in the area have no idea what they've been exposed to.

But the explosion isn't the only thing

people report seeing in the sky that day.

Just before and after the blast,

locals witness these eerie bluish-violet lights

hovering over the secret nuclear facility.

So here's the strange thing.

As nuclear weapons facilities and power plants

become more common in the '60s and '70s,

we also see a rise in UFO reports around these facilities.

And nobody's really sure why that is.

The reports of mysterious lights eventually fade.

Then, decades later, a woman named Tamara Prosvirina,

who lives near the disaster zone,

claims to find something utterly shocking.

She's out walking in the woods like she does every morning.

She hears this noise.

It sounds like the whimpering, like maybe a child or a baby,

or could it be an animal?

She says that she finds a tiny 10-inch-tall being in the underbrush.

She describes it as having greenish-gray skin

with almond eyes and this oddly shaped head with ridges.

And so she does what every sane person would do.

She takes it home and feeds it condensed milk and cottage cheese.

She calls it Alyoshenka, Little Alexei.

Like any excited new parent,

Tamara starts talking about Little Alexei

when she goes to the market and when she sees her neighbors.

The way she describes this little child is pretty odd.

So like they do in small towns, her neighbors start to gossip.

And they say that she might not be right in the head.

Convinced Tamara has imagined it all,

concerned neighbors reach out to get the Soviet version

of a wellness check on her.

They come to her house.

They don't look around for any small baby.

They assume it's just her.

They take her away and put her into a psychiatric ward.

According to reports, a few days later,

one of her neighbors actually goes into her house

and discovers this Little Alexei that she had been talking about.

But sadly, it's now dead.

So he wraps the body in a towel and takes it back to his house.

Unfortunately, not too long after that,

he is in trouble with the law for something else.

And when the police come to his house, they discover those remains.

Fascinated by Alyoshenka,

local detective Vladimir Bendlin

sends the miniature corpse off for testing.

A local doctor takes a look at it and determines that it's a human fetus,

most likely stillborn at 20 to 25 weeks,

which would explain its size.

If it's a human fetus, it's one that's very deformed.

But, you know, then again, this is the place

where all the radiation has been out,

and we're seeing things like that in the environment.

After the Mayak disaster, for decades,

fishermen are catching fish with no eyes or fins,

and farm animals are being born with anomalies, all due to radiation.

But there's one big problem with the deformed human theory.

The pathologist also notes that Little Alexei has no belly button.

Every living mammal, including humans, has a belly button.

It's where our umbilical cord connects us to our mothers.

So without a belly button, how could Little Alexei be human?

Detective Bendlin wants more information,

so he sends the remains to a group of ufologists for further testing.

No lab results come back.

And when he manages to get in touch with the researchers,

they act like they've never heard of him or Little Alexei.

The body just disappears,

and the assumption is that the government confiscated it

and conveniently lost it.

Which, according to some, brings us back

to the strange lights seen above Mayak the day of the disaster.

Some believe that Alyoshenka may have been an alien species

and perhaps was drawn to the Mayak facility

because of the enormous burst of radiation.

Whatever the truth is, the little creature from Kyshtym remains

one of Russia's strangest unsolved mysteries.

And I think many people might agree that's a high bar.

Coming up, when Earth quakes, do monsters wake?

Suddenly, it just unfurls this giant set of wings.

The creature kind of crouches down and then lunges.

In 1980, one of the most devastating volcanic eruptions

in US history rocks the Pacific Northwest.

It leaves astonishing destruction in its wake

and, a handful of people say, something else.

We are directly over Mount Saint Helens right now,

and there is no question at all that the volcanic activity has begun.

On the day that Mount Saint Helens erupts,

it creates a massive landslide and it shoots gas and dust and ash

80,000 feet up into the sky.

Coming up over the ridge towards me.

I'm pulling back out here.

Multiple people report seeing

something fairly large flying around within that ash cloud.

For the most part, these reports are written off

as hallucinations due to trauma,

or perhaps plays on the eye with the smoke and the ash.

It's easy to write off strange sightings from afar.

But 14 years later, it's much harder to dismiss a closer encounter.

Around 9:30 p.m. this high school senior named Brian Canfield

is driving down this rural road near Buckley, Washington,

when suddenly his truck kind of sputters to a stop.

The dashboard lights kind of flicker, and they go out.

But the headlights stay on.

There are no cars in sight. There are no houses in sight.

And this is 1994, so cell phones aren't a thing.

And he's thinking, "Great, what am I going to do now?"

As Brian is about to get out of the truck

to check the engine,

an enormous being steps into the headlights.

He looks at it. The thing is eight feet tall,

nine feet tall.

According to him, it has these massive biceps

and it's covered in this fur that is so black, it's blue-black.

He claims that it has a wolf-like snout.

Suddenly, it just unfurls this giant set of wings.

He thinks it's coming for him.

But instead, it goes up into the air and it flies off into the night.

As soon as this creature disappears into the night sky,

Brian's truck starts working.

Brian races home and tells his parents what he saw.

Then he tells the local paper.

Next to the headline about his encounter

is a sketch of the creature and a nickname that really catches on.

Batsquatch.

As soon as he sees that name in the article,

Brian thinks people are gonna ridicule him.

But that's not what happens.

Instead, more people actually come forward with their own Batsquatch sightings.

Just a few months after Brian's sighting,

there's another incident.

While flying his own private plane,

Butch Whittaker sees something unusual in the clouds

near his same altitude.

Butch immediately thinks that this is not an airplane

and it's also not a bird.

It's big and, man, it is super dark.

It has this super black, blue-black fur.

It's a hairy, humanoid-like figure with large wings,

a wingspan of over 18 feet,

which is the wingspan of his own plane.

Whatever it is, it's keeping up with Butch.

He's going like 130 miles per hour, and it's right there with him.

Obviously, it sounds crazy.

But because some of the witnesses are so credible,

people start to look for a pattern to these sightings.

What researchers find is that each of these encounters

seem to come after strong seismic events.

In the months leading up to Brian and Butch's sightings,

there are increased seismic activities in the area.

Near Crater Lake, there had been an earthquake

registering 6.0 on the Richter scale.

There's a very real fear that Mount Mazama may erupt.

Luckily, this is a false alarm.

The big explosion doesn't occur.

However, for a long time afterwards,

there are small aftershocks.

And that's what seems to line up with appearances of Batsquatch.

With all the sightings in the Cascades after the eruption of Mount Saint Helens,

it sort of makes you wonder,

do we have Mount Saint Helens to thank for unleashing Batsquatch onto the world?

This raises an alarming question.

If something like Batsquatch could be lying in wait

near Mount Saint Helens,

what else might be hiding near other volcanic hot spots?

Coming up, buried alive beneath a mountain,

33 men prepare for the worst.

They have no electricity, no way to call for help.

They have no way of letting anybody know that they're alive down there.

The mine has essentially become a tomb.

It was the late, great Mr. Rogers who said that during disasters,

you should always look for helpers.

They're the ones who give you hope in the aftermath of catastrophes.

And in the case of one famous accident in Chile,

hope comes from a helper you can't look for

because they're invisible.

More than 2,000 feet beneath Chile's Atacama Desert,

miners are working inside the San Jose mine,

digging for gold and copper.

The mine is more than a century old,

which means the working conditions are just as old.

It's hot, dark,

and the mine shafts are extremely unstable.

Around 2:00 p.m., a low rumble echoes through the tunnels.

And seconds later, the mine collapses.

What comes crashing down is a rock slab

that's as tall as the Washington Monument

and heavier than seven aircraft carriers,

which means anything that's still alive

is now 100% trapped underneath it.

When the noise finally stops,

the dust is so thick they can't even see their hands.

The good news is all 33 men are alive.

The bad news is every route that takes you back

to the surface is blocked.

They have no electricity.

They have no way to call for help.

They have no way of letting anybody know that they're alive down there.

The mine has essentially become a tomb.

These guys are seasoned miners

so they know all too well how this will go.

It could be days before heavy equipment comes

to dig them out and they get rescued.

The situation is dire.

They have but a few days' worth of food,

water, and medical supplies.

As the days pass, they're not seeing any signs

of anybody attempting to rescue them.

They're not feeling the vibration of a drill bit

trying to make it through the rock.

They can figure it out. They can do the math.

Nobody stays trapped underground for this long

and makes it out alive.

Just as their spirits are sagging,

a mysterious presence seems to drift through the group.

It's right around this time that one of the men feels a breeze touch his face.

Now, understand, this is a sealed mine they're in.

There's no vents or openings of any kind.

It sounds crazy that a gust of wind would change anything,

but to these miners,

that gust of wind in this very tightly sealed enclosure,

it almost feels supernatural.

But more importantly, it is giving them hope.

And so they start referring to that gust of wind

as the 34th miner.

On day 17, another tremor shakes the rock above their heads.

But this time it's good news.

A drill bit breaks into the cavern,

and the miners leap up like it's Santa

coming down the chimney at Christmastime.

They tape a note to the bit and send it back up,

and it says, "We are alive."

Through the borehole created by the drill,

workers above are able to use cables to send down care packages

filled with things like medical supplies and sugar water.

While fresh supplies are hugely appreciated,

the big question is, when will they get out?

The answer is devastating.

It could take four months.

You could give me all the supplies you want.

You could give me no supplies.

You tell me to stay underground for another four more months?

I'm gonna be driven to madness.

And sometimes, that madness could kill you.

That's how serious this type of mental shock is.

They get this terrible news,

but strangely enough,

they stay extremely calm.

Weeks into the drilling, something happens

that tests even the comforting power of this 34th miner.

This massive drill bit gets stuck in a vein of quartz,

and nothing that the engineers try will dislodge it.

Here, the rock is very solid. It's very hard.

So we have to wait and see.

The miners are 2,041 feet underground.

The drill bit freezes up

100 feet away from them.

So hope naturally sinks,

and engineers are trying to do everything they can

to get this bit started up again.

They're throwing everything at it: blowtorches, lubricant,

weight adjustments, all sorts of swear words.

Nothing works.

But then, suddenly,

for no real logical reason,

the drill bit starts up again.

The engineers are totally baffled by this.

But the miners think they know why.

Finally, after 69 days underground,

the world watches as the first miners are brought to the surface.

But ask any one of those miners

how all 33 of them managed to make it out alive,

and they'll quickly tell you there weren't 33 miners down there.

There were 34.

Always good to have invisible friends in low places.

Whether these stories are paranormal, psychological,

or something in between,

they remind us that disasters can have aftershocks

that last far longer than we expect.

Some of them are truly unbelievable.