5 Spooky Notes Left Behind By the Dying

5 ‘SOS, Help Me, I Can’t Move on the Cliff’

Japanese authorities in a helicopter were searching for a lost hiker in 1989, and they did indeed find him. But they also discovered a giant SOS sign made of birch trees on that same Hokkaido mountain, and the hiker said he wasn't the person who made it. Judging by the state of the wood, someone had laid it out it at least two years earlier. 

This meant some unrelated person had to have also got lost on Mount Asahidake. And a thorough search now uncovered a set of human remains, along with a driver’s license belonging to one Kenji Iwamura. The body had a tape recorder next to it, which Iwamura had evidently been using to listen to anime theme songs, but he’d also taped over one cassette with his own voice. 

“SOS, help me,” he said. “I can’t move on the cliff, SOS, help me. The place is where I first met the helicopter. The sasa” — that’s a type of running bamboo that grew there — “is deep and you can’t go up. Lift me up from here.” It’s unclear exactly why he recorded that. Those tapes weren’t going anywhere, so saying those words weren’t going to transmit the message to anyone. It’s possible that he simply said them aloud, deliriously, and recorded them by mistake. 

When police played the tapes for Iwamura’s parents, they said they didn’t recognize the voice. That would suggest that the body was someone else altogether, but we could also just chalk that up to the limited fidelity of 1980s audio recording. 

4 ‘Good Night! Goodbye! Bye! We Perish’

In 1987, a plane took off from Warsaw, and things quickly went wrong. Military aircraft were in the area, so air traffic control told the plane they had to ascend quickly to avoid smashing into them. The plane did so, and in the process, ball bearings in the engine exploded. 

Both engines stopped working. A fire broke out and spread to the passenger compartment. The plane started dumping fuel, so it could land at an airport without endangering people on the ground too much with a fiery explosion, but the process was too slow. It became increasingly clear that the plane was going to go down, and no one aboard stood much of a chance of surviving. The last words that the cockpit sent out over the radio were, “Good night! Goodbye! Bye! We perish.”

All 183 aboard Flight 5055 died. Among the wreckage, investigators found a scrap of paper on which a passenger had written a message. “The failure of the plane,” it said. “I don't know what will happen.” Here, like with Iwamura’s recording, it’s unclear whom the words were meant for or if the author really thought they’d ever reach anyone. 

3 ‘Awful, Awful, Awful, Awful, Awful, Awful, Awful’

When we execute a prisoner, it’s not meant to be painful. If it is painful, we at least ensure the criminal is so incapacitated that they have no way of communicating to the world what they’re feeling. 

18th-century China had a different perspective. Executions were a punishment, which meant the prisoner must suffer and everyone should know they suffer. One execution method of theirs was especially painful. It sliced the victim at the waist rather than the neck, leaving them alive and in agony for a bit of time.

In 1731, China killed a corrupt education commissioner named Yu Hongtu via this method, which was known as the waist chop. Historical records are a tad unreliable from this time, but according to one account, the man was able to draw out a Chinese character in his own blood as he died: 慘. Then he wrote that character out six more times. That character means “cruel” or “awful.” 

So, in his last moments, he wrote out, “Awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful, awful.”

2 ‘We Have Been Abandoned. Please Help to Rescue Us Before We Die. Help!!!’

An Australian diving company took a gang out for a dip in 1998 to see the Great Barrier Reef. When everyone piled back on the boat, two divers were missing. It took the tour organizers two days to realize this.

No one ever found the missing passengers, Tom and Eileen Lonergan. The following month, people did find what appeared to be Eileen’s discarded wetsuit, which washed ashore, showing large rips. Five months later, the remainder of their gear washed ashore, including a slate (divers write on slates when they can’t talk to each other underwater). “Monday Jan 26 1998 08am,” it read. “To anyone who can help us: We have been abandoned on Acourt Reef by MV Outer Edge 25 Jan 1998 3pm. Please help to rescue us before we die. Help!!!”

The theory here is that the couple did not suffocate down there. They probably surfaced, but stranded in the ocean, they became dehydrated. Delirium set in, and they stripped off their diving gear. They now lacked the ability to stay afloat for long. The sea then swallowed them up. 

1 ‘Starvation Is By No Means Very Unpleasant, But for the Weakness One Feels’

In 1860, an expedition set forth to chart the interior of Australia. Partway through, explorers Robert Burke, William Wills and John King split off from the main group, and when they returned, the other men had already taken off. So, the trio chose a new route they could follow on their own, met up with some indigenous people, and then set off southward, a journey that ended with their starving to death.

We’ve previously told you about the absurdities that led them to this point. We’ve also previously covered the surprising science behind how they starved to death. The men ate plenty of food, in the form of a plant called nardoo, but nardoo naturally contains an enzyme that breaks down all the vitamin B1 in your body. Your body is now no longer able to get energy out of food, whether from the nardoo you eat or from anything else you gobble on top of that. You can denature that enzyme and eat the plant safely — if you prepare nardoo properly, which Burke and Wills could have done if they observed the way the locals did it, but they didn’t. 

What we’d like to do now is share with you extracts from the diary of William Wills, which continued right up until the end of June 1861 and his death. 

Late in May, he says he “saw a lot of crows quarrelling about something near the water; found it to be a large fish, of which they had eaten a considerable portion. As it was quite fresh and good, I decided the quarrel by taking it with me.” A little later, he describes finding another fish: “Going along by a large waterhole, I was so fortunate as to find a large fish, about a pound and a half in weight, which was just being choked by another which it had tried to swallow, but which had stuck in its throat.” His reliance on serendipitous fish, rather than being able to catch fish himself, comes off as quite incompetent.

Indeed, when the trio run into the Yandruwandha people (whom Wills refer to as “the blacks”), the tribe have loads of fish, since catching them isn’t so hard. “These I imagined to be for the general consumption of the half-dozen natives gathered around,” writes Wills, “but it turned out that they had already had their breakfast. I was expected to dispose of this lot — a task which, to my own astonishment, I soon accomplished, keeping two or three blacks pretty steadily at work extracting the bones for me.”

A few days later, Burke, Wills and King go off, now heavily provisioned with fish that the Yandruwandha gifted them. They eat nardoo as well, and here’s where distress creeps into Wills’ entries. “Found ourselves all very weak,” he writes. “I, myself, could scarcely get along, although carrying the lightest swag.” They now hope to make contact with the Yandruwandha again, but they’re stuck on their own.

“I still feel myself, if anything, weaker in the legs,” he writes a few days later, “although the nardoo appears to be more thoroughly digested.” The following day: “Self weaker than ever; scarcely able to go to the waterhole for water.” The day after that, he’s worse, and “both Mr. B. and King are beginning to feel very unsteady in the legs.”

The next day, he has a plan: “I have determined on beginning to chew tobacco and eat less nardoo, in hopes that it may induce some change in the system.” This is good instinct, but he doesn’t go far enough. What nardoo he does eat keeps starving him, even as he dines on crows they shoot and the remains of their pet camel. 

“I am completely reduced by the effects of the cold and starvation,” writes Wills on June 20th. “I cannot understand this nardoo at all — it certainly will not agree with me in any form; we are now reduced to it alone, and we manage to consume from four to five pounds per day between us; it appears to be quite indigestible, and cannot possibly be sufficiently nutritious to sustain life by itself.”

The others keep gathering more nardoo, and keep searching for “the blacks,” realizing help is their only chance at survival. They understand that they’re starving, but they can only describe this as weakness because they aren’t experiencing traditional hunger pangs at all. Their bellies are full — full of nardoo. 

“Starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels,” says Wills, “and the utter inability to move one’s self; for as far as appetite is concerned, it gives the greatest satisfaction. The want of sugar and fat in all substances obtainable here is so great that they become almost valueless to us as articles of food, without the addition of something else.”

Those were the last words Wills wrote. His ability to very nearly intuit what was going on nutritionally in his body almost makes him sound like a hero. But for you to really understand his mindset, we have to leave you with this other sentence of his from a few days earlier: “It is a great consolation, at least, in this position of ours, to know that we have done all we could, and that our deaths will rather be the result of the mismanagement of others than of any rash acts of our own.”

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