5 ‘Final Destination’ Deaths That Targeted One Single Person
Death will come for you. And when it does, it might come only for you.
The following stories show death sneaking up on individual people and targeting them. Even locking yourself away won’t protect you. Nowhere is safe.
The Elevator Missile
In 1937, some flammable substance found its way into the sewers of Chicago. To this day, we aren’t certain what it was, but similar incidents in history offer clues. In 1981, for example, a bean processing plant dumped a bunch of solvents into the sewers of Louisville, and they ignited, causing $25 million in damage.
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When that Chicago fluid ignited, it caused an explosion something like the Louisville one, launching loose manhole covers through the air. More than a dozen of these manhole covers went flying, and one of them came down on an elevator operator named A.C. Day. This was a freak accident, no matter how you look at it. But the crazy part was that Day was inside at the time. He was inside an elevator, which was at the base of a 75-foot building.
The manhole cover surely couldn’t have smashed through five floors of that warehouse, not even when shot up explosively and then brought back down under gravity. But it did crash through a skylight, which just so happened to be on top of the elevator shaft. It then fell freely through the next six dozen feet and through the elevator’s roof, whereupon it struck Day dead.
Two others in the elevator were spared but were surely traumatized for life. Maybe they’d been scared of elevators before, but they’d never realized elevators can be fatal even on the ground floor.
The Second Crash
At the University of Evansville in Indiana, the basketball team is called the Purple Aces. The name goes back to 1924, when an opposing team’s coach congratulated Evansville by saying, “You didn’t have four aces up your sleeve, you had five!” They were a lucky team, said the name.
In 1977, the team boarded a DC-3 to fly to Tennessee for a game. The plane encountered a bunch of issues, with one factor being too much baggage. These bags shifted to the back of the plane, throwing off the vessel’s center of gravity. The plane went down, killing all aboard, which meant it killed every player on the team — every player but one. David Furr, who’d scored the most points of all players the previous year, wasn’t on the plane that day, having to sit the game out due to an ankle injury.
That was one blessing amid this tragedy. But you remember how the original Final Destination movie went, right? Kids managed to avoid being on a plane that crashed, but death found them in the end? Just two weeks after the plane crash, Furr was in a car crash and died. A pickup truck hit his car and killed him instantly.
He had been returning that day from watching a basketball game.
The Plane Grab
Your chances of ever being in a plane crash are slim, but if you are in a crash that kills people, it’ll probably kill quite a few of them. Aloha Airlines Flight 243 was a little different.
During this 1988 flight, the fuselage ruptured, tearing a section of the plane’s roof off and also blasting away a chunk of the plane’s side. The pilots still managed to land the plane, without losing a single passenger. The problem could have been averted by inspecting the plane for weak points beforehand, which became standard after this.
No passengers died, but one person did fly out of the plane when it ripped open. It was stewardess Clarabelle Lansing, who’d been in the middle of handing a drink to a first-class passenger when the hole opened up and sucked her out. We’re putting her down as someone struck by a bizarre death, but we technically don’t know that she died. No one ever found her body.
The Rocket Strike
When people found Wang Diange dead in his house in inner Mongolia in 2008, they weren’t sure what killed him. The roof of his home had a giant hole it in, but there were no signs of manhole covers that may have blasted their way through. The most reasonable explanation was that a bolt of lightning had hit the house.
His body went for cremation, during which something inside him popped. Along with the incinerated remains, investigators now found a piece of metal, which they hadn’t noticed before but had embedded in his body. It had come from one of these:
That’s a sounding rocket, a meteorological tool that takes measurements in the upper atmosphere. It had crashed down into Wang’s home. We’re guessing the blast left other detritus besides the bit of metal that wound up inside him, but no one investigated too closely initially, for fear that Zeus might hit them next.
The Magic Bullet
This final death might be the craziest one we’ve ever heard of, but it wasn’t initially viewed as odd at all. Staff at the Eleganté Hotel in Beaumont, Texas, entered a room and saw that a guest had died. Greg Fleniken was 55 years old and showed no signs of injuries. He must have had a heart attack or something.
Then the medical examiner discovered a bunch of internal injuries, as well as a wound on his scrotum. Indeed, the hotel staff had noticed dampness at his crotch, but they’d assumed he’d soiled himself as he died rather than that he’d been bleeding from the balls. The medical examiner labeled this a homicide — Fleniken must have been kicked in the testicles and then beaten to death. Strange then that there were no external bruising, other than the scrotum wound. Strange also that the room showed no signs whatever of a struggle.
Also, it was a locked room. This needn’t have added so much to the mystery, since hotel rooms lock from the outside when you leave them, but in the end, this did turn out to be part of the puzzle. Fleniken had been killed by someone outside of the room.
In the room next door, two drunk electricians had been playing with a handgun. One accidentally discharged the weapon, and the bullet went through the wall. Thanks to the unusual firing angle, it entered Fleniken’s scrotum and cut a path through his organs. It even traveled through the heart, leaving a rip that the medical examiner couldn’t identify at first but eventually admitted was a bullet hole.
The bullet must have remained in him, but he had been cremated by this point in the investigation, and metal so small (unlike a panel from a rocket) would have been destroyed in the flames. The reason no one noticed a hole in the wall was that the electricians had stuffed it with toothpaste, which quickly dried and blended in with the plaster.
It’s a resolution right out of a detective novel — a pretty good detective novel, which isn’t at all believable as something that would happen in real life. But this really happened. The shooter got 10 years in prison, and travelers worldwide learned to shun hotels and seek out stone castles.
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