Top 3 final messages from people about to die | Part 1

today we're gonna look at three final messages from people who knew they were about to die but before we get into those 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 three or four times every week so if that's of interest to you please replace all of the like button salted butter with unsalted butter also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads alright let's get into today's stories [Music] on december 7 1941 the japanese famously attacked pearl harbor the us military base in hawaii but pearl harbor was not the only us base attacked by the japanese that month in fact just hours after the pearl harbor attack the japanese shifted gears and attacked us military personnel on wake island which is a coral atoll in the northern pacific ocean after two weeks of fighting the japanese had taken wake island from the americans and they sent the majority of american military personnel and american civilian contractors to prisoner of war camps in asia but they retained 98 of these pows to stay on the island and fortify defenses over the next couple of years the americans would periodically bomb wake island but there was never any concerted effort to take it back from the japanese however that all changed on october 5th 1943 when the americans decided it was time to take it back they launched a huge air raid on the island that was so violent the japanese admiral on wake island was convinced a full-scale invasion was imminent and so in his paranoia he ordered the 98 pows they had retained on the island to be executed and so they marched these 98 pows to the edge of the sea they blindfolded them and then they gunned them down but in the chaos of the air raid and the execution one of the american pows somehow managed to escape after the japanese had left the area this pow snuck back down to the execution site and he carved into the rock a memorial for all 98 of the pows so he was including himself in that number because i'm sure he knew he would eventually be recaptured this was a small area and he was the only american there and sure enough this pow was recaptured that day and he was personally executed by the japanese admiral the identity of this pow has never been determined after the war ended the japanese admiral that ordered these executions was tried for war crimes found guilty and put to death himself the so-called 98 rock can still be seen on wake island today [Music] on january 25th 1998 american tourists tom and eileen lonergan boarded a boat in queensland australia the married couple was from louisiana tom was 34 and eileen was 28. they had spent the last two years in fiji and tuvalu serving in the peace corps australia was just a pit stop on their way back home they both were avid scuba divers and they wanted a chance to dive on the world's largest coral reef system the great barrier reef once tom eileen and the other 24 taurus had boarded this boat the captain did a head count and then once he had everyone he turned the boat around and headed out to sea after traveling 25 miles the captain stopped the boat and then told the group to put on their dive gear so tom eileen and the others happily put on their fins and their masks and their tanks and then when they were ready they were inspected and then allowed to jump into the coral sea less than an hour later the divers came back up to the surface and the captain began pulling them back into the boat once everyone was back on board the boat the captain did another head count just to confirm he had everyone and once he was sure he did he turned the boat around and he headed back to shore except the captain miscounted and neither he nor anyone else noticed shortly after the boat had left the area tom and eileen lonergan came up from their dive and looked around and realized they had been abandoned after the initial panic wore off they probably told each other that don't worry as soon as that boat gets back to shore they will find inside the boat our wallets and passports and other personal items and they'll know we aren't with them and they'll come out and get us and so most likely the couple was fairly optimistic as they just treaded water waiting for someone to show up any minute except they didn't show up any minute it took 48 hours before anybody showed up because that's how long it took before someone saw their wallets and passports and personal items were still inside that dive boat and in those 48 hours tom and eileen were exposed to intense summer heat no fresh water and sharks when their personal effects were finally found a huge search was launched for them but there was no sign of them a month later a female wetsuit washed up on the shores of australia and it was the same size as eileen's and an expert analyzed it and said it had been floating in the water for about a month so that lined up with when tom and eileen went missing five months later more diving equipment washed up on the shores of australia among those items were life jackets with the lonergan name stenciled on the back of them as well as an air tank and a dive fan that belonged to eileen but the most disturbing thing that washed up on shore was the couple's diver's slate a diver slate is like a dry erase board that works underwater on this slate was the lonergan's final message it said to anyone who can help us we've been abandoned on aegon court reef please help us before we die please help above the message was a date it was january 26th 1998. so that would have been one day after they were abandoned at sea so we know the couple was alive for at least 24 hours but beyond that no one knows what happened some say the pair staged their disappearance so they could start a new life somewhere or so they could take their own lives others say they were devoured by sharks most experts believe they eventually became delirious from the dehydration and that would have caused them to willingly take off their diving equipment and without that equipment they wouldn't have been buoyant and so at some point they couldn't have continued treading water and they would have drowned but regardless of which theory is correct tom and eileen have never been found bryce gilles was born in 1989 in northern virginia just outside of washington dc from a young age bryce's parents knew he loved the outdoors and so they signed him up for the boy scouts and as a scout bryce learned amongst many things how to survive in the wilderness and he would routinely put this training to the test by leaving his house and heading off to the nearby appalachian trail and hiking around sometimes up to 20 miles in a single day price ultimately became an eagle scout which is the highest rank anybody can obtain inside of the boy scouts a rank that only about eight percent of scouts will ever reach after he graduated from high school in 2007 bryce decided he wanted to go to school out west and during a visit to northern arizona university bryce fell in love with their school because all around their campus were these unbelievable hiking trails that were totally unlike anything he saw growing up on the east coast bryce decided this was his dream school so he applied and a couple weeks later he got accepted he was totally thrilled during his first couple of years at nau bryce took full advantage of these totally amazing hiking trails within a couple hours of the campus he also spent some time overseas in west africa helping to build a medical clinic for people in need during the summer break of 2009 so going into his third year at nau bryce was still living out in arizona in an apartment and he still had a few weeks before classes started and so he decided he would head off to the nearby grand canyon to do a little bit of hiking he had recently read in an outdoor magazine about this lesser-known but unbelievable trail that was just for experts in the canyon that he wanted to try it was called the deer creek thunder river loop and it brought hikers to this remote location where water gushed out of this huge limestone rock wall transforming the desert landscape below into this unbelievable green oasis the article said very strong hikers could complete this nearly 28 mile loop in about three days since bryce considered himself a very strong hiker he decided this was perfect for him bryce called his parents and let them know he was going to do this loop and that when he came back in a couple of days he'd be making a trip to virginia to visit with them then bryce called some friends in the area to see if they wanted to come with him on this hike but no one was available so bryce decided he would go on his own so the next day which was saturday july 18th bryce loaded up his car and he began driving these several hours to the parking lot that was nearest the trailhead bryce parked his car he got his gear out of the trunk and then he set off down the trail bryce had not obtained a back country permit for this hike this was a requirement for anybody doing an overnight out in the canyon which bryce planned on doing bryce also didn't file his route with the park rangers had he told them where he was going they would have tried to talk him out of it the deer creek thunder river loop had no protection from the sun the entire time and since it was july he would be hit with the highest temperatures in the most direct sunlight all this on top of the fact that even in the coolest times of the year this trail is still an extremely difficult trail because of the terrain you have to navigate in fact when hikers did file their route with park rangers and they indicated they were going to be doing this expert loop they would ask them to provide next-of-kin information in case they died during their hike it's unclear if bryce was just very confident in himself and his abilities or if he was being reckless from his car bryce hiked about two miles down some switchbacks into the canyon once he reached the bottom he would have found himself in this wide open flat area called the esplanade that kind of looked like the surface of the moon with all these potholes all over it at this point in bryce's hike it would have been dark out so he would have set up his tent somewhere on the rocks and camped out for the night people that have done this that have camped out on the esplanade have said it's unbelievably beautiful because most people experience the grand canyon from high up on one of the rims looking down into it but the esplanade is literally inside the canyon so you have this unobstructed view in both directions and apparently it's quite beautiful the next morning bryce got up at sunrise he packed up his campsite and then he continued on his hike the first challenge he would come up against that morning was navigating down what's called the red wall which is a fairly steep and treacherous descent that for an experienced hiker it would take about an hour to safely navigate and then at the bottom of the red wall you would enter into this area called the surprise valley no one really knows why it's named that but hikers who have been down in this valley they think it's named after the surprise you feel when you get in there and you realize how much hotter it is typically it's about 10 or 20 degrees hotter down inside of this bowl after bryce successfully navigated down the red wall he entered into this totally miserable surprise valley but he would have known he was only about a half mile away from his target destination the deer creek thunder river where he planned to jump in and cool off so eager to do that bryce took off but made a critical mistake he went the wrong way while it's unclear exactly how this happened experts believe his ears played a trick on him hikers are told as they're approaching this river in the middle of the desert they should listen out for it because when you get fairly close you can hear the sound of rushing water but hikers have to be careful because sometimes when the wind is blowing in a certain direction that sound from the river will echo off the inside of this bowl and it will appear to come from the opposite direction it's believed bryce was following his map when he heard the sound of this river coming from a different direction and so he abandoned the map and followed the sound price walked for quite a while in the wrong direction all the way up a hill and most likely the whole time he was hearing the sound of the water and he probably thought once i get over the top of this hill i'll look down the other side and i will see the water but when he crested the hill he looked down and just saw a barren valley had he continued another quarter mile down into the valley and then up the other side he could have turned around and he would have been able to spot an obvious landmark that would have brought him to the river but most likely bryce was exhausted from the extreme heat and the sunlight and trekking all this way and so he felt like it was probably too risky to keep going down into this valley because he had no idea where it went so in keeping with his wilderness training he got as a boy scout he dropped all of his heavy equipment off the side of the trail in an area he had marked so he could eventually come back and retrieve it and then he took his water food and headlamp turned around and began backtracking after a little while bryce decided to abandon the trail and actually veer off onto a dry creek bed in the boy scouts they're taught any dry creek bed will eventually connect to water and so at this point bryce is probably running low on water and figures whether this leads him to the deer creek thunder river or some other water body he didn't care he just needed water so off he went on this dry creek bed but after a while he saw less and less vegetation it was just this barren desert in all directions after a little while longer bryce dropped all of his gear on the ground after finishing his water at this point he would have known that if he doesn't find a water source soon he won't make it and so bryce just continues to trudge along on this dry riverbed not seeing any indication that he's getting any closer to water but then he looks up and he sees the land in front of him appears to slope downward out of view and then beyond that he sees off in the distance what looks like the southern wall of the grand canyon and below the southern wall is the colorado river and so bryce would have known if he can just go down this decline he's certain to reach this river and he'll be saved and so bryce made his way up to where the ground started going down towards the river he began safely descending fairly slowly and then he reached a very steep section called a spill which is a dry waterfall and these vary in height but they're pretty steep and they're pretty slick once bryce went down one of these things there'd be no way to get back up again so this was a one-way trip but bryce was desperate he knew his only chance was getting down to that colorado river which he could now see and so bryce scrambled down this first spill and then he found another one and another one and he kept going down these spills and they kept getting steeper and more challenging and the temperature continued to rise as he went down deeper into this canyon finally bryce reached a spill that was very very steep it was nearly vertical but again bryce couldn't go back up the way he came he had to keep going so at some point he threw himself off of the spill and he fell down 30 feet but he lived he stood up he dusted himself off and he continued walking forward he walked past these boulders into this clearing and right in front of him is the colorado river it's a half a mile straight down in front of him but the only way to get to it was navigating another spill and this spill was 80 feet tall and it was almost completely vertical there was no way to survive that kind of fall and bryce couldn't just turn around and try to find an alternate route because this was a one-way trip he could not climb back up the spills he had just come down to get there and to his left and to his right were these steep canyon walls that kind of bordered the space he was in that had no handholds on them so he couldn't climb them up or down bryce was trapped and he knew it the following tuesday when bryce was supposed to be home in virginia visiting his family he didn't show up so his family tried calling him but they couldn't get through to him it seemed like his phone was off and so they called the authorities the search party was sent out in the grand canyon to go look for bryce and on saturday july 25th so this is six days after bryce has found himself trapped on that ledge overlooking the river a search party was on the colorado river and they happened to look up in the direction where bryce had been and they noticed what looked like a person and so they got their climbing gear and they made their way up that spill onto this ledge and they found bryce he was sitting up against a boulder and he was deceased he had died from heat stroke and dehydration in his hand was his blackberry cellphone it wouldn't have had any service inside of the canyon but bryce used it as a notepad to write a final message to his family and to his friends in it he writes life is good whether it is long or short i was fortunate to do much more than most people and for that i am very thankful his message also had some humor thrown into it he said to his family that he was really thankful he had his blackberry phone because it would have been a lot harder to etch his final message into a rock he also said that he didn't know what the afterlife held for him he just hoped they had water then with his phone's battery dying he wrote one final sentence i feel like going into the wild is a calling we all feel some answer it and some die for it then shortly after writing that message bryce clutched his phone to his chest and he passed away he was just 20 years old so that's gonna do it guys if you found the secret in today's episode let us know in the comments what it is and where you found it and if you're the first person to do that we will pin you at the top of the comment section if you got something out of today's episode and you haven't done this already please replace the like button salted butter with unsalted butter also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly 3 or 4 video uploads if you want to get in touch with me you can direct message me on instagram or on twitter my username for both platforms is the same it's johnballen416 i also have a ton of content over on tick talk where my username is mr ballin i also have a second youtube channel called mr ball and shorts where i post random short videos and lost episodes if you have a story suggestion please submit it to our subreddit just called mr ballen it's linked in the description below so whether i see you on instagram twitter tick tock reddit youtube or some combination just know that i really appreciate your support and until next time that's gonna do it see ya

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 1,192,446

Rating: 4.9700613 out of 5

Keywords: strange, dark, mysterious, true, story, scary, scary story, horror story, disturbing, narration, narrator, storyteller, storytime, storytelling, unsolved mystery, solved mystery, true crime, oof, nope, final, messages, near death, nde, dying, die, open water, lost, abandoned, horror, true story, scuba, scuba diving, australia, Great Barrier Reef, coral reef, World War Two, world war 2, ww2, Japanese army, execution, pow, prisoner of war, Grand Canyon, arizona, last words, secret note, hidden note, wow

Id: RseUuG5Kl8Q

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021