Chapter 1: What are the three stories that illustrate the price of fame, fortune, and adventure?
Fame, fortune, adventure, all those things that we want, they all sort of come with a price. And today's three stories demonstrate that. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.
The first story you'll hear is called Surge, and it's about a couple's dream vacation that quickly turns into a nightmare. The second story you'll hear is called Stowaway, and it's about a runaway who wants nothing more than just to go see the world.
And the third and final story you'll hear is called The Path Was Traveled, and it's about a group of men who are very, very greedy, and their greed has devastating consequences.
But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays.
So if that's of interest to you, please offer to make the like button their favorite dish, fettuccine alfredo, but replace the alfredo sauce with poisonous sea urchins. Okay, let's get into our first story called Surge. In October of 2007, Helena Carroll and her fiance John Cullen had saved a little bit of money and they were torn on what to do with it.
They knew they should put it aside and put it towards a down payment on a new house, but they also really wanted to go on vacation and lately life had been very stressful for both of them. And so ultimately they decided let's just blow it all on an amazing vacation. And so later that month, they flew off to Thailand.
Over the course of their week, they spent most of their time at their resort, sitting in the pool and eating nice food, and they were having this really nice time. And on their last day, they decided they needed to do something a little bit more adventurous.
And so they decided to explore the Namtalu Cave inside of the Khao Sok National Park, which is this 160 million year old rainforest that was not that close to their resort. In fact, it was not really a huge tourist destination because of how cumbersome it was to get there.
But from everything they read about this park and specifically this cave they wanted to go in, it was just this breathtaking experience and so they were sold. After signing up for a guided tour, they headed down to the pier where they boarded a boat and drove 90 minutes to the entrance of this park.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the couple's dream vacation in the story 'Surge'?
Our next story is called Stowaway. In 1970, 14-year-old Keith Sapsford was living in Sydney, Australia with his parents, and he was desperate to travel the world. His parents wanted him to be able to travel. They just lacked the resources to be able to afford that kind of thing.
However, they were able to pull a little bit of cash, and the three of them did go on a nice European vacation that his parents were hoping would kind of calm down his desires to want to travel all the time. They thought this would be, you know, a taste before he got older and he could go travel as much as he wanted. But when he came back from that vacation, it really had the opposite effect.
It was like Keith had experienced the life that he so desperately wanted, and now he's home and it's like that life has been taken from him. Following that vacation, Keith began trying to run away from home. Not because he didn't want to be around his parents, but just because he saw it as his only way to, you know, see the world.
But every time he would run away, his parents would quickly find him and bring him back home. Their concern for their son would only grow, though, because he would find ways to sneak away and be gone for longer and longer stretches of time. And they're thinking it's only a matter of time before he really gets hurt.
In an effort to save their son, they ended up enrolling him in this very strict boarding school that was for boys with behavioral problems. And they were hoping that the staff at the school was going to be able to kind of calm their son down and keep him from trying to run away all the time.
But unfortunately the school really had the opposite effect because the school in a sense was like a prison. You weren't allowed to leave. And so immediately Keith, when he gets there, he's looking for ways to escape this boarding school. And two weeks after arriving, he would be successful. He would elude the staff and he would escape.
Three days after he had escaped this boarding school, he found his way to the Sydney airport. Now, this is the 1970s, and it was far easier to get into an airport than it would be today, where there's lots of security. There wasn't much of that at the time that Keith was at the airport.
And so Keith walked across the tarmac to a plane that was bound for Tokyo, and he climbed inside the wheel well, he tucked himself in there, and he waited for takeoff. A photographer named John Gilpin happened to be at the Sydney airport on the same day that Keith has now snuck into that wheel well. And he had a new lens for his camera that he was testing out.
And at one point he was just taking pictures of the tarmac and he began taking pictures of a plane that was taking off. And it was the same plane that Keith had snuck into. And he takes pictures of it as it takes off, it goes up to altitude and it flies away. And he just took a series of pictures of it, puts his camera away, doesn't think twice about it.
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