MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - No Way Out Vol. X

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

Today’s podcast features 3 stories that involve people who were trapped - with “no way out.” The audio from all three stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel, which is just called "MrBallen," and has been remastered for today's podcast. Story names, previews & links to original YouTube videos: #3 -- "A Crush on a Cruise" -- A cruise ship's unexpected catastrophe... (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaSQ4ou05dc) #2 -- "The Gauge" -- A critical error leads to a horrifying fate for these saturation divers (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3e5nxOx0XA) #1 -- "Teapot" -- A freak accident turns a vacation into a nightmare (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTrEzqm6dCE)   You can WATCH all new & exclusive MrBallen podcast episodes on my YouTube channel, just called "MrBallen" - https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallen If you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @mrballen Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today's podcast features three stories that involve people who got trapped with no way out. 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 A Crush on a Cruise, and it's about a cruise ship's very unexpected catastrophe. The second story you'll hear is called The Gage, and it's about a critical error that leads to a horrifying fate for several saturation divers.

And the third and final story you'll hear is called Teapot, and it's about a freak accident turning a vacation into a nightmare. 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 sneak into the Follow Button's house and open up all of their cereal. And make sure when you do this, you open the bag up really messily and you tear down the side of the bag, not along the seams at the top. Okay, let's get into our first story called A Crush on a Cruise.

Just after 6 p.m. on December 27, 2015, a woman named Sarah Robinson was getting ready inside of her cabin on the seventh floor of a massive cruise ship. She and her boyfriend were going to dinner that night with Sarah's parents in one of the restaurants on board the ship. And in fact, this entire trip, this whole vacation, was actually a big gift from Sarah's parents to Sarah and her boyfriend. And so far, the trip had been totally amazing. I mean, all four of them, Sarah, her boyfriend, and Sarah's parents.

I'd got to go swimming and drink great drinks and have great food. And it was just like a total dream. But now they only had one night left tonight, and they wanted to make the most of it. And their plan was to go to the big buffet that the ship offered and just totally indulge on the amazing food and just have some laughs, share stories. and then the next day they'd wake up in the Florida port that they left from, and the trip would be over. But for now, they had this one dinner left. And so, after Sarah and her boyfriend were all ready,

they left their cabin and they met Sarah's parents out in the hallway, and then Sarah led the way towards the stairwell that would bring them up to the 10th floor where the restaurant was that they were going to. Once they reached the 10th floor, Sarah could see right in front of her the entrance to this restaurant. And so she, her boyfriend, and her parents all behind her, began walking towards the restaurant. And to get there, they would have to walk past the sort of lobby right in front of the restaurant, where there was this elevator bank that would go down to the lobby and all the other floors. And so, you know, Sarah and her family, they walked past these elevators.

And as they did, Sarah began to hear what sounded like rain hitting the outside of the ship. But that didn't make any sense because that whole day, the weather had been beautiful and clear. And Sarah, when she heard this sound, she instinctively kind of looked around the corner out one of the windows, and she looked out into the night, and it was still clear and beautiful out. So this could not be rain. And so Sarah, she turned around and she looked at her boyfriend and her parents with this sort of quizzical look, being like, do you hear this? Like, what is that sound?

And they clearly had heard it too, and were looking back at her like, I don't know. But before they could even start to discuss whatever this was, a woman who they didn't know, who was standing near these elevators as well, began to scream. It would turn out just a few minutes before this woman began to scream, the cruise ship's chief electrician, 66-year-old Jose Sandoval Opazo, had begun doing routine maintenance on the elevators that were located a few floors below the 10th floor, but still within that same elevator bank that could bring you up to the 10th floor where that restaurant was. And while Jose was performing this very routine and quick maintenance on the elevator,

something strange happened. But to understand why this happened, you need to understand a little bit about Jose and the other electricians on board this cruise ship. So there was oftentimes a lot of very quick and easy maintenance that would need to get done on these elevators, which would involve going into the elevator shaft to do it. But again, these are very short bursts in and out, you know, very easy to do. All the electricians know how to do it. And the procedure was to actually fully shut down that elevator, like completely, and then go inside and do the maintenance, and then go through the process of starting the elevator all over again. But, that was so disruptive to the flow of traffic on the ship each day, and it was just kind of a hassle.

And so Jose and the other electricians had come up with this sort of workaround that didn't require them to shut down the elevator, because again, that was just a huge pain and they didn't want to do it. And so what they would do is they would wait until the elevator car within the shaft they needed to do maintenance on was at some other level, like on floor two, and they would go into the elevator on like floor eight, and then quickly do the maintenance on the inside of the shaft or whatever it is they had to do. or sometimes they would actually have to do repairs on the elevator car itself, you know, in which case they would just kind of go in real quick, do the repairs, get out again.

But all of it was predicated on just kind of knowing where the elevator car was in the shaft and being really quick, you know, in and out. And so Jose and the other electricians had done this many times and there was no issues. But on this day, Jose, he got into the elevator shaft to make these simple repairs. And so he actually was standing inside of the shaft on top of the elevator car that was down, you know, a few levels down, from 10, and he began making these repairs, and suddenly the car lurched into action, because a guest unknowingly had walked into the elevator car and pressed floor 10. And so Jose is on this elevator car that starts moving, and before he can even figure out what's going on, the little opening that he used, the kind of service entrance into the shaft, had been covered up by the elevator car.

And so his exit was now gone, and he was now relatively slowly moving up the shaft. Now, Jose would have no idea when this car was going to stop, but if it went to the top, he'd get crushed and he knew it. And so in kind of a moment of panic, Jose attempted to step to the side to like somehow go between the wall and the elevator. It was like he had nowhere to go and he knew it and he just took that path. But there was like an inch of space between the wall and the car. And so the second he did that, the car kept going and it sucked him down into that space and just destroyed him. And so by the time this elevator car reached its destination, the 10th floor, and that guest got off the elevator car. By this point, Jose's body had been totally destroyed, and all of his blood was dripping down the elevator shaft,

splattering into the walls and hitting the ground, and it sounded like rain hitting the outside of the ship. And so that's what Sarah and her family were hearing, and then the reason that woman started screaming is she was the first one who turned and saw all this blood coming down the front of the elevator doors. medics would arrive quickly on the scene, but there was nothing they could do. Jose was deceased. Our next story is called The Gage. Around 10 p.m. on September 9, 1975, a 24-year-old man named Roger Baldwin and his coworker, 29-year-old Peter Holmes, frantically crawled on hands and knees as fast as they could

down a hallway towards the door of their apartment. And the reason they were crawling and not standing and walking or running is because this was no ordinary apartment. This apartment was basically like a metal box with a bunch of interconnected metal tubes that was located 200 miles off the coast of Scotland, basically out in the middle of the ocean, and it was also underwater. And the reason for that is it was connected to an offshore oil rig, and oil rigs often need divers, like deep sea divers, to work on the rig down deep in the water. But if you know anything about underwater diving, especially deep underwater diving, is that it's not as simple as just throwing on some scuba tanks and going down into the water and doing

your work and coming back up again. No, if you're working on an oil rig down at depth, like an underwater welder or anybody who does work for a while deep underwater, there's lots of risks associated with going from the surface down deep where there's really intense pressures and you're breathing in different mixed gases that can interact with your body in sort of very terrible ways, it's dangerous. That's the reality of it. Going down to depth and then coming back up again is a very dangerous process, unless you know what you're doing. It's more efficient for owners of oil rigs to construct these pressurized apartments underwater for their deep-sea divers to live in,

so that when they go out to the rig, they only have to go down to depth once, live in the apartment, which imagine a cup that you just push down into water. There's like an air pocket, right? You push it deep into the water. They basically would swim up under into this apartment, deep underwater, and they live there and dive back out of there, do their work. come back into their apartment, but their bodies never really leave the working depth until the end of their shift, whether it's weeks or months or however long they're out there, and then they

only have to decompress one time. So in essence, you get to work, you go down deep, and you stay there effectively for a long time, and then when you're done working, you go back to the surface. And so that's why that apartment existed, and that's sort of the setup for these two guys. They've been living underwater. But at that moment, Roger and Peter were not thinking about their diving responsibilities, They were rushing down this metal tube hallway that led to their apartment because over the intercom, the folks on the surface, their supervisor, had communicated down to them that there was some sort of leak happening in the hallway. And so they basically had to rush into their apartment and seal the door behind them before the air basically vanished in the hallway and they suffocated.

So they're crawling as fast as they can. They finally get to their apartment door. They open it up, they go inside, they shut it, and they seal it. And now they're sitting there with their backs against the door, hoping that the leak was contained to the hallway, and they're looking up into the corner of their small metal room, their main living space where there's bunks, and there's also the entrance down into the water, basically right in front of them. And there's this camera up in the corner of this room looking down at them, and they, you know, they have no way to directly communicate with their supervisor on the surface.

But they know their supervisor has access to that camera, and he's looking at them on his monitor, and his black and white, you know, monitor. And so they're looking up at this camera, hoping that their supervisor is watching them and is doing everything he needs to do to officially contain this leak. Basically, Roger and Peter, they can shut their door, but they can't fully seal it. The full seal comes when somebody on the surface, their supervisor, injects helium into their room. Basically adds more pressure to their room, which then sucks the door fully sealed, and then they're safe. And so Roger and Peter, they're listening carefully for the sound of that injection of helium into the room.

room, and eventually they hear it, and there's some creaking on the door, and it sounds very much like their door is fully sealed, and now they're safe. And so Roger and Peter, they step away from the door, they sort of look up at the camera and say, thank you. And they're like, all right, you know, I hope that leak out in the hallway is our only issue here. Now, it's worth pointing out that things like this, as terrifying as that would be, you know, you're deep underwater and over the intercom, they're saying there's a leak. Like, that would be horrifying. But this is a really dangerous job. And unfortunately, leaks and other things like that just sort of happened. And so Roger and Peter were kind of accustomed to things like this happening. And they just had to, you know,

hope that the folks on the surface would do their best to, you know, mitigate the problems and, you know, keep them safe. At this point, though, Roger and Peter knew that, you know, it didn't seem like there were any of their emergencies here. You know, whatever leak was happening in the hallway, that could be dealt with, you know, if they had to, they could actually just leave their apartment with their diving equipment on and make their way back up to the surface. Like, were ways for them to get out of here. And they're thinking, okay, you know, our room has been fully sealed off. We heard the helium be injected into the room.

The door shut behind us like, we're good. And again, they can't directly communicate to the supervisor. The supervisor's not saying anything over the intercom. And so they think, okay, you know, it's good for us to just take our stuff off and go to bed. And so that's what they do. They take off their diving equipment and they climb into their beds and they turn out the lights. At the same time they were climbing into bed, their supervisor up on the surface, a guy named

Reid Arnold, who'd been talking to them over the intercom. he was sitting there looking at this big control panel with all these switches and gauges and monitors that controlled their underwater apartment. And unfortunately for him, you know, even though it did seem like the leak in the hallway was relatively contained, although it still was leaking, he was also now noticing that there was another problem that he wasn't telling Roger and Peter about yet. And that was, apparently, the door to their apartment, despite them closing it clearly and him injecting helium into the room, you know, following all the steps, it appears. appeared like the door somehow did not fully seal, which meant there was a slow leak.

And over time, if this wasn't fixed, the pressure would drop so severely in that room that, you know, that could be fatal for Roger and Peter. Like, this is an emergency, but it's sort of a slow one. And so Reed took a minute and kind of assessed the situation. And, you know, the only thing he could do to try to close this door to fully seal it, let's say, is to inject more helium into Roger and Peter's room. Not enough to harm them, but just enough to, further pushed that door closed. And so he did that. He injected a little bit more helium,

and he's watching the gauge of their room, you know, become even more pressurized. But the indicator that showed whether or not the door was sealed continued to show that it was not. And so as Reed is sitting there wondering what he's going to do next, he looked over at the monitor that was the live feed into the room, where he could actually watch Roger and Peter, that camera in the corner of the room. And he sees the two men are laying in their beds, but then sort of out of nowhere, they both get up climb off their beds, and they hustle over to the door, the leaky door, and they start trying to open it. But from the feed, as he's looking at it, it seems very apparent that they can't get the door to open. It's like it's stuck. And Reed's thinking to himself, that doesn't make any sense.

I have this indication light that says the door isn't sealed, so even if it was a challenge to open the door, it's not pressure sealed. They should be able to open it. So what is going on here? And so Reed, like he's beginning to panic a little bit because he just doesn't understand what's happening here, and as he's watching Roger and Peter, they go from frantically trying to open this door to almost in unison, stopping, turning around, walking over to their bunks, and then grabbing their mattresses, taking them off, and then Roger and Peter climbed on to their metal bed springs and began rolling around on the metal. Now, it's worth pointing out that there are some diving-related injuries, like from being at depth for too long or, you know, hypercapnia where you have too much

CO2 in your system. There's a whole bunch of things that can basically mess with your mind. And so Reed's thinking, oh my goodness, something's happened that's given these guys some sort of diving-related injury. Like they're acting crazy. This must be a product of something wrong. They're breathing the wrong mixture of gas. Maybe there's too much helium. Maybe there's too much CO2. Like, I don't know what's going on, but there is an issue here that's messing with their brains. Like, that's the only explanation for why they could be doing something so bizarre. And so at this point, Reed decides all he can do is just continue to put more helium into that room to try to seal that door. You know, maybe there's some sort of toxic gas that's getting into their space that's causing them to hallucinate or go crazy or who knows what.

And so he's just firing off this button adding more and more helium into the room. And after doing this for several minutes and still watching on the monitor as Roger and Peter continue to do this weird writhing around on their bed frames, That was around the time that Reed really focused on his controls, like, am I missing something? Is there some other indication on here that gives away what's going on here? And that's when he realized he had made a terrible mistake. It would turn out, Reed had misread the control panel. There really had been a leak in the hallway, and he was right to tell Peter and Roger to rush into their apartment. But once they were inside the apartment and they shut the door and then Reed injected helium into their room,

he actually did seal that room off. There was no issue in their apartment. They were totally safe. There was no problem. He was just misreading the control panel. He thought when he saw this additional indication that, you know, the apartment door had not sealed, that that was indicative of a leak in their apartment. But no, the controls were really trying to tell him that, hey, there's still a leak in the hallway

right outside of their apartment. And so basically, what Reed ended up doing by injecting more and more helium into the apartment where Roger and Peter were, is he was creating a deadly pressure chamber. And the reason the men began acting the way they were is because the room was getting hotter and hotter and hotter from all this pressure. They could feel it, you know, building inside of the space. And so they didn't know what was going on. They tried to get out, but they couldn't open the door because it was pressure sealed.

And then they took their mattresses off their bed and began rolling around on the metal to try to cool down. But it was so intensely hot and it was so pressurized that you can imagine the chaos and panic, these two men felt. Like, yeah, maybe theoretically they could have thrown on all their equipment and dove out of there. But you've got to remember this is happening abruptly, and they're basically boiling alive. And so it's like full-blown fight or flight mode, and these men are just trying to cool down, they can't. And so every time Reed injected more and more helium into that room, he was raising the pressure and therefore the temperature in that small space,

and eventually he boiled Roger and Peter alive. In the end, the supervisor, Reed, did not actually face any criminal charges because, one, it was a genuine mistake, but two, the mistake was one that many people would have made. There was basically an issue with this control board that sort of presented problems in a sort of ambiguous way. And so it really wasn't Reed being negligent. It was just a flaw in the control panel. The next and final story of today's episode is called teapot. On June 30th, 2002, an 18-year-old named Daniel Dick was on vacation with his mother and his two younger brothers in Hawaii. Daniel had just graduated from his high school in Los Angeles where he was the student body president. He was known to invite all of his classmates over to his house all the time for dinners,

and girls would call him all the time to try to get advice about their boyfriends. And Daniel also would befriend troubled teens in an attempt to kind of pick them up and get them back on the straight and narrow. When he and his family left for this vacation, he had been working. working part-time at a grocery store and was getting ready to attend California State University in the fall. That morning, Daniel went down to the beach where he planned on doing some swimming and maybe laying out in the sun for a little bit, and pretty quickly he met three girls, and after about 30 minutes of chatting with them, he asked them if they wanted to climb over the fence

and check out the blowhole. A blowhole is a fairly narrow hole that is situated on rocks right near where water is crashing, and this hole is usually formed by molten lava that is passed through underneath. And what happens is this hole is connected to a tunnel that feeds down and out into the water. So when the waves come in, they go through this tunnel and they get rocketed up this little opening, causing a massive geyser of water. Now if you don't go near the blowhole, it's not dangerous at all. It's just a very cool natural phenomenon.

The beach that Daniel and these girls were on was situated right near an infamously dangerous blowhole called the Holona Blowhole. The reason it was so dangerous is because the water it connected to through that tunnel was some of the most violent in all of Hawaii. So when those waves came barreling through the tunnel, it would shoot 30 plus feet in the air. And so to make sure everybody understood you're only allowed to watch the blowhole from a distance, they actually put up a fence all the way around it and put up signs saying, do not go any closer. To give you a sense of how powerful the water was that was churning through this tunnel, if you were standing on the other side of the fence watching

the blowhole from a safe distance, you could feel the ground shaking as the waves would rumm through the tunnel and then explode out of the blowhole. According to Daniel's family and friends, he was not a reckless person, he was just a very adventurous person. And so something like this blowhole really piqued his interest and he just couldn't handle being on the outside of the fence. He really wanted to get right up there and get a look at it. In fact, he told these girls he wanted to feel the power of the water hit him in the chest. That was his plan. The girls told him this was a bad idea, but he was insistent and he began walking over to the rocks where you could climb up and jump up.

this fence. The girls went with him, but they stopped short of the fence. As Daniel made his way over to the rocks, he passed by a couple that was laying on the beach, he waved to them, he climbed up the rocks, he climbed over the fence, and he made his way over to the blowhole. And he timed it to where a wave had just come in and shot a geyser up. And then as soon as the water went down and there was a break, he walked over the edge of this hole that was not very far across, and he kind of arched himself over it, so his chest was hovering right over where the water was going to come up. And initially a wave came through and the water shot up and it hit him in the chest and it kind of staggered him back for a minute. And at this point, the three girls and the couple that he had passed are now yelling for him to get away from the blowhole that it's way too dangerous.

But it was too late. He leaned back over the blowhole right as a massive wave in barreling through the tunnel. It rocketed up and it lifted him off the ground about five feet in the air and it turned him upside down so his head is pointed down. And when he fell, he went directly into the blowhole. The couple and the three girls that saw this happen described his body position as being the perfect dive. And in order to actually get into the blowhole, you would need the perfect body position. Because the opening is very narrow, and it goes down eight feet of just this narrow, narrow tube. And at the bottom of that, it opens up like the inside of a teapot. And inside of there is this vicious churning water that connects to this underground tunnel that feeds out to the same.

sea. And so when Daniel went head first down, his momentum, along with his perfect body position, forced himself down through that hole into that section that's kind of like the inside of a teapot. And once you're inside, there's no way to go back up again. The opening is too tight and there's nothing to hold on to. You wouldn't have the ability to force yourself up through that hole again. So the only way out is through the underground tunnel that leads out to the sea. But there are constantly waves pounding their way up this tunnel into the section where Daniel had fallen into. And so realistically, anybody that tries to swim through this fairly long underground tunnel is only going to get so far before a wave forces them back or traps them in some way in this

underground tunnel. As soon as Daniel went into the blowhole, the couple and the three girls immediately climbed up the rocks, hopped over the fence, and began looking into the tunnel yelling for Daniel. And as they're sitting there yelling for him and yelling for people on the beach to call 911, they would feel the ground start to shake as another wave would come through the tunnel and erupt through the blowhole. And they know every time that happened, Daniel, if he was alive, he was completely submerged in water for 30 seconds or so every iteration that this blowhole erupted. By the time the police showed up, Daniel has been trapped inside of this blowhole for some time and no one's heard him, no one's seen him. And so it's starting to start to live.

look pretty grim, and the police would say it's nearly impossible for anybody to survive being inside of this blowhole, especially at high tide, which is when he went in. In fact, the police would say, we can't even send divers in there until low tide, because if we send someone in now, they're going to get killed inside of this blowhole. It's too violent inside of there. And so the best they could do was put a weighted line into the blowhole anchored on the outside so that if by some miracle Daniel was still alive, He'd be able to grab this line and pull himself up. He probably would not be able to pull himself through the hole to safety, but at least he could keep himself out of the water

until rescuers could get there the next day at low tide. But when low tide came the next day and divers went out to the water, they discovered Daniel's body. It was floating near the area where water actually gets sucked into the tunnel and out through the blowhole. During low tide, he must have been pulled back out through the tunnel out to sea. It's unclear how long Daniel was alive once he landed inside of the blowhole,

or whether he ever attempted to actually swim through that tunnel out the sea, but at some point, he did drown. Daniel's mother petitioned to have a metal grate put over the blowhole so that nobody else would fall in and meet the same fate as her son, but this proposal was met with criticism from the locals who said the problem was not the blowhole, the problem was people not respecting the power of nature. And so while a fence still surrounds Holona Blowhole,

telling people to stay back, the entrance to the blowhole is still uncovered. A quick note about our stories. They are all based on true events. But we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballin podcast, Strange, Dark and Mysterious Stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballin.

Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Bone, research and fact-checking by Shelley Shoe, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, and Camille, Halahan. Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Witt Lacasio, Jordan Stidham, and Cole Lacasio, production coordination by Samantha Collins, production support by Antonio Manada and Delana Corley, artwork by Jessica Klogstenkiner, theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast. And just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr. Ballin podcast, you can also now

watch on the Mr. Ballin YouTube channel that very same day. And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe. Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballin. If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit seriousxm.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see you. Thank you.