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

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Today’s podcast will feature 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 -- "Escalation" -- You'll never feel safe on an escalator again (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eHMOFfHKDw) #2 -- "Volunteer" -- After a swimmer goes missing in a lake, a local man is called to help (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3rccx8oyEk) #1 -- "The Messiest Place" -- A routine hospital stay turns into a disappearance no one can explain (Original YouTube link -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWsSQgn0h-0)   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 will feature three stories that all involve people who were 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 escalation, and after you hear this story, you'll likely never feel safe on an escalator again. The second story you'll hear is called Volunteer, and it's about a swimmer who mysteriously goes missing in a lake, which prompts a local man. to come in to help. And the third and final story you'll hear is called the messiest place. And it's about a disappearance inside of a hospital that nobody can explain.

But before we get into that story, 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 four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays. So if that's of interest to you, please replace all of the Follow Button's toilet paper with duct tape. Okay, let's get into our first story called Escalation. Around 10 a.m. on July 26, 2015, a 31-year-old mom named Xiang Lu Juan and her husband, chased their two-year-old son around a brand new indoor playground. This playground was on the sixth floor of a mall in Jingzhou City, which is in central China.

And so Xiong and her husband had come to this mall today, just so their son could basically enjoy this playground. And currently, he was running around in circles and laughing hysterically. He thought it was great. Jiang caught up to her son and scooped him up and then placed him at the top of a slide. And he happily slid down to the bottom, and when he reached the bottom, Jiang was waiting for him, and the son, he just stopped and looked past her and pointed and started saying, ride, ride! And so Jiang, she turned around and she saw right behind them were these two escalators,

one going up and one going down. And so Zhang realized her son clearly thought these escalators were maybe a part of this playground. And so he wanted to go use them. They were a fun attraction. And so Zhang smiled and took her son's hands. and then told her husband they're going to go ride the ride, you know, the escalators, and then they began walking over. Once Jiang and her son actually reached the escalator, suddenly her son was not as keen to hop on board.

He was nervous. But Jiang, who had ridden escalators many times before, you know, told her son it's totally safe and she kind of coaxed him to do it. And eventually he stepped on right alongside her holding her hand, and about halfway up the escalator when she was confident her son would be okay, Jiang turned around and looked up towards the top of the escalator, the seventh floor, where he was. they were going. And she saw three mall employees at the top of the escalator on the seventh floor where they were going. And they were clearly looking at Jiang with a very serious look on their faces,

and they were gesturing at something towards the top of the escalator. It seemed like they could be warning her about something or simply pointing something out. She wasn't really sure. And so she looked up at them like, what's going on here? But the three mall employees just didn't do a good job communicating whatever was going on or whatever issue they were dealing with. And so as a result, Jiang and her son just continued riding up the escalator, and as they got closer and closer, these mall employees continued to gesture at something happening on the seventh floor, just beyond the escalator and Jiang still totally confused. And then finally, when Jiang and her son reached the top and stepped off,

Jiang suddenly understood what these employees were referencing, but by now it was too late. Moments later, Jiang's husband, who was still down below on the sixth floor at the playground, he heard the sound of his wife and son screaming over near the escalator. And so instinctively, he bolted over to the escalator, he didn't see his wife, didn't see his son, and he began going up the escalator when someone at the top screamed at him to stop and get off the escalator. And so he did. And right then, a mall employee came running down the other side carrying his son, and this person handed the son over to Jiang's husband, and Jiang just said,

Where's my wife? Where is she? and this employee, who clearly was completely shocked by whatever it happened up above, just shook their head. It would turn out, earlier that day, those mall employees who were at the top gesturing to Jiang, they had discovered a defect with the metal platform that sits right at the top of the escalator on the seventh floor. Basically, when you get off this escalator, it's the platform you step onto first. They had found there was something wrong with it. It wasn't stable.

But instead of immediately blocking off the escalator to make sure nobody walked on it, it and then go get it repaired, these employees just kind of nonchalantly allowed the escalator to continue, you know, stationed a couple of them at the top to make sure nobody, you know, used the escalator and then called for a repairman. But the repairman hadn't shown up and fixed this problem by the time Jiang and her son boarded the escalator. And these employees at the top knew there's this huge issue with the platform they're going to step on the second they get off, but they failed to communicate the danger to Jiang

and her son as they were coming up. They just kind of broadly gesticulated that there was some issue up here and to sort of watch out for it. But Chiang had no idea. And so by the time she got to the top and stepped off the escalator onto that platform, well, the defect with the platform is that it caved in with any weight. And so she fell into the escalator where the teeth of the escalator was rotating, and as she was getting pulled in to her death, her final moment captured on video as she took her son and thrusted him to the employees,

saving his life before she disappeared and died inside the inner workings of the escalator. Following Zhuge's death, there was a full-scale investigation, and quickly there were massive safety failures identified on the part of the company who made the escalator and also on the mall itself. Two people were ultimately arrested in connection with Xiong's death, and the safety failures and the mall reportedly offered to pay some settlement to Xiong's family. However, the details of that settlement have not been made public. story is called Volunteer. Around 5 p.m. on Sunday, August 15, 1971, a 23-year-old man named Michael was sitting inside of his living room in rural Ontario, Canada. Michael was flipping

through a photo album that showed pictures of him scuba diving and mountain biking and doing all these really high adrenaline activities because Michael really lived for adventure. And so as he's flipping through this album, he hears a knock on the door. So he stops what he's doing, he goes to the door, he opens it up, and there's this police officer who's totally full. frantic and is speaking a mile a minute, and he tells Michael, hey, so we had this guy who was swimming in a lake nearby and he went missing, he's been gone for over an hour now, we don't know where he is, and we were asking around, you know, does anybody have any scuba diving equipment or experience because we need to get in there and look for this guy in the lake? And everybody said,

you're the guy, you have scuba equipment and maybe you might be able to lend it to us so that, you know, the police could go in there and look for this guy. Now, Michael was kind of caught off guard by all this. I mean, this was not a typical occurrence to have police show up and have this type of request, but Michael immediately felt this sense of responsibility. He did know that he was sort of the top dog in scuba diving in rural Ontario, Canada, and he's hearing this police officer say what he's saying, but he's thinking, even if I give you my equipment, you can't just put the stuff on and safely conduct dives. You need the training as much as you need the equipment. And so Michael just kind of instinctively said, hey, look, I'm not just going to give you the equipment,

because I feel like I'm setting you up for failure here. What if I come with you, I'll put the equipment on, and I'll go look for this guy. I know what I'm doing. I know how to use the equipment. It'll be way safer and more efficient. And the cop said, thank you so much. That would be great. Let's go.

And so Kyle, he went and got his scuba equipment. And before long, he had thrown it in the police cruiser and the two of them were flying towards the lake. About 30 minutes later, Michael and the police officer pull into this parking lot, this wooded lot with trees everywhere, and straight ahead of them through the trees. They can see down below is this. big lake. And then to the left of the lake is a big dam. And then beyond that, over to the left side of that, is a river. And so where the swimmer had gone missing was in the lake portion.

And so Michael quickly hopped out of the car, he grabbed his scuba gear, and then he and the officer took off running through the trees down to the lake. And when they got down there, Michael scanned the area and he saw there were all these police officers and park employees. There were other people who clearly had just come to the lake that day, like tourists. And everybody's kind of scanning the lake. No one's really in the water. But everyone's sort of walking around the perimeters, like hoping they can just see this missing swimmer somewhere. And also Michael noticed clearly the family of this missing man was, you know, off to the side and many of them were crying.

But it definitely seemed like no serious search effort had really happened yet. It's like everybody was just kind of waiting for something to happen. And so when Michael shows up with all a scuba gear, it was like everybody looked at him as like, oh my goodness, thank you. Like get in there, find him. Like I bet he's okay. Like get out there. And Michael, you know, he's thinking to himself that he hadn't done a search like

this before, but the fact somebody was missing for that long already did not bode well, but he thought, you know what, I'm going to go in there, I'm going to give it my best shot, and I hope we find this guy still alive. So Michael put on all his equipment right on the shore side, and everyone's waiting, kind of watching, anxious about what's going to happen next. And once he had donned his equipment, Michael stood up and just began scanning the lake, looking for, you know, any sign of where to begin the search, because it's just one man and this huge body of water. He needs sort of a starting point. And so it's quiet. Everyone's just kind of watching Michael, as Michael's looking around the lake, and then at some point he looked out and he saw there was this little

ripple sort of right in the middle of the lake. Now, the surface of the lake had basically been glass-like because nobody was really in the water, save for like the very perimeter of the lake. And so the water was very calm, but he sees there's this little ripple, sort of right in the middle. And so Michael points out the ripple to the other officer he was with and sort of anybody who could listen. And he said, okay, I'm going to go in there and start searching right there. So Michael goes into the water and wades into about his waist, and then he kind of looked around one more time, put on his mask, and went under the water. About 15 minutes later, the police officer who had originally gone and gotten Michael and driven with him to the lake, he was still just standing

on the lake shore, along with the missing swimmer's family and other searchers, and pretty much everybody was just kind of waiting for Michael to give some sort of report about how the search was going. Now, Michael easily had enough air in his tanks to be out there for quite some time to do a pretty thorough search, and they're only 15 minutes in. They don't really know if This is too early to expect feedback from Michael, but it's just tense. Everybody's just waiting, you know, waiting to see what's going to happen. But at some point, as this officer is just standing there, one of the volunteer searchers comes bombing along the shore from up near the dam.

They ran right down to this officer and said, hey, you got to come with me. We found something over there in the river. And so, you know, at this point, the police officer is thinking, I bet they found the missing swimmer. You know, they're probably not in this lake. Maybe they found them over in the river. And he's thinking the worst, right? So he runs with the searcher, he goes to the dam, he goes to the river side on the other side of the

dam, and there's this crowd of searchers and police that are all along the shore of the river. And so this police officer pushes through the crowd, expecting, frankly, at this point, to see a dead body, to see the missing swimmer. But when he parts the crowd and sees what they're all looking at, he realizes there has been a terrible mistake. So two hours earlier, when this missing swimmer first went missing, this is like before Michael was ever contacted, you know, before he was out there searching for him, this is like the initial wave of panic, that we have a person who was missing somewhere in this water. Well, a park

employee had been really motivated to try to help with the search. And so without really telling anybody, they ran into the control room of the dam, and in there, they turned a valve. And this particular valve opened up a pipe that spanned from the lake back through to the river. And when this valve was turned and the pipe was opened up, water from the lake would go back into the river, basically draining the lake. This employee was thinking, if I drain the lake, it'll make it easier to search the lake where we believe this man has gone missing. Like this will make it easier to search the lake. And so this pipe has been opened up, this two foot in diameter, 30 foot long pipe connecting river and lake. And it's sucking water like mad from the lake into that river.

Nobody had really gone into the lake to look for this missing swimmer, believe it or not. So the lake really hadn't been touched as soon as this valve was turned. So the first person who went into the lake, once that was opened up, was Michael with a scuba gear on. And when he went into the water and actually flagged the ripple on the surface of the water, he didn't realize this, but that ripple represented this deadly undercurrent of all the water being sucked into this pipe. And so as soon as he went out and went under the water, the current pulled him so quickly, and so hard that he couldn't resurface, all his equipment got yanked off his body, and he was thrust into this pipe. And in the pipe, he got stuck, and he drowned inside of the pipe,

before eventually being forced out the other end where his body spilled out onto the shore of the river. That's what everybody was crowded around once they got up to the riverside, Michael's dead body. Four hours after Michael's body was found, they would find the missing swimmer. His body was located about 150 yards away from where Michael had first entered the lake. His body was found on the shore of the lake, and so Michael had sort of been close, but unfortunately, that current had pulled him under and killed him. Today, the lake has been permanently drained,

in part because of this tragedy. The next and final story of today's episode is called The Messiest Place. On the morning of Tuesday, July 13, 1993, a middle-aged nurse named Sharon Dempsey hurried down the hallway of the Meheri Hubbard Hospital, which was in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. And as she went down the hallway, Sharon checked in every single hospital room because she was searching for a patient that kept disappearing from her room.

When Sharon reached the end of the hallway, she looked into the last room, and there inside was the woman she was looking for. Her name was Mildred Lancaster, she was 69 years old, and she was sweeping the floor of another patient's room, with a broom that Sharon knew she had taken from the custodians card. Sharon walked in and she politely asked Mildred, you know, what are you doing here? And Mildred turned to her and just said, oh, she was just doing her job. At this, Sharon, the nurse, just sort of sighed and kind of rolled her eyes because, you know,

obviously this was not Mildred's job. Mildred was a patient. She had been admitted to the hospital two days earlier, primarily because she was having stomach pain, but she also suffered from severe bouts of confusion, which is something she was witnessing right here. Her family had told doctors that, you know, Mildred had spent. most of her life being a housekeeper. And so when she would get confused, which, you know, they saw plenty of times, she often would sort of default to thinking that she was back to being a housekeeper,

even though, you know, she was home or clearly not working. She would think she was working. And so when Mildred began demonstrating this kind of bizarre, disoriented behavior, there was some consideration to actually just physically restraining Mildred inside of her room to keep her from vanishing and, you know, going and thinking she was a housekeeper somewhere. You know, she could get into trouble or get hurt. However, Mildred was this very sweet and gentle woman who, you know, it was just hard to forcibly restrain inside of her room. And so instead, the medical team decided that we're just going to have to deal with the fact that periodically she's going to, you know, think she's at work and it might walk out of a room and go start cleaning somewhere. And so we need to

keep a close eye on her and keep her safe and just deal with her stomach pain and sort of manage her disorientation. And so in this moment, Sharon, the nurse, who's just found Mildred, once again cleaning some room she was not supposed to be in, she just, you know, followed their protocol and went in and kind of gently told Mildred like, okay, you know, put the broom down, come with me. And, you know, Mildred listened. And she led Mildred back to her room. And Sharon continued going about her day. A couple of days later, and Sharon was doing her regular rounds through the hospital. And as she did, she went into Mildred's room, and once again, she saw the room was empty. Now, Sharon was actually just kind of annoyed at this point. She wasn't really concerned. Because by this

point, Mildred had done this, had, you know, become disoriented and left to go clean or something, so many times by this point that it was just kind of a hassle. But, you know, Sharon just followed protocol and quickly left the room and began walking along the floor looking for Mildred so she could bring her back. But after searching the floor, she didn't find Mildred. And so after checking the whole floor again, but this time much more thoroughly, looking in every closet, every supply area, I mean, really searching the area and still not finding her, that's when Sharon began to panic. She began going to other nurses and doctors and asking them, have you seen Mildred? And remember, at this point, the whole floor is aware of what's going on with Mildred,

but nobody had seen her, so nobody knew where she was. And so Sharon ultimately went and spoke to the higher-ups at the hospital and informed them what was going on here. And in turn, they launched this huge search all across the hospital, both inside and outside, to just go find Mildred and get her back. And while this search is ongoing, Sharon was walking around trying to be helpful, because she was somebody, She was somebody that worked closely with Mildred and had a sense of where she might go. And she was telling folks to go to messy areas because Mildred, when she would get confused, would basically go clean areas she deemed messy.

And so go to parts of the hospital that might look messy. And so people were doing that. But this hospital, I mean, it was huge. It was 11 stories tall. And there were lots of areas that appeared messy. And so it just seemed like a kind of overwhelming task to quickly search this massive property for Mildred. And then on top of that, making it even harder to

to find Mildred was the fact that the hospital didn't have security cameras, so they couldn't just pull up the footage and see if maybe Mildred had walked outside or something. After about an hour of the search going on, when still they had not found Mildred and people were starting to wonder like, are we even going to find her at all? It was at that point that something new and really concerning happened. Sharon called Mildred's cousin to let her and the rest of Mildred's family know that Mildred was missing and that this time it was actually pretty serious that they hadn't found her. But as Sharon is breaking this news to the cousin, the cousin stops her and says, well, wait a minute, I think I know what's going on here. Because apparently, a few hours earlier,

the cousin had gone to the hospital to visit Mildred. And when they got there and spoke to the receptionist, the receptionist looked up Mildred to see what room she was in. And on their system, it showed that Mildred had checked out of the hospital that morning. So she was not there. And so, of course, this big search for Mildred was not going to find her because she wasn't at the hospital. But this really made no sense to Sharon. I mean, it did logically make sense that if she checked out, that would explain why she wasn't here. But Mildred should not have been allowed to check out of the hospital. She still definitely was not well, not just her confusion, but also the stomach pain she was having.

Like, she was still totally sick and should not have been discharged. But, you know, the cousin was adamant that they actually left the hospital because they told them, Like, you know, Mildred's not here. There's no one to go visit. She's gone. She checked out. And so Sharon hung up with the cousin and quickly ran down the hall to go talk to the receptionist to see if it was actually true, that Mildred had been discharged. And when the receptionist looked it up, sure enough, it was true. Mildred had checked out. And so at this point, Sharon, I mean, she could not believe what she was hearing. This didn't make sense.

And so Sharon, kind of not knowing what to do next, she walked away from the receptionist and she just walked over to the window that looked out to the front of the hospital. And she was just standing there, wondering what she should do. And as she was standing there, she was just looking outside kind of absent-mindedly. And she saw all these cars whizzing by, you know, all these busy streets out there. And she suddenly had this thought, like, well, wait a minute, what if Mildred, in her confused state, like, went to the front desk and somehow talked her way out and got discharged and has now wandered out into the streets? And what if she's gotten hit by a car or something?

Like, this could be an emergency. I have to do something. And so Sharon's first thought was, I got to call the police. And so not long after this, after Sharon did call the authorities, the police arrived at the hospital, and they arrived along with search dogs. And one of the search dogs almost immediately picked up Mildred's scent by one of the front doors of the hospital. And the dog led its handler down the street, which seemed to confirm that Mildred really had left the hospital. And so officers would search a full square mile around the hospital,

and they even got a helicopter to begin flying overhead, and the search went on for days. But nobody found Mildred. There was no sign of her. She just disappeared. Until almost two weeks later. On Wednesday, July 28th, so 13 days after Mildred went missing, a security guard walked into a construction site on his daily patrol.

And at the very edge of this site, he noticed there was a long, thin hole in the ground that was about five feet deep that had been dug to lay some pipework. But when the security guard just happened to walk over and looked down into the hole, he gasped because he saw Mildred. It would turn out on the day Mildred disappeared, she did become very confused, and she believed she was once again a housekeeper. And she went out, you know, left her room to go do some work.

And so Mildred just began wandering around the hospital for quite a while. And surprisingly, nobody stopped her, even though she had left the floor that she was supposed to be on. But she was just such a pleasant person and so nice that she just kind of passed by people and nobody said anything. And after wandering around for quite some time and going in and out of different places and up and down flights of stairs, she eventually found this construction site. And to her, it was not a construction site. Instead, it was this horribly messy area that needed to be cleaned, because there was pieces of wood and plastic and debris everywhere. And so she just began to clean.

And after a while, she had picked up quite a bit of debris and she had basically straighten the whole area out. but as she walked around towards the back of the site, she did not see a hole in the ground, and she fell inside. And because Mildred was just very disoriented, she likely didn't understand that she had, you know, fallen into a hole and needs to climb out again. And so in this dark space, this dark confined space, she would have just continued to feel more and more disoriented and maybe didn't even attempt to climb out. But however it happened, she just stayed in that hole and remained undetected for days.

until she just eventually died. But perhaps the most tragic aspect of this case is that Mildred actually never left the hospital. That construction site was on the 10th floor of the hospital. Mildred had just kind of meandered her way up to that floor, and that floor was being renovated. That was the construction site. And she had fallen in that hole,

then you have all these people that are searching the hospital, looking for her, and they searched that construction site, but they didn't look down into this little hole. And Mildred, assuming she was alive when they were up there, didn't have the wherewithal to call out for help. She was confused and just stayed quiet in that hole. And so she was never found. Today, it's still not known why Mildred was listed as having been discharged on the day she went missing, because she was not discharged.

Some people say maybe it was added into the system by mistake, or perhaps it was just a glitch in the system, but however it happened, it was just an anomaly. And then also, the police dog that found Mildred's son. that took the authorities away from the hospital, that's also anomalous. We don't know how or why that happened. Ultimately, Mildred's family would sue the hospital for $13 million in damages, but eventually they dropped the case. 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 and Cole Lacassio, research and fact-checking by Shelley Shoe, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Schumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fasiano. Research and Fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear. Audio editing and post-produced by Whitlocasio and Jordan Stidham. Production support by Antonio Manata and Delana Corley. Artwork by Jessica Clogston Kiner, theme song, 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 SiriusXM.com slash podcast plus to listen with Spotfxx. or another app of your choice. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see you.