MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - Silent Killer

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Some of the world’s worst killers are not human, and today’s podcast features 2 stories that demonstrate that. The audio from both of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.Story names, previews & links to original YouTube videos:#2 -- "A Few Drops" -- A seemingly meaningless event turns into a nightmare for one world renowned chemist (Original YouTube link -- https://youtu.be/q86aQiINdyo?feature=shared)#1 -- "Unknown Unnatural Hazard" -- As scary as it sounds, the most terrifying part about it, is that it could happen again somewhere else at any time (Original YouTube link -- https://youtu.be/aZt-5czd6cA?feature=shared)For 100s more stories like these, check out our main YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf 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 @mrballenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Some of the world's worst killers are not actually human, and today's podcast features two stories that demonstrate that. The audio from both 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 Few Drops, and it's about a seemingly meaningless event that turns into a nightmare for one world-renowned chemist. The second and final story you'll hear is called Unknown, Unnatural Hazard.

And as scary as this story is, the most terrifying part about it is that it could actually happen again somewhere else at any time. 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 twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to make the Amazon Music Follow button a s'more, but instead of chocolate, use mud. Okay, let's get into our first story called A Few Drops. Hello, I am Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of Wondery's podcast, British Scandal.

On our latest series, The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round-the-world sailing race. Good on him, I hear you say. But there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't seaworthy. Oh, and also, tiny little detail, almost didn't mention it. He bet his family home on making it to the finish line. What ensued was one of the most complex cheating plots

in British sporting history. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Hello, I'm Emily, and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities. And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks,

you know who I'm talking about no short shorts free cocktails careless whispers okay last one it's not andrew ridgely yep that's right it's stone cold icon george michael from teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet join us for our new series george michael's fight for freedom from outside, it looks like he has it all. But behind the trademark dark sunglasses is a man in turmoil. George is trapped in a lie of his own making, with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts,

or listen early and ad-free on Wanderie Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. In January of 1997, a very accomplished and Ivy League-trained American chemist named Karen Wetterhahn started experiencing tingling in her lower extremities. Now, it was uncomfortable, but it wasn't enough discomfort to warrant going to a doctor or really being concerned about it. She figured it was just something kind of minor, and it would go away on its own. But shortly after this tingling began, Karen started noticing she was having balance issues. She would be walking down the hallway at the university where she worked when inexplicably she would just lose her balance and start stumbling and would either fall to the ground or would have to lean

up against the wall to steady herself. She tried to convince herself that she was just being clumsy or that she was just really tired and that's what was causing it, but shortly after these balance issues presented themselves, Karen was hit with a host of other health issues. Her speech became awkwardly slow and slurred. She began hearing this white noise ringing in her ear that just wouldn't go away. And her field of vision drastically narrowed to the point where it was like she was looking through two toilet paper rolls. Karen's husband brought her to the hospital, where she underwent this very lengthy and

involved examination which involved spinal taps and brain scans to try to figure out what was going on because at first none of the doctors had any idea. After the testing was complete and Karen was sleeping in a hospital bed and her husband was sitting by her side, a doctor walked into the room with a clipboard and he had this odd look on his face, like the news he was about to deliver he didn't really even understand. And so he consulted his clipboard one more time, looking at some paperwork, and then he looked up and he looked at Karen and then he turned to Karen's husband and he just says to him, sir, does your wife have any enemies?

It would turn out Karen was suffering from a severe case of mercury toxicity. Mercury is a naturally occurring metallic element that is poisonous to humans in all its forms. And Karen had so much mercury in her body, in fact she had 80 times the toxic threshold, that doctors believed this had to have been an intentional poisoning, that someone must have attacked Karen trying to kill her with mercury. But Karen's husband said, you know, I don't think my wife has any enemies. And then when Karen ultimately woke up, she reiterated that sentiment that she did not have any enemies.

The doctors, who knew Karen was a chemist, they asked her, you know, have you had any recent exposure to mercury? And through slurred and difficult to understand speech, Karen would say that she had. In fact, over the last six months leading up to this hospital visit, Karen had had lots of exposure to mercury because she was actually in charge

of this huge $7 million research project that was looking to investigate the effects certain metals had on human health. And one of the metals she was studying was mercury. But Karen assured the doctor that anytime she handled any of these metals, she was always very, very cautious, especially when she handled mercury because she understood how hazardous it was. She said she always wore the proper protective equipment to make sure none of the substances made contact with her skin, and she worked under this big chemical hood, which is like a big vacuum, to ensure she didn't accidentally inhale any of the toxic fumes

that came off of these metals. The doctor was totally stumped and went silent for a second, and then Karen at some point broke the silence by saying, well, you know, there was one time I did have a spill with mercury, but it was totally meaningless and I haven't thought about it until just now, only because we're trying to figure out what happened. She would go on to tell the doctor about an incident that occurred five months earlier. She had been working at her lab at the university where she was employed when she accidentally spilled one or two tiny droplets of mercury onto the top of her left hand near her thumb. Now, she was wearing all of the prescribed protective equipment,

including latex gloves on her hand, and so when she saw these droplets on her hand, she wasn't concerned for her health. She just followed procedure. She stopped what she was doing, she wiped the droplets off, and then she left her workstation, she threw away the contaminated gloves, she thoroughly washed her hands,

and then put new gloves on, and then just went back to work and didn't think much of it. The type of mercury that Karen had spilled on her hand was called dimethylmercury. This is not the same thing as the shiny silver liquid we see in old thermometers. That is a hazardous substance, but it's nothing compared to dimethylmercury. Dimethylmercury is a clear liquid that is considered to be one of the most toxic substances

on the planet. After hearing this story from Karen, the doctor agreed that overall this did seem like a kind of meaningless event because she had followed all the proper procedures and those droplets had landed on her gloves, not on her skin. But since they had no other leads to operate on, he thought it would still be a good idea to test to see if dimethylmercury could penetrate through latex. And sure enough, after they ran some studies, they found it could. penetrate through latex. And sure enough, after they ran some studies, they found it could. In fact, the latex gloves that all these scientists were told to wear when handling this particular substance, they did nothing. The dimethylmercury would penetrate through

the latex in seconds. But even though they had just solved the mystery of how Karen got mercury toxicity in the first place, what no one could understand was why Karen was still suffering from the effects of mercury toxicity if her only exposure to it was five months earlier just that one time. Typically, people who have mercury toxicity, they will get better as soon as the source of their toxicity is removed. Meaning when the mercury goes away, they get better as soon as the source of their toxicity is removed. Meaning, when the mercury goes away, they get better. And it's because the mercury kind of pools in their bloodstream, and their body will naturally excrete it, and they'll get better.

But unfortunately for Karen, it would turn out dimethylmercury is a little bit different. It's far more lipophilic than other types of mercury. Lipophilic means a chemical substance is more likely to bind and mix with fat tissue in the body. And since blood is primarily made of water, when dimethyl mercury enters the body, it does not settle in the bloodstream. Instead, it settles in organs that are made up of primarily fat. And once dimethylury is in your organs, it takes an exponentially longer amount of time for your body to excrete it, if it ever does. Sometimes you just die from the effects of mercury toxicity before your body can get rid of it. And in Karen's case, when she showed

up to the hospital, it was already too late. Some of the dimethylmercury had already made its way up to her brain, which is an organ made up of 60% fat, and there it began to destroy her central nervous system. Three weeks after being admitted to the hospital, Karen fell into a coma. And then shortly after, one of Karen's friends was in the hospital visiting her, and she saw a tear was coming down Karen's face. And so the friend turned to the doctor and said, you know, is she in pain? Is that why she's crying? And the doctor said, no, it doesn't appear her brain

is able to register pain anymore. Karen would unfortunately never wake up from her coma. She would pass away on June 8th, 1997, roughly 10 months after those little droplets of dimethylmercury landed on her latex glove. The next and final story of today's episode is called Unknown Unnatural Hazard. unnatural hazard. Before sunrise on August 22nd, 1986, a man named Ephraim Che woke up feeling groggy and confused. As he lay in his bed inside of his small mud brick house perched up on a cliff, he tried to remember what happened the night before.

He didn't know why, but he knew, you know, something happened last night, I gotta remember it. But as he lay there kind of jogging his memory, he felt like there were holes in his memory, like he couldn't quite piece together what had happened the day or night before. However, there was one thing he distinctly remembered about the night before, and that was at some point he had heard one really loud boom of thunder outside. And Ephraim, kind of somewhere in the back of his mind, had thought, oh, it's going to rain tonight, and maybe when I wake up it'll still be raining. And then Ephraim, no matter how hard he focused, he couldn't really remember how much time passed after hearing that booming sound and then getting in his bed the night before. But at some point, he remembered being in his bed and feeling kind of sick. And that was it. That was his whole memory of the night before. And so that morning, August 22nd, when Ephraim has suddenly woken up feeling confused, he rolled over and he looked

out the window right nearby his bed and he looked outside and he saw the sky was clear and the grass was totally dry. There was no indication that it had rained any time recently. And so Ephraim is thinking to himself, you know, something is definitely off here, but I just can't get my mind right. And so finally Ephraim just sits up in his bed. He swings his legs out of his bed onto the ground. He stands up and practically falls over once he's on his feet. But he eventually gets himself back up, kind of steadies himself, and then he thinks, okay, I need to go check on my four kids and make sure they're okay. But the second Ephraim began to move in his house,

it was like his body didn't obey his mind. Because moments later, instead of checking on his kids, Ephraim had wandered out his front door and was just standing out in front of his house, just kind of staring off into the distance, having no idea why he walked out there. The village where Ephraim lived was called Nios, and Nios is extremely rural.

There's no electricity, there's no running water, and there's no paved roads for miles. The village is actually split into two parts. There's Upper Nios and Lower Nios. Ephraim lived in Upper Nios, right near this big beautiful lake called Lake Nios, but the majority of villagers lived in Lower Nios, which was below the lake. So that morning, after Ephraim kind of found himself standing outside of his hut for no reason, he began looking around in hopes that other people would be out and about in Upper Nios, where he lived, so he could go talk to them and try to figure out what was wrong with him or, you know, what was going on generally. But as he scanned around Upper Nios,

he saw there was not another soul anywhere. He was it. He was the only person walking around. So without giving it much thought, Ephraim decided he would just start walking down towards Lower Nios to try to talk to someone down there. And so he left his hut and he began walking down the hill that would take him to Lower Nios. After Ephraim got about halfway down this hill, right when he was near Lake Nios, he stopped because suddenly he became totally aware of the fact that the world was totally silent. Normally, the baboons in the nearby forest would be barking and insects would be humming

and birds would be chirping. But now it was just completely, totally silent. Even the mosquitoes, that were a totally annoying constant in Ephraim's life, were gone. It was like the entire world had just shut down. And as Ephraim is looking around, wondering what is going on here, he hears off to his right, over near the lake, a woman shrieking at the top of her lungs. And so Ephraim whipped his head in the direction the screams were coming from, and he saw there was this woman about 100 feet away.

She was a local, and she was looking right at Ephraim, and she was barely dressed, and she was ripping the rest of her clothes off, and she was just screaming. dressed, and she was ripping the rest of her clothes off, and she was just screaming. And so acting on instinct, Ephraim immediately turned and just started running towards this woman, and as he's bounding towards her, getting closer and closer, he's starting to notice there's these strange shapes on the ground kind of near this woman, but as he was staring at them, he just couldn't quite place what they were. But when he got about 20 feet away from this shrieking woman, he stopped again because he realized the shapes on the ground were this woman's entire family. They were all just laying on the ground as if they were sleeping.

And near them was all of their cattle, also just laying on the ground as if they were sleeping. But as Ephraim stared at each of these people and each of these animals on the ground, he saw there was some blood around their noses and their mouths, and he realized no person who's sleeping would be that still. These people are all dead. These animals are all dead. And so standing there, Ephraim turned his attention from the bodies back to this woman who had dropped to her knees and she was grabbing her father's arm and yanking on it and screaming for him to please wake up. But Ephraim could tell there was nothing she could do. Everyone was gone.

And Ephraim knew somewhere deep down that, you know, he's supposed to go over and help this woman or console her, but suddenly this wave of fear came over him, you know, the combination of having no idea what's going on, his mind really wasn't working still, and now seeing all these dead people, it was like he just couldn't handle it, and so even though he felt terrible about this, Ephraim took one last look at this very distraught woman and her deceased family, and he turned and he ran away. And when he got back to the main trail, he continued downhill in the direction of Lower Nyos. I'm Peter Frankopan. And I'm Afua Hirsch. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone.

Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time, somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle, that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Hey, Mr. Ballin fans. Did you know you can listen to episodes of this very show ad-free and one month early on Amazon Music with your Prime membership?

That's right. All your favorite Mr. Ballin episodes can be heard on Amazon Music ad-free, and you'll always be the first one to catch our new episodes. But that's not all. You get access to other amazing shows like Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Morbid, 48 Hours, and 2020, all ad-free too. And you know what that means, uninterrupted listening, so no more cliffhangers. Amazon Music is your home for all things true crime and offers the most ad-free top podcasts, so we definitely have something for you. And it's already included in your Prime membership. To listen now, all you need to do is go to amazon.com slash ballin. That's

amazon.com slash ballin or download the free Amazon Music app. It's just that easy. The villagers in Lower Nyos lived in these tiny huts with tin roofs that were closely grouped together. And usually, even early in the morning, Lower Nios was a very happy and lively place with kids running around and animals walking in the road and music playing. But as Ephraim came down the hill and was within earshot of Lower Nios, it was deadly silent. And so with panic starting to rise inside of Ephraim, he began to run at full speed, hoping that when he turned the corner and looked down the main road of Lower Nios, he would see the people he was hoping he would see. But when he turned the corner and looked down Main Street, all he saw were dead animals everywhere. They completely covered the streets, the sidewalk,

everything. And so at this point, Ephraim was so desperate to see another person that he kept his eyes looking straight ahead so as not to look at all the dead animals and just ran straight into Lower Nios. And he turned towards the first hut he saw and he ripped the door open and he stepped inside. And as soon as he did, he just stopped and he ripped the door open, and he stepped inside. And as soon as he did, he just stopped. Because on the ground right in front of him was a woman who was very clearly deceased, just laying in the middle of the floor. She had a bowl of corn right near her hand as if she had been eating and then just fell dead. And so Ephraim, he's staring at this dead woman.

And then he looks up, and he realizes the bedroom is right in eyesight. And he can see her family in their beds. And at first, Ephraim thought, oh, they're sleeping. But then, as he continued to stare through the doorway into this room, he saw none of them were moving. Their chests were not going up and down from breathing. Her whole family, they were dead too. At this, Ephraim kind of stumbled backwards out of the hut, and then he turned around to face the road he had just been on with all the animals, and when he saw the road again, it was like a piece of his brain started working properly again, because he realized those weren't

animal bodies. All those bodies he saw when he came in, those were people. Yes, there were some animals, but most of them were people. He could see people slumped on top of each other kind of piled up in doorways. He saw one person who was on his motorcycle in the middle of the road just slumped over his handlebars. And many of the bodies were either naked or partially clothed with piles of clothing next to them, as if they had been trying to rip their clothes off as fast as they could, like the woman up at the lake had been doing. And as Ephraim looked around in horror, he also realized that there were no markings or cuts or wounds on any of these people. It was like they were just going about their lives when suddenly they died. And so without anything else to do, Ephraim just continued to walk in the

direction he had come into the village, hoping that if he kept on going, he might run into someone who was alive. And so he begins walking down the road. He's stepping over bodies. He has no idea what to make of this. And then way down the road, up ahead, he sees there are two people coming towards him. There's a man and what looks like his son. And they're jogging down the road, stumbling over bodies, running towards Ephraim. And so Ephraim stops, expecting these people are going to stop and talk to him. But as these two people got closer, Ephraim saw both of them, the father and the son, their eyes were wide and they were looking straight ahead with kind of a distant

thousand yard stare. And they didn't stop for a second for Ephraim. It was like they didn't even see him. They just kept on running down the road, past all the bodies. Ephraim didn't try to stop them. He just watched as they passed. And then at some point they veered off the road and ran into the forest and disappeared. And it was at this moment that another part of Ephraim's brain seemed to kind of fit into place, because as he watched this father and son disappear, he suddenly had this memory come flooding back into his mind. And it was a memory of when he was a kid and his grandfather told him a story. And the story was about Nyos villagers a long, long time ago who decided they wanted to cross Lake Nyos from one side to the other. And so their leader magically parted the waters of Lake Nyos, creating a walkway on the lake bed

from one side to the other, and the villagers began to walk. And then about halfway across, a mosquito landed on the leader's shoulder and when he went to slap the mosquito, he lost control of the waters and they came crashing down and drowned all of them. Ephraim's grandfather told Ephraim that the ghosts of these drowned villagers now resided between these two big rocks located near Lower Nyos. And so growing up, Ephraim, along with many other people in this village, believed that because of these ghosts, Lower Nyos must be haunted. And in fact, that was actually why Ephraim built his house in Upper Nyos, to avoid these ghosts. And so now, as this memory of hearing

the story from his grandfather has come flooding back to Ephraim, he thinks to himself, of course, all of this is the work of those ghosts. And so fearing he would be attacked next, Ephraim turned and just continued running down the road, dodging bodies as he went. Ephraim turned and just continued running down the road, dodging bodies as he went. And as he ran along, periodically he would stop at various tin huts, and he would fling the door open in hopes he would find some survivors. But each time he went inside, everybody in there would be dead, lying in their beds or sitting in chairs or lying on the ground.

But after running for quite a while, Ephraim turned to go into yet another hut, and right as he reached for the door, the door opened on its own. And standing in front of him was the owner of this hut. His name was Joseph Nequain, and he was in much worse shape than Ephraim. The night before, Joseph had been inside of his hut, when suddenly outside he heard that very loud booming sound that sounded like thunder to Ephraim. And then after hearing the sound, Joseph heard his daughter in her bed making this terrible snoring sound. And so instinctively, Joseph turned to walk over to his daughter to make sure she was okay, but he only got a few steps before he collapsed to the ground. He had woken up that morning with cuts all over his arms from where he fell, and he was also totally exhausted and very confused like Ephraim, and so he managed to drag himself over to his daughter's bed, and he pulled himself up onto her bed, and when he got up there,

he realized his daughter was deceased. And so now Joseph has opened the door and he's looking out and there's all these dead people everywhere. And Ephraim is looking back at him and Joseph just can't process anything. He's just standing there in a total daze. And Ephraim, he wanted to say something, but no words could come out. And so he too just stood there looking at Joseph. And the two men just stood there right on the threshold of this hut, staring at each other, saying nothing for several minutes, until finally they both just extended their hands and shook silently. And then Ephraim turned around and ran back into the road. And so Joseph at first followed Ephraim kind of out of instinct, but very quickly he veered off from Ephraim, and Joseph went into his neighbor's hut to see if they were okay. But when he opened the door and went inside, he saw all of his neighbors were deceased.

But Joseph, he barely reacted to this. It was like he was so numb to what was going on, he just couldn't process it. was so numb to what was going on, he just couldn't process it. But after seeing all of his neighbors dead, somewhere deep down inside of his consciousness, Joseph knew he had to go find help. That was his mission. And so he left his neighbor's hut, he ran back to his own hut, he climbed onto his motorcycle, and he started to drive. And he started to drive. It took Joseph a long time to drive to the next closest village. But when he got there, there were people and they were all alive. And so Joseph tried to tell them what had happened in his village.

But Joseph just had such a hard time putting his thoughts together that his sentences just didn't make sense. He was kind of incoherent. And then when he did make sense, the things he was talking about, an entire village just suddenly dying, sounded crazy. And so nobody at this other village took Joseph seriously. And so that day, nobody from this other village went to Nios to see what was going on. But the next day, people from this other village did go to Nios, and when they got there, it was exactly as Joseph had said. The whole village was dead. And as authorities would soon find out, it was not just Nios that was affected by this tragic event. Several villages not far from Nyos had also suffered mass casualty events on the morning of August 22nd, 1986. And soon, news of these strange

mass death events in West Africa were making the news all over the world. And so on August 25th, three days after this terrible event, an American scientist named Joseph Devine turned on his TV and saw the news coming out of West Africa. The newscasters were totally baffled about how this could have happened, and no one can figure out what killed these people, and Devine is just staring at his TV in shock. And then he turns, runs to his phone, and he calls his contact at the U.S. government and told them, you gotta send me to NIOS. And because his contact knew Devine's background, he immediately said, yes, I'll get you on a flight as soon as we can. The End The End The End

The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End

The End The End The End The End The End The End The End The End

The End The End The End The End The End they saw the military was burying the dead in these huge mass graves, and looking on were the few survivors of this event, like Joseph and Ephraim, along with Ephraim's family they also survived, as well as other villagers who had come to see what happened. And so as Devine and Sigurdsson kind of maneuver their way through this crowd of very solemn people, they heard them talking about what they thought happened to all these people. And the theories ranged from secret governmental experiments, to invisible super weapons, to even atomic explosions. Others, like Ephraim, believed this was paranormal, that those ghosts from the drowned villagers had attacked the village. But Devine and Sigurdsson were reasonably sure that none

of those theories were correct. They felt like they did know what actually happened because they had actually witnessed a tragedy like this before, but on a much smaller scale. Two years earlier, and 60 miles south of Nyos, in an area called Lake Mnune, 37 people suddenly dropped dead. And Devine and Sigurdsson had been sent out there to try to figure out what happened to these people, and after lots of experimentation, they came up with a theory that explained what happened, and they called it Unknown Unnatural Hazard. They tried to warn people in the area that this could happen again,

and in fact, Sigurdsson had written an entire scientific paper about this theory and submitted it to a prestigious science journal. But nobody took Devine or Sigurdsson seriously. What they were proposing sounded made up, it sounded preposterous. But now, in NIOS, it looked very much like their unknown, unnatural hazard had happened again. Devine and Sigurdsson would leave the group of people watching this mass burying take place, and they would make their way up the hill to Lake Nyos, where they would immediately get to work taking water samples from deep inside the lake.

And after capping these samples, the lids began popping off. And that was the moment that Devine and Sigurdsson knew their unknown unnatural hazard theory had to be correct. Lake Nyos is not your typical lake. It is a crater lake, which means it sits inside of a volcanic crater, which is a big, deep, bowl-like pit that was formed from a past volcanic explosion. And because of this volcanic activity, there is carbon dioxide in Lake Nyos. A lot of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, or CO2 for short,

is an odorless, invisible gas that we actually breathe out when we exhale. Now, if you inhale a little bit of CO2, that won't hurt you. If you inhale a little bit more, like a medium amount of CO2, you could feel dizzy and nauseous, your skin will start to feel like it's on fire, you'll have rapid breathing. It'll be horrible, but you'll most likely survive if you stop breathing CO2. And if you breathe in a ton of CO2, you're dead. The CO2 in Lake Nyos had been trapped at the bottom of the lake for as long as anyone knew. But on the night of August 21st, 1986, something happened that caused that trapped gas to be released. Now remember, on that night, August 21st, Ephraim recalled hearing what he thought was thunder outside,

and also Joseph would recall hearing a loud booming sound that night. Now, we don't know exactly what that sound was, but it's safe to say that that noise, whatever it was, was connected to releasing the gas. Maybe it was the sound of a rock slide, and big rocks plummeted into the lake and hit the lake bottom and freed the gas that way. Or maybe it was just an actual volcanic eruption inside of the lake. Whatever it was, when the CO2 was freed, it bubbled to the top like it bubbled and popped off the lids of their sample tubes. And when it reached the top of the water, it kind of formed a cloud above the lake. Now, we can't see the cloud, but you can imagine a big cloud. And then this toxic CO2 cloud kind of rolled its way down the hill towards Lower Nyos and other villages in the area. And when this big toxic cloud began coming in contact

with people, with animals, and insects, virtually all of them died. As for the few who survived, like Ephraim and his family and Joseph, they were left feeling horribly confused, disoriented, nauseous, totally dizzy from CO2 poisoning. But when they finally were able to get away from NIOS and breathe fresh air, the effects of CO2 poisoning wore off and they were okay. This deadly CO2 phenomenon was exactly what happened, on a much smaller scale, two years earlier at Lake Menuhin. It was the unknown unnatural hazard that Deveen and Sigurdsson had tried to warn people about. The official death toll of the Lake Nyos disaster was more than 1,700 people and more than 3,500

livestock, although exact numbers will likely never be known. Today, people have moved back into upper and lower Nyos, including Ephraim, despite the fact that authorities have said that lake is still very dangerous and another unknown unnatural hazard, aka a CO2 disaster, could absolutely happen again. See you next time. See ya. Hey, Prime members. You can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. And before you go, please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. If you're listening to this podcast,

then chances are good you are a fan of The Strange, Dark, and Mysterious. And if that's the case, then I've got some good news. We just launched a brand new Strange, Dark, and Mysterious. And if that's the case, then I've got some good news. We just launched a brand new Strange, Dark, and Mysterious podcast called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries. And as the name suggests, it's a show about medical mysteries, a genre that many fans have been asking us to dive into for years. And we finally decided to take the plunge and the show is awesome. In this free weekly show, we explore bizarre, unheard of diseases, strange medical mishaps, unexplainable deaths, and everything in between. Each story is totally true and totally terrifying. Go follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts, and if you're a Prime member, you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music.