Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Third Man Syndrome

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

People who’ve found themselves in life-or-death situations with their endurance at its limit have reported sensing another presence with them, urging them to continue on and survive. No one knows what the heck is going on here but it sure is interesting.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. On the podcast health stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. I'm Dr. Priyanko Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane de Bolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I Have Scurvy at 3 a.m? And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way, like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2?

Extremely. Listen to Health Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other. I'm Eli Akani, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity. Listen to Season 2 of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Step. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just us right now, but that's okay because we have a third and fourth man with us today in the form of Jerry and Dave. That's right. I feel I sense their presence.

I do too. And they're guiding us on. They're saying, come on, you guys, you can finish the short stuff. It's going to be a good one. I can feel it, Chuck. I think we're going to be okay. We just demonstrated a really weird phenomenon. Pretty well, if you ask me, I think we did a great job just now. Everyone's saying so. But we just demonstrated this weird phenomenon called the Third Man Syndrome. There's an author named John Geiger, who for some reason changed syndrome to factor. But, That's typically what it's called this third man syndrome. And like I said, it's weird, Chuck. Take it away. Yeah, it has nothing to do with the movie The Third Man. Which was good. Great movie. And immediately when you sent this along and I saw the title, I thought it might have something to do with that.

And it doesn't have to be a man. It really should be the third person syndrome. Sure. But it is this phenomenon that has been, you know, talked about by many people over hundreds of years where someone, is in dire straits. Oftentimes it's like somebody sort of like a mountaineer or somebody in the wilderness that's lost and struggling to survive, but not always, as we'll see.

And when they're at their sort of worst moment, maybe worse low point, they get a third, a sense that someone else is there. And again, it's not always the third person. If they're alone, it's just technically the second person. Sure. But it's just somebody there kind of urging them on but it's not just like, oh, I got this weird feeling.

Like, it's a real serious, tangible thing. Yeah, like whatever sense you have when there's somebody sitting next to you and they actually are, there is a person sitting next to you, it seems to be the exact same type of feeling and level of feeling and all that. Yeah, it's not like this weird kind of like thought a little bit here or there. It's like sensing another presence. And the first person to ever really kind of document this was Ernest Shackleton. Surely he was not the first person to experience this, but he was the first person to write about it.

And his experience is just nuts in and of itself. Yeah, we talked about this guy before. It was a British expedition to Antarctica in 1914 slash 15, trying to get to the South Pole. It was his third try, and he's trying to establish a base there. And his ship got trapped in sea ice. They tried to kind of ride it out, but eventually the ice, kind of came together and I mean this just shows how forceful like creeping ice can be it kind of crushed the boat yeah and they abandoned ship set up camp on other ice and stayed there

initially for four months on this ice yeah waiting for the ice to break up enough to try to make an attempt by whaling boat over to elephant island which is the closest island and they made it they rode they rode for six days before they reached elephant island which was great. They weren't on the ice anymore, but they were on a deserted island. Which is probably cold. Yeah, I'm thinking it's pretty cold too. Yeah. And again, this is 1914. They're not like, you know, picking up the sat phone and saying, like, hey, can somebody come get us? Like, they've got a real problem here. So they're stranded on this deserted island and the closest place where there's other people where they actually can get in touch and say,

hey, somebody come get us, is a whaling station on South Georgia Island. And that's 800-mile away. So Ernest Shackleton says, got to keep going. Whittles down to a few men, I think, five or six other people, and they actually rode 800 miles from Antarctica to South Georgia Island. Yeah, so they get there 16 days later. It turns out they landed on the wrong side of the island because the winds blew them off course. And so this guy was undaunted still. He took two guys. I think you see where this is headed, even though the math is still wrong. And they made the rest of the way on foot. It's about 18 miles or 30 kilometers.

And through some pretty treacherous conditions, took about 36 hours. They finally get there. And everyone ends up being rescued. Like, that's the good news. But this is that last push is when Shackleton feels the presence of this additional person urging them on. Yeah, because this is like they've reached the limit of their. endurance and they're still going on. And so Shackleton sensed it, but he never said anything about it until he wrote his book South. It was published in 1919. But he did say something to the other two

people who were with them. One was Captain Worsley. And Worsley said, yeah, I had the same feeling, actually, and so did Creen the other guy on this expedition. They all sensed another person, in this case a fourth person, with them, kind of basically comforting them to some, to some degree. So that seemed in and of itself pretty cool. And I guess the word of this got out because T.S. Eliot, he's frequently cited as the person who coined the term third man syndrome. As far as I can tell, no one knows who actually took this T.S. Eliot poem and turned it into third man syndrome. But it actually did come indisputably from this T.S. Eliot poem from 1922. Yeah. So, well, the wasteland was the poem. Again, he was wrong on the math.

He should have called it the fourth man, but this is kind of the funniest part. T.S. Eliot said that he couldn't remember who inspired this, like which expedition it was when asked, you know, why the number of people was four and not three, or three and not four, rather. Exactly. And I'm feeling a little poetic today. Chuck, do you mind if I read this? A little excerpt. This is from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.

Three words. Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together. But when I look ahead up the white road, there is always another one walking beside you, gliding wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded. I do not know whether a man or a woman, but who is that on the other side of you? Answer me. Thank you.

Thank you. I say we take a break and let everybody in stunned silence absorb all that. All right, we'll be right back. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dabolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I have scurvy at 3 a.m? On Health Stuff, we're talking about health in a different way.

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And we're going to go through some of them right now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's quite a feat that he got all these together because they were definitely few and far between. One of the first ones that he mentions is a guy named Frank Smyth, who made a solo attempt at his summit Everest. He would have been the first back in 1933. And he got close, but he didn't make it. And he realized he had to turn back.

And his second man during this attempt was so real to him that at one point he actually turned to offer them food before he realized that there was no one there. So, like, this can be a pretty tangible presence, a tangible, intangible presence, essentially. Yeah, I mean, I've seen this in movies, you know, and they don't call it out as, you know, third man syndrome. But I've definitely seen these scenes, you know, where. there's an unseen person and they look and then they're not there, you know?

Yeah. But in a comforting way, not like, well, I was going to spoil that Nicole Kidman movie, but I guess I won't do that. Right. Not in a horror movie kind of way. No, for sure. But there was another guy, a climber again named Joe Simpson. This was 1985.

He was climbing in the Peruvian Andes and he broke his leg. So he was in really bad shape. And he wrote a book called Touching the Void where he talked about obeying this voice, like guiding him. And a lot of times that's what happens. It's not just like, you can do it, you can do it, but like go this way kind of thing. And if you're in the situation, after reading all this stuff, I would be wise to go in whatever direction your invisible person is telling you to go. Yeah, obey the voice, I think, is the upshot of all this.

Yeah, he was guided to safety by his voice. And enough of these are mountaineers that I started to think maybe the cold has something to do with this. But this has also happened to other people who are not in the cold, who are in the cold, in totally different situations, very famously out of the 9-11 attacks, two people who survived reported experiencing third man syndrome. One was Ron D. Francesco, who was the last person out of the South Tower before it collapsed. He was led down while everybody else was going up and actually went through flames, fire, like three stories of fire to get to safety, and it was because he was being urged on. And then there was another woman, Janelle Guzman McMillan, who

was actually trapped in the rubble of the North Tower, and she had a similar experience, too. Yeah. And, you know, again, it's, um, it feels like it might be like in the movie, like a family member or something. And sometimes it seems like that can happen. Like, uh, I know, wasn't there one of these where, uh, yeah, it was a geologist who was on a cave dive and lost her guideline with 20 minutes left, um, in her air tank. And she felt her husband, Rob, who had died, so her dead husband had died in a diving accident a few weeks prior. So he appears. So sometimes it's like a known individual.

Yeah, and Janelle Guzman-McMillan, I read she named, she didn't think hers was a family member, but she considered it a guardian angel, and its name was Paul. Oh. So they do get names sometimes, even if you don't know them. I would name mine. What would you name yours? I don't know. It depends. I think it would hit me in a moment, but it seems like the respectful thing to do and not just say, hey, you.

Thanks for all that. Right. Yeah. And just a little word of advice. If you can't come up with the name, just go with Tim. Tim, that's pretty good. Scientifically, I mean, you might be wondering, like, well, what's happening here? And no, no one really knows.

It's kind of one of those things where they think it may be some, like, hardwired, innate instinct that just kind of kicks in. You know, obviously you can't study something like this. And if it is hardwired, we may all have it, but luckily, most of us aren't ever in that situation, you know. Right. Like you, you not only have to be in this limit of your endurance life or death situation, you also have to survive it to come back and tell everybody about it too. So you would imagine like this is a pretty small population of people, right? I mean, clearly, just from the few stories that John Geiger was able to collect. Did you see the thing about the bicameral mind? No. Hi. Theory. So, remember our episode on the bicameral mind from Julian

Jane's. And basically just for people who aren't familiar, this is a hypothesis that all the way up until like the Bronze Age, people hadn't fully become conscious like we think of consciousness today. And so the voices in their head that we call an inner dialogue where we know we're talking to ourselves. To them, this was the gods speaking to them, guiding them, instructing them. So this idea is the third man syndrome is kind of this vestigial, bicameral experience that people used to have, where what seems like something outside of your mind is helping you, urging you on, guiding you, but really it's just another part of your mind that gets kicked in. Yeah, I love it, which kind of jives with the first theory anyway, you know, it's not like

that doesn't cancel it out, right? No, there's no canceling going on here. Yeah, good. You got anything else? Nothing else. Hopefully this instinct is within all of us, because I wouldn't mind a pal urging me on in the end. For sure, yes, but hopefully no one listening ever has to experience it because it sounds like it's pretty rough to get there. Agreed. Short Stuff is out.

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