On the morning of 18 February 2003, a man set fire to a carriage of train 1079 on Line 1 of the Daegu subway as it pulled into Jungangno Station. That train's doors were open, and most of its passengers got out.

Three or four minutes later, train 1080, running the other way, pulled into the same smoke-filled station. According to AP's translation of the radio transcript, the control centre told its driver: "When you enter the Joongang Station, drive carefully. There is a fire." There was no order to stop or to pass through. The train stopped beside the burning one, the power failed, and it could not leave.

The driver radioed for instructions and was told to stand by. Some time later, according to a police briefing reported by Pressian, a controller told him to "kill the train and go", meaning pull the master key and leave. He did. Without the key, almost nothing on the train worked, including the doors. Police said the doors were open on only two of the train's six cars. Each door had a manual release lever under the seats, but few passengers knew it was there, and the cars were dark and full of smoke.

192 people died and 151 were injured. A study by Won Hwa Hong of Kyungpook National University counts 142 deaths inside the train and 49 outside it.

Then police found that the radio transcript the subway corporation handed over was missing the "kill the train" exchange. It was still on the original tape. Two audit staff had cut it out as a "sensitive" passage.

The arsonist, Kim Dae-han, got life in prison and died there in 2004. The two drivers and six other employees got up to five years, the legal maximum for negligent manslaughter. How much the key itself mattered is still argued, since the power had already failed before it was pulled.

Sources:

• AP, 21 Feb 2003: https://www.semissourian.com/news/human-error-likely-boosted-death-toll-in-subway-fire-102243
• AP, 21 Feb 2003: https://www.firehouse.com/home/news/10570614/s-korean-fire-probe-focuses-on-errors
• Won Hwa Hong, IAFSS proceedings: https://publications.iafss.org/publications/aofst/6/s-5/view/aofst_6.pdf
• Korea Herald, 2023: https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20231011000686
• Pressian (Korean), 25 Feb 2003: https://www.pressian.com/pages/articles/71103

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old Mitsubishi ship designer from Nagasaki. In May 1945 he was sent to Hiroshima for about three months with two younger colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato. They were due to go home on 7 August.

On the morning of 6 August he realised he had left his company seal (hanko) in his desk at the dormitory, went back for it, and was walking past sweet-potato fields near the tram terminus when he saw a B-29 and two small parachutes. He was about 3 km from the hypocentre. The left side of his face, his left arm and his neck were burned, and his left eardrum burst.

On 7 August he took a 1 p.m. evacuation train from Koi Station and reached Nagasaki the next morning. On 9 August, bandaged, he went back to work on the sixth floor of the shipyard office and was reporting to his section manager, who could not believe one bomb had destroyed a city, when the second bomb exploded at 11:02 a.m., again about 3 km away. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," he later said. Both of his colleagues survived Nagasaki too.

He stayed largely silent for decades. After his son died of cancer in 2005, he began speaking publicly, got his first passport at 90, and spoke at the UN in 2006. In March 2009 Nagasaki officials recorded his Hiroshima exposure on his survivor certificate, making him the first person officially recognised as a survivor of both bombings, though about 165 people are believed to have been in both cities. His compensation did not change. He died on 4 January 2010, aged 93.

Sources:

• Yamaguchi's memoir in English translation, "Double A-bomb Victim" (Nagasaki University repository): https://nagasaki-u.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/6738/files/kakyo13_87eng.pdf
• Japan Times (2009): https://japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/03/26/national/man-93-officially-declared-survivor-of-both-bombs
• AP via NBC News (2009): https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29865222
• Kyodo via Hiroshima Peace Media Center (2010): https://www.hiroshimapeacemedia.jp/?p=14868
• History.com: https://www.history.com/articles/the-man-who-survived-two-atomic-bombs

Roopkund is a small glacial lake at about 5,000 m in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, India. When the ice melts for a few weeks each year, the shore shows leather shoes, glass bangles, bamboo staffs and the remains of several hundred people.

A forest ranger, H. K. Madhwal, reported the remains in 1942. During the war, officials first feared they might be Japanese soldiers, but the bones turned out to be far older.

In 2004, Subhash Walimbe of Deccan College described short, deep cracks on the tops of skulls, made by round objects about the size of cricket balls, and Oxford radiocarbon dates put the deaths at about 850 AD. The team concluded that giant hailstones had killed everyone at once. A local folk song also speaks of a goddess striking a royal pilgrimage with hail "hard as iron".

Then a 2019 study in Nature Communications read genome-wide DNA from 38 individuals. It found at least three distinct groups: 23 people with South Asian ancestry who died between the 7th and 10th centuries, possibly in several events; 14 people with ancestry most like present-day people of Crete and Greece who died around 1800; and one person with ancestry more typical of Southeast Asia. The two main groups died roughly 1,000 years apart.

Hail is not ruled out for some of them, but one storm cannot explain deaths a millennium apart. As senior author Niraj Rai put it, "It is still not clear what brought these individuals to Roopkund Lake or how they died."

Sources:

• Harney et al., Nature Communications (2019), via Max Planck: https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/item/item_3155610_4
• EurekAlert press release (2019): https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/718077
• National Geographic (2019): https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/dna-study-deepens-mystery-lake-skeletons-roopkund
• Down To Earth (2005): https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/skeleton--lake-10032
• The Tribune (2009): https://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090205/dplus1.htm

On Saturday 24 July 1915, about 2,500 people boarded the SS Eastland at the Clark Street dock for a Western Electric company picnic across Lake Michigan. At 7:28 a.m. the ship rolled onto its side in about 20 feet of water. It took roughly two minutes. Many passengers had gone below deck to get out of the rain and were trapped.

The warning signs were on the record:

• 1904: it nearly capsized leaving South Haven, Michigan.
• 1912: it listed about 25 degrees while loading in Cleveland.
• 1913: a naval architect warned there "may be a serious accident" (HISTORY.com).
• 1915: after the Titanic, the Seamen's Act required more lifeboats. The Eastland had been designed for six and carried 11, all on the top deck.

The builder, Sidney Jenks, later testified: "No, I did not worry about the Eastland." He also said no stability test had ever been done. Company officers, the captain and the engineer were charged, but a federal court found "barely a scintilla of proof" and no one was ever convicted.

One detail that stays with me: a seven-year-old, body No. 396 at the Second Regiment Armory, went unclaimed for days until his grandmother recognized him by his brown knickerbockers.

Sources:

• Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eastland-disaster-killed-more-passengers-titanic-and-lusitania-why-has-it-been-forgotten-180953146/
• HISTORY.com: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-24/hundreds-drown-in-eastland-disaster
• Michigan Public: https://www.michiganpublic.org/arts-culture/2015-07-23/the-eastlands-historic-sinking-killed-hundreds-why-isnt-it-remembered-more
• Chicago Architecture Center: https://www.architecture.org/articles/eastland-disaster-100th-anniversary/

In May 2012 Korean police showed reporters a 51-second video of a funeral in China and said Jo Hee-pal (often spelled Cho Hee-pal), the man behind Korea's biggest Ponzi scheme, had died there the previous December.

His pitch: investors bought massage chairs and medical machines on paper, the company rented them to bathhouses, and the rent came back as a fixed monthly payout. Prosecutors later counted about 70,000 investors. Most of the money was cycled back to earlier investors; the unrecovered loss was put at about 840 billion won.

On 30 October 2008, in a Daegu hotel coffee shop, he handed 900 million won in cashier's cheques to a senior police officer, who was later jailed for 10 years. A few weeks later, in December 2008, he left Korea by sea from the west coast.

In China he got an ID card, a driver's licence and a passport under another name: Jo Yeong-bok, ethnic Korean.

The story police were given: a night of drinking in a hotel basement karaoke, chest pain, and death in an ambulance at 00:15 on 19 December 2011. The 2012 reports placed it in Qingdao or Yantai; prosecutors in 2016 placed it in Weihai. The hospital's death certificate had no Chinese police seal. Prosecutors said that seal is only used when a homicide is suspected.

TV crews then found golf caddies who said they had seen him after his reported death, and a Qingdao course record dated after it. None of those sightings was ever verified. In 2016 prosecutors closed the case: a lock of hair kept since 2011 was matched to him by the National Forensic Service.

Both sides are still there. Prosecutors say the hair and the witnesses settle it. His victims point out that nobody outside his circle ever saw a body; he was cremated in China.

Full case file, with every source: https://strangeworldfiles.com/jo-hee-pal-korea-ponzi-declared-dead/

In 1915 the Antarctic ice trapped Ernest Shackleton's ship, the Endurance, in the Weddell Sea. As the pressure built, eight emperor penguins came up to the ship. Their cries "sounded like a dirge for the ship", Shackleton wrote.

Ordered onto the ice, each man could keep 2 lb of gear. Shackleton kept one page of the Bible, from Job: "Out of whose womb came the ice?" The photographer, Frank Hurley, went back into the flooded wreck for his glass-plate negatives.

She sank in November 1915. The 28 men camped on drifting floes for months, until their floe split right under the boats. In April 1916 they rowed to Elephant Island, their first solid ground in 497 days.

No ship would look for them there. So six men set out in the James Caird, a 20-foot boat, across about 800 miles of the Southern Ocean to South Georgia.

Three of them crossed the island's mountains on foot to a whaling station. "It seemed to me often that we were four, not three," Shackleton later wrote.

The 22 left behind lived under two upturned boats. Every day Frank Wild told them: "Get your things ready, boys, the Boss may come to-day."

On 30 August 1916 someone outside shouted "Ship O!" They first heard it as "Lunch O!" All 28 men of the Endurance came home.

In 2022 the wreck was found, 3,008 metres down, with her name still on the stern.

Would you have climbed into the boat, or stayed on the beach and waited?

Full case file with every source: https://strangeworldfiles.com/shackleton-endurance-all-28-men-survived/

Around the start of 1921 an ascetic covered in ash sat on the Buckland Bund, Dacca's riverfront, for about four months. Crowds began whispering a name: Ramendra Narayan Roy, the second Kumar (prince) of Bhawal, the second-largest estate in East Bengal.

The problem: the Kumar had been reported dead in Darjeeling twelve years earlier.

He went up to Darjeeling in April 1909 with his wife, her brother, the family doctor and about twenty servants. They stayed at a house called "Step Aside". He fell ill on 6 May. A telegram home said he was seriously ill, and the next morning word came that he had died.

Both sides agreed he was taken for dead on 8 May 1909. They did not agree on the hour. His wife's side said shortly before midnight, with the cremation the next morning. His side said around dusk, and that a storm broke and the funeral party sheltered from the rain, leaving him before the pyre was lit. A Darjeeling meteorologist later gave evidence.

He accepted that a cremation took place on the morning of 9 May. He said the body that was burned was not his. Both claims were argued in court.

In April 1921 he was brought to the family seat at Jaidebpur on an elephant. Questioned, he named his old wet nurse, and the crowd took it as proof. On 4 May, pressed by his sister, he said who he was.

His wife never accepted him. She called him an impostor.

The trial ran 608 days of hearings with 1,584 witnesses. Judge Pannalal Basu typed the judgment himself and slept with the typewriter key under his pillow. On 24 August 1936 he ruled the ascetic was the Kumar. The Calcutta High Court upheld it 2-1 in 1940, and the Privy Council in London affirmed it on 30 July 1946.

Within days of that final ruling, he died. The courts ruled on civil evidence; it was never a scientific proof, and historians still debate who he really was.

Would you recognise a family member who came back like that, after twelve years?

Full case file with the court rulings and every source: https://strangeworldfiles.com/bhawal-sannyasi-case-prince-cremated-returned/

On the night of 3 April 1997, Jo Jung-pil, a 22-year-old student at Hongik University, walked into the restroom of a Burger King in Itaewon, Seoul. He was stabbed several times and died. Two American teenagers had been in the restroom with him. Each told investigators the other did it.

Prosecutors charged only one of them with murder. In 1998 the Supreme Court overturned his conviction for insufficient evidence, and his acquittal became final in 1999.

The other teenager, Arthur Patterson, received only a short juvenile sentence for carrying the knife and destroying evidence. In August 1999 his travel ban lapsed for two or three days, and he flew to the United States. He stayed away for 16 years.

He was extradited in September 2015. During the new trial, judges examined a full-size replica of the restroom built inside the prosecutors' office.

In January 2017 the Supreme Court made his murder conviction final: 20 years, the maximum for someone who was a minor at the time of the crime.

Full write-up with sources: https://strangeworldfiles.com/itaewon-burger-king-murder/