111\. The Man In The Ceiling
38:41 Share

- Growing up, Melissa had what looked like the perfect life, loving family, great friends, until the day it all came crashing down when she discovered her father's dark secret. He was the notorious Happy Face Killer. On March 20th, Paramount+ presents the thrilling new original series, "Happy Face," inspired by a true life story.

After years without contact, Melissa's father reaches out to confess another murder. But there's a twist. Another man is already on death row for the same crime.

Now, Melissa must choose between keeping her secret and protecting her perfect life or unraveling an unsolved mystery to save an innocent man and decide how far she'll go to uncover the truth. Annaleigh Ashford and Dennis Quaid star in Happy Face. New series streaming March 20th, exclusively on Paramount+.

Work management platforms. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. You're listening to an Ono Media podcast.

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Into the Dark podcast. I'm your host Peyton Morland. I'm so happy you are here. If you are new to this show, this is Into the Dark, a true crime podcast that also ventures into everything ghosty, spooky, scary, literally aliens, UFOs, tinfoil tails, all of them, all of the above. Plus.

plus true crime. Thank you for being here. I hope you love the show. Before we jump into the episode, I usually do a quick 10 seconds that just starts us off on a lighter foot before we get into the nitty gritty. My 10 seconds this week is I'm actually getting ready to leave to Vegas with Garrett. We are going to go watch a volleyball tournament. We're going to hang out. We're bringing Daisy Mae. It should be fun. I just always do get a little stressed before we leave because I want to leave the house clean and

all that but honestly it's been good you're watching on youtube and you can see all the pimple patches on my face i'm not gonna say i'm sorry but you can go ahead and stare at them if you want i'm currently purging my face i don't know what's going on so i'm not wearing makeup i'm just trying to let it do its thing because that's what you gotta do so they're little hearts

Yes, if you can see them. Also a reminder that I do live stream on Twitch every single week, multiple times a week. You can find the link anywhere you're listening, whether that's in the episode notes or in the episode description. You can click it, follow me over there. You will be notified when I go live and we just kind of hang out over there. I'll do get ready with me's. I'll

do Q&As, we'll hang out, talk about life, and sometimes I even play Fortnite. So if you want to go join me there again, just click the link in the bio and follow. All right, all that being said, let's jump into today's episode. Okay, there are certain standards that you can always count on to be true no matter what.

Like that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Or that matter cannot be created or destroyed. Or E equals MC squared. There's a reason we learn these rules in physics textbooks, and it's that they're basic and universal. You can trust that they'll be true and accurate with no exceptions. At least, you should be able to. But sometimes, the world doesn't work the

the way we expect it to. Take the events of October 5th, 2017. That day, a man named Teteteki Gokwansi checks into a hospital in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Now, Stellenbosch is a very old town with a lot of culture. It's actually the second oldest town in the whole country, and it's known for its wine. It brings in a lot of tourists.

Now, Teteke is 61 years old, and he's actually a father of six children. He comes from a very big family, and in addition to his own children, Teteke has a lot of siblings who he's close to as well. And the reason he's at the Stellenbosch Hospital is because he needs abdominal surgery. It's supposed to be routine, but even so, it's going to be a very intense operation.

The sort of procedure where he won't even be able to walk for several days after he leaves the OR. That is pretty standard for what it's worth. Of course, every person's body is unique and there are a lot of different procedures that might require an abdominal surgery. But speaking very generally here, it's normal for people to need to stay in the hospital and recover for about a week after this kind of operation.

Even after that, it might be anywhere between one to three months before they're completely back to normal. Well, the good news is, is that in Teteteke's case, the operation is a complete success. Everything goes well. And by October 7th, this father of six, Teteteke, is on the road to recovery. It

It has been two days since his procedure in South Africa, and he's doing well overall. He still can't walk on his own, so he has nurses checking on him regularly, which is exactly what happens at 5.15 a.m. that day. A nurse comes into the hospital room that day in 2017 and confirms that Teteteke is still in good shape.

He doesn't seem to be in pain or experiencing any complications from his surgery. The only real problem is that his linens need to be changed. And since the nurse doesn't have any clean ones with her, she leaves his room to go fetch some more. She's only gone for a few minutes at most.

But when she comes back, Teteteke isn't there. His bed in this hospital is totally empty and there is no sign of him anywhere in his room. Now, it's worth remembering Teteteke just had surgery on his abdominal area. He cannot walk.

It's not like he just got up out of the hospital bed to use the bathroom or to stretch his legs. There is no possible way that he could have left that room on his own. So someone must have taken him. But

That makes no sense either. He's not booked for any treatments or check-ins that would require a staffer to carry him out of the room. And his family isn't supposed to pick him up or bring him home yet. So the nurse is standing here in this empty hospital room and she can't think of who else would take to Teteke, her patient, if it wasn't hospital staff or a family member.

Plus, if someone did want to take him away, they didn't have much time to do it. Again, the nurse was only gone for a few minutes just to go get clean linens. That's not much time to carry a man off or load him onto a new gurney, which is what someone would have had to do to get to Teteke out of his room. Even if someone did pull off such a successful abduction, you would think somebody would have seen them.

The Stellenbosch hospital is very secure. There are security guards on site to keep the facility safe, but they all say they didn't see anything. Literally this patient is just missing. You'd think it would be attention grabbing if someone had wheeled this patient out of his room or tried carrying him. Instead, it's like he just vanished.

So since the nurse has no idea what could have happened, she actually reaches out to the hospital administrators and they call to Teteke's family.

His brother, Christmas, is home when the phone rings. And yes, his brother's name is Christmas. So he's home, he answers the phone, and he is shocked by what the hospital's representatives have to say. They begin the conversation by asking if Teteke, who can't walk, is home with everyone else. Christmas is confused by this question. He tells the hospital worker, no, no.

He's not home, duh. He's supposed to still be recovering? And that's when the representative admits, Teteke isn't in his hospital room.

And the whole story comes spilling out. There was a nurse who went to change his linens and then he's gone. As soon as Christmas and the others get the news, they head straight to the Stellenbosch Hospital. They search everywhere, the halls, the patient rooms, the grounds outside. And unfortunately, there are a lot of areas of the hospital that they can't get to.

There's a bunch of construction going on, and many hallways and rooms are locked and off-limits to the public, but to Teteke's relatives' figure, if they can't get into those areas, he probably wouldn't have been able to either, so they don't have to search those rooms and halls. Still...

Even with them scouring the rest of the facility and checking everywhere they can think of, they do not find him. The family doesn't find him. The hospital staff doesn't find him. They don't even find any clues about where this missing patient could have gone.

So finally, they have no choice but to call the police and tell them, "We've lost a hospital patient who can't walk. I guess he's just missing." Well, the police don't have any more luck than Teteke's family did. They also searched the whole hospital and they also find absolutely nothing. Within a few hours, maybe a day or two at most, this investigation in 2017 in South Africa is at a dead end.

All that anyone can do is keep their fingers crossed and hope to Teteke will turn up before too long. Well, days go by. Nobody finds out anything new for the next 13 days, almost a full two weeks since he vanished in that hospital bed.

But on October 20th, a construction crew is working in the hospital and they're in one of those parts of the facility that I mentioned earlier, an area that is closed off to the public. Nobody can access it except for the construction crews, not the doctors, the nurses, or the patients. The workers are in this almost totally deserted empty section during a quiet Friday shift.

or at least it's supposed to be quiet. But when they remove a ceiling panel to get access to the crawl space above in this hospital that's under construction, the crew finds a body. Now, it has clearly been up there for a while. It's already badly deteriorated, enough so that it's not clear right away how this person died, let alone how he ended up stashed in the ceiling in this remote area.

If this part of the hospital had been more active and if more people had been passing through, they might've noticed a smell before now, but either way, the construction crew now has to figure out who this person is and how they ended up here. So they go to the hospital officials, right? These people who have hired them to even be doing this construction on the hospital. And they say, hey, we found a dead body in the crawl space in the ceiling. And the hospital staff is like,

No, it doesn't take them long to identify this person. Of course, it's Teteke. But even though everyone knows who this is, all of the investigators, his family, the hospital staff, the police, are left with one big question. How did he end up here?

What happened to Teteteke? I mean, this whole situation is so weird. It makes no sense. There is absolutely no way that Teteteke could have wandered out of his room and climbed up there on his own. I mean, setting aside the fact that he couldn't walk and he definitely couldn't climb into a ceiling.

He also didn't have access to this part of the hospital. So some people begin to wonder if Teteke didn't put himself in the ceiling, did someone else put him there? Right. Naturally, it doesn't take long for rumors to start going around. I mean, this is a big deal. It's 2017.

We're in South Africa and this patient goes missing and then 13 days later is found in the ceiling of the hospital. So some people say that a serial killer might be murdering victims in South African hospitals. And to support this theory, people point at another mysterious disappearance from 16 years earlier in April of 2001.

That year, a 44-year-old man named Stephen Makinya checked into a different South African hospital because he was experiencing chest pains. He was a lot like Teteteke in that he was middle-aged, he had a big family. In his case, he had seven children.

Stephen was also very responsible. He was the only breadwinner in his family, so all seven of his kids relied on him to work hard at his job and support everyone. So I have to imagine this did make him eager to recover from his medical problems and to get discharged so he could go back to work. Again, we are in 2001 in a different hospital in South Africa. But Stephen couldn't rush the process of getting well.

In total, Stephen stayed in the hospital for three days. And then on the third day, as he's recovering, eager to get home, he just vanished from his room. He was there one minute and gone the next. It honestly was a lot like what would later happen with Tetekei.

There was no explanation for where he could have gone or how he even got out of his room in the first place. The staff at the facility searched everywhere for him, and so did Stephen's family. But unlike the more recent disappearance, it reportedly took five months for anyone to find Stephen, or at least what they thought remained of him.

By then, it was September of 2001, and once again, the discovery was a complete accident. All right, you guys, as I know, I began a relationship with Nutrafol a while ago, and ever since then, I have not stopped taking them. Nutrafol is the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand trusted by over one and a half million people.

See thicker, stronger, faster growing hair with less shedding in just three to six months with Nutrafol. I know that sometimes it feels like, oh, I really am working towards this goal with my hair, but what do I do? How do I start? And honestly, everyone's root causes of hair thinning are different. So a one size fits all approach to hair growth just doesn't cut it.

Nutrafol has multiple formulas that are tailored to give your hair what it needs to grow throughout different stages, such as postpartum and menopause, as well as for different lifestyles, such as plant-based diets. All of that matters. So while many supplements rely solely on ingredient studies, Nutrafol

Nutrafol clinically tests final formulations to ensure their efficacy. In a clinical study, 86% of women reported improved hair growth after taking Nutrafol Women Hair Growth Supplement for six months. Building a hair growth routine is simple. Purchase online, no prescription required, automated deliveries and free shipping keep you on track,

Plus, with a Nutrafol subscription, you can save up to 20%. You'll have access to free doctor consults and a Headspace meditation membership is included. So start your hair growth journey with Nutrafol. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners $10 off your first month's subscription and free shipping.

When you go to Nutrafol.com and you enter the promo code DARK, guys, if you have ever considered taking a hair supplement, give Nutrafol a try and use my promo code DARK to get $10 off your first month subscription and free shipping. Find out why over 4,500 healthcare professionals and stylists recommend Nutrafol for healthier hair.

Nutrafol.com spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L.com promo code dark. That's Nutrafol.com promo code dark. Let's get back to the episode. All right, you guys, we are getting into an ad and I have a question. Are you ready to optimize your nutrition this year? Factor has chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. They're dietician approved and ready to heat and eat in just two minutes.

minutes so you can fuel right and feel great no matter what life throws at you.

Factor meals actually arrive fresh and fully prepared. So they're perfect for any active, busy lifestyle with 40 options across eight dietary preferences on the menu each week. It's actually easy to pick meals that are tailored to your eating goals. Choose from preferences like calorie smart, protein plus or keto. You guys, it's so easy when you know what you're wanting, more protein, calorie smart, and you can just go and pick it.

Factor can help you fill your best all day long with wholesome smoothies, breakfast, grab and go snacks, and more add-ons. As you guys know, Garrett and I do not love to cook, and Factor Meals make it so easy, ready in two minutes. I know what I'm putting in my body. It's perfect. Eat smart with Factor. Get started at factormeals.com slash factorpodcast and use code FACTOR

Factor Podcast to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping. That's code Factor Podcast at factormeals.com slash factor podcast to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. The people who found Stephen weren't actually looking for him. See, one day some facility managers lit a controlled fire in the hospital's lawn to burn up the overgrown grass.

And when the flames died down, they were shocked to see a badly charred body just lying in the dirt. It had been hidden in that grass, hidden by all of the brush.

And now it was visible again, and it was also severely burned, enough so that it was basically unrecognizable. I mean, five months had gone by and it had been burned. It was almost impossible to tell who this body had belonged to. Some officials thought that it could be Stephen. They called his family to share the good news that he might have been found, but they still needed to confirm this person's identity.

Interestingly, when the body was found, it was wearing shoes and the shoes were in pretty good shape. They hadn't burned up completely in that fire. So Stephen's relatives took one look at those shoes and they actually recognized them right away. That was how they were able to identify him. They knew Stephen had a pair of sneakers exactly like those ones the corpse was wearing. So in their mind, there was no question Stephen

This had to be Steven. He had disappeared from his hospital bed and ended up dead in the hospital brush. But just to make sure, a coroner tried to run DNA tests. Unfortunately, so much of the body had burned up. The skeleton was almost all that was left. And those bones were so charred, they weren't able to get a good genetic sample or make a positive identification. This also meant it was impossible to determine a cause of death.

But even though the coroner couldn't run the DNA tests, Stephen's family thought the shoes should have been enough to identify him. Not to mention, like someone goes missing from the hospital and then there's a dead body in the hospital's lawn. I mean, if the body wasn't Stephen, who else could it be? It's not exactly normal for people to go missing from medical facilities or for unidentified corpses to turn up months later.

Except the hospital officials say this wasn't good enough. They wanted more concrete evidence. So they asked for the body to be sent to a different medical examiner, someone with better equipment who might be able to run more sensitive tests. And Stephen's relatives agreed. And then they waited to hear back from this other coroner. They waited a long time. Years, in fact, longer.

but nobody would give them the information they were looking for. They wouldn't say if the body was Stephen or someone else or if they were still waiting for results. By 2016, the family was still waiting for those answers. It had been 15 long years since

And during that whole time, they weren't able to bury Stephen or have a proper funeral. They also couldn't have him legally declared dead because the law didn't say so, which was a problem because they also couldn't collect on any death benefits like his pension. And remember, Stephen had been the only person financially supporting all seven of his children. And with him missing and maybe dead, they needed some way to make ends meet.

And as frustrating as all of this was, the worst part was the feeling that the family was being lied to or left out of the loop. Nobody could understand why the coroner and the hospital officials had kind of ghosted them. They just refused to explain what was going on.

It almost felt like they were hiding something, especially because the entire situation was so suspicious. I mean, everything from Stephen's unexplained disappearance at a hospital to the strange body turning up in the hospital's lawn to the lack of answers about its identity. It was just hard to explain it all without resorting to tinfoil tails or CTs.

It rhymes with munspiracy, period. And when Teteteke disappeared under such eerily similar circumstances in 2017, it's starting to feel like some kind of a pattern in South Africa. I mean, it's not happening often, but when this has now happened twice and they turn up, you know,

You know, a patient vanishes from his room just to potentially turn up dead in the hospital's yard five minutes later. And then another man disappears under almost identical circumstances only to reappear in the hospital ceiling after two weeks. Like I mentioned before, one early theory was that both men fell victim to the same possible serial killer.

The reasoning was that if a medical professional like a doctor or a nurse was kidnapping patients, killing them and stashing the bodies around the hospitals, that could explain this pattern. Like they believed it was someone at the hospital doing this. And as for Stephen's family's frustrations and their suspicions that the hospital may have been hiding information from them for all these years, it could have been that someone was trying to protect a member of their staff.

Or they didn't want to admit that they had hired a murderer and opened themselves up to legal liability or just that they had lost someone and that someone turned up dead on their property. It's hard to imagine a medical facility helping someone get away with a violent crime, but stranger things have happened. Except other than Stephen and Teteke's disappearances, there was no other evidence of a serial killer on the loose. And keep in mind, they did die 16 years apart from one another.

It is a crazy coincidence if it is one, but it's also not too far-fetched to think that could happen. That's a very long time for a killer to wait between victims. Plus, frankly, we don't even know if either of them were murdered. Like I mentioned before, we still don't know if the body in the lawn is even actually Stephen. And to all appearances, that person's cause of death couldn't be determined either.

Now, as for Teteteke, well, there's been some controversy around his cause of death too. And I'm going to talk about this more in depth a little later. But for now, all you need to know is that officially, he died of natural causes. So some people don't believe that a serial killer murdered Teteteke. Instead, there are other theories about what happened to him. Some of them are pretty outlandish. So bear with me. This is going to get a little wild. So...

Some folks believe that Teteke ended up in the ceiling of the hospital because he was teleported there. Now, don't turn it off. Let me explain. As out there as that might seem, scientists already know that teleportation is possible. It is a known phenomenon that has been observed for subatomic particles, right?

When it comes to teleporting something bigger and more complicated, like an entire human body, it's a lot more debatable whether something like that could ever happen. A lot of scientists say no, it is impossible. But for a few who are willing to consider some fringier ideas, some people actually say that if you can teleport tiny subatomic particles, you might be able to do that billions of times, enough times to teleport every single part of a person's body from one spot to another.

The process might kill the person who's trying to teleport. It's not exactly a safe or easy way to travel, but that could explain how a healthy man could disappear from his hospital bed and reappear dead in a ceiling. It would also explain why nobody saw Teteke move from one location to another. And here's the wildest part. There are rumors online that...

that at least one person experienced teleportation personally, and they lived to tell about it afterward. Of course, none of this has been verified, but it is a story worth exploring anyway when we are getting into tinfoil tales like this. So it happened all the way back in 1593, hundreds of years ago. Back then...

A man named Gil Perez worked as a soldier. His duty specifically was to guard the royal palace in the Philippines. And he was having a hard time of it. According to the legend, on October 25th of that year, a group of pirates attacked the palace. A high-ranking state official was killed in that battle. So of course, in the days after his assassination, life in the palace was chaotic.

People needed to figure out who would take over for the official, what work needed to be done. And I have to imagine that the surviving politicians also wanted to ensure that they were safe now, that they wouldn't be hurt or killed in another follow-up assault. So everyone was working hard, dealing with their emotions and trauma and feeling very uncertain about the future. Then, just a few days after the pirate attack, Gil was on duty.

But he suddenly found himself feeling incredibly dizzy and tired. It was like all of his exhaustion was hitting him at once. He had a very hard time even keeping his eyes open, as the story goes. Gil couldn't even stay on his feet, so he leaned against a wall and closed his eyes for just a second. He knew he couldn't actually lay down or nap because he was on duty. But maybe Gil hoped that taking a moment to himself would help him stay alert. Except Gil closes his eyes and then opens his eyes again.

And all of a sudden, he doesn't recognize his surroundings. In fact, he wasn't at the royal palace anymore. Frankly, Gil didn't know where he was, just that his surroundings were totally unfamiliar. He'd never been anywhere like this before. So Gil flagged down a passerby and asked where he was. And that's how he learned he was in Mexico.

So in the blink of an eye, the time it took to close his eyes and open them again, he had teleported from Asia to North America. Right away, he turned himself into the nearest authorities he could find in the hopes that they could help him make sense of what had happened to him.

To prove that he was who he said he was, Gil told the officials everything about the pirate attack from a few days before. He knew things that nobody in Mexico could know in those days, before the telephone, TV, or internet news. They hadn't even heard that the state official was dead yet, let alone the specific details about how everyone had been handling things after he'd passed.

But before too long, the news began to trickle out from the Philippines to Mexico, and sure enough, everything Gil had told them in those days matched the official reports. If you believe this account, it proved that Gil had either traveled around the world in the blink of an eye, or he had some other way of learning about current events that were happening thousands of miles away.

Now, the reason I'm even sharing this account is because Gil's story is considered one of the most persuasive accounts of teleportation ever. Assuming it's true, there's almost no way to explain what happened to him or how he knew what he knew.

And if it was possible for Gil to teleport half a world away in the 16th century, it should also be possible for Teteke to teleport from his bed to a ceiling crawlspace in the same hospital, right? I know that's a lot to take on faith, but this theory sounds a bit more believable when you realize that there's yet another case, just like Stephen's

and Teteteke's. See, about a year and a half goes by after Teteteke's strange disappearance and death. Remember, police, family, hospital officials still have no idea what happened. But on May 10th, 2019, a man named Sandile Sabaya checks into yet another South African medical facility. This one is called the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital.

Overall, Sandile is healthy and he doesn't have any real history of health problems, but he has a broken bone in his legs. So he needs to have it treated at this hospital. Now, this hospital is almost a thousand miles away from Stellenbosch where Teteke was staying when he disappeared.

They're about as far as you can get without actually leaving South Africa, but technically they're still both in South Africa. There's no reason for anyone to make any connection between Teteteke and Sendile. That is until history apparently repeats itself. See, the doctors decide that Sendile needs to see a foot specialist. They're not equipped to treat him in this hospital. Still, he remains there as an inpatient until they can get him transferred somewhere else.

Sandile stays in his room for a few days, and finally, when he's supposed to be ready to go to the new hospital, some doctors step into his room to find that he has vanished.

Another patient in a South African medical facility has gone missing. And because of his broken bone, it would have been impossible for him to have walked off on his own. The hospital staff launches a massive search once again. And sadly, nobody can find Sandile. Nor do they locate anyone who saw him leave or who might know where he could have gone.

Hi there, it's your vagina speaking. I know sometimes I have a hard time getting there when we get down, but OMG Cream from Wisp is here to help. The instant arousal makes it easier to, you know...

It takes two minutes to order online, so let's give it a try. O-M-G. I literally just went to heaven. I'm going to try that again. Go tell your friends, though. Get on Wisp. Order OMG cream online at HelloWisp.com. That's HelloWisp.com and have it delivered for free. Use code OMG for 15% off your first order.

This episode is brought to you by Universal Pictures. From Universal Pictures and Blumhouse come a storm of terror from the director of The Shallows, The Woman in the Yard. Don't let her in. Where does she come from? What does she want? When will she leave? Today's the day. The Woman in the Yard. Only in theaters March 28th.

Eventually, the hospital has to report Sandile missing to the police. And again, this is the third patient to go missing at a hospital. And the detectives are stumped right off the bat. But by late May of May 2019, the staff at the hospital began noticing something very unpleasant.

There's a terrible smell permeating the hallways and the patient's rooms. They have a tough time tracking down what's causing the odor. They search for days without finding anything. And with every hour that passes, the stench in this hospital gets worse. And finally, someone realizes, pins it down to a storage room.

And when they open the storage room door, they see some kind of liquid dripping from the ceiling. Clearly, whatever's up there is responsible for the smell. So once a facility team gets the ceiling open, they look around to see what's up there. And it's a body. Sandile's badly decomposed dead body.

I mean, this is so similar to what happened to Teteteke. In a little less than two years, two men vanished from their hospital rooms only to turn up dead in the hospital ceiling. Add Stephen to the mix, the man who may have burned in the hospital yard,

That makes three eerily similar cases. They were all found days, weeks, or months after their disappearances. They were all unable to walk prior to going missing. I mean, the parallels are just impossible for anyone in that vicinity to ignore. So when Sandile dies mysteriously, that ignites a new debate and new focus on Teteke's old unsolved case. I mean, you can't help but tie the two of these together, both found in the hospital ceiling.

So to take his loved ones are very frustrated by this point, and they are eager for any kind of answer about what happened to him. In fact, they believe the officials at the hospital know more than what they've been saying. That's just like what Stephen's family has alleged to take his relatives agree with them that there seems to be some kind of cover up at play.

In interviews with the press, because we are now in 2019, they have actually suggested that employees at the facility are intentionally withholding information about the death. From the sound of it, the police have also been oddly resistant to investigating this case. Like, they're afraid of what they'll find. And when some officials open an inquest into his disappearance and the odd way he died, that also goes nowhere. Again, it just all feels mysterious to Teteke's family.

They think they're getting the runaround. Now, I don't know if there's any truth to those accusations, but I do have to acknowledge that in statements to the press, hospital officials have been telling a very different story from what Teteteke's family has been telling the press. Take the cause of death. According to Teteteke's relatives,

Clearly, foul play was a factor. They say the evidence is clear based on his autopsy results. They also say that one doctor at the hospital told them point blank that Teteke had been murdered. But the spokesperson from the facility says that's not true. The facility says they never ruled Teteke's death a murder. And in fact, according to them, his autopsy clearly showed that he had died of natural causes.

Now, this is like I mentioned before, but to be clear, when I say natural causes, I don't mean it was complications from his surgery. The hospital says that the operation he had on his abdominal area had nothing to do with his passing.

From the sound of it, the official story is that Teteteke simply died peacefully, naturally, and nonviolently in a ceiling crawl space that he had no way of accessing. They've also said that they've been nothing but transparent with Teteteke's loved ones. They say that they're not hiding anything and they've shared everything they know. If there are any open questions about Teteteke that they haven't answered,

That's only because they say they don't have the answers. It's just a strange situation that nobody can explain. A patient who couldn't walk somehow got up into the hospital ceiling and just peacefully died in his sleep in the hospital ceiling.

Now, I don't know how to reconcile those two very different statements. I don't know who's telling the truth, and I don't know what either side would have to gain from spreading misinformation, except maybe not being liable, the hospital. There are a lot of possibilities, though. Did Teteke Stephen and Sandile all go missing and die as part of some kind of top secret government experiment?

Maybe some group was testing teleportation technology on hospital patients or were they maybe killed by a doctor or a nurse and their employers didn't want to admit that they had hired a serial killer or that their hospitals were dangerous. Those are the two most popular theories.

But this case is so bizarre. The possibilities really are endless. It's just giving Stranger Things hospital. For all we know, it could have been aliens or magic or just about anything else, including the Upside Down.

So it's not hard for me to see why people would jump to wild theories about teleportation or tinfoil tails in this situation when something this strange happens. Something that honestly defies any grounded explanation. It's natural to look at less plausible possibilities because like how could no one have seen them moving? How could someone have wheeled them out and then put them in the ceiling and no one heard, no one saw, nothing. Whether Teteteke is a victim of a cover-up, a

a supernatural phenomenon, or a serial killer. His story is one where the rules about how the world is supposed to work just simply fall apart. Something happened that definitely wasn't supposed to happen. And until we figure out what that is, we might have to second guess everything we know about physics,

reality, or even the universe around us. And that is this extremely suspicious and mysterious disappearances and deaths of the three hospital patients. All right, you guys, thank you so much for tuning into this episode and I will see you next week as we dive further into the dark together. Goodbye.

All you homeowners have unique needs. Some feel the need to leave up holiday decorations year-round. Others have the need to use their garage as practice space for their new metal band. And because each homeowner has unique needs, GEICO helps you get the right coverage for your home and what's in it. That way, you get exactly what's right for you, even if your needs are unique. Get more with GEICO.