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Well, we got a minute. I'm going to buy that truck I've been wanting. Wait, don't you need, like, weeks to shop for a car? I don't. Carvana makes it super convenient to find exactly what I want. Hold up. You're buying a car on your phone? Isn't that more of a laptop thing? You can shop wherever you want.
I like to do my research, read reviews, compare models. Plus, Carvana has thousands of options. How'd you decide on that truck? Because I like it. Oh, that is a great reason. Go to Carvana.com to sell your car the convenient way. The couple are falling asleep to the noise of the train. It's almost hypnotic.
This time they had prioritized their comfort over being financially responsible. They booked the sleeper seats. Money well spent. I mean, their beds are tiny. They each get one right next to each other, but they're still out in the open. It's a three level bunk bed system. They have a row of people above them and a row of people below them. And their bunks are just out. Anyone passing through the aisle can see anybody that's on any of these bunk beds just falling asleep. But
But at least they can fully lay down and sleep the entire 11-hour ride back home. Gia, the wife, she shakes her husband awake. Husband Lee, Lee, L-I, slowly opens his eyes and he checks his phone. It's 1 a.m. I'm gonna use the restroom real quick. Lee nods and he starts pulling the blanket off of him, but his wife stops him. Shh, I'll be right back.
She points down at the elderly people that are underneath them in the bunks below. I mean, if both of them, her and her husband, climb down from the middle bunk, there's a higher chance that the elderly couple are going to wake up. They look like they're deep in sleep right now. There's no point in disturbing any of that. It's okay. I have my phone. I'm going to be right back. Lee, the husband, hesitates, but he just watches his wife climb down the bunk bed ladder and rushes off to the restroom.
He glances out the window. It's pitch black outside. I mean, they must be crossing through a very rural area because there's no buildings. There's no light coming from outside the window at all. Just the noise of the train on the tracks. And then boom, the train shakes and Lee jumps awake. What was that? I mean, it must have been he must have fallen asleep and it must have been some sort of rock that hit the window or something. He rubs his eyes and he checks his phone. It's 1.30 a.m.,
He looks to his left and his wife is no longer in her bunk bed. It has been 30 minutes since she went off to use the restroom. She should be back by now. His mind starts racing because that's weird, right? He quickly puts on his shoes, climbs down the bunk bed ladder, walks to the restroom and their carriage, because you know each train has a carriage, carriage 13. It's empty. She's not in there.
His heart starts pacing faster, but it's fine. I mean, calm down. This makes sense. Sometimes if the restroom in the carriage that you're in is busy, you go to the carriage over. So he runs over to carriage 14 and he slams the bathroom door open. It's empty. She's not in there.
He does this with carriage 15 and as many restrooms as he can before he feels this intense panic, this tightening in his chest. He runs all the way to the train conductor's cabin and he starts banging on the door. The conductor opens it up, 1.30 a.m. He looks confused, stressed. "'Please, you have to help me, sir. My wife, my wife is missing.'"
The train conductor looks at the husband for what feels like multiple seconds because I think he's just processing what he just said. And then slowly, his lips just turn into a smile. And he's smiling at husband Lee. What do you mean your wife is missing? That's impossible, sir. Nobody goes missing on a moving train. ♪
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As always, full show notes are available at rottenmangopodcast.com. Now, a few quick disclaimers before we begin. Today's case has a few graphic descriptions of physical violence, injuries, and amputations. I also want to be very clear that mentions of coping or struggling with mental health related to the development of a physical disability is solely from the survivor herself. That is not a reflection of everyone who may have a disability and how they or others may view it.
So, with that being said, let's get started. It doesn't matter if you want to stop. There's absolutely nothing you can do about it. That is likely one of the very first things that all train conductors are taught. If you press the emergency brake right now, you will come to a complete full stop probably from a mile from here. There is no immediate stopping a train. Imagine telling a swarm of 100 elephants to instantly stop running at full speed. It's not going to happen.
And sometimes that means you watch disaster happen and know that there is absolutely nothing that you can do about it. That is the only thought going on in the train conductor's minds when they see a body on the middle of the tracks wearing a thick winter coat just laying there. Hurry, do something! They both know that there's nothing either of them can do. They pull the emergency brakes and stop a mile later.
After 30 seconds, that's how long it takes to come to a complete stop. Hurry, somebody call the police, we gotta go. Everything is happening so fast but so slow at the same time. The way that the train hit and ran over the body in the winter coat was so quick and so subtle that they couldn't even visually see the body. It's likely they wouldn't even have noticed or felt it if they hadn't made eye contact.
There was a train conductor who hit a cow once, a 1,000-pound-plus cow, and they said it felt like when you're driving on the highway and a small gnat, a small bee hits your window, you kind of hear the sound, but you don't feel the whole car shake. It doesn't even dent your window.
That's what it felt like. So of course, they didn't feel anything with the winter coat on the tracks. But now they're trying to head back as quickly as possible to check and see if everything is okay. Who is it? Why are they laying on the tracks in a giant puffy winter coat? What the hell is going on? They rush all the way back to this now blood red soaked winter coat that looks completely mangled. And instead of a human, they see a deer.
Someone had put a winter coat on a deer and laid it down on the tracks. What? This is the very strange life of a train conductor. You almost never know what to expect during your shift. It could be nothing, or it could be a nearly unsolvable mystery of why would somebody do that? But train conductor Zhao knows that this is not one of those instances. I mean, the only mystery is how not very intelligent this passenger is. What?
Train conductor Zeng pauses and lets out a smile because this is probably going to be the least exhausting task of the day. The first logical place to search is the dining cart.
It's right at the center of the train, and when you step in, the first thing you notice is the smell. And then the sound. All of the rattling sounds of the silverware and cups as the train moves along. It's just what you imagine the place to be. There's rows of tables and chairs along each side of the carriage. It's like a breakfast restaurant that sells pancakes. The ones that have those sticky syrup dispensers. But maybe a little bit nicer. The tables are covered with white linens, glass windows on both sides, and you can just see everything blurring past you.
It's about 2am, but there's somebody leaned up against the window, reading a newspaper, drinking a cup of hot coffee. He looks over his newspaper at Lee and the conductor and goes straight back to reading. This carriage is a relatively quick search. They check under each table, each deep red colored booth, under them, under the ground, and as the conductor expected, no signs of Jia anywhere in the dining cart. She's probably in a restroom somewhere.
Lee and the conductor, they start making their way over to the seating carriages. This train in particular has 18 carriages, 18 different compartments, if you will. Eight are for sitting and eight are for sleeping. Those are excluding the dining carriage, storage carriages, the train conductor carriage. These are just the passenger areas. It's a big train. In total, the train can carry up to 1,500 people. They have a lot of square footage to cover during this search. They start with the hard seat carriages.
Chinese seating carriages are typically split up into three different levels. The first is not even a seating carriage. You get to stand. For less than a dollar for an 11-hour train ride, you have the joy of standing the entire trip. You can maybe sit on your luggage. You can maybe sit on the floor. Or if you're lucky, you can maybe sit on somebody's seat when they go use the restroom for about two seconds.
But otherwise, you're on your two feet the entire way. The carriage with people standing are going to be a hard search because they're packed with people. It's not much different from trying to swim through a sardine can. You can't see anything but the person in front of you. Excuse us. Excuse me. Gia, Gia, are you in here? Say something, Gia. She's not.
They get to the hard seat carriages. You might as well be sitting on an uncomfortable park bench or a plank of wood at 90 degrees. Sometimes the people with the hard seat tickets will get up to use the restroom. And when they get back, they see a stander sitting in their spot. Oh, sorry. I have a standing ticket, but I did here. Let me get up. It's OK. You can sit. You can sit.
The hard seats are so uncomfortable, they start thinking, "Maybe I should have gotten a standing ticket. How is standing more comfortable than sitting?" They go row by row of the hard seat carriages. Most people are knocked out, dead asleep, head leaning up against the stranger next to them. They don't care it's 2am, they don't care about social etiquette, they just need to find a nice surface to lay their head down. The conductor is shining his bright flashlight at each of the faces.
They're all squinting, using their arm to block the light. Hey, what are you? Sorry, my wife is missing. I'm looking for my wife. Jia? Jia. Then the two head over to the soft seat carriages. There are a bit less people in there. The seats are the ones that you would expect. Cushiony, almost like an airplane seat. And as they're going through the aisles of the soft seating carriages, and the longer they can't find Jia, the more the train conductor and husbandly feel confused. I mean, Jia's disappearance just doesn't even make sense.
It's like a weird magic trick.
You know how those magicians will make someone disappear on stage? There's no way it makes sense. People don't just disappear, but they're doing it on stage. So it really feels that way, doesn't it? If you just sit in the crowd, you turn your brain off, you have a really good time. The magician can do something that nobody else in the crowd can do. They can do magic. Poof. Person here, person gone. But if you start thinking, if you really start thinking, where did they disappear to? You start getting some real answers and it's never magic.
Sometimes it's a false bottom where the magician will put someone in a box. You can see that they barely fit in there. Box closes up. Magician starts stabbing swords into the box and it makes you nervous that the person inside is getting stabbed. But then they take out the knives one by one, open the box back up and the person is fine, unharmed.
Usually, it's a false bottom. There's a hidden trapdoor, a compartment underneath them that they hide in. Or maybe a trapdoor behind them. Because even now, the conductor knows nobody just disappears on a moving train. There is no such thing as magic. People don't just vanish without a trace. And as they're going carriage by carriage, the conductor is flashing the light into each row, each face to verify that none of them are the missing wife, Jia. Lee, the husband, is glued to his phone.
You know what? The whole thing is a little suspicious. Why didn't Lee go to the restroom with his wife? It's 1am on a train. Wouldn't you want to make sure that your wife gets to the restroom safely? And even if he didn't escort his wife to the restroom, how could he just fall back asleep? He couldn't wait five minutes for his wife to get back before going back to snoring? He fell asleep and only woke up a full 30 minutes later when the train jerked to the side?
Because the train conductor knows people do not go missing from moving trains, it means that it's more likely a situation where somebody harmed the wife. And statistically speaking, it's always the husband, is it not? Okay.
Okay, to be fair, it's not always the husband, but there's a good, good chance that it is. And would this not be the perfect place to commit the perfect crime? Wait till the train is passing a very difficult to search area, perhaps on the edge of a mountainside cliff. When the perfect opportunity comes, you kill your wife, throw her out the window, throw her out the door, say she's missing, you've already gotten rid of her body, and anyone
Anyone of the 1,000 people on the train could be a suspect by the time that anyone realizes that your wife is truly missing and this is an emergency situation. By that point, the train would be very far from her body. It would be such a puzzling mystery and you would be the sad, confused husband who never gets closure.
It's almost too perfect. Or if that's too risky, maybe he hid his wife's body. Perhaps the hiding locations on the train that come to mind first are the most dangerous ones. Underneath the train, or on top of the train, or maybe the storage carriage hiding amongst the cargo. But it would be nearly physically impossible for Lee to hide his wife's body in one of those areas.
And now that the train conductor is looking at it, husband Lee does seem genuinely frantic to find his wife. He's been on his phone nonstop, calling her nonstop, trying to see if her phone would ring in any of the carriages. Gia, the wife, can hear her husband calling her phone nonstop. It's ringing again and again. And there's probably not even two seconds it hadn't been ringing in the past God knows how long. She knows it's her husband because she had set his ringtone to a custom one. And now it's just painful to listen to.
Jia's laying there not moving towards her phone. She knows it would mean a lot to her husband if she could just pick up the phone and tell him where she is, what happened, or maybe even why. Maybe he could get some semblance of closure in that way, but she's not going to pick up the phone. Not yet anyway. So he's just going to have to wait, doesn't he?
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The train conductor is looking at Lee making nonstop phone calls to his wife, which maybe she can't come to the phone right now. And maybe she can't be found on this train because she was never on the train to begin with. Are we even sure that husband Lee got on the train with his wife? Her purse is conveniently missing because she took it with her, but maybe, maybe she never got on the train. That seems like a logical explanation to all of this than vanishing on a moving train. I mean,
I mean, think about it. There's over a thousand people on this train right now. What are the odds that at least one of them has lost their minds? Maybe husband Lee just genuinely believes that she was on this train with him, that she boarded with him, but he's traveling alone.
There was a movie called Flight Plan that came out a few years before this incident. Have you heard of the movie? No. It goes like this. A woman named Kyle, who happens to be an airline engineer, she boards a flight from Berlin to the US with her little daughter, Julia. It is a very rough trip for the both of them. They flew to Berlin to claim Kyle's dead husband's body. Yeah, the husband died. He's mysteriously dead. And now they're bringing his body in the plane cargo all the way back home to the United States.
How old is the baby? The girl in the movie is maybe seven years old. Now, Kyle obviously is not in her right state of mind. She just lost her husband, the father of her child, Julia. So when the plane takes off, she decides to take some anti-anxiety medication. She ends up knocking out. When she wakes up, her daughter, Julia, is gone.
Kyle starts freaking out, alerting the captain, very much like how Lee alerts the train conductor. She alerts the flight crew and they drop everything. Well, everything but flying the plane, of course. They drop everything to help her find her missing daughter. But slowly, Kyle can feel the flight crew. They're getting distracted. They're not trying to help her. They're not making eye contact with her. What the hell is wrong with you people? My child is missing. We have to find her. Ma'am.
You boarded alone. Julia, your daughter, is not on the plane's manifest. She is not a passenger on the plane. No, that can't be true because your records are incorrect. Ma'am, I'm so sorry. They aren't. We spoke with the authorities in Berlin. Your child, Julia, died in Berlin with your husband.
You must be in a state of shock and grief that your brain is not processing the information. You might be hallucinating. Kyle almost believes them until she sees a tiny heart that her daughter drew on the plane's window when it got fogged up. And now she's on a mission on this plane in the air to prove that her daughter has been kidnapped on a plane, on a moving plane. In the end, at the end of the movie, Kyle is able to prove that her daughter was very much real and did board the plane.
What then when did they lie to her? Why did everyone lie to her? It was a ransom.
shady people doing shady things trying to frame her for ransom but her daughter is very much real and very much on the plane so the theory that husband lee had just lost his mind and believed he boarded the train with his wife but didn't it's quite easy to prove because he is able to show the train conductor his wife had a ticket and was seen boarding the train by the neighboring bunk mates they all saw her before she went to the restroom before they all fell asleep so yes she was on this train
And right before she went missing, they had been on the bunk asleep and nobody has seen her since then. The train conductor and Lee start combing through the sleeping carriages once more. This is technically where Jia, the wife, was last seen, so they want to be extra thorough. This is her bunk, right? Yes. Huh.
I see. In prison, there's a bed bunk hierarchy. Contrary to what I had thought, bottom bunks are actually the favored ones. They're the best. Top bunks typically mean that you're not the top dog of your cell. Your body is vulnerable to attacks. It's very hard to fight when you're on top. What are you going to do if they're stabbing you through the bunk bed?
The prison lights are shining bright because you don't have anything to cover from the ceilings. You can't hang anything from the ceiling to get some privacy, whereas the bottom bunk, you can try to hang some sheets or some clothes. Trains are interesting because they also have bunk hierarchy.
In China, and on this very specific train, the K2011 Express, the bunk bed carriages, the sleeper carriages, if you will, have six beds per section. In each section, there are three rows of two small tiny beds facing each other. The top, the highest two beds, they have the least amount of space. If you try to sit up, you're not going to be able to without crouching your neck or slamming your head on the top of the train. And just like in prison, it is the brightest, which is one of the biggest setbacks in
Even when the train turns down the lights at night, you're going to get the most light pollution since you're at the top.
However, it's great because it's secluded. Passengers say if you bring a book or you bring your phone with full battery because there's not a lot of outlets up there, that's the best bunk. Nobody's gonna bother you and you're out of the line of sight by people who walk down the aisle. Nobody's that tall. Then you have the middle bunk. It probably comes shoulder height to people who are walking past in the open aisles. So if you're wearing a dress, you'd do best to cover it with a blanket.
It's great if you're a scenery person. It's the only bunk with good views out the window. You can't really sit up still, but you can lay there and stare out the window if that's what you're into. It's a little less private than the very top bunk since everybody walking past is, again, eye level with your body, just about. But it's easier to get in and out of this than the top bunk.
Then you have the very bottom bunk. It's actually the most spacious of the three levels and it even has like a small nice table on the side that you can use. You can also fully sit up straight. So the choice to sit or lay down is fully yours. It's also relatively dark since it's covered by the top two bunks, which why wouldn't everybody choose the bottom bunk then? More space, the choice to sit or lay down, it's dimly lit, you have table space.
The main drawback is a lot of strangers on these trains will just sit on random people's bottom bunks to sit and chat with each other. They could even, if they wanted to, snatch your belongings or perhaps even you. Husband Lee and Jia are not at the bottom bunk. They're in the middle, but maybe, maybe somebody saw Jia laying in the bunk and started having very bad thoughts. Maybe they thought that they could do something to her. Maybe she was kidnapped by a stranger on the train for very sinister reasons.
But if that's the case, where are they hiding her?
Jia is laying there. The floor is cold, but she knows she can't move. She's tried. Even if she wants to, it's not working. It feels like she's tied down to a bed of steel nails. If she had known this was going to happen, would she have still taken the same route back to her bunk bed from the restroom? Would she have even gone to the next carriage's restroom? Or would she have just waited in line to use the one closest to her? The one closest to her husband?
I mean, if she did, would things be different? Probably. She probably wouldn't be in this situation right now. Everything would probably be different. And right now, nothing is going according to plan. But there's no time to think about that. She feels the blood dripping down the lower part of her body and she starts screaming as loud as she can. Please, somebody help me. Someone help me, please. Honey! Honey!
Husband Lee is slamming his fist on the bathroom door. He never had a chance to check this restroom for his wife. And now that he thinks about it, was this restroom locked since Gia first went missing?
Everyone in carriage 11 is knocked out asleep, but Lee could not care less. He's banging on the door screaming, "Gia, are you in there? "Gia, open up, please, it's me. "Gia, open the door, are you in there?" Lee has all sorts of probabilities running through his mind. Gia's not great with motion. Maybe she got motion sick and fainted in the restroom, and now nobody can help her unless they get this damn door open. He starts jiggling the handle of the door, trying to use brute force to get it to open, and it's not opening, and the train attendant walks over and starts unlocking the door for Lee.
Maybe he could see the desperation in Lee's face. Is anybody in there? Please speak now. We're going to unlock the door. We will be opening the door now. Please knock if you're not ready. Before the attendant can unlock the door from the outside with a key, they hear someone is inside the restroom.
They're unlocking the door. The door creaks open just a crack and a man, a middle-aged man, squeezes past the door and closes it behind him. As he walks away, he does not break eye contact with Lee. He just smirks as he zips up his pants.
What the hell did this? Did he do something to his wife? Lee, his heart is beating out of his chest. He turns back to the bathroom door, slams it all the way open. And inside on carriage 11 is a very, very normal bathroom. Gia is not there.
1,000 random strangers on the train. It's a numbers game, no? How many of them are bad people? It can't be zero, right? How many of them have bad intentions? It can't be none of them, correct? Once the train is in motion, the passengers are isolated from the outside world. If there is a killer, if there is someone trying to do something nasty on board the train, you're stuck. You're trapped with them. And the scariest part is you don't even know who that would be.
But this theory doesn't make perfect sense either. The part that doesn't make sense is who would want to do this to Jia specifically? Adding to the confusing mystery is to harm Jia, to get rid of her body from the moving train or to hide her body so thoroughly that the train conductor cannot find her, it would require some preparations, some planning. This does not seem like it would be a very easy random crime to commit.
She's not exactly a prime target either. She's a 44-year-old mother who is traveling with her husband, works as a manager for a toothpaste company. It's not like they're very wealthy and have a lot of money for ransom or a lot of things to be stolen from. She's beautiful, don't get me wrong. She does very well in her field, but she's not in a position where she's creating enemies. They live very normal, average lives.
So if Jia is nowhere on the train, her husband didn't do this to her, likely a stranger didn't do this to her, maybe Jia did this to herself.
Hypothetically speaking, if one wants to disappear and vanish without a trace so that nobody comes looking for them, a moving train would be a really good choice. If Jia were to vanish at work one day, everybody would be out in her hometown in the city searching for her. Neighboring cities would be on the lookout. Her case might even go viral on social media. But if she vanishes on a train, it would be such an unsolvable case that people would not be actively searching for her face in a sea of people out and about in everyday city life.
They might look for her in the mountainside where she was last seen. And the steps to faking one's disappearance are very straightforward. They're pretty easy. It's uncomplicated. First step, don't get caught. Second step, don't forget the first step. It's not like it hasn't been done before. One of the most famous disappearances takes place on a train, and that is of Louis Le Prince.
a French inventor. He actually created the very first motion picture photography, aka this man invented movies. He boarded a train from Dijon, France to Paris, France. And while on that train, he disappears without a trace.
He's vanishing. It feels very similar to Gia's. It feels like a magic trick. Even all of his luggage is gone. But there is proof that he did indeed board the train. So where the hell did he go? When the train gets to Paris, there are extensive searches to locate Louis le Prince. And they come up with nothing. They never found him nor his belongings. It's like a magic trick. He vanished off the face of the earth on a moving train. So people start theorizing what they believe happened to Louis le Prince.
One of the theories being, if this man is so smart, he can create the first motion picture. Would he not be smart enough to fake his own disappearance? Maybe he waited for the train to slow down or took advantage of an unscheduled stop and slid away to start a new life. Maybe the pressure of constantly creating new inventions and living up to his previous accomplishments was getting to him. Perhaps he realized that this is not the life that he wanted for himself and he can't face his family to tell them all of that. So he faked his own disappearance. That is one of the theories.
However, the most popular theory is that Louis Le Prince did not fake his own death. The most popular theory was that someone wanted Louis Le Prince's inventions and wanted to claim his patents as their own. So they killed him. They murdered him on the train and got rid of his body. Lee, the husband, survived.
starts losing his mind on the train. He's been running through the aisles of the carriages, screaming his wife's name. No care in the world if he's disturbing everybody. He just needs to find his wife. He feels like this is some sort of sick joke. How can she just vanish? He's analyzing every single person's face. Does that person look guilty? Is that my wife? Does that person look like they've just stuffed someone into their luggage?
His brain is so busy hunting down his wife, it feels like the rest of his body is going into autopilot mode. He's running down the aisles. Left hand, press call, phone up to ear, ring, ring, ring. You've reached the voicemail. Left hand, press call, phone up to ear, ring, ring, ring. You've reached the voicemail of left hand, press call, phone up to ear, ring, ring, ring. Hello? Lee freezes. He looks down at his phone. It's the correct number. It's his wife's number.
and a man has just picked up the phone. "Hello? Where- Sir, your wife is at the hospital. Please come meet her." How the hell did his wife get off this train and to a hospital? Husband Lee is sitting on the floor, crouched down with his back leaned up against the hospital door. He's squatting, he's clenching his teeth, trying to hold in his own sobs,
The types of screams he can hear from inside the hospital room are not normal. They're primal. Like someone is being viciously attacked and shredded by a cheese grater. He had never heard someone scream like that ever in his life. And they were all coming from his wife, Gia. He can hear her through the door. Ow, please, my left leg. It hurts so much. I need more painkillers. I'm in agony. Please just make the pain go away. Somebody needs to help me, please.
The pain Ji-Ae has been going through has been so overwhelming, all-consuming, that Ji-Ae has not been able to sleep, eat, she can't even distract herself. All day, all night, all she does is scream until she exhausts herself and her throat is on fire. The screams from inside the room keep getting louder. Husband Lee knows he needs to go in there.
So he quickly takes a deep breath, wipes his tears on the back of his hand, clears his nose, straightens out his back, puts on a smile, opens the door and walks in. Every day, multiple times a day, this is what he does. He walks in there, sits on the edge of the hospital bed and he puts his hand near his wife. He doesn't touch her, but he gets close.
Honey, it's okay. It's okay. I know you feel a lot of pain in your left leg, but you have to remember what the doctor said. It's in your head, honey. Tell yourself the pain is not real because you don't have a left leg anymore. She looks down and her left leg, her left arm, and her right foot are all gone. Severed.
Jia has lost three limbs, but she can still feel all of them. It's called phantom limb pain. It's when an individual perceives feeling and a lot of the times painful feelings in a limb that are no longer there. The limb doesn't exist anymore, but the brain thinks it's still there. The nervous system sends out receptors and gets confused because they're not being relayed properly, which eventually translates into the sufferer feeling pain.
In essence, the nerves in your spinal cord that lead to the brain still exist from that limb that's been severed. Your brain senses something is wrong because those nerves stop sending signals and that triggers a pain response, which is usually the body's default response when they feel like something is wrong. They force you to feel pain to alert you, hey, you're
hey, something's not right here. Wait, so she's feeling pain? In her left leg. When it's no longer there, but it feels like she still has it and it's painful. Yes, but it's not there. The brain is a very powerful organ. Think of it like this. You have a best friend that you have spoken to every single day of your life
your entire life every second of every day you've spent every single waking moment with them and then one day they suddenly ghost you but your brain cannot comprehend or remember a time where you've been without them and you're confused how can they just be gone nothing makes sense you have no closure you're bound to feel some sort of pain and confusion for a very long time this is so much worse
One netizen said, I had an amputation right below the knee. I experienced phantom pain. It starts like someone has a lighter under the sole of my foot that is no longer there. It heats up. I can feel my foot on fire, but the foot is no longer there. And then bam, like someone slams a giant spike through my non-existent foot, just stabbing it, piercing it all the way through. And that pain slowly shoots up my leg all the way up to the rest of my body.
Another netizen said, early on, my phantom pain felt like my foot was being crushed by a metal bar across the top of my foot and being electrocuted all at the same time. But the foot didn't exist anymore.
Another netizen writes, I feel like my foot is being crushed, constantly electrocuted, stabbed with a dull knife and any other pain that you can imagine. There's also the weird sensations that aren't necessarily painful, but it drives you crazy. Itching. You want to itch your foot so bad. But when you go down to itch and relieve some of that, it's not there, but it keeps itching.
Another one that drives you crazy is I feel like I'm dipping my foot into a cold lake. It's so cold. I'm getting frostbite on my toes, but my foot is not there.
As for Jia, she said, the first attack of phantom limb pain made me scream so loud until I couldn't scream anymore. Li did not want to ask his wife too much about what happened. So he tried to get bits and pieces from the investigators, the ones that first found Jia and came to the scene. When they got out there, they didn't honestly know what they were looking at.
They told Lee, we thought, is this a woman? A man? It has to be a person though, right? We had no clue. The investigator said it was difficult to even tell if it was a person actually. It was just a pile of blood and limbs, like a bloody blob. But it had to be. Logically, it made sense, but their brains would not let them comprehend it or rather comprehend who they're looking at. They look down at the ground. There's blood and body parts scattered like a human puzzle. The person they're staring at,
basically only has half their body left. And they're thinking, "What the hell happened to this poor woman? Who did this to her?" There's something called "Milanoheliophobia." I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but it is the fear of black holes, like the ones in space. The fear of objects with such extreme mass and gravity that it consumes even light itself. Just visually speaking, people say that looking into a black hole, even just the photos, right, because that's all we have,
is terrifying to know that once you get sucked into the black hole, you become spaghetti. Spaghetti-fication, that's what they say. You fall into a black hole, it compresses your body down from the top to the toe and then stretches you at the same time and it turns you into literal human spaghetti. That's probably why a lot of people have intense fear, intense emotions when they stare into a black hole.
And the investigators for the train company are huddled together in a circle, bent over, staring straight into the black hole. Impossible. I mean, how can such a, I mean, I can't even believe it.
In the middle of carriage 14, there is a black hole. Well, okay, not really. You know those trash cans where you press down and the sides will push down, letting you throw the garbage in with your hand? Unless someone steps on this particular spot of the carriage, the floor, the hole does not open up. It's almost like a false bottom, a magic trick. And they've taken off the compartment doors, and there is a hole, a gaping hole on the floor of carriage 14.
On Gia's way back from the restroom that night, she made sure to keep both feet planted on the ground. Just normal train etiquette common sense, just in case the train makes a sharp turn that she's not going to end up in somebody else's bunk. But as she's walking back through carriage 14, ready to walk back into carriage 13 where her husband is, the floor underneath her just disappears. A
A tile of the floor swings open briefly, opening up and in the blink of an eye, sucks her down into a black hole. She drops down onto the railroad tracks and she is swallowed by the bottom of the train.
instantly for Gia everything goes black and then the pain hits she can almost feel each wheel going through her body these are pulled from her court statements they're just running over her she said the pain is so intense that she cannot stop screaming but nobody can hear think she can't even hear her own screams the trains roaring and the friction sound of the wheels in the railroad truck are so loud it's deafening then she loses consciousness
Jia would be run over by 20 train carriages going at 40 miles per hour. By the time that the train she was on had sped off, she looked like she had been chewed up and then spit out. When she woke back up, she was somehow somewhat alive. She said that she just laid there staring up at the night sky. There wasn't a single star up in there. Everything was pitch black and Jia was left for dead.
If someone on the train had seen her walking down the aisle one second, gone the next, they might have thought it's like one of those magic tricks with a trap door, a false bottom.
And people say when things are in motion, they stay in motion. To give you some context, when things in motion are moving, they have more force than things that are still. If you calmly walk up to a ball, a basketball, and it's stationary sitting on a table and you bump your head against it, it's likely going to be unpleasant. It's not going to kill you. You probably won't even have a bump on your head. Now, if that same ball is thrown off the penthouse unit of a 98th floor apartment and it hits you on the head, you might be hospitalized. Things in motion have a lot of force.
The train that Lee and Jia were on weighs 2,000 tons, about the weight of 200 giant elephants. But now it's going 45 miles per hour and ramming straight into Jia. The impact of the injury something like that would cause, it's more comparable to 3,100 elephants running over her. I don't even think our brains can really comprehend what kind of injuries that would cause. Jia is laying there for a moment,
It's almost peaceful. I mean, not painless, but it's kind of peaceful until the realization hits her. If she does not move soon, another train is going to come down and completely rip the rest of her body apart, leaving her truly like a puzzle waiting to be put back together by coroners. And that's if they even find her. Who knows? Maybe the animals will get to her first.
She's on the tracks and the objective, at least in theory, is quite simple. Move her body off the tracks to the side. She's not even thinking about getting to help or getting to the nearest town. Just get off the tracks. That's all she's thinking about. She said, if I do not leave the tracks as soon as possible, I will be shattered. But when she goes to move, there's this really strange sensation. She tries to move her left arm, but it's like her arm does not belong to her. It does not listen. It does not move. It does not budge.
It's weird. She's straining so hard to move that arm. She can feel the veins in her head bulging, throbbing, but nothing. Nothing is moving. All she can do is sit on the cold railroad tracks that are digging into her back and smell that awful metallic scent. At first, she thought that metallic scent was likely the rusted railroad tracks, but she realizes soon enough it's the scent of her blood.
She uses all of her strength to lift her head up by her neck and she looks down at the state of her body. Her left arm is almost completely detached. Her left thigh is gone. Her right hand, the only hand she has left, is full of sticky liquid. Blood. The thought to just let it be is the first thing on her mind. What's done is done. Look at her. She can't even put herself back together. There's no way she's gonna survive. That's what she's thinking.
But then she keeps seeing images pass by of her husband, of her son, and the decision feels very logical. She said, "My son cannot live without a mother. My husband cannot live without a wife. My aging mother and my only sister, they'd be so sad. So I cannot die." Jia laid there repeating in her mind over and over again, "Son, mommy's gonna come home to you. Mommy's gonna come home to you. Mommy's gonna get off the railroad tracks."
She uses her only good working hand, her right hand, the one that's almost been obliterated. She uses it to grip on one side of the railroad tracks and she's trying to use it to pull her body over to the side. Maybe she can roll her body. She grabs it, ignoring the excruciating pain going up her hand. And with every ounce of everything left in her body, strength, adrenaline, love for her son, she pulls as hard as she can and moves to the side less than an inch.
And then she knocks out again. The amount of pain in her body combined with the amount of blood she's losing every second. She has no energy. She's very weak. When she wakes up, she tries to move her body again and falls again. All she can hear is the song playing in her head over and over. Love you 10,000 years. That's her song with her husband. And it's not like she's having her life flash before her eyes. I mean, she is. But the song is actually playing while she's struggling to move. It's the custom ringtone that she set for her husband.
I love you 10,000 years. But she can't reach her phone. It's too far. So she uses this song to try and motivate her to move upwards. Maybe if she can grab the purse that's just inches away. Maybe if she can just get off this railroad truck, she can tell her husband what happened and he can come save her.
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So that's what she does for the next half hour or so, or at least that's what she said it felt like. She lays there until she finally has enough energy to try and move again. This time she musters up truly everything in her system and she knows either one more try or she dies. There's no other option. She starts inching closer and closer, one centimeter at a time, every few minutes breathing, exhausted from the pain. And after what feels like an eternity, she manages to make it to the other side of the tracks.
She hauls her body over, one last push, and she lands right next to the tracks. Her face is resting on the edge. Her whole body feels sticky with oil, like if somebody were to grab her and try to help her up, their hands would just slip off, like somebody oiled down her whole body. But it's a combination of her sweat and blood. She opens her mouth to let out a big breath of air, and she feels the pain deep in her teeth.
because she realizes that she had essentially burned her lips off from grinding her face against the railroad tracks.
She's about to fall asleep again, but she realizes her face that feels numb at this point is resting on the railroad tracks. The thought is very clear in her mind. Her head is going to be cut in half, but she feels no motivation to move it. At least not yet. Her body is starting to give up. She no longer has adrenaline. She knows what's going to happen to her, but she almost feels like why not just let it because of how tired she is. She's never felt pure exhaustion until now.
After laying there, she decides she has to try. And she musters up every last bit of strength and moves her face off the track, just inches away. But at least this time, her face won't be sliced in half. By now, she's in a trance until she feels a vibration. Her whole body starts vibrating and there's a loud roaring sound. She opens up an eye and sees the train heading straight towards her. She said in that moment, perhaps my determination touched the heavens. I don't know.
I heard the train. I was bursting with joy. This was the only hope for salvation and I must not give up. I quickly thought how to let the train driver know that I was there, that I was a living injured person. I knew what I had to do. So I waited nervously waiting for the light and the light comes, shines over her whole body. And she said, I put all my strength I had into lifting my head up as high as I could so that the train engineer, the driver of the train could see me. And I waited until the lights passed all the way through my body and
And then I lost consciousness again. She does get the attention of the train crew. They pull the emergency brake, stop a mile away, run. They run to her side and call the police to come save her. The police initially did not know how to even help her. They didn't even have a stretcher to bring her to the car. So they did what they could. They ripped a door off from their police station, literally ripped it from the hinges, ran back to Jia and used force.
that as a stretcher. They gently placed her on, placed all of her severed limbs onto the doorframe and started running as fast as they could to their cars and eventually drove her to the hospital. They didn't know if she was going to make it. Looking at her on the doorframe, barely conscious, the odds are not in her favor.
NASA did a study forcing test subjects to lie in a bed for three months at a time. Well, not forcing, but have them lay in a bed for three months so that they could learn about bone and muscle atrophy in space. And by the end of the 90 days, most healthy participants could not walk. They had to be slowly lifted vertically and even sitting up, the blood pressure cuffs hanging off their arms, they had to lay back down.
Even just sitting at 90 degrees was too much. They started sweating. It felt like they were going to faint, even though they're just sitting. They're not even walking. But that's just after 90 days.
Jia had to lay in that hospital bed for 190 days. And she was fighting, actively dying. She was not even a healthy participant in a NASA study. The entire time, her body is failing. Jia said, She continued,
I think normal people can't do that even for one night laying in the same position non-stop unable to even move an inch I was lying in that position the same position for more than two months I couldn't move at all She had a bed sore mattress at the hospital which is like an air mattress where air pumps into one section of the bed at a time So it feels like you're constantly in the ocean your whole body is slightly going through wave-like stimulations It helps relieve pressure on just the same part of your body which prevents bed sores
But every wave, every air compression made Jia scream in agony. She said it felt like after being run over 20 carriages of an industrial train, it was painful, but it was nothing compared to this, the recovery. Even her right hand, her only hand that she had left, it was skinned raw. They had major injuries. She couldn't touch a single thing. Every time the nurses came in to take care of Jia and replace her bandages, she said she was in so much pain. Even the
on her skin would make her scream. This raw, hoarse, guttural scream would escape her body and the nurses would be terrified of Jia. They didn't even want to make eye contact with her. Jia said that's how everybody was. Everybody was terrified of her. Nobody wanted to make eye contact with her. And the list of injuries...
I mean, I think if we were to go in depth, we would spend 40 minutes here. In short, in summary, her left arm was completely gone. Her left leg by the hip bone had been completely gone. Her right arm, her only remaining arm, almost had to be amputated. They had to save it because her shoulder was shattered in so many places. Her right leg was amputated below the knee. She had injuries to her head. In one part of her head, her scalp was essentially peeling off and her skull was exposed.
She lost an alarming amount of blood. She lost almost half of the blood in her body. Her heart was beating 29 beats per minute, which is nothing. She was barely alive. There were contusions on her left kidney, major head injuries, abrasions all over her body. Those are just some of the major injuries. There were thousands of minor injuries all listed, making her medical chart one of the longer ones that the doctors had ever seen at the local hospital.
Every day, the doctors had to go in there and cut dead flesh off of her. Flesh that had turned completely black and some parts were even starting to have maggots crawling about. Every day they would cut it off with a pair of scissors. Jia felt like she had already lost so much of herself.
And there they are, taking more bits and pieces of her every single day. Which, speaking of, at one point, she needed a skin graft, but the only healthy or somewhat healthy skin she had left on her entire body was her right thigh. So they took the skin off of that. Obviously, they did this for Jia. It was what her body needed. But just the psychological meaning was not lost. Jia was ripped apart again.
Jia said that she would look in the mirror and feel so detached from the person staring back at her. Her whole body was swollen. There were cuts and bandages all over. Only her eyes were peeking out from the blood-stained white bandages wrapped around her face like a mummy. She said that she couldn't bear to even look at herself. She said, and I quote, when I looked in the mirror, I saw a monster. And even if that's how Jia felt in that moment, she obviously is not a monster. She's a survivor. The real monsters that people believe...
are the train company, the one that operated the train that she was on when this whole incident took place. I mean, truly, at first, nobody even believed that Gia had fallen through a hole on the train floor. There must be some sort of misunderstanding. Maybe she fell off the train door in the connecting part of the carriages. Maybe the door was open a little bit and she fell through, or maybe she leaned up against the door because she lost her balance. It swung open and she fell out.
When the investigators first arrived at the train tracks, the police, Gia had already lost a ton of blood and was on the verge of death. But she told them, I fell through the center aisle of the train carriage, through the floor. What? How is that possible? Look, please look. I had to get off the railroad tracks myself. If you look, my hands and legs, they're in the middle of the railroad tracks.
I didn't cut them off myself and throw them there. Please, you have to pay attention to the scene. Remember everything. My body parts that are separated are laying in the middle of the railroad tracks and I'm laying on the side of the tracks. Please, you have to protect the crime scene so that you can testify for me later. Please.
Eventually, Gia would file a lawsuit against the train company, and they tried to brush it off. They stated during the pre-departure inspections, the conductor and the train team did routine checks of the entire train, front to back, back to front, center, everywhere. There was nothing amiss, so it must not be their fault.
But something's not adding up. Aside from the giant gaping hole that's now covered in the middle of the carriage. Again, the hole technically had a trapdoor mechanism. Where essentially, nobody would know that there's a hole there unless they stepped on that very specific spot in the carriage. So when Jia's husband is looking for her, there's no hole. There's no hole until someone steps on it.
But what would be the purpose of installing a trap door like that on the middle of a carriage floor? There would be no sense. Like, why would they do that? Why would the train company even do something like that? Well, they didn't intentionally do it.
The train company basically took an old green train and refurbished it on the inside. They kept most of the original body, just ripped out all the insides and kept the outside structure. This specific train itself was a rainbow train. It was green, pink, yellow. All the carriages were different colors because they were pieced together from random old trains that they had picked out and strung them along. And for that reason, the company had to install air conditioning onto the carriages that did not have an AC system.
They installed it, and the only problem was they needed to sometimes test a portion underneath the train to troubleshoot the AC. But instead of running wires out from out the window, out the door of the train, they thought, let's just create a hole at the bottom of the train that leads directly to the port that we need to access for the AC, and then cover it with a bolted system that nobody can fall through. It just makes the most sense.
It was supposed to have a port cover that was foolproof, but clearly it was moved. It was tilted to the side so anytime you stepped on it, it would just open up.
So clearly it was not working. And I don't think that there's any way to look at this and not believe that this is the train company's fault. I don't think anyone would even argue that. Imagine being on a plane and the floor just gives out and you fall from the sky. How could someone argue that it's not the airline or the plane manufacturer's fault? In the lawsuit, Gia filed for compensation $1.5 million, which is nothing.
I don't think anyone would go through what she went through for $1.5 million. The mental, emotional, physical trauma, the loss of future income, the compensation was supposed to cover medical expenses, disability compensation, employment of caregivers, prosthetics costs, nutritional costs, food subsidies, changing of disability-friendly housing, rehabilitation care, nursing costs, transportation costs, therapy costs, and compensation for moral damages.
The railroad company said, "Your ask is ridiculous. It is unreasonable. The compensation you're asking for is sky high. It's never been done before." Even when Jia came into the courtroom in a wheelchair, she showed the court the parts of her body where her limbs were severed off. And it's like nobody wanted to look at her. They couldn't even make eye contact with her. The air just felt frozen. In the end, the court rejected Jia's request for $1.5 million in compensation.
At first, they awarded her just $110,000. They later amended that and gave her $190,000. And to add insult to injury, the train company's motto is, the greatest enemy of accidents is a sense of responsibility. Yet they refused to be responsible for what they did. Nearly $200,000. That's it. That's all Gia got.
She said physically, she felt as if for months in recovery, almost at least fully a year really, she felt like she was being tortured non-stop like the ancient times. Those types of torture tactics, that's what she felt. That's just the physical. Psychologically, the damage was immeasurable. Both Jia and her husband Li, they had a very hard time adjusting afterwards, which is completely understandable.
Their lives changed overnight. The abruptness is what they really struggled with. Lee said he just couldn't understand how his wife had been so healthy a few hours ago, and now she's not. Now she can't brush her hair, get dressed. She can't even support the weight of her own body. She can't use the restroom when she wants. Do you know how frustrating that is?
She said, my life has changed drastically. I cannot take care of my own life. I have to ask for help for everything. I have no way of getting up, lying down by myself, going to the toilet by myself, washing my face, brushing my teeth, taking a bath by myself, eating by myself. If someone leaves a cup of milk on the dining room table for me, just a little further away from where I sit,
If I put out my hand and try to grab that glass of milk and I want to grab it and drag it in front of me, but if I don't lift my hand well enough or if my hand grip is not strong enough or if I can't drag it towards me, then the glass of milk will tip over and the milk will spill on the table, on my wheelchair, onto my pants and flow onto the floor and I can't even clean it up. If I want to read a book but the book is placed on my bedside out of reach, I cannot read.
Piece after piece, failure after failure, I have incomparable frustration. I stay in the house all day long. More than nine months straight, I did not get a day of sunshine. For more than nine months straight, I lived in a contained area less than 300 square feet. I feel like a prisoner in a cage without a cage. I thought of self-exiting, but I couldn't even physically do it.
After 190 days of being in the hospital, Jia was discharged, but she would still need to go through extensive rehabilitation to adjust her new life, to adjust to her prosthetics, which by the way, when she went to the prosthetic center in Shanghai, they didn't even know how to help her. They had never seen this level of injuries, but she didn't give up. She said, I left home standing up. I must go home standing up. I must appear in front of my family standing up.
which makes it sound like this case is gonna have a happy ending but she would not be able to stand up she would not walk through the front door of her home and she said she does try her best to overcome the cards that she's dealt but she's not happy there were articles posted about how she's finding happiness and overcoming all of life's challenges ready to take on whatever's thrown at her but it doesn't really seem like that's true it just gets clicks but the truth is Jia said
"I have a mixture of happiness and sadness. I'm happy that I get to see my son again, but I'm sad that my home is still the same, but I'm not the same." She needs a large number of sleeping pills to fall asleep every night, and she said that lively and cheerful Jia that was once there before the accident is replaced by an irritable, emotionally violent Jia.
The likelihood that she's going to develop traumatic arthritis in her one remaining arm left is very high. Her right shoulder has been practically obliterated, that the doctors had to piece it together like a puzzle. And because nobody in Jia's personal life could relate to what she had gone through, they didn't even know how to help her. So one day, her sister, Jia's sister, laid down on the train tracks and she waited to be run over.
She said she just wanted to understand what Ji-ah had gone through because she was going crazy not being able to help. Everything she thought was helping wasn't helping. Thankfully, there were no trains on that track that day, but that just goes to show how desperate everybody was.
and I wish I could leave you with something happier but sometimes life doesn't really have happy endings and that kind of seems to be the case here at least as of right now I do hope that Ji-ah is able to find happiness eventually but that is where the story is right now what are your thoughts? let me know down in the comments and please stay safe I will see you guys in the next one bye