Urban Legend Status: TRUE
Gloria Ramirez (January 11, 1963 – February 19, 1994) was a Riverside, California, woman dubbed “the toxic lady” by the media when several Riverside General Hospital workers became ill after exposure to her body and blood. Her case was the basis for a scene in one episode of the American TV series The X-Files, an episode of the American TV drama Grey’s Anatomy, a segment of a show on Discovery Communications’ channel Investigation Discovery called “The New Detectives”, and the “Stink Bomb” segment of the animated film Memories.
The emergency room visit
About 8:15 in the evening on February 19, 1994, Ramirez was brought into the emergency room of Riverside General Hospital by paramedics, suffering from the effects of advanced cervical cancer. She was extremely confused, and suffering from bradycardia and Cheyne-Stokes respiration.
The medical staff injected her with Valium, Versed, and Ativan to sedate her, and agents such as lidocaine to stimulate her heartbeat. When it became clear that Ramirez was responding poorly to treatment, the staff tried to defibrillate her heart; at that point several people saw an oily sheen covering Ramirez’s body, and some noticed a fruity, garlic-like odor that they thought was coming from her mouth. A registered nurse named Susan Kane attempted to draw blood from Ramirez’s arm, and noticed an ammonia like smell coming from the tube.
She passed the syringe to Julie Gorchynski, a medical resident who noticed manila-colored particles floating in the blood. At this point, Kane fainted and was removed from the room. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Gorchynski began to feel nauseated. Complaining that she was light-headed, she left the trauma room and sat at a nurse’s desk. A staff member asked her if she was okay, but before she could respond she also fainted. Maureen Welch, a respiratory therapist who was assisting in the trauma room was the third to pass out. The staff was then ordered to evacuate all emergency room patients to the parking lot outside the hospital. A skeleton crew stayed behind to stabilize Ramirez. At 8:50, after forty five minutes of CPR and defibrillation, Ramirez was pronounced dead from kidney failure related to her cancer.
Investigation
The county health department called in California’s Department of Health and Human Services, which put two scientists on the case, Doctors Ana Maria Osorio and Kirsten Waller. They interviewed 34 hospital staff who had been working in the emergency room on February 19. Using a standardized questionnaire, Osorio and Waller found that the people who had developed severe symptoms such as loss of consciousness, shortness of breath, and muscle spasms tended to have certain things in common. People who had worked within two feet of Ramirez and had handled her intravenous lines had been at high risk. But other factors that correlated with severe symptoms didn’t seem to match a scenario in which fumes had been released: the survey found that those afflicted tended to be women rather than men, and they all had normal blood tests after the exposure.
Theories
Possible role of dimethyl sulfoxide
Dr. Gorchynski denied that she had been affected by mass hysteria, and pointed to her own medical history as evidence. After the exposure, she spent two weeks in the intensive care unit with breathing problems, she developed hepatitis and avascular necrosis in her knees. Eager to clear her name and win her lawsuit against General Hospital in Riverside, she and RN Susan Kane contacted Livermore Laboratories for a second opinion.
Livermore Labs postulated that Ramirez had been taking dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a solvent, as a home remedy for pain. Users of this substance report that it has a garlic-like taste. The Livermore scientists theorized that the DMSO in Ramirez’s system might have built up, due to urinary blockage. Oxygen administered by the paramedics would have combined with the DMSO to form dimethyl sulfone (DMSO2). DMSO2 is known to crystallize at room temperature, and crystals were observed in some of Ramirez’s drawn blood. Electric shocks administered during emergency defibrillation could have then converted the DMSO2 into dimethyl sulfate (DMSO4), a powerful poisonous gas, exposure to which could have caused the reported symptoms of the emergency room staff.
However, while the conversion from DMSO to DMSO2 may be scientifically plausible, the subsequent conversion from DMSO2 to DMSO4 inside the human body is questionable at best. In addition, while DMSO4 is highly volatile, it seems unlikely that it would have completely evaporated, leaving no trace whatsoever.
Final conclusion and burial
Two months after Ramirez died, her badly decomposed body was released for an independent autopsy and burial. The Riverside Coroner’s Office hailed Livermore’s DMSO conclusion as the probable cause of the hospital workers’ symptoms, while her family disagreed. The Ramirez family’s pathologist was unable to determine a cause of death because her heart was missing, her other organs were cross-contaminated with fecal matter, and her body was too badly decomposed. Ten weeks after she died, Ramirez was buried in an unmarked grave at Olivewood Memorial Park in Riverside.
Status of technical forensic analysis
The possible chemical explanation for this incident by Dr. Patrick M. Grant of the Livermore Forensic Science Center is beginning to appear in basic forensic science textbooks. In Houck and Siegel’s textbook, the authors opine that, although some weaknesses exist, the postulated scenario is “the most scientific explanation to date” and that “beyond this theory, no credible explanation has ever been offered for the strange case of Gloria Ramirez.”
Everything that Grant ever speculated or concluded about this incident was evaluated by professional forensic scientists, chemists, and toxicologists, passed peer-review in an accredited, refereed journal, and was published by Forensic Science International.[9][10] The first paper was very technically detailed and did, in fact, give two potential chemical reaction mechanisms that may possibly have formed dimethyl sulfate from dimethyl sulfoxide and dimethyl sulfone precursors. The second communication gave supplemental support for the postulated chemical scenario, as well as insight into some of the sociology and vested interests inherent in the case.
One of the letters proposed the production of toxic chloramine gas due to urine mixing with bleach in a nearby sink. This hypothesis, previously proposed to the investigators and to the medical personnel involved in the incident, was apparently never considered by all involved. The noxious effects of this gas are documented in the New England Journal of Medicine, Vol.341:848-849, Sept.9,1999, “Severe Lung Injury after Exposure to Chloramine Gas from Household Cleaners”. In reality, Grant addressed this chloramine scenario in Ref. 8, and it did not come close to fitting the ER incident.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Gloria Ramirez, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Metrolink Crash/Derailment
On 12 September 2008 at 4:22 p.m. in California’s San Fernando Valley, a commuter train carrying 225 passengers collided at a combined speed of 83 mph with a Union Pacific freight train run by a crew of three. In what came to be known as the Chatsworth crash, 135 people were injured (of which 87 were taken to hospitals, 46 in critical condition), and 25 died.
One of those who died in that horrible accident was Charles Peck. Peck was a 49-year old Delta customer service agent at Salt Lake City International Airport. He had come to Los Angeles for a job interview at Van Nuys Airport to be closer to his fiancé, Andrea Katz. His fiancé heard about the crash from a news report on the radio as she was driving to the train station to pick up Charles up. Peck’s parents and siblings (who live in the Los Angeles area) were with her.
Peck’s body was recovered from the wreckage 12 hours after the accident. Yet for the first eleven of those hours, his cell phone placed call after call to his loved ones, calling his son, his brother, his stepmother, his sister, and his fiancé. In all, his various family members received 35 calls from his cell phone through that long night. When they answered, all they heard was static; when they called back, their calls went straight to voicemail. But the calls gave them hope that the man they loved was still alive, just trapped somewhere in the wreckage.
The barrage of calls prompted search crews to trace the whereabouts of the phone through its signal and to once again look through what was left of the first train, the location the calls were coming from. At 9:08 p.m., nearly five hours after the crash, Peck’s fiancé Andrea Katz received one of those calls. But when she answered, all she heard was static. Despite hearing nothing from the other side she told him to hang on and that help was on the way. The last phone call came from Charles Peck’s phone at 3:28 a.m., almost an hour before they found his lifeless body.
Medical examination of his body showed that he had died quickly after the collision, almost instantaneously.
Sources:
Photo Credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times / September 12, 2008
The Mothman is a creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area of West Virginia from November 12, 1966, to December 1967.Most observers describe the Mothman as a man-sized creature with large reflective red eyes and large wings. The creature was sometimes reported as having no head, with its eyes set into its chest.
A number of hypotheses have been presented to explain eyewitness accounts, ranging from misidentification and coincidence, to paranormal phenomena and conspiracy theories.
Appearance
Mothman is described as a man sized, or larger, creature with glowing red eyes and wings of a moth. It may have eyes set in his chest. It is described as a 7-foot-tall (2.1 m) creature, with long wings and huge red eyes. It possesses an unusual shriek.
History
On November 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette, along with their young cousin, Lonnie Button, were traveling late at night in the Scarberrys’ car. They were passing the West Virginia Ordnance Works, an abandoned World War II TNT factory, about seven miles north of Point Pleasant, in the 2,500 acre (10 km²) McClintic Wildlife Management Area, when they noticed two red lights in the shadows by an old generator plant near the factory gate. They stopped the car, and reportedly discovered that the lights were the glowing red eyes of a large animal, “shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back,” according to Roger Scarberry. Terrified, they drove toward Route 62, where the creature supposedly chased them at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour.
A plaque on the Mothman statue provides a version of the original legend: “On a chilly, fall night in November 1966, two young couples drove into the TNT area north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when they realized they were not alone.” Driving down the exit road, they saw the supposed creature standing on a nearby ridge. It spread its wings and flew alongside the vehicle up to the city limits. They drove to the Mason County courthouse to alert Deputy Millard Halstead, who later said, “I’ve known these kids all their lives. They’d never been in any trouble and they were really scared that night. I took them seriously.” He then followed Roger Scarberry’s car back to the old Ordnance Works and found no trace of the strange creature. According to the book Alien Animals, by Janet and Colin Bord, a poltergeist attack on the Scarberry home occurred later that night, during which the creature was seen several times.
The following night, on November 16, several armed townspeople combed the area around the TNT plant for signs of Mothman. Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Wamsley, and Mrs. Marcella Bennett, with her infant daughter Teena, were in a car en-route to visit their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Thomas, who lived in a small house near the igloos (concrete dome-shaped dynamite storage structures erected during WW-II) near the TNT plant. The igloos were now empty, some owned by the county, others by companies intending to use them for storage. They were heading back to their car when a figure appeared behind their parked vehicle. Mrs. Bennett said that it seemed like it had been lying down, slowly rising up from the ground, large and gray, with glowing red eyes. While Wamsley phoned the police, the creature walked onto the porch and peered in at them through the window.
On November 24, four people allegedly saw the creature flying over the TNT area. On the morning of November 25, Thomas Ury, who was driving along Route 62 just north of the TNT, claimed to have seen the creature standing in a field, and then it spread its wings and flew away, and Thomas sped toward the Point Pleasant sheriff’s office. He then reported the incident that he had seen.
A Mothman sighting was again reported on January 11, 1967, hovering over the town’s bridge, and several other times that same year. Fewer sightings of the Mothman were reported after the collapse of the town’s bridge, the Silver Bridge, when 46 people died. The Silver Bridge, so named for its aluminum paint, was an eyebar chain suspension bridge that connected the cities of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio, over the Ohio River. The bridge was built in 1928, and it collapsed on December 15, 1967. Investigation of the bridge wreckage pointed to the failure of a single eye-bar in a suspension chain due to a small manufacturing flaw. There are rumors that the Mothman appears before upcoming disasters and seems to try to warn people of them. After that, Mothman was never again seen in Point Pleasant.
Analysis
There are several theories concerning the Mothman phenomenon.
Supernatural theories
John Keel claimed that Mothman was related to parapsychological events in the area, including precognitions by witnesses, and the December 15, 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge spanning the Ohio River.
Misidentified bird
One of the early theories is that the Mothman was a misidentified Sandhill Crane, which, in the late 1960s had been a problem in surrounding regions. Sandhill cranes have an average wingspan of 5.3 feet (up to 7 feet), average overall length of 39 inches and have the general appearance described, glide for long distances without flapping, and have an unusual shriek. Other theories suggest the possibility of the Mothman being a Barn Owl, an albino owl, or perhaps a large Snowy Owl (based on artists’ impressions). Skeptics suggest that the Mothman’s glowing eyes are actually red-eye caused from the reflection of light, from flashlights, or other light sources that witnesses may have had with them.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Mothman, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Belchen Tunnel is a motorway tunnel in Switzerland, and forms part of the A2 motorway from Basel to Chiasso. It is 3.2 km long, and lies in the northern (slightly northwestern) part of Switzerland. It links Eptingen in the canton of Basel-Country with Hägendorf in the Canton of Solothurn. The tunnel was built in the mid-1960s. It was completely renovated in 2003.
The “white woman” – an urban legend
January 1981, a modern myth circulated, dealing with a “white woman” (“weisse Frau”) of the Bölchentunnel (“Bölchen” is local dialect for “Belchen”). This phenomena is a paranormal event and mystery that has never been solved. Shaped as an old white-clothed hitchhiking woman, a ghost (though not initially recognized as such) appears out of nowhere in front of the drivers and sometimes even speaks to them.
The first known Belchen ghost was actually male. The first written credentials about the phenomena (dated June 1980) are about a male hitchhiker who was picked up but, despite the high speed, after a while no longer sat in the backseat.
Towards the end of that year, the “white woman” began appearing in or outside the tunnel. On January 6, 1981, the tabloid Blick wrote about the sightings, followed by other media also adopting the story. Basel Police received many phone calls, dozens of which had to be logged.
The “Bölchengespenst” (Bölchen ghost) became a popular subject for 1981’s Shrove Tuesday carnival. Even the musicians of the Oberbaselbieter Ländlerkapelle treated the legend. Later, the discussion cooled down – until the 1983 edition of the book Baselbieter Sagen reported further strange sightings of the white woman. There were two female jurists who picked up an inconspicuously dressed, clumsy, pale, middle-aged woman in Eptingen. When later asked if she felt better, she answered “No, unfortunately not. I am not well at all (or “It isn’t going [at all] well (for me)” from the German “Es geht (mir) [gar] nicht gut.”). Something really awful is going to happen, something very dreadful!” (Swiss-German: “Nei, leider nid. Es goht gar nid guet. Es passiert öppis Schrecklichs, öppis ganz Furchtbars!”) When the two jurists next looked at the backseat, the woman had disappeared.
Other variations
Such visitations don’t only happen inside or around tunnels. A re-edited edition of the Baselbieter Sagen mentions similar cases at other Basel places: “the Heidegg castle’s lady,” “the maiden on the goat,” and “the grey woman in Zunzgen.” In Läufelfingen, the woman wears a green loden coat, in the Canton of Bern, a girl in a short leather jacket appears. In the area of Basel, as with the case in Tenniken, a man wearing black is seen. The man prophesizes an earthquake and a hard winter before disappearing. The mysterious hitchhikers can even disappear if the car has only front doors and no back doors.
A 1981 article in the magazine Schweizer Volkskunde describes analogous visitations. According to it, such “modern ghosts of the road” were seen in other Swiss Cantons and tunnels, such as the Luzernerland area and in Toggenburg.
External links
– (German) Belchen Tunnel
– (German) «Plötzlich war die Frau weg, fort, einfach nicht mehr da», Volksstimme, 25 January 2001
Photo Credit: BelchenTunnel.ch
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Belchen Tunnel, licensed under CC-BY-SA.