5 Real Prison Escapes That Shouldn't Have Been Possible

We admit it: We fucking love prison escape stories. On one hand, yes, it usually does mean a dangerous criminal is back out on the street. But on the other, there just is no such thing as a boring prison escape. And when the person doing the escaping is an unimaginable genius, badass, or both? You get stories that'd be considered too far-fetched for most movies.

#5. Choi Gap-bok Squeezed Through a Food Slot

Via Andrew Bardwell

Picture every movie cell door you've ever seen. You know how they've always got that food slot at the bottom, the tiny rectangle guards slide the food trays through? If you need help, it's about 6 inches tall (that is, the length of a dollar bill) and about 17 inches wide.

Now imagine crawling through that slot.

Via YouTube
Actual footage of the escape.

Because a guy actually did this. His name was Choi Gap-bok and at the ripe old age of 50, he was arrested by South Korean police on suspicion of burglary. Gap-bok had been in and out of jail throughout his life, and somewhere along the way he picked up doing yoga. We don't know if he practiced yoga specifically with this in mind or if it just happened to come in handy, but either way, he decided it was time to use the 23 years of stretchy practice he had under his belt to slip right the fuck out of his prison cell.

He asked his guards for his special "skin ointment," and they gave it to him, then went off to sleep. After all, when an old man asks for lotion and privacy you don't fucking hang around outside the door. What's the old guy gonna do, lube himself up and squeeze through his food slot?

Via YouTube
"Don't mind me. I'm just trying my door on as a belt."

Yep. It can totally be done, as the below video demonstrates (especially if you're not a huge guy -- Choi was 5-foot-4-inches). If you can get your head through it, everything else from your shoulders to ribs kind of compress -- he was able to squeeze all of his parts through in 30 seconds. It's really just a matter of body control and really, really not wanting to be in jail.

Why did he escape? Because he wanted to prove his innocence, and obviously breaking out of prison is the best way to do that. He was caught six days later and put in a cell with a smaller food slot, so now, not only can he not escape, but he almost certainly won't get a turkey at Thanksgiving.

#4. Jack Sheppard Becomes a Prison Escape Celebrity

Via Wikipedia

If you were alive in 18th century London you'd know who Jack Sheppard was. A small-time thief, he became notorious for his awesome escapes. And we're not exaggerating here -- crowds would actually go to his trials just hoping he'd dazzle them. For instance, have you ever seen a movie or TV show where somebody busts out by tying a bunch of bedsheets together into a rope? Well, Jack Sheppard most likely invented that.

Via Wikipedia
"Probably not a good time to tell you, but ... I still wet the bed."

Granted, he didn't have a window to drop out of, so he first smashed through his cell's ceiling and then dropped his rope of sheets over from the prison roof. Breaking ceilings is noisy work, so there was a crowd gathered when he hit the bottom. He quickly pulled a Bugs Bunny, telling everyone "He's over there!" and then ran off with the cops in hot pursuit. So, yeah, he was something of a showman.

When he got caught again, he and his wife, Lyon, were thrown in a cell together. They broke a bar off the window and then pulled the "bedsheets-rope" trick again and ran off. So when he was arrested again shortly thereafter, he was locked in a strong-room, stuck in leg irons and chained to the floor. The guards, not enjoying his wacky escapes that, oh, by the way made them look like assholes, put even more chains on him.

Via Wikipedia
Holy shit, those things are either enormous, or he was the size of a Barbie doll.

This did not deter Sheppard. First, he found a nail and bent it to create a lock pick for his handcuffs. Then, using his chains, he wrenched free an iron bar from the chimney (which was ironically installed to prevent prisoners from escaping) and then used that bar as a tool to break through the ceiling. All told, he ended up breaking through six barred doors, jumping to an adjacent house's roof, sneaking inside without waking anyone up and then running off into the night.

When he finally died, it was with a third of London's total population attending his hanging. Ultimately, his fame was his undoing -- the thick crowd actually prevented his friends from taking his recently hung body to a doctor to be revived. Because even in death he had an escape plan.

Via Wikipedia
Though "don't get hanged" would seem to us to be the far safer plan.

#3. Frank Abagnale Convinces His Guard He's a Prison Inspector

Via Telegraph

If you don't recognize the name, Frank Abagnale is the renowned con-man Leo DiCaprio played inCatch Me If You Can. He's done bank fraud, impersonated pilots, teachers, doctors, and even lawyers, all using outlandish techniques that you wouldn't even think would work in a cartoon. But maybe none compares to the absolutely ridiculous way he conned himself out of prison.

After being sentenced to 12 years for various forgeries, Abagnale had fantastic luck in 1971 when the U.S. Marshal transporting him forgot the detention commitment papers. No, this didn't mean he got to go free -- not yet -- but it did give Abagnale an opening to subtly convince the guards that he was actually an undercover prison inspector pretending to be an inmate. You know, here's a clean, well-spoken, educated guy who just happens to be missing his documents? It had "The bosses sent this guy to spy on us" written all over it, and Abagnale played it up for all it was worth. This meant the guards treated him far better than any other inmate (since they thought he was there to investigate conditions in the prison) -- Abagnale got better food and privileges than anyone else.

Via Wikimedia Commons
"Apologies for the wait, sir. One of the sous chefs was shanked."

But this article is about prison escapes, and it was right around then that Abagnale decided to go ahead and just bullshit his way right out the front door. He called a friend of his, Jean Sebring, who had been visited by the FBI agent in charge of Abagnale's case, Joe Shea, when he was pursuing Abagnale. She doctored the business card Shea left her, then pretended to be a freelance magazine writer doing an expose on prisons and used that to also get the business card of a prison inspector. She visited Abagnale, posing as his fiance, and slipped him both cards.

Abagnale then told the guard that he was, in fact, an undercover inspector just like they thought. He gave them the prison inspector business card as proof, and then told them it was imperative he speak to the FBI immediately. The guards slapped each other on the back and bragged about how smart they were to not be fooled by the government's obvious ploy. Abagnale gave them the other card (the one for the supposed FBI agent), and they dialed the number on it. Abagnale's friend picked up at a phone booth, pretending to be an FBI operator.

Dynamic Graphics/Creatas/Getty Images
"This is either the FBI or Shanteesa the Love Goddess, depending on who's calling."

She said she needed to meet with Abagnale right outside of the detention center, and, of course, the guards had no problem with this because A) They thought they were talking to the FBI and B) They thought Abagnale was a federal inspector. Of course, it was just Abagnale's friend waiting in a car, and the guards watched as their prisoner just walked out and drove off into the sunset, laughing his ass off.

10 Experiments That Reveal Amazing Facts About The Sense Of Smell

Humans don’t have the best sense of smell. We smell with about five or six million cells, compared to a rabbit’s 100 million or a dog’s 220 million cells. Even so, several studies have shown that our sense of smell picks up cues that we don’t even notice on a conscious level. The animal and plant worlds also have some secrets to reveal about the sense of smell.

10The Autism Sniff Test

Autism is difficult to diagnose. Currently, there is no objective medical test for autism spectrum disorder, so doctors rely on studying a child’s behavior and development instead. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the diagnosis of autism skyrocketed to 1 in 88 US children in 2012, up from 1 in 166 just four years earlier.

Although some of these children with newly diagnosed autism may have been incorrectly overlooked in the past, there is also a good chance thatsome are being misdiagnosed. A medical test for autism would provide a less subjective method of determining which children truly have the disorder.

That’s where our sense of smell comes in. When you pass a bouquet of freshly picked flowers, you sniff deeply to take in the scent. When you enter a public bathroom badly in need of a cleaning, you take shallower breaths to keep the smell out.

One study showed that autistic children don’t make this distinction. They breathe and smell the same way regardless of the kind of smell to which they’re exposed. In the lab, a sniff test was 81 percent accurate in identifying children with autism at an average age of seven.

The autism sniff test is not ready for the field yet. But if it becomes viable, it could make huge strides in accurately detecting autism. Its nonverbal nature means that it may be used to detect autism in toddlers and babies, allowing for earlier intervention.

9Cat Urine And Baby Mice

In an experiment that must have looked a lot like a Tom and Jerry cartoon, scientists found that mice exposed to a strong smell of cat urine when they’re young are less likely to escape from cats as adults.

When first exposed to the smell, the mice in the study were less than two weeks old, a time when they were still fed milk. As a result, they learned to associate the cat urine smell with comfort and security. Even so, exposed mice still had a stress response to smelling a cat nearby, but they were not as likely to run from it.

This mouse research is an interesting mirror of human “priming,” which happens when some signal—a touch, a sound, even a smell—changes the way we process things subconsciously. Studies have shown that something as trivial as the temperature of our coffee can influence the way we perceive people.

In animals or in humans, smells can change the way we feel and act, regardless of what our instincts say.

8The Armpit Effect

In 1995, Swiss zoologist Claus Wedekind gathered 49 women and asked them to smell the sweaty, two-day-old T-shirts of 44 men. No, this wasn’t some kinky party. It was an experiment that showed just how much our sense of smell impacts our choice of partner.

The study showed that women subconsciously choose their mates by smell. Without realizing it, we identify someone’s chemical signature when we smell them and are instinctively attracted to people who complement our own smell.

Our goal as a species is to create healthy offspring. This experiment showed that smell plays a large part in reaching that goal. A woman is more attracted to the smell of men with major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes that are different than her own. Parents with different MHC genes have children with stronger immune systems, so it appears that a woman can subconsciously detect through smell who would be the best mate for her.

This experiment also explains why women on birth control pills often find they’re no longer attracted to their partners once they go off the pill. Using birth control pills makes a woman more attracted to a man who has a smell signature that’s similar to her own. This may occur because the pills’ effect of mimicking pregnancy makes a woman instinctively more attracted to nurturing relatives rather than someone who would be the best mate.

Whether a woman is attracted to her partner’s smelly armpits also depends on at least one other factor: A variation on the armpit sniff test showed that women were happier when they smelled the sweat created by happy men. It has already been shown that negative emotions can be transferred through smells, but now we know you can share your joy through your sweat, too.

7Old Book Smell

Open an old book and you’ll be greeted by a very specific scent. That’s not just the bibliophile in you rejoicing at holding an old book. There’s a science behind that well-known smell, which may hold the key to preserving old books.

When we use current methods of dating an old book or document, we have to destroy a small part of that book or document. The more common methods of dating include analyzing a small portion of ink or using a fragment of the document for radiocarbon dating.

However, that old book smell may have given us a less intrusive way to test the age of a book. The smells are created by “volatile organic compounds,” which are released when you turn the pages. These compounds can tell researchers a lot about the age and condition of the paper.

During a sniff test of some old documents, researchers isolated 15 compounds that may help to detect the level of damage sustained by the paper tested. In theory, smelling the pages of an old book can help to determine the stage of degradation of the paper, which in turn can help to better preserve it.

6Freshly Cut Grass

The smell of freshly mowed grass has been shown to relax and de-stress people, so much so that a University of Queensland scientist has bottled it into an “eau de grass” perfume. But why does a mowed lawn smell so good?

In reality, the smell you find so calming and refreshing is a distress signal. A study from 1983 found that when pest insects attack certain trees, those trees give off a signal that alerts nearby trees of the danger.

A more recent study from 2010 revealed a complicated chain reaction from the freshly mowed grass smell. When plants are attacked by pests, they give off a smell that attracts parasitic wasps, which lay their eggs in the pests and protect the plants.

The US Department of Agriculture has invested nearly half a million dollars into studying this SOS compound because these signals may also protect plants from drought. Researchers aren’t sure yet how this happens, but understanding the role of this distress signal may help to protect plants one day.

5Asparagus Urine

Asparagus is known for its health benefits because it contains vitamins A, B6, and C as well as folic acid, potassium, thiamin, and antioxidants. The spears also have their own council in Australia. But asparagus is even better known for smelly urine.

If you’ve ever eaten asparagus, you may have noticed that your urine smells odd afterward. No one is sure what causes this smell. But the leading candidate is asparagusic acid, a substance unique to asparagus and mostly blamed for the smell because no one can prove otherwise.

However, if you’ve never noticed a strange smell after eating asparagus, you might not be able to detect the smell. Or maybe you don’t make it. Scientists aren’t sure, but they felt it was important enough to investigate.

Many studies have been conducted on asparagus urine, each with a different conclusion. About 50 percent to 92 percent of people don’t produce the smell, depending on which study you consult. Other people do create the smell but seem unable to detect it.

So what’s going on? The wildly different numbers were reported by studies conducted in different places. That means it’s possible that whether you can smell or make asparagus-scented urine depends on your ethnicity.

In July 2010, researchers took one more stab at sorting the nonproducers from the non-detectors. According to this study, 8 percent of people don’t produce the smell, and 6 percent can’t detect it.

Despite the findings, the study points out that it’s impossible to test an unknown substance. As a result, the cause of asparagus urine remains a mystery to everybody.

4Smelling Delicious To Mosquitoes

You may be the one person who gets bitten by mosquitoes when everyone else remains unscathed. What makes you so delicious to these bloodsucking pests? It can be anything from your blood type to whether you just enjoyed some cold beer.

An infection with malaria will also make you smell irresistible to mosquitoes. A 2014 study found that the malaria parasite changes the way people smell, making them more attractive to mosquitoes. The more mosquitoes the infected body attracts, the more effectively the disease can spread.

Since mosquitoes are already known as the transmitters of the deadly malaria disease, researchers are looking for a way to make humans smell less attractive to the pests. One team of researchers at Penn State University received a grant in 2009 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to research a fungus that can dull a mosquito’s sense of smell, making it hard for them to find human hosts on which to prey.

Another group from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has managed togenetically engineer mosquitoes to respond differently to odors, including those of humans and the insect repellent DEET. But it appears that the key to fighting malaria may be the mosquito’s sense of smell.

3The Smell Of White

White is not a color. What we call “white” is really the combination of all thewavelengths of visible light, which essentially cancel each other out. We see white and hear white noise, but what happens when you create a white smell?

One study tried to create a “white smell” composed of 30 or more different odors. Alone or in small groups, it’s possible to detect the separate smells. But once you reach a mixture with enough scents, all the smells blend together into one neutral odor.

The white smell was given the name “Laurax” and unleashed onto study participants. People described Laurax as “not pleasant, but not unpleasant.” It didn’t matter which 30 odors were mixed together. As long as the mixture contained at least 30 scents, people identified the resulting smell as Laurax. Even if the two Laurax mixes had none of the same components, they still smelled the same.

This shows that not only does the concept of white carry over into the sense of smell but also that we may detect smells differently than once believed. It’s widely assumed that our sense of smell works by analyzing different components of a scent and combining them into a whole. This study implies that our noses pick up on the whole, not the parts.

2Anxiety And Smell

Stress and sweat go hand in hand. Sweating under pressure is a common reaction for many people, although scientists couldn’t explain it at first. They now believe that stress sweat was once an automatic way to warn othersaround you of potential dangers.

Smelling bad when you’re stressed may be expected, but it turns out that you’ll also smell well. A 2013 study showed that being anxious gives us abetter sense of smell. The study found that the more anxious a person is, the better he becomes at discriminating between negative smells. This is most likely a holdover from when smell was important to survival.

Not only does our sense of smell become better when we’re anxious, but we also perceive neutral smells as worse. So the more stressed we are, the worse the world around us smells. The worse (and more threatening) things smell, the more anxious we become. If we can learn more about this negative feedback loop, it might help us to develop better treatments for anxiety and depression.

1Loss Of Smell Means Loss Of Health

If you had to lose one of your senses, which would you choose? Many people would opt to lose their sense of smell, which seems less important than hearing or sight. However, losing your sense of smell can signify the beginning of many other health problems.

There have been many studies exploring the connection between your sense of smell and your mental and physical health. In October 2014, one study found that older people with severe deteriorations in their sense of smell were twice as likely to be dead within five years.

According to some research, our sense of smell begins to deteriorate when we’re in our twenties, with some odors losing their potency when we’re as young as 15 years old. But a drastically declining sense of smell in adults can be an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, or evendepression.

A 2012 study also found that psychopaths are more likely to have an impaired sense of smell. Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone with a poor sense of smell is psychotic. But it does mean that the nose knows more than we think it does.

10 More Extremely Bizarre Phobias

We probably all suffer from a minor phobia or two, but some people’s lives are virtually debilitated by their fears. This list looks at ten more of the most unusual phobias that afflict people in modern days. If you suffer from any of these phobias, be sure to tell us about it in the comments. For those interested, here is the previous list of bizarre phobias.

10

Agyrophobia

Fear of Crossing the Street

Agyrophobics have a fear of crossing streets, highways and other thoroughfares, or a fear of thoroughfares themselves. This, of course, makes it very difficult to live comfortably in a city. The word comes from the Greek gyrus which means turning or whirling as the phobic avoids the whirl of traffic. The phobia covers several categories, wherein sufferers may fear wide roads specifically down to suburban single lane streets, and can also include fearing jaywalking or crossing anywhere on a street, even a designated intersection. This phobia is considered independent from the fear of cars.

9Mageirocophobia

Fear of Cooking

The bizarre fear of cooking is called mageirocophobia which comes from the Greek word mageirokos which means a person skilled in cooking. This disorder can be debilitating and potentially lead to unhealthy eating if one lives alone. Sufferers of mageirokos can feel extremely intimidated by people with skills in cooking, and this intimidation and feeling of inadequacy is probably the root cause of the disorder for many. If you suffer from mageirokos and wish to develop some basic skills in cooking, check out ourTop 10 Tips for Great Home Cooking and Top 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Cooking.

8

Pediophobia

Fear of Dolls

Pediophobia is the irrational fear of dolls. Not just scary dolls – ALL dolls. Strictly speaking, the fear is a horror of a “false representation of sentient beings” so it also usually includes robots and mannequins, which can make it decidedly difficult to go shopping. This phobia should not be confused with pedophobia or pediaphobia which is the fear of children. Sigmund Freud believed the disorder may spring from a fear of the doll coming to life and roboticist Masahiro Mori expanded on that theory by stating that the more human-like something becomes, the more repellent its non-human aspects appear. My apologies to those who suffer from pediophobia for the picture above.

7

Deipnophobia

Fear of Dinner Conversation

Now admittedly some dinner conversations can be very awkward, but some people are so terrified of the idea of speaking to another person over dinner that they avoid dining out situations. In times gone by there were strict rules of etiquette that helped a person to deal with these situations – but they are (sadly) mostly forgotten. In today’s society in which rules and formality are out the window, it is possible that the more controlled nature of a dinner party may lie partly behind this phobia. For those amongst us who are interested in some tips for coping with fine dining, read our Top 10 Tips for Fine Dining (number eight is specifically about dinner conversation).

6

Eisoptrophobia

Fear of Mirrors

Eisoptrophobia is a fear of mirrors in the broad sense, or more specifically the fear of being put into contact with the spiritual world through a mirror. Sufferers experience undue anxiety even though they realize their fear is irrational. Because their fear often is grounded in superstitions, they may worry that breaking a mirror will bring bad luck or that looking into a mirror will put them in contact with a supernatural world inside the glass. After writing this list I realized that I suffer from a minor form of this disorder in that I don’t like to look into a mirror in the evening when I am alone for fear of seeing someone (or something) behind me.

5

Demonophobia

Fear of Demons

Demonophobia is an abnormal and persistent fear of evil supernatural beings in persons who believe such beings exist and roam freely to cause harm. Those who suffer from this phobia realize their fear is excessive or irrational. Nevertheless, they become unduly anxious when discussing demons, when venturing alone into woods or a dark house, or when watching films about demonic possession and exorcism. Sufferers are most likely to be recognized by the strings of garlic around their neck, crucifixes, wooden stakes they carry, and gun loaded with silver bullets. Okay – I made that last part up.

4

Pentheraphobia

Fear of Mother-in-Law

Of all the phobias on this list, pentheraphobia is probably the most common. It is, as stated above, the fear of one’s mother-in-law. I am sure that most married people have, at one time or another, suffered from this terrible fear. This fear is one that is so common in Western society that it frequently appears in movies and other forms of entertainment. Of the many available therapies for this illness of the mind, divorce seems to be the most popular. A related phobia to pentheraphobia is novercaphobia which is a fear of your stepmother – the most famous sufferer of which is Cinderella.

3

Arachibutyrophobia

Fear of Peanut Butter Sticking to the Roof of your Mouth

I must say that finding information on this disorder is extremely difficult – which does make me wonder if it is perhaps the figment of an over-active imagination, but it is definitely bizarre and fairly well known so it seems to deserve a place here. This disorder seems to be a fear that is quite easily worked around: don’t buy peanut butter. However, for a child who is forced to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day, one can see how it might cause severe trauma in later life. Here is the testimony of one alleged sufferer: “Whenever I’m around peanut butter I start to sweat excessively and my body starts convulsing. The roof of my mouth becomes coarse and itchy. I can’t live with this fear anymore. My thirst for peanut butter must be quenched without me going into a full blown panic attack.”

2

Cathisophobia

Fear of Sitting

Cathisophobia (sometimes spelled with a ‘k’) is a terror of sitting down. This disorder can be sparked off by a particularly nasty case of hemorrhoids but in some serious cases it can be due to physical abuse relating to sitting on sharp or painful objects. Sometimes, the sitting fear is due to some punishment in the school days, or it may be an indication of some other phobia like sitting in front of elite and influential people. Cathisophobia is characterized by sweating, heavy or short breathe, and anxiety.

1

Automatonophobia

Fear of a Ventriloquist’s Dummy

I think we can all see the merit in this disorder – the very act of ventriloquism seems particularly nasty to me. It involves a man with his hand up a dolls butt which he then proceeds to talk to. Sufferers of automatonophobia need not seek treatment – it is a perfectly valid reaction to a perfectly revolting concept. I think that is enough said on this topic.