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A French Grandmother Got Stuck in the Bathroom for Three Weeks

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You could argue that it's better to be trapped in a bathroom than an elevator -- at least there you can relieve yourself, and you have water to drink. But what if instead of a healthy young man, it was an elderly woman? And what if her imprisonment was 10 times as long?

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If you're a boy in puberty, this is known as "the jackpot."

This one happened in a Paris suburb where, after using the facilities and trying to leave, a French grandmother found that her door lock was broken. While busting down jammed doors may simply be an inconvenience for burly Olympic athletes, it's a much tougher task for a 69-year-old grandmother with zero heavy sled-pushing experience, especially a French one. We suppose she could have surrendered to the door, but in this situation that probably wouldn't have helped.

Days passed. With no phone (an unthinkable prospect for most people going to the bathroom these days), she tried to alert neighbors to her distress by banging against the pipes at night, but all it did was annoy them. They had no idea the noises were a cry for help, and instead assumed the apartment complex was undergoing late-night construction. At one point a group of tenants started a petition to end the presumed maintenance work, as it was keeping them awake. To be fair, once they found out what had truly happened, they were appropriately horrified at the prospect. After almost three weeks of noise, someone finally caught on when they noticed the woman's absence and a stack of gathering mail.

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But only after the petition to "move that old bag's mail" had gathered the required signatures.

3

A-91-Year-Old Got Locked Inside a Bank Vault

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A 91-year-old Frenchwoman residing in Rennes had some business to attend to at her nearest BNP-Paribas bank as part of her Saturday errands. The bank employee locked the vault after leading the woman inside to her safety deposit box, which is most likely bank protocol. What was not bank protocol, however, was having an epic brain fart and forgetting about the customer, leaving her in there for the rest of the day.

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"Uhh ... it is bank protocol to not tell my manager about this."

"But surely they remembered her at the end of the day, before going home?" you undoubtedly ask. "After all, somebody has to do some kind of vault check before everybody goes home for the night, right?" Nope, they just left her in there and turned out the lights, leaving her without any way to alert anyone of her predicament, since she was 91 freaking years old and didn't own a cellphone.

And if she was simply facing the prospect of an overnight stay in the vault until the staff came in the next day, that would be one thing. But remember, this was a Saturday, which meant the bank would not reopen until the following Tuesday (hey, it's Europe), which is a hell of a lot of time to be stuck in a vault for anyone at any age, but did we mention that she was 91? Yeah, if nobody intervened, they were going to open that door on Tuesday and find a goddamned corpse.

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"But nobody would have been able to steal her body, and that's what is really important here."

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People Keep Getting Forgotten in Solitary Confinement

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We said that the people in the previous entries were "imprisoned" in those rooms or elevators, but of course that's not really accurate -- you're never more watched than when you're in prison. You're meticulously supervised by staff, you have a lawyer you can call if things go sour, and everyone is operating under an umbrella of laws meant to preserve your rights. So, "Lock him up and throw away the key!" is really just a humorous figure of speech.

Usually.

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Slightly more frequent than "Do you feel lucky?" mostly because .44 Magnum rounds are kind of expensive.

But then we have stories like Daniel Chong's. Chong, a college student, was hanging with his buddy, who happened to be the friendly neighborhood drug dealer. While Chong was chilling on the couch, police crashed the buddy's house and took everyone to jail. After questioning, Chong was quickly identified as just a visitor and was put in a solitary cell to be dealt with later. And then they completely forgot about him. Literally -- it was just like how sometimes you'll stick something in the microwave and then get distracted and forget about it until hours later. Only it was a human being.

1

A Man Was Imprisoned for 53 Years Because No One Could Speak His Language

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Getting sent to a POW camp is no fun, regardless of the war or which army took you prisoner. But there is one benefit -- despite what Rambo would have you believe, usually you get to go home when the fighting is over. But sometimes, in the mass confusion following a horrific conflict, people just ... fall through the cracks.

Take Hungarian Andras Tamas, who was just one of millions of POWs in World War II. He had fought for the Germans and was captured by the Soviets in 1944. The problem was that Tamas went nuts while in the gulags (they'll do that to a person), and thus lost the ability to tell anyone who he was or why he was there. And after he got transferred to a mental hospital, the Soviets (whose system was not exactly a model of efficiency) eventually forgot, too.

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Understandable, what with them being so busy building nukes and killing and oppressing their citizens.

With the war long over, the staff who knew the truth -- that he was a Hungarian POW who didn't speak Russian -- moved on to different assignments or just retired. Years passed, and eventually there was no one left who knew Tamas' case history, and they were too lazy to check his files. They were content that there was a crazy man who spoke no Russian, only a weird gibberish, and left it at that.

For half a century.

Rosetta Stone
In their defense, Rosetta Stone doesn't have a Hungarian version.

It wasn't until the late '90s that a visiting foreign doctor recognized that Tamas was actually speaking Hungarian and not an alien tongue he was making up on the fly. Cracking open his medical file for the first time in decades, the doctor found Tamas' case history and quickly notified the authorities in Budapest. The POW finally returned home to a hero's welcome, where he was dubbed "the last prisoner of World War II." Which is a nice title, but we're hoping somebody in Russia is checking to see if there are any more.

Yosomono writes about being forgotten and locked away in the nuclear wastelands of Japan.

Of course, things aren't ALWAYS this scary. For your relief, check out 25 Real Facts That Make Common Fears Way Less Scary.

Related Reading: If you think it's crazy these people got trapped, you'll flip out when you realize all the critical things that have been lost...like these sayings from Jesus. And then there's the Gospel of Eve, which made semen-eating into a religious act. And if those RFK assassination photos hadn't been lost, we might have a REAL different understanding of history.