WEBVTT - Stranger Danger 0:00:04.080 --> 0:00:07.440 Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of 0:00:07.480 --> 0:00:14.440 iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of 0:00:14.480 --> 0:00:18.440 the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all 0:00:18.480 --> 0:00:22.160 of these amazing tales are right there on display, just 0:00:22.200 --> 0:00:28.840 waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. 0:00:36.240 --> 0:00:39.360 Have you ever wondered what happens to a commercial airliner 0:00:39.440 --> 0:00:43.080 when it's retired from service? Well, for those curious enough 0:00:43.080 --> 0:00:45.519 to ask, you'll find that there are a wide variety 0:00:45.560 --> 0:00:48.800 of jobs these planes can be pressed into after they're 0:00:48.840 --> 0:00:53.159 done ferrying passengers, and not all of these jobs are legal. 0:00:53.520 --> 0:00:57.760 In fact, one infamous airliner eight four four AA ended 0:00:57.800 --> 0:01:03.320 up causing an international incident. Maury Joseph is a Florida 0:01:03.320 --> 0:01:07.039 based CEO of an airline leasing company, and in February 0:01:07.120 --> 0:01:09.720 of two thousand and two, he came into possession of 0:01:09.800 --> 0:01:13.080 a Boeing seven twenty seven tail number as I said, 0:01:13.319 --> 0:01:18.319 eight four four AA, recently retired from American Airlines. He 0:01:18.520 --> 0:01:22.400 was approached by a South African entrepreneur, Keith Irwin, who 0:01:22.400 --> 0:01:25.720 had been hired by a joint partnership of airline interests 0:01:25.760 --> 0:01:30.199 in Africa, looking to make money transporting fuel by air 0:01:30.560 --> 0:01:34.240 to diamond mines in Angola. A civil war had broken 0:01:34.240 --> 0:01:37.280 out in the country and transporting fuel by car had 0:01:37.319 --> 0:01:41.560 become too dangerous. Both Morey and Irwin had thixed skins 0:01:41.600 --> 0:01:44.440 and were used to conducting business in third world nations 0:01:44.440 --> 0:01:47.600 with these kind of problems. They also weren't afraid of 0:01:47.640 --> 0:01:51.880 working with industries that some people might find distasteful, such 0:01:51.920 --> 0:01:55.680 as the diamond trade. Maury sold Irwin the seven forty 0:01:55.680 --> 0:01:59.200 seven for one million dollars, but accepted a down payment 0:01:59.280 --> 0:02:01.800 of just one hundre undred and twenty five thousand, with 0:02:01.920 --> 0:02:05.919 further installments to follow once the fuel shipments got to underway. 0:02:06.320 --> 0:02:10.400 Maury even sent a business associate with Irwin to Angola 0:02:10.440 --> 0:02:13.400 to make sure that things went smoothly. But from the 0:02:13.440 --> 0:02:17.960 get go things were anything but smooth. Irwin and his 0:02:18.120 --> 0:02:21.720 flight crew were subjected to harsh conditions in Angola. They 0:02:21.760 --> 0:02:25.560 slept in terrible housing with no running water or electricity. 0:02:25.880 --> 0:02:30.040 They also felt unsafe. Practically everyone in the city carried 0:02:30.040 --> 0:02:33.440 in AK forty seven. They were stuck in limbo as 0:02:33.480 --> 0:02:35.880 they waited for their clients at one of the mines 0:02:36.200 --> 0:02:39.919 to process their passports and get them licenses to operate 0:02:39.960 --> 0:02:43.800 the seven forty seven in Angola airspace. At one point 0:02:44.000 --> 0:02:46.640 they feared that they would never get their passports back 0:02:46.919 --> 0:02:50.280 and would be stuck in the country forever. Eventually, though, 0:02:50.320 --> 0:02:53.880 their passports were returned, but some of Irwin's crew had 0:02:53.919 --> 0:02:57.160 already had enough and they returned to the States. Even worse, 0:02:57.200 --> 0:02:59.840 the client at the diamond mine wasn't paying up for 0:03:00.120 --> 0:03:03.240 expenses a crewed. Thus far, Erwin had to accept his 0:03:03.360 --> 0:03:06.880 losses and negotiate a new deal with a new client. 0:03:07.840 --> 0:03:11.000 Erwin and what remained of the crew started flying missions 0:03:11.000 --> 0:03:15.280 delivering fuel to diamond mines in Angola. It was dangerous work. 0:03:15.440 --> 0:03:18.119 They had to maintain as high in altitude as possible 0:03:18.400 --> 0:03:21.560 until the very last second before landing to avoid being 0:03:21.639 --> 0:03:24.280 hit by gunfire from the war, and there were no 0:03:24.440 --> 0:03:27.880 paved landing strips at these mines. They were making extremely 0:03:27.919 --> 0:03:32.799 bumpy landings at dirt airfields. Before long, most of Irwin's 0:03:32.800 --> 0:03:37.000 crew had given up and gone home, including Maury Joseph's representative. 0:03:37.320 --> 0:03:40.440 The operative had failed to make a return on Moury's investment, 0:03:40.800 --> 0:03:43.680 and he wanted his plane back. Eight four to four 0:03:43.880 --> 0:03:47.559 double A would sit in a hangar in Angola for months, 0:03:47.600 --> 0:03:52.640 slowly deteriorating and accumulating storage fees, and so eventually Maury, 0:03:52.760 --> 0:03:56.760 our Airline CEO, traveled with an associate of his, ben Paedia, 0:03:57.040 --> 0:04:00.000 to Angola, whose job it was to prepare the air 0:04:00.000 --> 0:04:03.200 aircraft for the flight to South Africa, where it would 0:04:03.240 --> 0:04:06.960 be finally sold off. Maury flew ahead to finalize the deal, 0:04:07.520 --> 0:04:09.600 but on May twenty sixth of two thousand and three, 0:04:09.960 --> 0:04:13.360 he received a disturbing phone call. The aircraft and ben 0:04:13.400 --> 0:04:17.880 Paedia had disappeared. It was last seen making erratic movements 0:04:17.920 --> 0:04:21.960 on the runway in Angola before making an unauthorized takeoff 0:04:22.000 --> 0:04:25.880 over the Atlantic, and Maury wasn't just mad, he was 0:04:25.920 --> 0:04:29.480 also scared. Losing track of a plane that size and 0:04:29.560 --> 0:04:33.560 that valuable had serious consequences. This was even more true 0:04:33.560 --> 0:04:37.000 in the years immediately following the September eleventh, two thousand 0:04:37.000 --> 0:04:40.120 and one attacks. He had to contact the FBI and 0:04:40.200 --> 0:04:44.200 the Homeland Security, who in turn contacted every single US 0:04:44.279 --> 0:04:46.760 embassy in Africa to let them note to be on 0:04:46.800 --> 0:04:50.080 the lookout for the missing plane. Everyone was afraid that 0:04:50.120 --> 0:04:54.400 the plane had been co opted by terrorists. Fortunately, an 0:04:54.400 --> 0:04:57.320 attack never came, but that left one of the biggest 0:04:57.360 --> 0:05:02.200 mysteries in aviation history happened to the plane. Most people 0:05:02.240 --> 0:05:05.160 close to Ben Padilla believe that he wouldn't have stolen it. 0:05:05.480 --> 0:05:09.039 He was a simple airline engineer. It seems more likely 0:05:09.080 --> 0:05:12.279 that criminals from Angola might have attacked the plane with 0:05:12.400 --> 0:05:15.480 him on board and taken it into a remote area 0:05:15.560 --> 0:05:19.920 for disassembly. It's also possible that whoever hijacked the plane 0:05:20.279 --> 0:05:23.880 never made it to their destination and crashed into the ocean. 0:05:24.640 --> 0:05:27.760 This is one curious tale that will remain that way. 0:05:28.080 --> 0:05:31.240 No trace of eight four four double A has ever 0:05:31.320 --> 0:05:35.880 been found. It's the largest missing aircraft in world history. 0:05:36.640 --> 0:05:40.200 Whatever you think of Maury Irwin Ben and the plane 0:05:40.279 --> 0:05:43.599 cargo business, it seems like surely there has to be 0:05:43.640 --> 0:05:59.520 an easier way to make a living. As anyone from 0:05:59.560 --> 0:06:02.120 a small town will tell you not to. Everyone is 0:06:02.240 --> 0:06:06.919 so welcoming to outsiders. People are wary of strangers. Newcomers 0:06:07.120 --> 0:06:12.040 can feel isolated, unwanted, or even outright disliked, and such 0:06:12.200 --> 0:06:15.240 was the case for Teodor Glava, a Romanian immigrant who 0:06:15.320 --> 0:06:19.520 moved to the small town of Lafayette, Colorado, in nineteen fourteen. 0:06:20.400 --> 0:06:24.080 Born in Lesnik in eighteen seventy seven. Glava led a 0:06:24.120 --> 0:06:27.560 brutal life working in marble minds belonging to the Austro 0:06:27.680 --> 0:06:32.479 Hungarian Empire. This work was dangerous, physically demanding, and of 0:06:32.520 --> 0:06:35.400 course it paid very little, so he came to America 0:06:35.440 --> 0:06:38.920 with nothing, hoping to find better work mining coal there. 0:06:39.360 --> 0:06:42.279 Glava eventually planned to send for his wife and daughter, 0:06:42.480 --> 0:06:46.000 whom he had left behind in Romania. When he arrived 0:06:46.040 --> 0:06:50.200 in Colorado, Glava was emaciated from years of backbreaking work 0:06:50.240 --> 0:06:52.599 and his difficult voyage, and the fact that he was 0:06:52.640 --> 0:06:56.279 so tall didn't really help. His skin was pale after 0:06:56.440 --> 0:06:59.479 years of working in the marble quarries and months in 0:06:59.560 --> 0:07:02.720 a cramp ship's cabin. Today we would consider him a 0:07:02.960 --> 0:07:07.279 sickly looking man. To the townspeople of Lafayette in nineteen fourteen, 0:07:07.320 --> 0:07:10.600 though he looked straight out of every vampire legend they 0:07:10.640 --> 0:07:14.280 had come to fear Tiotoglava's story came to a tragic 0:07:14.440 --> 0:07:18.160 end only four years after his arrival. The Spanish flu 0:07:18.280 --> 0:07:21.040 pandemic wiped out hundreds of people in the nearby town 0:07:21.080 --> 0:07:24.840 of Boulder, and the disease reached Lafayette shortly after. Glava 0:07:24.880 --> 0:07:28.480 and many other coal miners stood almost no chance. Remember 0:07:28.520 --> 0:07:31.800 this was before the age of vaccination. The cold and 0:07:31.960 --> 0:07:36.040 unsafe working conditions meant that their immune systems were already weak, 0:07:36.400 --> 0:07:39.600 and tragically, he passed away in December of nineteen eighteen 0:07:39.760 --> 0:07:41.720 before he ever got a chance to send for his 0:07:41.760 --> 0:07:45.080 family back home. And this is where the story of 0:07:45.120 --> 0:07:48.200 tiotoor Glava comes to an end and the legend of 0:07:48.240 --> 0:07:51.800 the Lafayette Vampire is born. You see, because Glava had 0:07:51.800 --> 0:07:55.240 been ignored and isolated for so long, no one really 0:07:55.280 --> 0:07:58.040 knew much about him. The absence of his family and 0:07:58.080 --> 0:08:00.480 the poverty he died in meant but there was no 0:08:00.640 --> 0:08:03.760 money for a proper burial, and as a result, he 0:08:03.880 --> 0:08:06.920 was buried in the paupers section of the Lafayette Cemetery 0:08:07.200 --> 0:08:10.520 with a headstone hastily carved using the pointed end of 0:08:10.560 --> 0:08:15.440 a trowel and cheap cement. Glavaz headstone also inaccurately listed 0:08:15.440 --> 0:08:19.280 his birthplace as Transylvania, the birthplace, as we know, of 0:08:19.360 --> 0:08:24.280 literature's most famous vampire, Dracula, with influenza killing dozens of 0:08:24.280 --> 0:08:27.600 others in Lafayette, Though, people in town became desperate for 0:08:27.640 --> 0:08:32.160 someone to blame when they spotted Glava's strangely scrawled headstone 0:08:32.400 --> 0:08:36.720 and that terrifying word Transylvania. They recalled the pale, lanky 0:08:36.760 --> 0:08:40.400 stranger who had wandered into their midst so recently, and 0:08:40.640 --> 0:08:44.080 hatched a plan to rid themselves of this pandemic. They 0:08:44.120 --> 0:08:48.160 would need to dig up and kill the vampire. That winter, 0:08:48.600 --> 0:08:51.880 residents bundled up against the Colorado snow and made their 0:08:51.880 --> 0:08:54.880 way to the cemetery. Once there, they found his grave, 0:08:55.280 --> 0:08:58.600 and they started to dig. What they found in glavas Coffin, 0:08:58.920 --> 0:09:02.400 confirmed all of the worst fears. He looked nothing short 0:09:02.840 --> 0:09:07.280 of monstrous. His hair and fingernails had continued to grow, 0:09:07.640 --> 0:09:11.520 which they took for proof of his undead nature. Glava's 0:09:11.559 --> 0:09:14.760 gums had pulled back away from his teeth, making them 0:09:14.800 --> 0:09:18.800 appear longer and more pointed. Moreover, his body looked almost 0:09:18.840 --> 0:09:22.560 completely unchanged from the day he had died. In short, 0:09:22.679 --> 0:09:25.640 he looked exactly like the vampire legends they had heard 0:09:25.880 --> 0:09:29.400 all their lives. Now, as any mortician will tell you, 0:09:29.559 --> 0:09:33.440 these changes to Glava's body were not supernatural at all. 0:09:33.800 --> 0:09:37.360 Skin and gums shrink after a person dies and begins 0:09:37.400 --> 0:09:42.440 to decompose, making hair, nails, and teeth appear longer, especially 0:09:42.520 --> 0:09:46.080 without the modern embalming processes we have today. And then 0:09:46.120 --> 0:09:50.280 there was Glava's unchanged appearance. Without any money to pay 0:09:50.280 --> 0:09:52.679 for a proper burial, he had been placed in the 0:09:52.880 --> 0:09:56.160 cheapest coffin available and buried in a shallow grave by 0:09:56.200 --> 0:09:59.400 a caretaker, possibly the same guy who had carved his 0:09:59.440 --> 0:10:03.319 headstone out of cement. The winter weather had kept Glava's 0:10:03.320 --> 0:10:07.120 body well preserved, which explains why he looked almost the 0:10:07.120 --> 0:10:09.760 same as the day he died. Of course, to the 0:10:09.760 --> 0:10:12.640 people of Lafayette, they had no way of knowing this, 0:10:12.880 --> 0:10:15.319 and they hadn't trudged to the cemetery in the middle 0:10:15.360 --> 0:10:19.080 of the freezy night in search of rational explanations. Once 0:10:19.080 --> 0:10:21.880 they had dug up Glava's body, one of the locals 0:10:22.120 --> 0:10:25.959 plunged a wooden steak right through the supposed vampire's heart, 0:10:26.200 --> 0:10:29.040 and then, satisfied that they had rid themselves of the 0:10:29.080 --> 0:10:32.880 source of their bad luck, they went home. One can 0:10:33.080 --> 0:10:37.439 only imagine their surprise when a flourishing sapling appeared directly 0:10:37.480 --> 0:10:41.640 over Glava's grave that spring. The wooden steak intended to 0:10:41.720 --> 0:10:47.640 kill the vampire had taken root and grown into something beautiful. Nowadays, 0:10:47.960 --> 0:10:51.720 Glava has become a legend in Lafayette and around the 0:10:51.800 --> 0:10:55.559 United States. His grave, with the same poorly carved headstone, 0:10:55.840 --> 0:10:59.840 is covered in roses, trinkets, money, and souvenirs from his 0:10:59.840 --> 0:11:03.600 home country of Romania, and the tree is over a 0:11:03.679 --> 0:11:08.080 century old now and still growing. Passer buyers probably think 0:11:08.120 --> 0:11:11.040 that they're seeing the final resting place of a beloved 0:11:11.120 --> 0:11:14.559 local resident, but have no idea that they're actually looking 0:11:14.600 --> 0:11:22.439 at the legendary vampire of Lafayette. I hope you've enjoyed 0:11:22.440 --> 0:11:26.200 today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for 0:11:26.240 --> 0:11:29.040 free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show 0:11:29.080 --> 0:11:34.120 by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created 0:11:34.120 --> 0:11:37.440 by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. 0:11:37.880 --> 0:11:41.000 I make another award winning show called Lore, which is 0:11:41.120 --> 0:11:44.520 a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can 0:11:44.559 --> 0:11:48.440 learn all about it over at the Worldolore dot com. 0:11:48.480 --> 0:11:52.720 And until next time, stay curious.