Stranger Than Fiction Vol. XV

**MrBallen** (0:00)
Sometimes, the truth is stranger than fiction, and today's podcast features four stories that demonstrate that. The audio from all four of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel, and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. The first story you'll hear is called A Miracle, and it's about a woman in rural Mexico who feels this sudden and excruciating pain in her abdomen. The second story you'll hear is called The Simulation, and it's about a man who enters a flight simulator for routine training, but you won't believe what happens next. The third story you'll hear is called Deja Vu. After a doctor's office calls a patient for an upcoming surgery, a series of events unfolds that is truly bizarre. And the fourth and final story you'll hear today is called The Silk Hat, and it's about a woman who answers her front door in the middle of the night and sees someone wearing a black silk hat.
But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark & Mysterious Deliberate in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do when we upload four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to make the follow button a really nice, big, authentic Italian meal. But don't tell them, every time the recipes call for olive oil, you used motor oil instead. Okay, let's get into our first story called A Miracle.
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On the afternoon of March 4, 2000, a 40-year-old woman named Ines Ramirez stood in the kitchen of her tiny one-room home, which was deep in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico.
Ines had a whole chicken on the counter right in front of her that she had just killed and plucked, and now she was using a 6-inch long knife to butcher it for their dinner. And as she did this, every once in a while, she would look out the window to check on her seven kids who were playing together out in the yard.
So Ines and her large family lived in a very isolated rural community of about maybe 500 people. They didn't have running water or electricity or a phone, and they lived miles away from their closest neighbors. They mainly lived off of corn and vegetables that they grew themselves, chickens they raised, and then wild animals that Ines' husband would catch.
Her husband was actually gone that day because he was out in the mountains hunting for deer.
And so as Ines is just kind of going about her fairly typical evening routine here, you know, making dinner, she suddenly felt this really intense, very painful, cramping sensation that was kind of ripping through her abdomen. And it hurt so bad that Ines stopped what she was doing and kind of doubled over and grabbed the counter and just tried to steady her breathing. I mean, this was really shocking. And for about a minute, Ines just stood there, you know, holding onto the counter, just waiting for this pain to pass. And eventually it did. Once it eased up, it was like, okay, she was back to normal and she could stand up again. But this was sort of alarming. But at the same time, Ines was used to dealing with basically all medical crises on her own. They lived in this isolated part of the world and the nearest medical clinic was 50 miles away and they didn't have a car. So like anything that happened, they basically had to deal with it themselves. And that was routine. And so for Ines, despite how incredibly painful this was, she just told herself, like, now that it had passed, the pain was gone. She said, you know what? It's probably fine. Like, I'm good. And so pretty quickly she just kind of forgot about it and went back to butchering the chicken.