The harrowing elevator horror stories that will make you think twice about getting in a lift

STUDENT Cailem Leembruggen joked with his pals as more and more people piled into the lift of their holiday apartment block.

The 19-year-old Australian was on a break with his classmates in Surfers’ Paradise, Queensland, to celebrate graduating from high school and they had been invited to a party a few floors below.

Packed tight with 14 people, the eight-person lift moved down, before jolting to a stop between floors and someone quipped: “I think we overloaded the lift.”

Seconds later, the occupants were thrown into panic when the lift plummeted towards the ground at breakneck speed.

“We started bracing ourselves, holding on to whatever we could,” says Cailem.

The car fell eight floors before hitting a buffer at 90mph and miraculously no one was hurt.

The terrifying incident, caught on Cailem’s phone in November, is among the elevator horror stories featured in the new Channel 5 documentary, Trapped in a Lift.

Chilling footage also reveals the moment a dog is almost strangled by his lead, and shows a man trapped in a tiny lift alone for 41 hours.

Blood pouring from lift shaft

In the US, 26 people a year die in lift-related accidents while in the UK, we average less than one death every two years.

According to expert Mark Fairweather, there is a one in 1.32 million chance of being injured in a lift.

But in 2016, US holidaymaker Matt Davis took horrifying footage of blood pouring down from a lift shaft “like a rainstorm” after a crew member was crushed to death while working on the mechanism.

In 2017, two 17-year-olds plunged to their death when the glass floor of their lift in Salamanca, Spain, collapsed. And in 2010, an elevator company was fined over the death of Katarzyna Woja, who was crushed when the lift fell between two floors in her city gym as she was stepping out of it.

Last year, horrifying footage emerged of a Shanghai woman whose leg was sliced off below the knee when it got trapped in a faulty door as the lift moved off.

In November, a Chinese schoolboy was left terrified after using an umbrella to stop doors closing sent a faulty lift into freefall over 25 floors.

While fatalities are rare, for many people the prospect of anything going wrong in that tiny metal box is the stuff of nightmares.

Trapped for 42 hours and ‘facing death’

For Nick White, the nightmare came true during a late shift in his office block in Manhattan, New York.

When his lift shuddered to a halt between floors, it was the start of a 41-hour ordeal.

Getting no response from the in-lift phone line, he pressed the alarm but no one came.

It was midnight on a Friday night and, despite cameras in the lift that should have been monitored 24 hours a day, nobody came to his rescue.

After a few hours with no food or water, and no way of knowing when he would be found, Nick is seen drifting in and out of sleep – always waking in the same nightmare.

After 24 hours, psychologist Emma Kenny says, “He’s now facing the possibility he may not be found. He will literally be considering that he’s facing potential death.”

Nick was finally spotted on the security camera after 40 hours, on Sunday afternoon, and released by engineers an hour later. He later sued the elevator company for a “six-figure sum.”

Pet almost choked to death

Manager Ben Duke was on a normal shift at the Roadside Inn in South Carolina, when a guest got in the lift at the lobby.

But as the car sped upwards, Ben realised that the guest’s dog was still outside – and its lead was trapped in the door.

As the distressed pooch began to be hoisted into the air towards certain death, he sped into action, grabbing it and attempting to unhook the collar but he was pulled towards the elevator.

“It was freaking out the whole time, barking, yelping,” says Ben. “It scratched me across the face but if I let it go it would have been a terrible result.”

Desperate, Ben summoned superhuman strength and somehow managed to snap the lead with his bare hands, saving the stricken dog.

“The owner came back down grief-stricken, thinking he had killed his dog,” says Ben. “Luckily I was able to show him the dog was OK.”

Trapped on her big day

Bride Melissa Rodger planned every detail of her lavish 2018 wedding to fiancé Justin, at the Providence Biltmore Hotel in Rhode Island  – but she ended up spending much of it in a lift.

After the wedding pictures, groom Justin went to mingle at the cocktail reception while Melissa popped upstairs.

But after “a shudder and a loud noise”, the lift stopped. “I started to worry, thinking ‘Oh my God this is my wedding. How long are we going to be in here?” she says.

Her bridesmaids, who were waiting for her on the next floor, raised the alarm. The fire department arrived and, after an hour, prised the door open.

“Someone handed me a glass of champagne and I was really excited,” she says. “I thought ‘this is the way out’ they can just lift me out.”

But, as Mr Fairweather points out, climbing out of a lift when it’s not secured can be fatal as the metal parts can “come down like a guillotine.”

It was another hour before engineers were able to get the lift into a safe position and Melissa walked out to a rapturous reception with friends, family and a few additional firefighters.

“When all’s said and done I wouldn’t change anything,” she says. “It makes a pretty good story.”

Jumping on impact ‘useless’

In an echo of Cailem’s story, the programme also features the terrifying rescue of six people – including a pregnant woman –  who visited a restaurant on the 95th floor of one of Chicago’s tallest buildings.

The cable snapped and the lift dropped 84 floors before the safety mechanism brought it to an abrupt stop.

Unable to get down to the lift, firefighters cut through the wall of car park to reach the people trapped inside.

Jen Baxter, head of engineering at Institution of Mechanical Engineering, says that the popular belief you should jump as the lift hits the ground is a myth.

“If you’re travelling at 90mph and you time it perfectly so you jump exactly at the moment you hit the buffer,” she says. “You are still travelling at 90mph and will  still land at the same speed.”

Trapped in a Lift: When Elevators Kill airs Thursday, 17^th October, at 10pm on Channel 5