Last Breath (2025). It’s based on the true story of deep-sea diver Chris Lemons, who was stranded 300 feet underwater with an emergency gas supply expected to last just five to eight minutes. However, Lemons ended up being stranded on the ocean floor for almost 40 minutes.  In September 2012, the ship supporting his North Sea dive lost its positioning system and drifted away.  His lifeline snagged and snapped, cutting off his breathing gas, heat and communications. Alone in the freezing darkness, he eventually lost consciousness. When his colleagues recovered him, they feared they were bringing back a body. Inside the diving bell, they removed his helmet and gave him rescue breaths. He came round. Lemons recovered without lasting brain damage. Three weeks later, he returned to diving, with the same colleagues who had saved him.

In 2010, a California woman took a sip from her office water bottle and suspected it contained semen. Then it happened again. This time, she kept the bottle. She asked her fiancé to provide a comparison sample, then had the workplace bottle tested. A private lab confirmed her suspicion. DNA testing identified her coworker, Michael Kevin Lallana. He admitted contaminating her water twice. He found her attractive, he told detectives, and knew “her lips had touched” the bottle. In 2011, he was convicted of two misdemeanor battery counts with sexual-gratification enhancements. He received 180 days in jail, three years’ probation and an order to register as a sex offender. He was also ordered to pay over $27,000 in restitution.

Eight days after their June 2013 wedding, Jordan Graham promised Cody Johnson a surprise. She took him to Glacier National Park, and pushed him off a roughly 300-foot cliff. Then she told his family he’d left with friends. As people searched, Graham created a fake email account and sent herself a message from a stranger named “Tony”. It claimed Cody had d*ed during a hike and urged her to call off the search. She eventually pointed searchers to his body. It was recovered on July 12, five days after she k*lled him. Graham pleaded guilty to second-degree m*rder midway through her trial. In March 2014, she was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.

In 2015, Forbes valued Elizabeth Holmes at $4.5 billion. A year later, it revised her estimated fortune to zero. Holmes left Stanford at 19 to build Theranos, promising hundreds of blood tests from a finger prick. Investors poured in more than $700 million, pushing its valuation to $9 billion. But the technology couldn’t deliver. Its machines produced unreliable results, and Theranos secretly relied on conventional equipment for much of its testing. Whistleblowers and journalist John Carreyrou helped expose the deception. In 2022, Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and sentenced to 11 years and three months in prison. A24’s new documentary, You Can See Everything, follows Holmes in the weeks before prison, after she invited filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim into her home.

Natalia Grace’s adoptive parents accused her of being an adult faking her age, then had her age legally changed from 8 to 22 and left her living alone. Michael and Kristine Barnett adopted the Ukrainian girl with dwarfism in 2010. Two years later, they persuaded an Indiana court to change her birth year from 2003 to 1989. In 2013, they moved to Canada with their biological children, leaving Natalia in an Indiana apartment. Natalia maintained she was a child. A biological-age test conducted in 2023 estimated she was around 22, supporting her account without establishing her exact birth date. Both parents faced neglect charges. Michael was acquitted in October 2022, Kristine’s charges were dismissed in March 2023.

Final Destination 2’s opening scene for the simple reason that it still crosses my mind every time I drive behind a truck carrying a load.

In 2001, Jodee Berry was blindfolded and led into a car park to collect the new Toyota she thought she’d won. Waiting for her was a toy Yoda. The 26-year-old Hooters waitress in Panama City Beach, Florida, had won a beer-sales contest. According to Berry, her manager had even told staff the winner would have to pay the vehicle’s tax. He later called the contest an April Fools’ joke. Berry quit a week later and sued the restaurant’s owner for breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation. In 2002, they reached an undisclosed settlement. Her lawyer said she could now visit a dealership and “pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants.”

A Brazilian woman accused her husband of cheating and made him sleep in a separate bed. Her husband was a rag doll. In 2022, Meirivone Rocha Moraes claimed a friend told her another woman had taken Marcelo, the life-sized doll she’d held a wedding ceremony with, to a motel. She also claimed she found messages on “his” phone.

Stephen Slevin was arrested for drink-driving in August 2005, placed in isolation, and forgotten for almost 2 years. He spent 22 months in jail without a trial, deteriorating so badly he pulled out his own rotting tooth. He hadn’t been convicted. He was still waiting for his case to be heard. Inside New Mexico’s Doña Ana County jail, he wrote requests for medical help as his mental health deteriorated. He became malnourished. Bedsores and fungus developed on his body. His toenails grew so long they curled under his toes. In June 2007, the charges were dropped and he was released. A federal jury awarded him $22 million in 2012. After the county challenged the verdict, he accepted a $15.5 million settlement in 2013. “Walking by me, watching me deteriorate day after day after day,” he said, “and they did nothing at all to get me help.”

James Bond actually has a real tombstone on a remote Atlantic cliff. Locals erected it on Kalsoy in the Faroe Islands, where his final moments in No Time to Die were set.

In 2011, a father of two died trapped inside his own clothes airer. His attempts to escape only tightened its grip. Brian Depledge, 38, was hanging washing at his Bradford home when investigators believe he tripped over a stool and fell backwards into the rack. It collapsed around him, trapping his head between the rails. As he struggled, the frame compressed his neck and chest. He suffocated. At the inquest that September, coroner Professor Paul Marks recorded a verdict of accidental death. “I have never come across a case like this,” he said, calling it “probably rarer than being struck by lightning or struck by a meteorite.”

In December 2005, police shut down an Australian zoo and searched it with 60 officers and a helicopter. A double murderer had been hiding there. He still escaped. Malcolm Naden had vanished after k**ling Lateesha Nolan and Kristy Scholes earlier that year. While police hunted him, he stole food around Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo. A later account described him stealing the elephants’ bananas and sleeping in the roof space of the zoo manager’s hut. His time on the run stretched to nearly seven years. In December 2011, he shot a police officer in the shoulder. Police finally caught him in March 2012, hiding in a remote property near Gloucester. The following year, he received life without parole. His response: “Thank you, your honour.”

A great white shark bit Shirley Ann Durdin in half on March 3, 1985. Her four children were watching from shore. The 33-year-old mother was snorkelling for scallops at Peake Bay near Port Lincoln, South Australia, roughly 150 yards from the beach. Her husband, Barry, tried to reach her. A fellow diver held him back, fearing the shark would take him too. “I must go to Shirley. I must help her,” Barry cried, according to the diver’s account. A search followed, but only a single swim fin was recovered. Her body was never found.

Hugh Jackman accidentally stabbed Taylor Kitsch in the thumb while filming X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), leaving a claw sticking out of his flesh. They were shooting a fight between Wolverine and Gambit when Kitsch suddenly recoiled and someone called “Cut!” Jackman looked down at his hand. Only two claws remained. He looked across at Kitsch. The missing claw was embedded in his thumb, and his co-star was simply staring at it. The injury temporarily stopped filming. “He stabbed me and I bled, a lot,” Kitsch later recalled.

Tom Cruise's three marriages all ended when his wives were 33 years old. Coincidentally, Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman, and Katie Holmes were each 11 years younger than the one before her.

In July 2003, a melting glacier exposed a hockey player’s body in the middle of a ski run. He’d been missing for nearly 14 years. Duncan MacPherson, 23, disappeared after taking a snowboarding lesson at Austria’s Stubai Glacier on August 9, 1989. He was travelling through Europe before starting a coaching job in Scotland. He never arrived. Six weeks later, his borrowed car was found in the resort’s parking lot. Searches failed to locate him. When his body finally emerged from the ice, his rented snowboarding equipment was recovered with him. Investigators suggested he had fallen into a crevasse. His parents challenged that explanation, and no full autopsy was performed. Author John Leake later argued that a snow-grooming vehicle had struck him and his death had been concealed. The resort denied a cover-up, Leake’s account was never established as an official finding.

Any of the Iron Man movies. The falling passengers in Iron Man 3 (2013) were actually real skydivers jumping from 13,000 feet. Red Bull’s team wore business clothes and military uniforms while camera-equipped skydivers filmed alongside them. Visual effects artists erased their parachute gear and added the damaged aircraft, even Iron Man was initially a real jumper in costume, later replaced with digital armour.

In November 2015, a man putting up Christmas lights spotted a car in a pond. Inside were human remains, and the wallet of a man missing for nine years. Davie Lee Niles vanished after leaving Jake’s Bar in Byron Township, Michigan, on October 11, 2006. Years passed without answers. In 2013, his family published an obituary saying “only God knows the time and place” of his death. Then funeral home employee Brian Houseman climbed a lift to decorate a Christmas tree. From above, he noticed a submerged car. Investigators recovered skeletal remains from the driver’s seat. The vehicle was registered to Niles, and his wallet was inside. The pond was roughly half a mile from the bar where he’d disappeared. His car was even visible in Google Maps satellite imagery.