Today's stories are about how sometimes doing what you think is the right thing can actually be the most dangerous choice you can make.

But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format,

then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week.

So, if that's of interest to you, the next time you're walking into a building,

and the follow button is right behind you, obviously following you into the building as well,

make sure the second you go in, you turn around, make eye contact, and then you pull the door

shut.

Don't hold the door for them.

Okay, let's get into our first story, which is called

tangled and frozen. On a Saturday afternoon in February of 2011, 18-year-old Michael Peary was a thousand feet underground,

crouched inside of a dark cave in Lafayette, Georgia, along with four of his friends.

As Michael looked around, his headlamp beam bounced off all the low-hanging rocks and

underground waterfalls and deep crevices, and it all just kind of felt like some kind of dark

and otherworldly planet down here. So this cave that they were in was a famous cave called

Ellison, and Michael and his friends had

driven over 400 miles from their college town in Gainesville to see it. Ellison was almost 12 miles

of tunnels and shafts and crevices, and thousands of cavers went through it every year. It was very

popular. Now, to be clear, caving as an activity was not really

Michael's thing. He was a marketing major at the University of Florida, and he mostly considered

himself to be a pretty quiet person and liked studying or playing in his school band or

volunteering with his church youth group. And so crawling through a tiny, pitch black, very claustrophobic

hole, hundreds of feet underground, was not really his first choice for fun. But Michael was not there

...