5 Horrifying Places Where People Got Trapped And Forgotten

1. Nicholas White Was Stuck in an Elevator for 41 Hours

It was longest cigarette break of Nicholas White's life.

The 34-year-old New York production manager was working late one Friday night in October when he went outside for a smoke.

He was returning to his office on the 39th floor when the elevator stopped abruptly between floors. White pressed the alarm, letting it ring and ring. But at 11 p.m. the building was deserted, and it would be nearly two days before White was rescued.

He paced around the elevator like a bug trapped in a box, fighting claustrophobia every minute of his 41-hour ordeal, which was captured on a video surveillance camera.

"After a certain amount of time I knew I was in big trouble," White told "Good Morning America" in an exclusive interview.

He had no watch, no cell phone, no food or water. His only sustenance was a pack of Rolaids.

"Rolaids aren't a very good meal," White said.

The the most difficult part of the ordeal, he said, was going 41 hours without water. At one point, White thought he might die of dehydration.

He relieved himself by opening the elevator doors a bit and urinating down the elevator shaft.

"I hoped that might be a signal to people in fact: 'why is the elevator leaking?'"

A Cold Sweat

Cold yet sweating, White laid on the floor trying to stay calm. Then he got up and started pacing. At one point he pried open the elevator doors and screamed for help. The only response was silence.

"I had no idea if it was day or night," White said.

Herang the emergency bell, but he couldn't take the constant noise so he occasionally turned it off.

Split-screen video footage of the building showed other parts of the building, including three other elevators. The video showed maintenance workers occasionally fixing various things, but no one heard him and none of them wondered what was going on with car No. 30.

Not a religious man, White prayed for help. On Sunday at 4 p.m., White, who was nearly delirious from thirst, heard a voice on the intercom asking if anyone was there. Finally, he was rescued.

When he went back to work, White found out his co-workers who were also there late thought he had skipped out and left that night.

"A person left me a note about all the problems that occurred while I was playing hooky from the job," White said.

After the 41-hour nightmare, White received a settlement from the building. Unbelievable to many, he still takes elevators.

"Living in Manhattan I'd be seriously limiting my life if I didn't take elevators," he said.

here is the footage of that whole incident.

2. Grandmother Got Stuck in the Bathroom for Three Weeks

This one happened in a Paris suburb where, after using the facilities and trying to leave, a French grandmother found that her door lock was broken. While busting down jammed doors may simply be an inconvenience for burly Olympic athletes, it's a much tougher task for a 69-year-old grandmother with zero heavy sled-pushing experience, especially a French one. We suppose she could have surrendered to the door, but in this situation that probably wouldn't have helped.

Days passed. With no phone (an unthinkable prospect for most people going to the bathroom these days), she tried to alert neighbors to her distress by banging against the pipes at night, but all it did was annoy them. They had no idea the noises were a cry for help, and instead assumed the apartment complex was undergoing late-night construction. At one point a group of tenants started a petition to end the presumed maintenance work, as it was keeping them awake. To be fair, once they found out what had truly happened, they were appropriately horrified at the prospect. After almost three weeks of noise, someone finally caught on when they noticed the woman's absence and a stack of gathering mail.

By the time French firefighters broke through to free the woman from her apartment turned prison, she had been trapped for 20 days. She should be applauded for her feat of Les Stroud-ian endurance, considering she survived solely on tap water and (presumably) a previously untouched bowl of hard candies from the late 1970s.

3. A-91-Year-Old Got Locked Inside a Bank Vault

The bank employee locked the vault after leading the woman inside to her safety deposit box, which is most likely bank protocol. What was not bank protocol, however, was having an epic brain fart and forgetting about the customer, leaving her in there for the rest of the day.

"But surely they remembered her at the end of the day, before going home?" you undoubtedly ask. "After all, somebody has to do some kind of vault check before everybody goes home for the night, right?" Nope, they just left her in there and turned out the lights, leaving her without any way to alert anyone of her predicament, since she was 91 freaking years old and didn't own a cellphone.

And if she was simply facing the prospect of an overnight stay in the vault until the staff came in the next day, that would be one thing. But remember, this was a Saturday, which meant the bank would not reopen until the following Tuesday (hey, it's Europe), which is a hell of a lot of time to be stuck in a vault for anyone at any age, but did we mention that she was 91? Yeah, if nobody intervened, they were going to open that door on Tuesday and find a goddamned corpse.

But she was lucky as her son was worried and after retracing her steps and visiting all the elderly woman hotspots she frequented, they wound up at the bank. After some frantic calls, the bank manager arrived and was at long last able to get the vault open ... the next morning, at 10:00 a.m. she was saved.

4. People Keep Getting Forgotten in Solitary Confinement

Daniel Chong a college student, was hanging with his buddy, who happened to be the friendly neighborhood drug dealer. While Chong was chilling on the couch, police crashed the buddy's house and took everyone to jail. After questioning, Chong was quickly identified as just a visitor and was put in a solitary cell to be dealt with later. And then they completely forgot about him. Literally -- it was just like how sometimes you'll stick something in the microwave and then get distracted and forget about it until hours later. Only it was a human being.

And they forgot about him for four days and that even handcuffed.

Convinced that he'd been left to die and distraught at not being able to talk to his family one more time, Chong tried to carve a message to his mother into his body. Finally, officers became curious about the weird banging in what was supposed to be an empty cell, and probably only investigated because they thought the jail was haunted. They opened the door to find Chong, covered in his own filth. He was rushed to the hospital and spent five days recovering from dehydration, kidney failure, cramps, and a perforated esophagus.

authority gave him $4 million as an apology mark.

And yet his story is nothing compared to Stephen Slevin's.

In 2005, Slevin was pulled over in rural New Mexico for a suspected DUI. Normally this means an overnight stay while you sober up, but Slevin showed signs of mental illness, and the police feared he was a suicide risk. So, they stuck him in solitary confinement. And then, once again, they kind of just left him there. Days passed, and then weeks. Slevin's pleas for information about his case fell on deaf ears.

Weeks turned into months. Slevin wasn't allowed to shave and was only rarely allowed to shower. His clothes were rotting off his body, and the prison staff refused to give him more. Every day, prison staff walked by his cell and gave him food, but ignored his increasingly desperate attempts to get help. After his tooth started to rot, they refused him a trip to the dentist, so Slevin had to pull it out himself.

So, how long do you think a man could be left in solitary before somebody -- a jail official, a lawyer, somebody -- stopped to ask why this dude's overnight stay had turned into an indefinite detention? A couple of months? Three?

Try nearly two goddamned years.

At that point they just dropped the charges and set him free. The county appeared to have no explanation for why Slevin was left there (at one point he had been transported to a mental hospital, then inexplicably returned to solitary), later he won $22 million but settled for less.

5. A Man Was Imprisoned for 53 Years Because No One Could Speak His Language

Andras Tamas, who was just one of millions of POWs in World War II. He had fought for the Germans and was captured by the Soviets in 1944. The problem was that Tamas went nuts while in the gulags (they'll do that to a person), and thus lost the ability to tell anyone who he was or why he was there. And after he got transferred to a mental hospital, the Soviets (whose system was not exactly a model of efficiency) eventually forgot, too.

With the war long over, the staff who knew the truth -- that he was a Hungarian POW who didn't speak Russian -- moved on to different assignments or just retired. Years passed, and eventually there was no one left who knew Tamas' case history, and they were too lazy to check his files. They were content that there was a crazy man who spoke no Russian, only a weird gibberish, and left it at that.

It wasn't until the late '90s that a visiting foreign doctor recognized that Tamas was actually speaking Hungarian and not an alien tongue he was making up on the fly. Cracking open his medical file for the first time in decades, the doctor found Tamas' case history and quickly notified the authorities in Budapest. The POW finally returned home to a hero's welcome, where he was dubbed "the last prisoner of World War II." Which is a nice title, but we're hoping somebody in Russia is checking to see if there are any more.