Stranger Danger

when it's retired from service? Well, for those curious enough to ask, you'll find that there are a wide variety of jobs these planes can be pressed into after they're done ferrying passengers, and not all of these jobs are legal. In fact, one infamous airliner eight four four AA ended

up causing an international incident. Maury Joseph is a Florida based CEO of an airline leasing company, and in February of two thousand and two, he came into possession of a Boeing seven twenty seven tail number as I said, eight four four AA, recently retired from American Airlines. He was approached by a South African entrepreneur, Keith Irwin, who had been hired by a joint partnership of airline interests in Africa, looking to make money transporting fuel by air

to diamond mines in Angola. A civil war had broken out in the country and transporting fuel by car had become too dangerous. Both Morey and Irwin had thixed skins and were used to conducting business in third world nations with these kind of problems. They also weren't afraid of working with industries that some people might find distasteful, such

as the diamond trade. Maury sold Irwin the seven forty seven for one million dollars, but accepted a down payment of just one hundre undred and twenty five thousand, with further installments to follow once the fuel shipments got to underway. Maury even sent a business associate with Irwin to Angola to make sure that things went smoothly. But from the get go things were anything but smooth. Irwin and his

flight crew were subjected to harsh conditions in Angola. They slept in terrible housing with no running water or electricity. They also felt unsafe. Practically everyone in the city carried in AK forty seven. They were stuck in limbo as they waited for their clients at one of the mines to process their passports and get them licenses to operate the seven forty seven in Angola airspace. At one point they feared that they would never get their passports back

and would be stuck in the country forever. Eventually, though, their passports were returned, but some of Irwin's crew had already had enough and they returned to the States. Even worse, the client at the diamond mine wasn't paying up for expenses a crewed. Thus far, Erwin had to accept his losses and negotiate a new deal with a new client. Erwin and what remained of the crew started flying missions delivering fuel to diamond mines in Angola. It was dangerous work.

They had to maintain as high in altitude as possible until the very last second before landing to avoid being hit by gunfire from the war, and there were no paved landing strips at these mines. They were making extremely bumpy landings at dirt airfields. Before long, most of Irwin's crew had given up and gone home, including Maury Joseph's representative. The operative had failed to make a return on Moury's investment,

and he wanted his plane back. Eight four to four double A would sit in a hangar in Angola for months, slowly deteriorating and accumulating storage fees, and so eventually Maury, our Airline CEO, traveled with an associate of his, ben Paedia, to Angola, whose job it was to prepare the air aircraft for the flight to South Africa, where it would be finally sold off. Maury flew ahead to finalize the deal, but on May twenty sixth of two thousand and three,

he received a disturbing phone call. The aircraft and ben Paedia had disappeared. It was last seen making erratic movements on the runway in Angola before making an unauthorized takeoff over the Atlantic, and Maury wasn't just mad, he was also scared. Losing track of a plane that size and that valuable had serious consequences. This was even more true in the years immediately following the September eleventh, two thousand

and one attacks. He had to contact the FBI and the Homeland Security, who in turn contacted every single US embassy in Africa to let them note to be on the lookout for the missing plane. Everyone was afraid that the plane had been co opted by terrorists. Fortunately, an attack never came, but that left one of the biggest mysteries in aviation history happened to the plane. Most people close to Ben Padilla believe that he wouldn't have stolen it.

He was a simple airline engineer. It seems more likely that criminals from Angola might have attacked the plane with him on board and taken it into a remote area for disassembly. It's also possible that whoever hijacked the plane never made it to their destination and crashed into the ocean. This is one curious tale that will remain that way. No trace of eight four four double A has ever been found. It's the largest missing aircraft in world history.

Whatever you think of Maury Irwin Ben and the plane cargo business, it seems like surely there has to be an easier way to make a living. As anyone from a small town will tell you not to. Everyone is so welcoming to outsiders. People are wary of strangers. Newcomers can feel isolated, unwanted, or even outright disliked, and such was the case for Teodor Glava, a Romanian immigrant who moved to the small town of Lafayette, Colorado, in nineteen fourteen.

Born in Lesnik in eighteen seventy seven. Glava led a brutal life working in marble minds belonging to the Austro Hungarian Empire. This work was dangerous, physically demanding, and of course it paid very little, so he came to America with nothing, hoping to find better work mining coal there. Glava eventually planned to send for his wife and daughter,

whom he had left behind in Romania. When he arrived in Colorado, Glava was emaciated from years of backbreaking work and his difficult voyage, and the fact that he was so tall didn't really help. His skin was pale after years of working in the marble quarries and months in a cramp ship's cabin. Today we would consider him a

sickly looking man. To the townspeople of Lafayette in nineteen fourteen, though he looked straight out of every vampire legend they had come to fear Tiotoglava's story came to a tragic end only four years after his arrival. The Spanish flu pandemic wiped out hundreds of people in the nearby town of Boulder, and the disease reached Lafayette shortly after. Glava and many other coal miners stood almost no chance. Remember

this was before the age of vaccination. The cold and unsafe working conditions meant that their immune systems were already weak, and tragically, he passed away in December of nineteen eighteen before he ever got a chance to send for his family back home. And this is where the story of tiotoor Glava comes to an end and the legend of the Lafayette Vampire is born. You see, because Glava had been ignored and isolated for so long, no one really

knew much about him. The absence of his family and the poverty he died in meant but there was no money for a proper burial, and as a result, he was buried in the paupers section of the Lafayette Cemetery with a headstone hastily carved using the pointed end of

a trowel and cheap cement. Glavaz headstone also inaccurately listed his birthplace as Transylvania, the birthplace, as we know, of literature's most famous vampire, Dracula, with influenza killing dozens of others in Lafayette, Though, people in town became desperate for someone to blame when they spotted Glava's strangely scrawled headstone and that terrifying word Transylvania. They recalled the pale, lanky stranger who had wandered into their midst so recently, and

hatched a plan to rid themselves of this pandemic. They would need to dig up and kill the vampire. That winter, residents bundled up against the Colorado snow and made their way to the cemetery. Once there, they found his grave, and they started to dig. What they found in glavas Coffin, confirmed all of the worst fears. He looked nothing short of monstrous. His hair and fingernails had continued to grow,

which they took for proof of his undead nature. Glava's gums had pulled back away from his teeth, making them appear longer and more pointed. Moreover, his body looked almost completely unchanged from the day he had died. In short, he looked exactly like the vampire legends they had heard all their lives. Now, as any mortician will tell you, these changes to Glava's body were not supernatural at all.

Skin and gums shrink after a person dies and begins to decompose, making hair, nails, and teeth appear longer, especially without the modern embalming processes we have today. And then there was Glava's unchanged appearance. Without any money to pay for a proper burial, he had been placed in the cheapest coffin available and buried in a shallow grave by a caretaker, possibly the same guy who had carved his

headstone out of cement. The winter weather had kept Glava's body well preserved, which explains why he looked almost the same as the day he died. Of course, to the people of Lafayette, they had no way of knowing this, and they hadn't trudged to the cemetery in the middle

of the freezy night in search of rational explanations. Once they had dug up Glava's body, one of the locals plunged a wooden steak right through the supposed vampire's heart, and then, satisfied that they had rid themselves of the source of their bad luck, they went home. One can only imagine their surprise when a flourishing sapling appeared directly over Glava's grave that spring. The wooden steak intended to

kill the vampire had taken root and grown into something beautiful. Nowadays, Glava has become a legend in Lafayette and around the United States. His grave, with the same poorly carved headstone, is covered in roses, trinkets, money, and souvenirs from his home country of Romania, and the tree is over a century old now and still growing. Passer buyers probably think that they're seeing the final resting place of a beloved local resident, but have no idea that they're actually looking

at the legendary vampire of Lafayette. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldolore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.