You don’t want to fall through a roof. You REALLY don’t want to fall through a roof ONTO a caged furnace. Holy shit.

After hearing the way the setup was described, i was incredibly surprised at the comparatively low deathtoll of only 23. 400 people on a roof made to only support its own weight, 5 stories high above a factory with a burning furnace... i really thought this would go into triple-digits. these people were incredibly lucky

Props to the factories workers. They tried every way to prevent this and were repeatedly denied help. Then they had to be the first to witness the horrific scene and jump in to rescue them.

Sometimes the fault truly does fall on the victims and this is one of those cases. At least the adults. Children tend to follow adults lead, even with something they know they're not supposed to be doing. "If the grown ups are doing it, it must be ok". They ignored the factory workers, broke into the area, then after noticing the roof wasn't safe, they joked about it instead of getting down.

What pisses me off about this case is that the factory workers were even MOMENTARILY considered a possibly guilty of this event, even if ultimately let go. They did their due diligence by trying to drive the idiots away.

As tragic as the whole story is, the sight at 5:15 of a worker from 1900 clearly dabbing on the dummies who wouldn't stay off the roof does undercut the mood ever so slightly lmao All humor aside, thank you for bringing attention to these forgotten tragedies!

I'm an historical archaeologist. While researching early glass making in the San Francisco Bay region, I came across this story. It has haunted me ever since. Conditions in the glass foundries were appalling, with boys as young as six running miles every day with gobs of molten glass for a pittance. Injuries were frequent and deaths not unknown.

Considering that 100 or so people fell through the roof, dropping five stories onto a hot furnace and other equipment, it’s kind of surprising only 23 of them were killed.

Geez...falling five stories only to land on a 1000+°F furnace. I hadn't heard of this disaster before now. Great video!

This might be the first story on FH where the factory managers/owners are not to blame. The foreman and the workers tried to chase the crowd off, even going so far as to threaten them; when that didn't work, they turned to the authorities for help but were rebuffed. And when disaster struck, they shut the furnace off and began trying to rescue everyone.

I have to agree, this is one of the times that the people did it to themselves. But Oh My God, the temperature of the furnace they fell onto! I shudder to think of the horrid scene in that place!

Surprised that, in the US, no sports crowd crush disaster has surpassed this death toll. Those events, sadly, have often had terrible consequences in other countries.

One of the rare times the victims screwed themselves instead of a shady construction company screwing them

I was surprised to hear the death toll was only 23.

Dozens of people falling literally into an oven, spilling themselved with hot oil and being trapped in their positions is insanely horrific, and while I learn about that I see the man at 5:15 hitting a point perfect dab. I could not have been prepared

I can't imagine falling onto the furnace and not being able to get off because of injuries from the fall. What a nightmare. You must have an unlimited number of disasters to draw from. It's so interesting and educational. thanks for sharing.

Its so sad that its been forgotten. Im so glad you find these and share it with us so the event isnt lost forever

And if you ever need evidence of America's all-consuming obsession with football, here's two papers reporting on the game not even acknowledging the people falling to a firey death within shouting distance.

"Because the survivors were deemed to having contributed to their injury, they were not entitled to any compensation" As callous as it is, that's definitely the right call.

Thinking about my own younger years, in retrospect I have to consider myself incredibly lucky to be alive and uninjured today. Being young makes you so reckless as to do things you would never, ever, in a million years, do as an older wiser more experienced person. This story just reminded me of some foolish things I did as a youngster (I never climbed on top of flimsy roofs, but some of the things I did, especially with friends, wasn't too far from that, and sometimes even worse in terms of the dangers).

A tragic event, of course, but I can't overlook the patented safety dab at 5:15

"10,000 tickets were printed for that first game. Twice the number of spectators showed up." "I don't like where this is going."-JonTron

I hadn’t heard about this before. And it was sad but the victims had no one to blame but themselves. You never think things like this will happen to you until it does…😢

I must say, it's rather comically dark to celebrate victims who died in a furnace with giant bonfire.

Lost to the mist of time, but this tragedy had a huge impact on me. Not least for the sense of impending disaster. Falling 5 storeys is horrific enough, but falling that far and landing on a fully operational furnace just makes it all the more unbearable

I particularly respect that you include information that the buildings shown were of a similar type, and not the actual incident structure, likewise your other information of a similar nature. Your integrity and thoroughness are greatly appreciated. This incident is so horrific, with spectators that somehow survived their five storey fall, landing on the scalding hot roof of an operational blast furnace! The photograph of spectators crowded onto the apex of the roof, moments before its catastrophic collapse is eerily unnerving...

Thank you for covering this. I never would have heard of this without your channel. One possible suggestion for a video -- the disaster at the Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago, Illinois in 1958. I'm currently reading a book about it (To Sleep With the Angels) and boy is it heartbreaking.

This is why I like this channel, we learn a little history with a factual account. Thanks for keeping it real!

I agree with the judgements. Bring back personal accountability. And also, a 5-0 game with a late field goal? So one safety for practically the whole game 😂

When you showed the images of the fire and talked about the active furnace, and noted it was all children on the roof, I literally said "oooh noooo" with my hands covering my face.

Been following your channel since you were 3 videos deep and I haven't missed a single anytime you post one. As always, your work is unequaled in its quality and your use of that background music and cadence has become a signature of your work you should always be proud to have produced.

40 years ago in Grand Marais, Minn. A couple looking for UFO's died after getting stranded in their car. There is lots more to their story, but details are hard to find. Would be pretty fascinating to learn more.

Keep up the great work with these documentaries and shining light in some of the events that aren’t talked about much or are almost forgotten.

Here we are hearing about it 122 years later. May the dearly departed continue to rest peacefully

Wow even my Dad who seemed to know everything about baseball and football games back in his day never told me about this disaster! Scary and so sad! Ty FH 💕

I worked in a foundry with molten metal and the last place on earth you want to end up is in a furnace they are so dangerous, I really feel for those that died in such a painful way and the survivors with those burns that was always my fear working with furnaces.

I actually lived near Stanford and my brother went to Berkeley and I've never heard of this. Thanks for this, it was indeed fascinating horror.

I lived in the Bay Area for forty-five years and worked in San Francisco for thirty-five of them. This is the first I've heard of this tragedy. What a sad story! From a new subscriber, Thank you for posting this! 🙋👍

The workers at the glassworks were probably never able to eat cooked pork again without an attack of PTSD due to how much cooking human flesh supposedly smells like pork...

5:15 The earliest recorded depiction of a man doing a dab.

I'm an avid fan of Cal football since the 1960s, and have attended many Big Games. This is the first time I've ever heard of this calamity.

This is why I don't like going to crowded areas

Wow, I'm from the US and had never heard of this! Thanks for doing this one. As a graduate of UGA, I'm surrounded by SEC news. I've never heard of the "Big Game" either.

I'm very surprised to hear that the worst sporting disaster in the US is 'only' 23. Here in the UK we have had several since WW2 that were much worse than that.

Grew up my whole life in California and locally in the bay area and no one ever talks about this. Wow. Thank you.

Since we're on Sporting events, hopefully someday we get a video about the 1955 Le Man's disaster. Great, informative video!

This is one story where I don't feel so bad for the victims. It's still sad that ot happened, but they knew they weren't supposed to be up there and were actively dodging people trying to keep them down 🙄

This channel is the only one for which I will sit and await the newest episode's release. No one else does it as well as FH

At 5:05 you see a window with flames in the background. If you look at the bottom middle pane. There's literally a face in the dirty window. It's kind of creepy seeing the face as the narrator is telling the story of people falling and being burned.

Great episode! That would be an ugly way to die. I love your channel. \ As a native Californian, I especially like the West Coast videos like one and the Saint Francis Dam collapse. Many locals don't even have any knowledge of these disasters. I've been to the site in this video and to the St. Francis Dam site (I still own a small chunk of the failed dam's concrete). If you haven't already, I'd love to see your take on the Mt. Saint Helens volcano eruption in Washington.

I went to Stanford for college and business school and had never heard of this. Great job!

As others have stated before it's interesting when it's not company negligence. And it's unfortunate that the valiant efforts to stop people putting themselves in danger by the factory workers didn't work.

Crazy and unheard of (to me). Thank you for sharing! This is why I love your channel and always recommending it when I have the chance.

Thank you for this. I didn’t know about this but you do an important job of making us remember.

Perfect. Woke up for another one of my insomnia midnight Cinderella runs I need something interesting to watch. 👍

It's 5am and I'm still awake, stoked to be able to watch this video

I expected a crush, instead i got people melting and burning alive I thought of something terrible but got something even more horrible

I am a huge fan of fascinating horror and have been a subscriber for the last few years and I love to listen to them! That being said, there are a couple of the stories, this being one of them, that completely leaves me seething! "The deceased had no business being up there." What the hell kind of attitude is that? It wouldn't surprise me to find out a majority of the children who died falling through that roof actually worked in those factories and having died the way they did probably saved them from an agonizing death in the future from some sort of debilitating industrial cancer. I mean truly, nothing was done as a result of this disaster. Nothing positive happened. No charitable funds opened up in any victim's name, no extra safety precautions or a little warning sign or two in the right place was introduced, hell, they didn't even stop the game! It was all for nothing. Society learned nothing. And that, my friends, is how you know a great storyteller! They make you emotional, no matter what that emotion is. Well done, another great video! Bravo!

Fascinating Horror has the best delivery with this kinda content (in case I sound lacking compassion, I’ve only just started the video.) Love the vids and research you do, thanks for the hard work.

The 1982 ending of Cal vs Stanford is one of the most famous in history. Look it up if you have never seen it.

very sad, these sort of things happen even today, a good friend of mines son (albeit 30 years ago) climbed up onto a buildings roof as a prank and fell through the skylight, he survived but broke his back and has been in a wheelchair ever since……. I remember doing similar things when I was 10/12+ and luckily survived the daredevil escapades…….. I'm now 74!

How horrible. The ignorance before, during, and after such a tragedy is staggering. To think that the pain those people went though is lost to time…that’s crazy. That one person suffered for three years? Poor guy. I wonder if he would’ve done any better with the medical advancements we have today.

this channel is well-rounded and all the content quite good. i like this channel

Brilliant as always, Kristian. (Really pleasing as I think I suggested this one in Dec last year...thank you for bringing it alive!)

I have to say I agree with the court. If I have a swimming pool with a high fence around it, signs posted saying keep out, and a literal watchman and other people around saying DON'T, and you manage to drown in my pool despite that - what was I supposed to do? I understand attractive nuisances, but who else's fault was it? The organizers for the event being hugely popular? This didn't happen because of an overcrowded stadium, or because ticket purchasers were turned away for lack of room. The factory? They had a fence and literally a watchman watching and attempting to keep people out. Whoever built it? Well, the roof was perfectly fine to hold its own weight. Was it reasonable to prepare for 400 people to trespass and go sit on it? And when they realized IT FRIGGING *FELT* UNSAFE, they joked about it. They didn't get off. It's messed up that the police department said "talk to the guy there," but they did HAVE a guy there. He just wasn't available. Maybe they thought he was. Maybe they thought the issue was purely trespassing and not "THEY'RE GOING TO CAVE THE ROOF IN." When children fall five stories onto an operating furnace, it does *feel* like someone should pay. But the reality is that the victims knowingly and deliberately avoided the reasonable safeguards in place.

While it's horrible that this disaster happened, and that businesses both back then and today, I think, are typically the causes of disasters, THIS is a situation where I 100% agree that this business couldn't have done anything to prevent this tragedy, and it was truly beyond their control. You could argue that they could've made the roof a bit stronger in case of bad weather, or used fixed oil pipes instead of ones that could easily break, but that STILL doesn't excuse the victims from trespassing and being on the roof in the first place, which, roof collapse or no, is a crime of itself. Not to mention the fact that nobody thinks "what if a crowd of people sits on my roof"? What designer would even THINK of a scenario of something which wouldn't happen under normal circumstances? No matter what, these people had no business being on the roof in the first place, and, had they NOT been there, regardless whether or not the construction of the building was up to par, this disaster wouldn't have happened. It's like climbing over a zoo fence and getting upset that the animals in the enclosure attacked you. At the end of the day, whether or not the zookeeper did his job right is irrelevant, because you shouldn't have climbed over that fence to begin with. There are smart ways to save money. Climbing on top of a roof of a building and trespassing so you won't have to pay a ticket to watch a football game is NOT one of them.

The reason your one of my favorite KZfaqrs is you come up with accidents I’ve never would have learned about without your channel. Keep up the good work!

5:15- *YOOOO BRO, HE’S DOING THE DAB!*

5:15 a historic dab for all the “what could go wrong” logic behind a complete lack of health and safety measures at the time.

I love your channel. Keep it up!

We need that law to come back. "Oh, you were where you weren't supposed to be and got injured? Sounds like a you problem broham." Seriously, the guards tried at the least.

i like your extremely respectful, tasteful, buttoned-down summary of the facts, overlaid by that contemporary newspaper headline’s choice of words, “sizzling shrieking human mass” 7:17

Organises big football game... pockets spilling with cash... forgets football. Sounds like the ideal politician and future President!

Special mention for the use of stock photos and footage in this one, it must be very hard when there's little to no photography of the incident itself, and while they're probably not perfect, the 'similar to...' images still massively help to visualise the whole thing. Just wanted to express some appreciation for that rather than slapping a single static image on the whole video like some channels might do.

I am quite familiar with The Big Game, but had never heard of this associated disaster before. Thanks for posting,

08:00 "They were not entitled to any compensation." - Well, yeah, play stupid games, get stupid prizes.

The headline of the newspaper @7:20 really got me, had to reread it a second time. "Two San Jose Men Die Amid **Sizzling Shrieking Human Mass** in Collapsed Factory at Big Game"

Great work as always. Kids really have no conception of danger. I used to play with my friends on the railroad tracks--I really cringe now when I think of it. It was very dangerous. My mother would know because I would always tear the belts on my dresses doing that. Lucky to still be here.

I grew up in the Bay Area, but I've never heard of this disaster. I'll definitely have to read more about it!

I really, really look forward to every episode -- "fascinating". Thank you!

I’ve listened to tons of these but for some reason the telling of this one really struck me. I think because it wasn’t clear what was going to go wrong and then the lead-in as you mention the building, then the roof, then the supports, that’s really good. Anyway, thank you!

5:16 "I know it's imperative we rescue these guys sir, but I need to dab on the haters first."

The injuries were so beyond the crime. What a horrendous loss.

The lack of self-preservation instinct back in the days was astounding. Usually it's lack of knowledge or undiscovered dangers that led to accidents back then, but this time it was just sheer stupidity.

I have never heard of this catastrophe. How awful. Thank you for the great video.

A bunch people falling five stories through a roof onto a scalding furnace and hot oil sounds like something out of a Final Destination movie. Back in the early, early days, college football was far more dangerous than it is now. I can't remember when it was, but college football almost got banned when something like a dozen players died on the field or from injuries sustained on the field in a single year.

You should upload these to Spotify as short podcasts!

Oh my gosh! I’ve never heard of this! Well done!!!

Again, fantastic content. Good job.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Excellent presentation, really enjoy your videos. Might I offer another incident for your telling, the Abbeystead disaster of 1984.

This was a good one that I'd never heard about, you provide some really quality stories and content! Keep it up! Also, stay well.

I went to one of these schools and heard lots of the lore of the Big Game’s history, but, as mentioned in the last line of this video, I never heard a thing about this disaster until now.

Another great episode.

I always look forward to a new video from you dude, please keep going love your channel.

This one's a difficult one to hear about as a safety professional- the number one rule of safety is to never blame the victims. Obviously, this one challenges that ironclad rule. The only solutions I can think of to prevent this from happening would be to increase capacity of the stadium or increase security around the glassworks plant, but neither of these are easy solutions and the deficiencies in both were not at all to blame.

When 400 people get on top of a building, oblivious to the inherent risk, it makes me wonder how humanity has managed to survive this long.

3:09 corrugated iron, wooden beams, the phrase " it was designed to support its' own weight." I'm dreading the next few minutes of this video...

5:22 this was shown for too long for me but to acknowledge this guy dabbing

I don’t understand why college football is so important in the US