Speaker 1: As we got closer, we could see that there was
a body in the puddle next to the van. Everything
was submerged, separate or face, and for me it was like,
Oh my God, Please don't be dead. Please don't't be dead.
Speaker 2: This is the Miracle Files. I'm Emily Jones.
Speaker 3: And I'm Holly Worthington.
Speaker 4: Sometimes the news and social media can feel pretty dark.
Speaker 2: And true crime can leave you afraid to even crawl
into bed. But we're here to prove that there are
more miracles than murders.
Speaker 4: In these special Miracles in the News episodes, we dig
through the headlines for.
Speaker 2: You because miracles still happen and God is still good.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to Miracles in the News. Okay, we've all
heard of quicksand. I'm sure I know. When I was
a kid, I thought quicksand was like the scariest thing
in the entire world.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, Like there's like a clip in The Princess
Bride where he's stuck in the quicksand. Yes, and I
swear it made me think that quicksand was everywhere. I've
always convinced I was gonna fall right in.
Speaker 4: I thought that too, And when I was a kid,
like our brothers, Mark and Andrew and I would go
out in the sandbox and we would create all these
little quicksand pits, and there were quite a few of
those little army men toys that met their demise in
those muddy breads.
Speaker 2: I think I dug up those army men. Years later,
probably I was like.
Speaker 3: That you did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But as an adult, I haven't really felt like
quicksand was a threat to me.
Speaker 2: Not about you.
Speaker 3: Body, No, definitely, not until.
Speaker 4: I heard about a story in the news recently. And
it starts in June. Sixty eight year old Katherine Wasner
is driving her van along a remote road. It's like
kind of this muddy trail in the woods of northern Minnesota,
when all of a sudden, her van gets stuck. She's
completely alone. She's surrounded by nothing but trees and nature
for miles and it's not like she can flag anyone
down and get help because there's no one around. So
she walks to the other side of the van to
see if there's any way she can get the van unstuck,
and suddenly she starts sinking.
Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, her van got stuck on the trail.
So she got out and fell into the mud that
she said was like quicksand this all happened east of
Park Rapids.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Wait, okay, so there's just like a mud quicksand puddle
right next to her van.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it looks like just an ordinary mud puddle, but
it's actually about two feet deep. And when she falls
into it, the mud underneath just sucks Catherine into it
and it holds her in place, and the more she
struggles to get out of it, it actually becomes tighter.
Speaker 3: The mud just like grips her and will not let
her go.
Speaker 2: So, like, how much of her body is in the mud.
Speaker 3: Yeah, everything except her face and I'm talking even like
most of her face, but like her nose and cheeks
and eyes were out.
Speaker 2: But I mean, that would be so free duck, that'd
be so scary.
Speaker 4: Right, So Catherine has no choice but to just stay
as still as possible for hours and hours because even
the smallest movement could cause her to sink further and
submerge her face. And meanwhile, back home, her family realizes
that something has to be wrong. So Catherine was last
seen driving near Akley, Minnesota, but when she doesn't return home,
authorities issue an endangered missing person alert, especially because she
has medical conditions.
Speaker 3: But searchers have.
Speaker 4: No idea where she's gone, and no one knows that
Catherine is about one hundred miles away.
Speaker 2: Wow, in the mud, in the mud, So why is
she even out there?
Speaker 1: You know what?
Speaker 4: The articles didn't really say. I wondered the same thing.
And I don't know if she just she's maybe just
looking for a beautiful place to go for a drive,
or maybe she's confused and it's taken.
Speaker 3: In a wrong turn.
Speaker 4: I'm not really sure. But time passes, the sun starts
to go down. She ends up spending the night out
in the middle of the woods, still stuck in the mud.
And then another day goes by, and another day. For
three days, she waits three days under the hot June sun,
three nights alone in the woods, and the only part
of her body above the mud. Her face becomes badly sunburned,
she's dehydrated, and she's just completely unable to escape.
Speaker 2: It be pure torture. Like we have a game at
my house called the Misery Index, and like ranks things
one to one hundred on how awful they would be
to go through. Gosh, like one's like a step toe
fifties like maybe like a car accident or something. Number
one hundred is being buried alive in that game. In
that game, it actually is like nked torture that is
possibly go through it crazy. Yeah, yeah, I this was awful.
Speaker 4: I'm sure like I, it would be such a nightmare.
And meanwhile, two lifelong friends from North Dakota are getting
ready for a day of writing their UTVs. Adam Sandbek
and Mike Gravelan had done this for years together.
Speaker 3: They have their routine.
Speaker 4: They normally ride separate machines. They usually stay on familiar trails.
They usually drive fast, but on this day, none of
that happens.
Speaker 5: They say. They almost always use the same trail, but
not on Saturday. I have never mapped that trail in
my life.
Speaker 1: Ever. We changed everything how we do everything for some reason.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So instead of writing separately, Adam decides to ride
with Mike. Instead of staying on trails they know well,
they decide to explore somewhere new, and instead of passing
by an unfamiliar trail that they never go down, they
turn onto it. In fact, they actually drive past at first,
and then they turn around and go back. Mike later
said that they had driven past this trail for years
and had never once thought about going down it. And
this isn't exactly an inviting trail either. It's muddy, it's
covered with potholes, there's even a fallen tree blocking part
of it. It's the kind of road most people would
probably just turn around and avoid. But these two men
keep going. And then they see a van way back
in the woods, and Mike immediately knows something isn't right.
As they get closer to investigate, Adam notices something sticking
out of a mud puddle. At first, he can't tell
what he's looking at. Then he realizes it's a human
face right there in the mud. I can't even imagine what.
Speaker 3: That moment was like. Be crazy, yeah, crazy.
Speaker 4: And their first thought is they think they've found a body.
Their first thought is is they think they've found a body.
Speaker 1: We started walking towards the body, and for me, it
was like, oh my god, please don't be dead, Please
don't be dead.
Speaker 5: All you can see was just her face sticking out
of the water.
Speaker 1: Her ears were submerged, everything was submerged except for her face.
Her eyes were open.
Speaker 6: Oh my gosh, that would be shocking, shocking, I have
to say, when I first found this story, somebody had
created this ai image of this mud puddle with this space,
and I thought it was real at first, and it
was so disturbing looking, but that's probably what it really
looked like.
Speaker 2: I mean, I have a clear picture in my head. Yeah,
so so scary.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but then something even more shocking happens.
Speaker 1: Well, we walked up. We thought she was dead, and
we thought it was just a body, and then she whispered,
help me, and it scared the crap out of me.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. I'm trying to like put myself in
these guys shoes and think what I would do, and like,
I'm sure they're going to do something, but I imagine there
had to have been a moment where they just were
frozen in time. Yeah what am I seeing here?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it'd be like something out of a horror movie, honestly,
I know. But Mike has actually spent thousands of hours
training as a US Deputy marshal, and it doesn't take
long before these two men jump into action. They immediately
start digging her out, but the mud has a suction
like grip on her whole body, and it ends up
taking about an hour and a half for these men
to finally pull Catherine from the mud.
Speaker 3: That's how stuck she was. Wow. So they then call
nine one one, and here's the nine one one dispatcher
summarizing the situation on the call.
Speaker 1: Came across the vands, second the mud and the female
party laying in the water.
Speaker 5: Next to it. She's waiting alert but says she's been
there for a couple of days.
Speaker 3: Crazy.
Speaker 4: I'm sure she wondered if that would be her final
resting place at some points.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it'd be so hard, so hard.
Speaker 1: She watched the sun come up and go down while
she was in that puddle, and she said it was
like quickset and she couldn't get out.
Speaker 2: Catherine was even trapped through the previous night's storm.
Speaker 1: She'd line in the water and you know, watching it
rain and probably just hoping that the water level doesn't
rise and surpass her breathing.
Speaker 2: She's a resilient woman, super strong. To be able to
endure what she did for three days is absolutely amazing.
I can't imagine that moment where it's you're already stuck
in mud and you can't move and the water levels
are rising. Oh, you don't know what you're gonna be
able to breathe at any second. Like, to make matters worse.
Speaker 3: She had to felt so panicked and to not be able.
Speaker 2: To even move this poor woman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she definitely has to be a strong woman.
Speaker 4: So eventually paramedics arrive and they rush Catherine to the hospital,
and despite everything she's endured, she's expected to make a
full recovery, and she's so.
Speaker 3: Grateful to be alive.
Speaker 4: I mean, Catherine could have easily died in those woods,
but God had other plans for her, and Adam and
Mike were literally the angels who saved her life.
Speaker 2: Wow. I mean, it's not like there's probably a lot
of research about what happens to your body when you're
stuck in mud for.
Speaker 3: Three days now, I'm sure not.
Speaker 2: But it is amazing that she walked away from this alive.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, And so here's the part that really sticks with me,
no pun intended. In the interviews I watched, Adam kept
replaying all the little decisions that day that led to
them finding Catherine, and I agree with him that it
had to be God, call it the miracle in the mind.
Speaker 1: We changed how we do everything for some reason, and
it had to be got it had to be.
Speaker 2: Isn't that how miracles so often happened? Like something small,
unexpected changes your path and leads you to where God
wants you to be. Like, yeah, we hear all the time.
Speaker 3: I think many of.
Speaker 4: Us have had experiences where a wrong turn became the
right turn. You know, or you have a delay that
leads you to the right place at the right time.
And one thing is for sure in this story, if
Adam and Mike had spent that day exactly the way
they always did, Catherine Wasner probably would never have been found.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And what's so powerful about stories like this is that
if you allow God to use you, you can be
the reason that someone else's story continues.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, Well, thank you everyone for joining us today.
Speaker 3: As always, subscribe.
Speaker 4: And leave us a review, and make sure to share
this story with your friends and family. And we'll leave
you with a few words from the heroes in this story,
Adam and Mike.
Speaker 1: We've heard that word hero a lot lately, and we
ain heroes, just two guys. But I have no doubt
the hand of God was there guiding us.
Speaker 4: Hey, there you go.
Speaker 3: Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 4: If you have a miracle to share, contact us at
the Miracle files dot com or find us on social media.
Speaker 3: We release new episodes each Monday.
Speaker 2: Yes, so don't forget Miracle Mondays. Subscribe on your favorite
podcast platform and YouTube for amazing video content as well.
Speaker 4: Join us next time as we discover more of God's miracles,
and don't forget to look for His light in your
own lives