Here’s a Snopes link with several more examples.
This thread has me chuckling in between vows to never, ever, ever, ever, ever set foot in an elevator again (I really hate elevators. To a ludicrous degree).
Asimovian, that’s one of the best stories ever! Next time, you should treat those guys in the elevator with you to a roller-coaster ride at the park. 
Hey now, don’t be too hard on yourself. If you had reports that instead of 13, the display had a dæmon skull sitting on a couch (yeah, just the head-- easier to relax that way) watching the scene from The Exorcist where the girl sticks a crucifix up her hoo hah while chanting “Fuck me, Jesus,” and you had ignored that portent of doom, then maybe you could chastise yourself a little bit.
Of course, if the demon head had been watching something more innocuous (read: not Teletubbies or American Idol) like Scooby Doo, then maybe you still could have gotten on the elevator, thinking that the incubus’ skull was just chillin, wanting to be left to his own devices. Hell, with Scooby, he might have even offered you some popcorn and a toke.
It could have been worse. As the doors closed, she could have said…
[Anne Robinson]“Good morning, Mr. Tyler. Going…Dooown…?”[/Anne Robinson]
That sounds like something that happened once in the 1960’s.
All joking aside, props to you for handling the situation with such aplomb. If I was in that situation the only thing I would have been plombing is my pants.
Never been stuck in an elevator. But in the 1990 timeframe, I had two unpleasant experiences in the same building I worked in.
1> I worked on the 19th floor. Bomb threat against the three letter business computer company on the 4th floor. It took 45 freaking minutes to walk down the stairs in order to evacuate the building. Worse yet, for some reason, the air flow was sucking air into the stairwell from all floors, pulling the doors open, so if there had been a bomb resulting in a fire, we’d have all been cooked in a big smoker.
2> I’m alone on the elevator. It FREEFALLS from the 19th floor to somewhere around the 6-7th floor, where the mechanisms kick in and slow it to a stop at the 4th floor. :eek:
Why no, I didn’t decide to use the stairs from that point on. I worked on the 19th floor. I’m not walking that several times a day.
If that was directed at me, thank you, but elevators just don’t trigger anything with me. (Which is not to say that I don’t have my share of phobias.) And both of the other occupants were cool folks, too. The other guys was about as chatty and joking as I was. I couldn’t tell if the woman who was with us was nervous about the situation, or if she was just naturally quiet, but either way, she showed no signs of panic.
Granted, now that I’ve read this thread, I’m going to be very, very careful about any elevator that opens in between floors. Elevator decapitation is definitely NOT on my list of acceptable ways to go.
From the link at Snopes-30 people each year are killed from elevators? Holy crap.
I am not particularly perturbed by elevators, but man, I dream of them all the time, and not in a good way.
I truly think the funniest part of this thread was the advertisements I was forced to read at the bottom of the forum while thinking of my smart ass reply…No bs…the ads were:
1.) Maryland Home Elevators
Residential Home Elevators Sales over 3,000 home elevators installed
2.) Residential Elevators
Custom Manufactured in Maryland, Call Now…
3.) Calvert Stairlifts LLC
Serving MD, DC, VA, & DE Discount Prices-Factory Certified
Oh shit, forgot to post my favorite bad elevator joke, which I told to my friends in an elevator and got an attractive girl to laugh:
The elevator operator opens the door and lets the boy out. “Your floor, son.”
“Why do you call me son?” the lad asks.
“Well, I brought you up, didn’t I?”
More than THIRTY people die every year in the US from elevator accidents?!
Cripes, that’s scary. I thought it would be one of those things where it happened maybe once or twice a year.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a movie based on this fear:
And did anyone fart?
My elevator story:
Back in the early nineties, before cellphones, when I was working in Hong Kong, during my lunch hour I went to visit my buddies, a bunch of Filippino architects, at their high-rise office in Wanchai. It was a 1970s building, built in the “crappy Asian concrete” style of the time. The elevators were from the same era.
The five architects, me, my friend, and a couple of strangers, crammed into the tiny elevator to go up to their office on the 16th floor. When it got to the 16th floor, however, the thing just carried on going - up and up and up, us furiously punching the inert buttons, towards the top floor, the 28th, where I thought it would stop. Even there it didn’t stop - we carried on going up for another second or two, until the top of the elevator jammed up at the pulley, or as near to it as it could get.
We rang the bell. Nothing. We rang again. Nothing. We shouted. Nothing. We banged on the door. Nothing. We tried forcing it. No luck. So one of the guys just leant on the bell. There was no air conditioning, but thankfully the fan was on, as were the lights.
To amuse us, the architects made farmyard noises.
After about an hour, during which time, thank god, nobody required any bodily functions, nor had a panic attack, we heard some banging on the door, and some clanking, and then the the door parted by about half an inch, and a crowbar protruded in at the bottom. We put our fingers in the gap between the sliding doors, and a bunch of gloved hands came in from the outside and grabbed too, and eventually between us and the crowbar we inched the doors open. We had halted about 4 or 5 feet above the 28th floor, and were looking down on a bunch of grinning Chinese firemen.
The firemen helped each of us down from our perch, and we took the other elevator down - I had to go back to my office, never having seen my friends’ place of work. I was considerably late back, and my boss roasted me for it. Nor did she believe what had happened to me.