A sinkhole opened up under a man’s bedroom and swallowed him up.
As if there wasn’t enough to worry about in life already, prepare for a new nightmare to start infiltrating your unconscious next time you close your eyes. However, devastatingly, it wasn’t just a nightmare but one man’s reality.
Florida resident Jeffrey Bush vanished after being sucked into a sinkhole which opened up below his house in Tampa, his entire bedroom getting engulfed.
On March 1 2013, a sinkhole estimated to measure around estimated at 20 feet across and 20 feet deep opened up right below Jeff’s bedroom.
His brother, Jeremy, heard him ‘scream,’ telling CNN’s ‘AC360’ at the time he ‘ran toward’ the bedroom to help, but by the time he reached it ‘everything was gone’.
He said: “My brother’s bed, my brother’s dresser, my brother’s TV. My brother was gone.”
However, not giving up just yet and swearing he could hear Jess still ‘hollering [his] name to help him’ Jeremy told The Guardian that he jumped into the hole himself to try and reach for his brother.
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Alas, ‘all’ Jeremy could see was ‘the cable wire running from the TV going down into the hole,’ alongside ‘a corner of the bed and a corner of the box spring and the frame of the bed’.
A sheriff deputy eventually pulled Jeremy out before he met the same horrifying fate as his brother.
Officials later lowered equipment into the hole to try and recover Jeff, but Hillsborough County fire rescue spokesperson Jessica Damico said there was no sign of him and ongoing observation showed no signs of life either.
The hole was later filled by Hillsborough County who also bought the Bushs’ house and the property next door to ensure no one else lived there and was at risk of the same fate.
And it’s just as well the county did, because the very same sink hole struck again.
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The sinkhole which opened and led to Jeff’s vanishing later opened on two other occasions.
The first time, in 2015, measuring 20 feet wide. It was similarly filled in, however in July 2023, the same hole opened yet again.
Thankfully, in both cases, no one was injured, however, Jeff’s remains have never been recovered from the site.
Florida Department of Environmental Protection notes Sinkholes are a ‘common feature’ in Florida.
The state features many caverns below the ground of limestone – limestone easy to dissolve in water and subsequently susceptible to giving way.