Grandma trapped in elevator for six days survived by rationing groceries

On 1 January 1988, while the rest of the world celebrated the new year, 76-year-old Kively Papajohn of Limassol, Cyprus, was trapped in an elevator.

She’d been in there for four days, surviving the cold and battling dehydration by rationing the fruit, vegetables and bread that she had in her shopping bag.

Kively was eventually rescued on 2 January, after spending a total of six days stuck inside – a world record for the longest time trapped in a lift.

This was over double the previous record of 62 hours, set by Englishman Graham Coates from 24-27 May 1986.

Kively had lived in Manhattan, New York, for over four decades, where she used elevators multiple times per day without ever experiencing an issue. However, upon her return to her birthplace of Limassol, her luck ran out.

Kively’s terrifying ordeal began on 28 December, the first day that the shops opened back up after Christmas. She had gone out to get some groceries, but as she was returning to her third-floor apartment, the lift got stuck at the second floor.

Despite shouting and banging on the door, Kively’s cries for help went unanswered. 

Her apartment block was on Anexartisias Street, a bustling shopping area, however, Kively was the only person living inside the four-storey building – all the other apartments were empty.

“Shivers went down my spine and I was in a cold sweat,” she later told the National Enquirer.

The elevator was so small that Kively could not even lie down. Unable to sleep during the night, she said she prayed to Virgin Mary and waited until dawn, when she resumed banging on the walls.

“When I saw I was going to pass another night in that trap, I thought I’d lose my mind,” she recalled.

Kively hadn’t eaten anything up to that point, as she was trying to consume as little as possible to avoid having to use the toilet, but to keep her strength up, she ate a few of the tomatoes she’d bought.

On the third day, Kively said she began to feel weak, and after crouching down to rest her legs, she found herself unable to get back up. She remained in that position for the next three days.

By the fourth day, she had weakened further and no longer felt hunger or thirst, though she continued eating small amounts of food.

Kively remembered little of the fifth and sixth days, saying she was in a “trance”.

Kively had told her relatives in Limassol that she was going to visit the city of Paphos for a few days, so no one had come looking for her. However, when her niece called to check on her in Paphos, she learned that her aunt had never arrived.

She then called the fire department for help, and a rescue squad was sent up to Kively’s apartment (via the stairs) to break down the door.

Of course, Kively was not there, but luckily she was awoken by the noise, and she was able to muster enough energy to begin shouting again.

She was promptly discovered and freed, before being rushed to the hospital, where she stayed for several days to recover from the dehydration, psychological shock, and abrasions of her hands and feet from banging them against the elevator wall.

“In fact, I banged so much that the stone came out of my ring. It’s still there, somewhere in the lift shaft,” she told Cyprus Weekly.

“After the first three days I couldn’t stand and eventually my legs became all swollen. Thank God they found me in time.”

Had she not been saved, doctors said that Kively would not have survived another day.

After recovering, Kively abandoned her plans of retiring in Cyprus and instead returned to New York, where she lived with her sons for eight more years before passing away in 1996.

Just like Vesna Vulović, who experienced the highest fall survived without a parachute, and Matt Suter, who travelled the farthest distance survived in a tornado, Kively is a rare type of record breaker – an involuntary one. Although their extraordinary tales of survival are awe-inspiring, we hope that no one is unfortunate enough to ever break their records.

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Header image credit: David Shoykhet/Unsplash (left); Bruno Kelzer/Unsplash (right)

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