Author Glenn Van Ekeren, in his book “The Speaker’s Sourcebook” published in 1988; It tells the interesting story of a man who froze to death “just because he believed” in a freezer that was actually broken and not working. There is no personal information about this man, whose name is unknown, only his story. This story spreads more and more among the people, and like a word-of-mouth game, every hearer adds something new to the story.
The story becomes even more compelling when the story is told in the respected magazine Reader’s Digest, that it is real and that the name of the person who froze to death is Nick Sitzman, the story becomes even more compelling and people have no reason to believe the story is true anymore.
Nick Sitzman and his questionable story:
In this word-of-mouth story, Nick Sitzman; He is a strong, healthy and ambitious young railroad worker with a hardworking and loving wife, two children and many friends. On a summer day, train crews finish their work an hour early. While doing a final check on the wagons, Nick is accidentally locked in a freezer. When he realizes that the rest of the workers have left the field, he panics and starts shouting, but no one hears him. He thinks that the temperature in the freezer is zero degrees and if he stays inside, he will freeze to death in a short time. In order to tell his wife and family what happened to him, he scrapes the following with the knife he found inside: It’s very cold, my body is numb. I wish I could sleep. These may be my last words.
Later in the story, teammates find Nick frozen to death in the morning. When they examine the freezer’s temperature records, they realize that this is impossible. Because the freezer Nick is locked in is broken and hasn’t worked for the past week, including that night. The temperature inside the freezer has never dropped below 10 degrees Celsius. As a result, they come to the following thought; The cold didn’t kill Nick, Nick killed himself with the power of thought. In another version of the story, Nick Sitzman works in a restaurant. Likewise, it remains locked in a broken and inoperative freezer; He thinks that the freezer continues to cool, and at the end of the story he freezes to death.
The relationship between the Pygmalion effect and the frozen man story
Although there are doubts as to whether the story itself actually happened, the Pygmalion effect, or “self-actualizing” This story is often told when explaining the “prophecy” theory. This theory, which is one of the theories of social psychology, is defined by the sociologist Robert K. Merton as “New behaviors resulting from the wrong evaluation of events or conditions cause the wrong to happen”. In short, what you believe affects your behavior, and these new behaviors make what you believe in.
Nick Sitzman allegedly believed so much that he would freeze to death that the prophecy finally came true and Nick actually died. But he didn’t even leave a real name behind.
Is the story true?
This story could not be found in the archives of Reader’s Digest during the researches. There is no evidence that a person named Nick Sitzman actually existed. When you’re locked inside a freezer, you can start believing that the freezer is still working and getting really cold. It is even possible for you to have a heart attack because you are afraid, but it is not physiologically possible for you to freeze to death in weather conditions above 10 degrees Celsius.
Despite everything, let’s say that such a situation actually happened, wouldn’t the science-medical community have to keep every single data of this event and do research on it? But the interesting thing is, there is neither a hospital record nor an autopsy report about this incident. All we have is an “evidenceless” story.
Sources: 1, 2, 3
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