9/11 Stories

You’re running late. A phone call has put you half an hour behind, and you’re hurrying up Washington Street, trying to hail a cab. You’re forty years old, with a ten-month-old son at home and nearly ten years at Cantor Fitzgerald behind you. Your husband, Greg, is on the 84th floor of the South Tower.

You push through the revolving doors of the North Tower and turn toward the elevators. Then the floor jolts beneath you.

This is 9/11 Stories, real accounts of the people who lived it, so they’re never forgotten.

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Your Host, Eric Racheff

Jason Thomas had been off active duty in the Marine Corps for only a few weeks when the morning of September 11th began, and his uniform was still in the back of his truck. By the time the North Tower fell, he had put it on and driven into Manhattan with no orders and no plan, just his training and a city in trouble. Before the day was over, he and another Marine in uniform would walk into a section of the site that rescue crews had been pulled out of, calling into the smoke and listening for an answer.

This is the story of Sergeant Jason Thomas.

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Your Host, Eric Racheff

On the morning of September 11th, Genelle Guzman was sixty-four floors up in the North Tower, moving down the stairwell with everyone else, counting floors like everyone else. She made it to the 13th before the tower came down around her. What happened in the twenty-seven hours after that — the dark, the silence, and the voice that stayed with her through it — became a story she's spent twenty-five years trying to explain. This year, for the first time, the rest of the world is hearing it too.

He was a Wall Street trader with an office on the 104th floor of the South Tower — but underneath that, he was still the kid who'd carried a red bandana in his pocket since he was six, still the volunteer firefighter who never quite let that dream go. On September 11th, both versions of him showed up. It would take his own family eight months, and a stranger's account in the newspaper, to understand exactly what that meant.

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He came to New York for a few weeks and never left — eventually landing a job washing windows a hundred floors above the street, in a building he came to think of as a second home. On September 11th, an ordinary elevator ride trapped him and five strangers between floors, with nothing but the tool on his belt standing between them and the fire spreading below.

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An off-duty firefighter was on his way to spend the day with his brothers when he heard the news that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. What he chose to do next became one of the most enduring stories of that entire day.

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To Donate to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, please visit www.t2t.org

He spent years warning that this exact building was still a target — and running drills nobody wanted to do because of it. When the moment actually came, everything he'd built paid off in ways nobody could have predicted.

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Your Host, Eric Racheff

Two strangers on the same floor of the North Tower, ninety flights between them and the street below. What happened between the moment they found each other and the moment the building came down.

Sponsored and Produced by The Conspiracy PodcastYour Host, Eric Racheff

She was the first officer in the city to radio in the attack — then spent her final hour guiding hundreds of people out of the South Tower before going back in one last time.

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For twenty-five years, one man spent his career warning the government about a threat almost nobody wanted to take seriously. Days before September 11th, he started a brand new job — one with an irony he couldn't have scripted himself.

Sponsored and Produced by The Conspiracy PodcastYour Host, Eric Racheff

This is the true story of Paige Farley-Hackel and Ruth and Juliana McCourt.

In the pre-dawn dark at Logan Airport, two best friends say goodbye before boarding two different flights to the same reunion in California. A simple decision — a handful of frequent flyer miles — is the only thing that separates them that morning. What happens next unfolds across two towers, seventeen minutes apart.

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Your Host Eric Racheff

A flight attendant on American Flight 11 spent the last 23 minutes of her life on the phone, calmly telling American Airlines everything she could about the hijacking underway around her — including actual audio from that call.

Sponsored and Produced by The Conspiracy PodcastYour Host, Eric Racheff