3 of the Most Amazing Escapes – by Post, Balloon and Raincoat Raft

What's the most valuable thing you've ever sent?

If you've got an online business, distant relatives or have moved recently, chances are you've trusted something pretty precious to a delivery company or specialist courier services – whether it's £15 in a birthday card, something personally dear or expensive goods. But would you trust the courier company with your life?

That's just what Henry Brown, a slave from Virginia, did in the 19th century: he travelled for 27 hours in a parcel in order to escape the slave-owning states of the Southern U.S.A. And he's not the only one who's taken crafty measures to escape from impossibly tricky circumstances – he's the orchestrator of just one of the top 3 most innovative, amazing escapes of all time:

1. Henry 'Box' Brown
In 1849, after his wife and three children were sold by his master, Henry Brown resolved to escape and hatched an outrageous plan: to mail himself from his hometown in Virginia to the Northern states of America and freedom. He enlisted the help of a local storeowner, who sealed the box and sent it to sympathetic abolitionists in Philadelphia.

350 uncomfortable miles by rail and road later he was delivered. According to legend, he jumped cheerfully out of the box with a hearty greeting; other reports say he promptly fainted. Brown became a touring speaker and later moved to England, where he married again. He made a living by giving lectures on his experience and doing conjuring tricks.

2. The Wetzel and Strelczyk families' escape from East Berlin
Immortalised in the Disney film 'Night Crossing', this pair of families from Germany's Democratic Republic pulled off one of the most imaginative escapes from the oppressive regime of East Germany. Inspired by a program on TV on the history of the hot air balloon, mechanic Hans Peter Strelczyk hatched an outrageous plan to cross the border: he started to build a burner engine out of cooking-gas cylinders and collecting small scraps of nylon fabric.

Along with his wife and the family of his friend Wetzel, he eventually succeeded in making a functioning engine and had gathered enough fabric to sew together a 72-ft balloon. After one failed attempt, their homemade craft carried Strelczyk, Wetzel, their two wives and four children successfully to freedom on September 15, 1979.

3. Escape from Alcatraz
Hundreds of prisoners attempted to break out from notorious island-prison Alcatraz over the years it was active – most were captured, shot or drowned as they swam towards the shores of San Francisco. Of those hundreds it's possible, though not probable, that three men successfully managed to escape.

Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin were convicted bank robbers; all found themselves inmates of Alcatraz in 1962. Using sharpened spoons reinforced with metal from coins and a drill fashioned from a stolen vacuum cleaner, the escapees tunnelled through the damp wall of their cells to an unguarded corridor. They left dummy heads carved out of soap and embellished with real hair on their pillows to fool guards while they climbed up an air vent to the roof – and once on the shoreline, used stolen raincoats to fashion a raft.

Though bits of their raft and even their paddles were discovered floating on the bay, their bodies were never found. Over the years their relatives and friends claim to have received postcards in the men's handwriting and there have been several unconfirmed sightings.