20 creepy stories told by divers and other water lovers (21 photos)

Despite its impressive size, the World Ocean remains perhaps the main mystery on Earth - after all, more than 80 percent of it is still unexplored. Fascinated by this mystery, one Reddit user invited divers and other ocean enthusiasts to share experiences they couldn't explain that scared the crap out of them. It turned out that there are quite a few of them - the post has more than two thousand comments, and here are the most interesting of them.





1.



“My friends and I were diving off the coast of Florence, Oregon, and found a body on the ocean floor in a completely terrible state. It was a surfer who had gone missing a few days ago, so he was wearing a wetsuit that leaves his legs, arms and head exposed. The crabs had gnawed flesh from exposed areas, so that it was essentially a torso with a skull head and skeletal limbs.

However, the scariest dive of my life was when two of my buddies and I were diving for shrimp at night in Puget Sound. It was about one in the morning and we were a good 100 feet [30 meters] down, about as dark as you could imagine. Typically, on night dives, we stood in a circle, turned off the lights, then swirled the water and watched the bioluminescence float around us, like floating stars in the black watery space. Beautiful. Only this time we turn off the light, swirl the water, and it begins to shimmer just enough for us to notice the fourth person sitting in our circle.

We were at a dive resort, so it was normal to meet another diver, except it was 1am and we didn't see anyone else on the pier getting ready to dive. He was also alone, which was strange given the dangerous conditions of night diving in these waters, and he had no fins or gloves. I don't know how he swam so well without fins and didn't get hypothermic without shoes or gloves. We were wearing dry suits because it was so cold, but this dude was wearing a regular wet suit with some skin exposed and it looked like he had a giant gash on his leg.

So all three of us spot him and we're so fucking scared we can't even move and I can hear over the comm my buddies breathing heavily and the guy just smiles and waves at us and then swims off.

It was 100 times scarier than that skeleton dude. Whenever you think you're alone and someone suddenly just appears nearby, like in an alley at night, it's f***** weird. 100 feet underwater at night is scary.”

2.





“One day I was water skiing on a lake (in Louisiana) and at one point I flew into the air and literally landed on an alligator. I felt my foot brush against him and we looked into each other's eyes as I gasped for air. Then he went under water. The moments after that were the most terrifying of my life, because I was absolutely sure that I was about to feel him grab my leg and drag me under the water. I started screaming and couldn’t stop until the boat came back for me.

You don’t realize how long 2-3 minutes drag on until you find yourself alone in open water.

Never ever".

3.



“I was surfing off the west coast of Vancouver Island. So I’m sitting, waiting for the wave, and then a giant black silhouette slips right under me and my board. I quickly jumped to my knees, loudly exhaling: “God’s bitch.”

A moment later, the friendliest face in the world pops out of the water right in front of me. Big curious seal. Damn you seal... you scared the crap out of me that day."

4.



“I was diving off the coast of Manly Island, near Sydney. We were told to stay away from the caves and stuff - well, it's just common sense, what with the sea serpents and all that. And so three friends and I jump into the water and swim. We were on the edge of the reef and just looking at the corals and all the debris. Me and another guy swim to the very edge of the reef to explore the deeper areas (without swimming too deep, of course), and swim past a small crevice. She was so small that at first we didn't even notice her. I turn my back to her to check where the other guys are, and then my friend starts shaking me violently and feverishly poking me towards the crevice. I turn around (already expecting to see a demon or some kind of monster), and then a huge lump of maroon flesh and suckers leaks out of the fucking hole. At this point I wet my pants (I swear). Basically, it was an octopus with a tentacle span the size of a kiddie pool, and it lunged at the second guy, sprayed ink on him, and disappeared. I decided that he swam away because I couldn’t see him. I saw the guy's hand flailing in the dark, and I thought he was swimming to safety, and I was ready to get the hell out of the ocean forever. From a distance I saw that the octopus had grabbed his right leg and was feeling him in this mass of inky horror. I had no idea whether to help the guy or not, I had never been so scared because I knew that octopuses, in fact, can kill people. I was so scared that I could hardly breathe. I tried to help him, and as I approached, the octopus swam further into the reef. I have never seen such a frightened person in my life. He swam very quickly to the boat, and I followed him, and the guy didn’t even need a ladder to climb onto the boat - he simply emerged from the water and climbed onto the boat, pulling himself up on his hands. I called the driver, he ran up. A friend of mine had a piece of meat the size of a tennis ball ripped out of his shin. He still has marks from the suckers (these bastards are strong). To this day he has never been to the beach again and is afraid to even take a bath.”

5.



“I'm a rescue diver in the Bahamas... We were diving into an underwater blue hole (a hole below sea level) and one diver went missing.

After an hour or two of searching, I returned to the blue hole to see if he had left any traces. I noticed the shine of his watch and his hand sticking out somewhere at the bottom.

I started going down to the bottom to pick up his body. On the way down, I realized that the “bottom” was a school of sharks, which, apparently, had gathered there to mate. There were so many sharks that they blocked the view of the real bottom.

I went down into the darkness, grabbed his hand (I couldn’t bring myself to look at the body) and began to rise. The sharks followed us. And they circled around us. Halfway through, at a depth of about 65 feet (20 meters), we had to take a break to avoid catching the caisson. I was scared shitless. The whole time I was waiting for my blood pressure to normalize, I was scared shitless. It turned out he was hit by a passing boat.”

6.



“I have been diving since I was a child because my family owned a dive shop. I've dived all over the world, but what scared me the most was an incident at a local lake. I was about ten, and I took our jet ski boat off the dock into a secluded cove to find an abandoned cemetery (Tennessee Valley Authority had created a lake in the 1930s and displaced an entire town, leaving several similar sites empty access to them, lost among the trees). When I got ashore, I found a blanket with the edges tied together to make a bundle. I didn't open it, but I poked it a little for research purposes. There was clearly a cinder block lying there, and everything else was just soft. After a particularly strong poke, blood began to seep through the bedspread. I grabbed my little ass in my hands and ran back to the boat without looking back. Several decades have passed, and I still think about it and wonder what was there.

Now on a more cheerful note: our store was often contacted about things that had fallen into the water and high-speed boats that were sunk by various idiots. My father was the head instructor in the store and usually assigned such work to me or one of the regular customers. However, in January he took on one such job to test a new drysuit, and took a friend with him. I was in charge of their equipment and waited on the shore. Dad came up first and started telling me about a strange fishing lure he found while sifting through the mud. Around the same time, his friend emerges and asks dad why he’s been playing with this tampon for so long.

I had a great childhood."

7.



“I was diving at a spearfishing spot about 30 miles [48 km] offshore. I was 60 feet [18 meters] underwater. And here I am swimming, and then I notice a school of mahi-mahi. There were about 30-40 of them. All of these fish were between 2 and 5 feet in length [0.6 to 1.5 meters]. They were so beautiful, their sides shimmered with different colors. Then I feel something tugging at my leg. I look at my legs and see that a healthy tiger shark is pulling me by the flippers and trying to drag me with it. A second later she tore the flippers off my leg. She then sailed away, but continued to circle within sight. I think she was still curious about what I tasted like. I kept an eye on her the entire time I swam back to the boat. The most terrible incident in the water in my life.”

8.



“I led a group of 8 students on a night dive on our liveaboard in Egypt. Every few minutes I turned around and just checked that everything was in place and no one got lost.

About 30 minutes into the dive, we all sat in a circle on the bottom to turn off the lights and look at the bioluminescence. After we turned the lights back on, I quickly looked around the circle to count everyone.

A little away from the group, alone, without an underwater light, 45 feet [14 meters] below the surface and without a boat on the surface in sight, a stranger was kneeling - fully equipped, breathing evenly and looking into my eyes.

I panicked a little at the time because I had no idea who the hell this man was, where he came from, or what he was doing there... and so I did what seemed like the only logical thing to do: I took the group back to the boat, and I didn’t say anything to any of the children.

I'm still scared."

9.



“I was diving with friends and found a fishing glove with my hand inside. We took the glove to the local police station and they told us that no one had ever found the guy missing his hand."

10.



“On one of my night dives at the Flower Garden Banks Marine Sanctuary in 2005 or 2006, I encountered the speckled sea cucumber for the first time. I thought I had stepped out of the real world into a science fiction/fantasy world when I saw this long worm with tentacles around its mouth, sort of a cross between a snake and an octopus. At first it was creepy, but now I specifically look for them because they are pretty cool.

On a more recent dive (this spring), although I knew I would see him (that was the purpose of the dive after all), I came across a 3 year old, 36 pound golden retriever who had been washed away by the spring floods and the dog was stuck. in the trash under the bridge. I was scared as hell when I first noticed her body. Knowing that you are looking for something and actually finding it are two very different things. But at least I was able to deliver her body to her family.”

eleven.



“This happened when I was doing my second dive in the beginner diving course (can't remember the name).

So, we're going to go down to the ocean floor to do a couple of basic exercises (like putting water in a mask and letting it down). My friend, let's call him Daniel, was the first diver to dive with an instructor, but when his fins touched the bottom, it turned out that there was a carpet shark hiding there. Daniel touched her and she lunged at him and bit him on the thigh. Daniel got scared and started to surface VERY quickly (if you surface that quickly without the proper “form” you could die). He was scared shitless, and so was I, since I was next to him. I grabbed his calf and tried to pull him down, and he realized what he was doing. At that moment I was scared, but 10 minutes later, already on the boat, we nicknamed him “Shark Tamer.” In Australia, absolutely everything really wants to kill you, ha.”

12.



“Divers in one area of ​​Honduras began feeding eels. She was a fucking healthy moray eel and she loved the divers because they always fed her.

Once, when I was diving, no one fed her, and the instructor didn’t even mention it. And now this tame moray eel is furiously chasing half a dozen divers, and they are scared out of their wits. I hovered about 20 feet [6 meters] above them and watched the chaos unfold. All these people thought they were going to die, but in reality this two-meter moray eel with razor-sharp teeth just wanted his dog treats.”

13.



“In La Jolla, California, there are caves along the coast that you can swim through when the tide is good. On this day the water level was high enough to allow one to swim through this rather narrow cave. Well, it was my turn to swim, and when I was already halfway, a wave came and covered the cave while I was still in it. I was thrown against the wall of the cave, my shoulder was covered in blood.

But we thought: well, damn it, we just got into the water. Our plan was to swim to the buoy and then return to shore. So I said, whatever, let's do it. An open wound in an area where great white sharks have been spotted - no big deal, you need to get some exercise!

Well, we get to the buoy, and I’m just overcome with a very strong feeling of fear. We're probably a good 15 minutes offshore and I'm starting to think about this wound on my arm where the shark bait is just dripping out into this giant huge ocean full of things that want to eat me. Sure enough, I look down and see something dark floating towards me. I’m like, “*****, *****, *****,” and I start to swim away, and then I turn around and see two more of the same things approaching me from different directions. My face turns white, I expect that I will now be grabbed and dragged under the water, and no one will ever see me again. Nothing happens.

My friends see the look on my face and ask what happened. We all decide to swim back. My friends are better swimmers than me, but that day I easily beat them all. When I finally got to the shore, I started almost kissing the sand, and then some old man comes up to me and says: “You shouldn’t swim with that cut on your arm, you’ll attract sharks!”

14.



“I was drift diving in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and in about 30 yards [27 meters] I drifted over at least a dozen human skulls.”

15.



“One summer, my cousins ​​and I were swimming in the lake near their house, and at some point my sister started screaming like crazy. All the adults immediately jumped into the lake to pull her out.

It turns out that she just caught her foot in some seaweed. But our parents didn’t tell us that a man drowned in this lake, and his body has not yet been found. The next day he washed up on our shore.

I’m still a little scared to swim in that lake.”

16.



“It was on the beach, I was about thirteen. My brothers and I went there to play a little. Some seagull, there are quite a lot of them there, went down to the water to grab a tasty fish. Anyway, the seagull must have miscalculated its choice of victim, because whatever it was, grabbed it and dragged it under the water.

I don’t know what it was, but I didn’t want to play in the same water with that thing anymore.”

17.



“I was snorkeling off the coast of Mozambique near the islands when suddenly a dugong swam right below me. He was HUGE. I literally pissed myself."

18.



“I was diving in Thailand and we were at a special dive site where there were two steep underwater hills filled with rock formations, corals, etc. Between these two hills there was a sandy bottom with scattered rocks ranging from 1 to 5 meters in diameter, all full of holes and full of sea life.

We swam from one hill to another and examined these stones along the way. I was swimming along one particularly large one when something suddenly hit me very hard in the side of my stomach. This scared the crap out of me and I quickly backed away. The dive instructor noticed and swam over to me and we started looking around to figure out what happened.

And then we saw a giant moray eel (I was later told it was a giant moray eel). It was absolutely gigantic, I had never seen such a big eel. It was at least a couple of meters long and probably as wide as my head. We decided that I swam too close without noticing him, and he attacked, crashed into my buoyancy compensator and, fortunately, did not persist.”

19.



“So, I was in Cancun, Mexico with my host family (I was an exchange student). There was a hotel surrounded by a river where you could snorkel.

I can't drown (lol thanks to fat) so I didn't wear a life jacket. I swam about a mile in the river when I suddenly noticed something interesting at the bottom.

I swam with difficulty closer to the bottom (the water was probably 9-12 feet deep? [2.7-3.6 meters]) and saw that it was a shell! What a wonderful gift for my temporary sister, today is her birthday and she will be delighted!

I continued to try to swim to the bottom, but again and again I was thrown back to the surface by my own weight. Thirty minutes passed and I started to get a headache. But I wasn't going to give up so easily.

I managed to grab the shell and pull it towards me! Victory!

Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. Out of surprise, I dropped the shell and saw that blood was flowing from a fresh wound. I surfaced and studied it on the shore.

The wound was bizarre, shallow, but shaped like a bite from human teeth. I've been pinched by crabs many times and this mark looked completely different. And I felt it too.

I couldn't figure out what kind of thing lived in this shell. I searched the Internet and my zoology textbook, but nothing resembled this bite mark.

I still don’t know what bit me.”

20.



“I was scuba diving with my family in Hawaii. We were pretty deep, probably about 25 feet [7-8 meters] underwater, when the woman in front of me kicked the breathing thing out of my mouth. I had just expelled all the air from my lungs, so I was deep underwater with no oxygen and almost no time to react. So I began to frantically climb to the surface. As I was rising, I felt this terrible expanding sensation in my chest. It was the most terrible moment of my life. One of the instructors surfaced after a minute or two and said he didn't expect me to be alive or conscious or anything like that. I returned to the hotel with a strong shock and cried a little in horror. It was a tough day."