Disclaimer: The following post has discussions of suicide.
There's nothing like spending your summer soaking up the sun and enjoying the bliss of the open water.
But have you ever thought about what lurks underneath the surface?
Reddit user mustardusk asked redditors the creepiest or most unexplainable thing they've seen while swimming underwater. Here are some of the responses that made my blood run cold:
1. "I’ve done a number of dives, and the strangest thing I've ever seen was a large deep freezer with a heavy industrial chain wrapped around multiple times with about five cinder blocks attached. ... We logged the GPS and depth coordinates and notified the police. We were eventually able to find out what was inside — 10 porcelain dolls."
2. "You can dive in man-made lakes and check out what's left of old flooded homes and communities...My buddy who likes to dive said the creepiest thing, by far, is finding cemeteries 100+ feet beneath the water in the dark, eerie quiet."
3. "I had a dive master that told me once he was diving somewhere and found a full skeleton wearing diving gear with the air on the tank turned off, pretty deep down. If I remember correctly they said they reported it to the police and it was found out that the man's wife turned off his air while they were on a dive to murder him."
4. "There was a diver team that found a man who survived for three days in an air pocket after a shipwreck. Here is the video of the moment they found him. They were on a body recovery mission and were not expecting anyone to be alive, but miraculously he survived for three days underwater and apparently had to listen as his crewmates were being eaten by sharks and other fish."
5. “I dropped my goggles and was trying to reach down into the river to grab them but ended up pulling out a sheep skull by its sockets.”
6. "Someone just dove to the bottom of our lake to check a drain and now he won't go back under 'cause he said he saw a fish that could swallow him whole. 20+ feet long he said."
7. "When I was a kid swimming in the lake at summer camp, I dove underwater and I swear I saw someone in scuba gear hiding underneath the dock watching us. I told the lifeguard, but he wasn't able to find anyone."
8. "In 2010 a man took a test-drive in a car with the salesman and in a suicide attempt he drove the car off the pier into the sea and drowned. The salesman managed to escape by breaking the window and swimming to the surface... My friend, a Garda diver, was dispatched to retrieve the other man's body. When he got to the car, the man was still facing forward, hands on the steering wheel, eyes wide."
"When the diver opened the driver door, this combined with the smashed window caused the currents to flow through the car and the man's wide-eyed head turned around slowly from the force of it to face the diver." —dandylahma
9. "Got charged by a mother humpback whale. Her curious calf had swam around us and we were between her and the baby... She kicked down and swam under us last minute. We didn't see anything until that 60-foot freight train passed beneath us."
10. "There's a sea-loch in Scotland called Loch Fyne that is popular with divers. Once on a dive, in what we thought was a remote part of the loch (we used a boat to get there), I was descending a vertical wall and came across garden gnomes around 10 meters down, just sitting on the ledges. One was fishing. We concluded that it was another dive club having fun. Here's a picture..."
11. "I used to teach canoeing lessons to Boy Scout troops at a local neighborhood lake. ... When doing lifeguard work in the water during a swim test, my sunglasses fell off my head. I dove down to find them and shit you not, I found a sunken, entangled hospital gurney at the bottom of the lake."
12. "Not a diver, but I've heard from old divers who worked for the core of engineers that there're some huge catfish around the bottom of the dams. Like the size of vans."
13. "I once went diving in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, where it is quite popular to see sharks. There was a cool-looking structure under us, so we swam towards it to get a closer look. I just start getting this cold, cold, cold, cold feeling running through my body, and that’s when a shark appeared and I physically shat myself from fear."
14. "An unending void. That's when I quit diving."
15. "When my dad was in grad school, he did some field studies classes — some of which involved diving in Monterey Bay. One day he was diving and found a shopping cart with bricks and cinder blocks and a chain attached to the handle. He naturally followed the chain and found a bare foot wrapped in the chain. He assumes something probably ate the rest of the body and apparently his friends had seen similar things too."
16. "My dad used to do a bunch of diving in the Minnesota lakes. After a certain depth, there's a layer of silt that lays flat and blocks out the little bit of light that gets to it. There was this one pit that my dad went diving into that had these steps leading into a cavern that made a very ominous looking stairway to nothing. Thus being dubbed: The Stairway to Hell."
17. "I found some weird ancient-looking green mask and left it there."
18. "I did a night dive in Borneo once near a sea gypsy village, so we were surrounded by a lot of trash, including hundreds of plastic bags floating in the water. You could barely see anything outside the light of your torch, and every so often one of those bags would brush past you and you'd discover it was actually a big ass jellyfish. One of the most uncomfortable dives I've ever been on."
19. "When I was a kid we used to go to a place during the summer holiday that had some very nice beaches and an estuary with a very wide river mouth. ... One day while snorkeling, a MASSIVE stingray passed directly underneath me. This thing was easily two meters wide, covered in white scars and missing its tail. I just froze in the water and it felt like my heart stopped."
21. "I once saw half a shark. It was still swimming around but its entire left side was just gone, organs hanging out and everything. Like a living resident evil zombie shark. It must have been very recently attacked because I doubt you can live very long with all your insides poking out."
Some posts have been edited for grammar and clarity.