Deep-Sea Divers Share Their Horror Stories

I almost drowned from a small but wave on the Florida coast. So a deep dive is a lifelong HELL NO for me. But go ahead... tell us some stories.

Poof. Gone.

"I was watching a documentary about saturation divers the other day. Absolutely scary stuff. They live in a dome under the sea for several days/weeks so they don't have to decompress every day."

"There was this interview where one diver told a story about a colleague just vanishing. He was right behind him at one moment and then was gone in the next. No signs of an accident on the safety line, no sounds, no light signals, he was just gone."

PenguinSwordfighter

Implosions

"I used to work at a dive shop, a regular customer of mine told me on one of his deep cave dives at around 300 feet his main light imploded, and both of his backup flashlights failed. While this happened he also lost his guide line (read: life line back to the surface)."

"He was in a large room, so he dropped a reel with line on it and swam back and forth basically fishing for the guide line. He eventually hooked it and located it, but then had to make a decision which way to follow the line. The correct choice would lead him to safety, while the wrong choice would lead him deeper into the cave system. He made his choice and slowly followed the line out."

"He reached his first spare air tank that he staged and knew he chose the right direction. He had a long wait at each of his staged decompression tanks. It took him, from what I recall, around 7 hours to properly decompress and make it back out of the cave, all while not being able to see a damn thing."

pwnstar

side-by-side...

"I went on a group dive trip with someone who was pretty experienced, and he was telling us a bunch of stories about his wreck dive down to an old WWII-era Japanese warship sunken in the Pacific. One somewhat morbid but funny story was when his group went into the ship and saw several pairs of shoes strewn about, lying perfectly side-by-side."

"After they all surfaced later, one girl in the group was like, 'Why did they leave their shoes behind like that?' and everyone else just looked at each other like, 'Oh man... who's gonna tell her?' Anyway, the real horror story is about a father and son duo who had decided to go on this trip as a bonding experience. So the thing to note about WWII shipwrecks is that after over half a century, they're pretty much rusted to oblivion."

"One bad kick will effectively disintegrate a perfectly-preserved captain's log, just from the motion of the water. Well, the duo was exploring the inside of the ship, and suddenly someone hears a loud CLANG! The father and son had wandered into an enclosed room, and the door had slammed shut with both of them inside."

"At that point, the guy telling the story paused, and someone else in the group was like, 'Wait, so what happened to them?' And the guy was like, 'What the hell do you mean, man? They got trapped and f**king died!' And in that moment, I decided f**k that s**t - I am never, ever diving down to go check out the inside an old WWII warship lmao."

yungbabo

Unreal

"For as long as I been around the internet 1 diver story stuck with me. Not because of paranormal or unexplainable events. This person's story said they were deep diving with their father and literally saw a Lovecraftian size creature envelope his father ahead. After all was said and done at the surface he come to find out later his schizophrenia had come to while he was deep sea diving. I couldn't imagine seeing something your brain was telling you was real. Especially in that setting."

SunnyvaleRicky

Vortex

"One time when I was on a diving boat with some friends, one of the guys on there told about a story about how he used to be an underwater welder, and one time he and some other guys witnessed someone getting sucked through a hole the size of a tic tac."

Dragon_King3199

Why do people even go that far down?

Everywhere

"I’m by no means a deep sea diver, but I am a licensed diver, sea urchins are massive and everywhere, like you really don’t expect their size and how common they are."

drewdreds

Wrecked

"Did a 60M/200ft dive on a wreck in a shipping channel. The dive boat skipper should call up the harbour master and check if there are any ships scheduled, and if there are not good to dive. Anyway did the dive. 25 mins bottom time so a fair amount of deco."

"During the 12M deco stop we could hear the rumble of a very very very large engine. Hmmm. Kept getting louder. And louder. And louder. During the 9M stop it got REALLY loud we looked at each other, gave two thumbs down and bolted back down to 18M and just hung there figuratively shi**ing our drysuits until it got quieter after a few minutes."

"We then resumed our deco. A small pod of dolphins came in to have a gander at us which was cool. A big f**k off panamax sort-a-size ship had come within 100M of our deco buoy. Never dived off that boat again."

thedugong

Gruesome

Not sure if anyone has mentioned it, but the [Byford Dolphin Diving Bell Accident] (https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/4x1a2c/comment/d6blno6/) is pretty gruesome and scary. Basically, when deep see divers were returning to the surface, they were in a decompression chamber at a very high pressure."

"And there was a catastrophic failure of the decompression room that meant the air depressurized several atmospheres almost instantaneously and killed a couple divers by literally exploding them from the pressure release. Not sure what could be more of a gruesome tale than that."

anon_e_mous9669

The Worst

"Not my story but still wanted to share: it's the story of a diver who was hired to remove and bring back bodies from a bridge that collapsed into semi deep water with numerous cars on it. Some people made it out of their cars and some didn't. But the worst thing that he saw was the bodies of children still stuck in the cars while the parents saved their own lives. The thought of going into murky water to essentially fish up corpses that are like a day old chills me every time I think about it."

sarper97

Nope!

"I went diving to a wreck around 200ft down, and I heard this terrifying roar and saw some creature almost twice the size of a blue whale. Noped right outta there as soon as I saw that, I'm not going there again, I'll stay in my lifepod."

Overgrown_fetus1305

Roar

"I saw a lion fish at 27 feet in Cozumel a couple weeks ago. I made it out okay though."

Fieos

"Lion fish generally aren’t very dangerous. Yes, they have toxic spines but it’s not exactly easy to end up with their spines in you. You’d have to be pretty damn careless to do it. I’d honestly say there’s a lot of common eels that are substantially more likely to hurt you. I’ve got a pair of fins with some large chomp marks from a mean ass wolf eel."

Tlentic

LA Craziness

"Totally late, but this is an amazing account of a police diver that had to dive in the La Brea tar pits in L.A. iI’s intense. La Brea tar pits dive"

vroomvroom450

The body

"Mr. Ballen on YouTube has some really nice videos on cave divers and horror stories, you should check him out."

Pelios

"I watched one of them today 😭 the one where the guy goes back to retrieve a diver that died who was never found and during the rescue, he disappeared too and drowned."

"The other divers there launched another rescue group and he was found holding the guy he was retrieving and both of their bodies were brought to the surface and were laid to rest. the parents of the young original diver felt guilty about the one who died getting their son’s body. Such a sad story."

lunababygirl09

On Holiday

"So I was at this diving resort where there was one instructor/guide who spoke my language. He told me about how 10 years ago he and his friends had been diving in open sea, it was supposed to be a 30m dive but there was a heavy downdraft and they all got sucked down, he's guessing 70m."

"With a lot of effort most managed to get out of that current and into another one which luckily brought them back up. One of them didn't. He saw his friend drown. He told me this when I asked about safety at the resort and he didn't bring it as a cautionary tale. I've spend the rest of my holiday with another guide who spoke broken English."

Aggressive_Tear_769

Intense

"Nothing to add myself but this is my favorite compilation of diver horror stories. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdIni-VEHJ4 Warning some of them are pretty intense and involve witnessing murders."

Kryptosis

Thanks Dad

"Not my story but my dad's, he said they've been diving around 40m down in some ocean/sea I don't really remember, in the middle of the descent he noticed his bubbles didn't go up, they went down to the abyss, he looked at his wrist depth meter and he saw he started to descent way faster then he was supposed to, he got caught by an underwater current."

"He said that inflating his jacket didn't really work nor did releasing the led weights from his pockets. thanks to his massive freaking testicles he found a way out of it. I sometimes scuba dive with him, in shallow waters, but the idea if this happening f**king terrifies me."

Mhaul

No Air

"Not me but I read a post from someone who went diving a lot a while ago. She said there's something that happens to the brain if you go too far down too quickly or something? Or maybe it just happens randomly. But you can start hallucinating. She said that at some point she was swimming down and all of a sudden started hearing children crying and calling for her to swim more downward toward them. Then her oxygen was going to run out and she would have definitely drowned if her diving partner hadn't grabbed her and forced her to the surface."

ToastedMaple

Don't Watch

"Always hated the idea of deep sea diving. Saw 'Last Breath' a couple weeks ago and even though I knew what the outcome was I was still so nervous and scared watching it."

Shovel1708

Well that is all I need to hear. I'll stay on dry land, thank you.