35 ‘Horror Stories’ From People Who Have Seen Things In The Ocean They Wish They Could Forget
Interview
There are few things more fascinating than large bodies of water; few that are scarier, too. The pitch black of the seemingly infinite depths holds many secrets, glimpses of which only few are lucky to witness. Be it a unique creation of nature or a man-made treasure lost hundreds of years ago, they tend to be equally captivating as they are creepy.
Members of the ‘Ask Reddit’ community recently discussed all sorts of things that are seen while roaming large waters. They shared their stories after redditor u/tylo144 addressed those working at sea and asked them what was the creepiest thing they’ve ever witnessed out there. The answers covered everything from bizarre to tragic stories, from items to all sorts of creatures, so scroll down to find them on the list below and see what secrets the water holds. There you will also find more details provided by the OP, which they shared during a recent interview with Bored Panda.
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I was in the US Navy for about 10 years, and have 10s of thousands of miles at sea in an aircraft carrier. Countless nights on the flight deck in the middle of the night and middle of the ocean...
Creepiest: A HUGE patch of the ocean glowing. Like nuclear waste in the Simpsons glowing. I've seen bioluminescent algae of a few kinds and this was nothing like it. I've never seen anything like it before or since.
Weirdest thing: hundreds of mile out to sea from land and there was a MASSIVE fire on the water. It was like the top of a gas refinery, but on the water with nothing under it but water. Flame going a few stories into the air.
Saddest: a fellow sailor trying to jump overboard. He apparently got a 'Dear John' email and pictures from his cheating wife and decided to end it. We were on the smoke deck, he bummed a cigarette, then asked the time, we said 2300... he replied "sounds like a good time to die" and in one motion tried to launch over the chest high wall (with an opening to the water below). Luckily we were faster than him. We grabbed his legs and wrestled him down and laid on him and basically hog tied him till the MAs (Navy cops) got there. Broke my heart because he was a good dude. I never saw him again. He got transferred off the ship shortly after. Not sure what happened to him but I hope he's doing better.
Funniest: 2 flying fish collide mid-air. I was smoking when we were in the Persian Gulf and saw the fish fly from a pretty far distance towards each other. I remember thinking 'there's no f****n way they're going to hit' them SPLAT SPLASH! I was in tears laughing but no one saw it. Everyone just thought I was a weirdo, but I got to see a miracle of nature lol
Contract Mariner. I disappear into the blue area for 6-8 months a year. Creepy? Not much honestly. The sound of moaning steel due to slack tanks when you’re rolling really hard can be a bit unnerving. St. Elmo’s Fire is pretty neat. Fata Morgana aka “The flying Dutchman” is pretty cool to see in real life. After awhile the only thing out there that really spooks you is a problem you have that directly influences your survival.
All the spooky s**t I’ve ever been a part of have been no b******t emergencies. Fire in the engine control room? Im the first responder down there to see if it’s an actual emergency or a f****d up Consilium sensor? Wall of toxic smoke from burning electronics and the high voltage room? Oh f**k.
Have an emergency weather sortie because we are dragging anchor and rolling 30 degrees with 50ft UKC and we’re getting pushed toward the island? f**k me 10 shots ain’t enough we are about to run aground in a 55,000 ton 800ft ship. Pucker factor. Oops now we get the hook up to get the f**k out of there we immediately lose steering and propulsion? Good s**t.
I’ve seen brand new million dollar sport fishers capsized and bobbing around like a cork 1000 miles from land.
I’ve seen tiny little song birds skipping along the surface just barely clinging to life but they’re flying as hard as they can to find land. Some of the saddest s**t I’ve ever seen are those little birds skipping off the water as they fly further out to sea hoping to all f**k they come across some land.
I dunno. I’m on the Yuengling at a port bar and I’m rambling. To answer your question TLDR style;
The creepiest thing about being out there are the bottomless depths of sadness, loneliness and heartache. You will go places in your mind that words will never be able to do any justice in trying to describe.
I'm not a sailor at all. But I did a few boat trips with a friend who moved boats around for a living. He was usually carrying boats from the French Riviera (Monaco, Nice, Antibes, Cannes) to Corsica.
My very first trip with him, we left from Monaco on our way to (I think?) Calvi. We left in the evening, and the trip started very well, with dolphins following us around...nice moment.
Around 2am, in the middle of a pitch black night, very far from any coast, we saw a tiny light in the distance, pretty much on our way. And as we got closer, we saw it was a tiny fishing boat. The kind that usually doesn't go very far from the coast...except we were more than 100km from the coast.
We slowed down as we got close to it, and yelled to check if someone was on it. No answer. So we decided to get close to it. And soon it became obvious it was empty. There were just a few bottles of water, some snacks, some fishing gear, even some dead fish in a bucket, and an old Nokia phone (still on!). But nobody on.
My friend called on the radio, explaining the situation. Italian coastguards told us to wait around till they arrived. We did, and when they arrived they told us they would investigate the situation. They took our ID, wrote down our explanation of the situation, and let us leave to finish our trip.
The whole thing was creepy to me, as it seemed obvious the owner had fallen from his boat, couldn't get back in, and drowned. I had this in mind for weeks, thinking we could maybe have rescued the guy if we had passed there slightly earlier.
After a while, this story faded in my mind, and I went on with my life. Till someday my friend called me to explain that he got a call from an Italian guy, who thanked him because he could get his boat back thanks to us. He was the owner of the tiny boat, who explained he was out fishing not too far from the shore, when he had a big chest pain. He made an emergency call and was soon rescued, but his boat was left to drift. Till we found it.
Learning that the guy was still alive, erased the creepy side of this story from my head, and I was happy about it.
“I have thalassophobia—a fear of deep water,” the OP told Bored Panda in a recent interview, “So, I’m definitely not capable of going out to sea and refuse to go on boats, even if it’s just a Maui booze cruise.”
It’s safe to assume that the OP is far from the only one who feels shivers go down their spine at the thought of deep waters alone. However, according to Medical News Today, there is no exact estimate of how many people live with thalassophobia. When it comes to phobias in general, roughly 7-9% of Americans are reportedly affected by them in any given year.
Probably a giant squid...well in excess of 10m as a conservative estimate.
Clinging to the bow and hull of our emergency escape vessle which was hanging a few metres out of the water, and a few metres below where I was stood. In the depths of night while i nipped out for a sneaky smoke, and I happened to look down at the rescue boat and could see the shadow didn't look right in the moonlight.
Stupidly i used my phone torch (big no no when its darken ship) and scared the c**p out of myself. The vessle it was wrapped around is about 15m long, and its tentacles were wrapped up over the gunnels 2/3 of the way down the sides.
Within seconds it had detached and fell back into the ocean.
I can still picture its eyeball, the size of a football, staring right at me before it dropped into the ocean. It still gives me chills now.
I used to be an oilfield diver in the Gulf of Mexico. I'd say about 80% of the dives I logged were at night. Mostly 500 ft and under DSV's.
It's very eerie feeling sitting on the downline doing in water decompression in the middle of night. I'd always ask topside to turn off my headlight.
Like a worm on a hook. Just bobbing in the darkness.
Medical News Today pointed out that thalassophobia can evoke a “fight, flight, or freeze” response. Activated when the body is preparing for danger, it typically leads to sweating, elevated heart rate and faster breathing.
For some people, it might even evoke a panic attack, resulting in hyperventilation, trembling or shaking, lightheadedness, or nausea, among other things.
The bioluminescent animals (or whatever they are) in the water is pretty amazing. Our toilet would fill up with seawater and if you took a p**s in it in the middle of the night it would agitate the water and it would glow sometimes
In 20 years the weirdest s**t I’ve seen is other people that work out here….
There’s about 40% of the sailors like what they do and are good at it. Another 40% that are good at it, but would do something better if the money was right. But there’s another 20%…. If they lived ashore for more than 6 months a year they’d end up dead or incarcerated. There’s no more “west” for them to go to so they went offshore and became our problem.
i have a friend who works on ships. he said the single scariest thing he had ever seen was looking out a window and seeing a wave that he said looked like it was 100 meters high pass right by their boat and suddenly disappear. he knew about rogue waves but he said seeing one that big, and that close, and watching it suddenly just vanish was so creepy and shocking that he was literally stunned for a minute.
If i saw that, I'd be out of there as fast as my feet could carry me
“I had a nightmare the night prior, after reading Whale Fall, a great book about being eaten alive by a whale. I woke up and kept thinking about what else is out there and figured I’d ask the internet,” the OP told Bored Panda, referring to why they decided to ask fellow redditors about the things one sees at sea.
They admitted to being quite taken aback by the netizens’ response. “I was shocked at how popular the post was and definitely surprised [about the answers],” they said, emphasizing the range that the stories covered—from the supernatural to storms, animal interactions, and beyond.
“I think the most surprising and common theme, though, was that the creepiest thing at sea were fellow sailors or crew mates and the terrible things people are capable of especially when isolated. That was surprising.”
Creepiest thing I’ve seen has definitely been seeing myself and other crewmates lose our minds.
On one particularly awful voyage, everything that could go wrong went wrong and we found ourselves without food, water, and sleep for a very unhealthy amount of time. It started off with auditory hallucinations. Ships are noisy, and when you’re going crazy, you begin to think those noises are talking to you. I heard children laughing, a choir singing, and creepiest of all, a particular splash sounded like it was calling my name from the sea. Combine that with visual hallucinations and then things get really terrifying. I was convinced we were in the desert at one point with sand all around us and mountains in the distance. Another crew member freaked out and told us we were about to run into an apartment building. The creepiest thing I saw was an all-black flying pig with red eyes on the bow. I think the scariest though was when someone was convinced we lost part of our crew overboard. It turned into a massive, delirious argument over where everyone was even though we were all accounted for. That trip was brutal, and the captain put us all in a terrible situation due to sheer incompetence.
Other than that, there was this one time I saw three gigantic ships in the distance with no lights and they did not show up on AIS. Suddenly they were gone. It was extremely creepy.
Does nobody think to bring or make some kind of a condenser on a boat? you can't drink ocean water but you can evaporate it and then condense it back down to get drinking water. How do you run out of water on the ocean.
A few things come to mind, but i have to say, "Deadheads." In my younger days, I was captain of a dragger out of Kodiak AK. She was a 130' Gidddings marine trawler. I will never forget my first week in the wheelhouse with the owner who was retiring and showing me the operation before I took over. After a night busting ice off the rails in freezing rain and 2 meter seas, he went to bunk and left me to wheel watch. It was clearing up with a medium haze and flat calm waters. Most of the crew was sleeping or hanging out in the galley, so I was alone and the only eyes forward.
I'm drinking some nasty folgers and sucking down a Marlboro red when I see what looked like an old pier piling, straight ahead. I kept looking at that spot, and, nope, nothing there. A few seconds later I swear I saw that thing again but only closer. Nope, gone again. I thought, s**t I've been up waaay too long and I'm f*****g hallucinating. Then out of nowhere this tree trunk shoots directly up into the sky, this thing had to be 60' tall and was about 30'off the bow, dead center. I damn near s**t myself. I pushed to port and rubbed the "tree" with the right side of the bow. We were at a good 14knot clip which is fast as hell for an almost fully loaded trawler. Then it shot town and disappeared about midship.
I later learned that these are pretty uncommon in the Aleutians, where we were fishing. They're called "deadheads" and only 2 of the guys on the boat had seen them before. They float vertically, and Bob straight up and down. These things were known to destroy older wood boats and kill crews. I'm just glad I wasn't dragging the net, and it would have cost us in the ballpark of 100k.
I've seen what most people would consider worse, but the fear that a huge bobbing tree in the middle of Alaskan waters come out of f*****g nowhere tops my list.
Right. Long time lurker, first time poster here.. I’m no longer at sea but used to as a younger chap with romantic ideas spend months on end on cargo ships. Mostly tankers, crude oil VLCC and refined product tankers but with a little time in oil and gas and towing, I came ashore in 2017 with a Master unlimited ticket, sailing as chief officer. My last ship was a self discharging bulk carrier. Anyway I digress.. it wasn’t so much about what I saw which was creepy I saw plenty of interesting things I wouldn’t have seen anywhere else. However, I was second mate on a tanker distributing refined oil products around the coast of New Zealand. A yacht had sailed from a port on the east coast, bound for another port just down the coast abit but it had disappeared. Solo sailor on board - aside from his dog. None the less, the search proved fruitless and it was suspended. However, for weeks afterwards at about 0130 in the morning the rescue coordination center would broadcast a plea at the end of the weather and navigation warning broadcast asking for the yacht to make contact if it could hear the message and was able to do so. I’d sit in the dark, chain smoking and working on my 7th cup of coffee looking out into the black imagining the guy who’s had a stroke or heart attack on board with the same broad cast playing out on his radio while his dog ate his face to keep from starving.. or imagining him having fallen over the side imagining what it’d be like watching your yacht sailing indifferently off into the distance with your dog in the cockpit pacing and agitated unable to do anything about it. Knowing you were f****d and had a matter of hours - if that left to live before the cold got you or exhaustion. Or, imagining the dog starving and dying on a yacht by itself weeks later listening to the same broadcast in the dark. The places your mind goes in the dark by yourself… They found the yacht in the end. The dog was still alive.
A man swimming alone in the Java sea. He had been floating for a couple of days and although several boats had passed him he didn't dare hail a ship not from Indonesia because he feared being taken as a slave or something it's possible he was a little mad but he did seem happy to have us turn up.
A dead human body. It was the tropics and it wasn't in good shape. We turned it over to the authorities at nearest land. There were enough teeth left to identify it by dental records. Here's hoping the man's family got closure. The body was double bagged and stored in the walk-in freezer until our next port visit. There was quite a bit of cleaning and decontamination involved, but that's the gist of it.
Hopefully that man's identity is discovered. Would hate for his family to never have any closure.(Edit: I accidentally read it as "there weren't enough teeth left to identify"💀)
I worked on the sailboat one summer in the Bahamas and something that you see a lot when you’re in the ocean is kayaks and life jackets floating around and you always radio them in but they always just fell off a yacht or something and it’s never a big deal.
Once we found a kayak floating and it had a fishing rod in the rod holder which basically meant someone was using it
EDIT: didn't see how viral this went overnight - some people were asking questions, the coast guard doesn't really even look into this stuff unless there is a confounding report so we never received an update (not that I would have expected one unless there was a full scale search), we went up close to it and it had the removable seat cushion still in which further convinced us that someone had been using it, there was nothing else to see, the line was in the water, but we never really revisited it, we tried not talk about it because the kids on the boat got creeped out after the adults kinda freaked out and didn't control their emotions.
Not exactly in the water but body parts in a sea chest. (The sea chest is a hole in the hull which is used for water intake)
A cleanly bit in half great white shark.
I don't want to meet the creature that considers sharks prey.
I didn’t witness what happened. I witnessed the guy it happened to. Early 2000s and a man I know who looks like a biker who should be a pro wrestler is working as a union underwater welder. He’s working a contract on the St. Louis bridge across the Mississippi River. He would usually stop by after work and eat some food or have a beer, as I was on his way home. We’ve known each other a long time. I’ve never even remotely seen him scared or afraid. One day he shows up in the middle of the day, hours before he would normally be off work. And he looks terrified. I thought maybe he got robbed or held at gun point or something along those lines. He tells me he’s under the water welding like every other day and he starts to get bad feeling. He says you can’t hardly see anything down there on a good at day and that day was worse than normal. He stops working and he’s trying to see what ever it is he can see that’s giving him the feeling. He said he got a feeling in his stomach like it’s already too late and he turn his head and looks behind him and he can see something sparkly and shiny a foot or so away. He reaches out to try to touch it and realizes it his own reflection because he can see his hand reaching towards him. Said it took second to realize it but he looking into an eyeball as big as he is. Dark black and reflecting him in it. He bolts for the surface and gets out the water, quits on the spot, and comes and stops at my house and tells me this story. I’ve know him for years. He’s not the type that makes things up or even really has a sense of humor. He’s easily 6’4”. I believe he went through exactly what he said he did that day and that story and the way he looked have sat with me since. I assume he came across some granddaddy of a catfish down there but I don’t know. A six foot eyeball??
It's not my whole career, but I've been out at sea. Ironically, it's not the bodies of refugees in the water so much as boots, backpacks, etc. that have washed up on shore that stick with me.
I can understand that. A body is awful enough, but it's the belongings that tell you who a person actually was, that gives them more life than just the body you may find. So can be equally upsetting.
Former Navy. The Indian Ocean is absolutely infested with sharks. You see nothing but dorsal fins extending all the way into the horizon.
The Indian ocean is absolutely infested with sharks? Isn't that their habitat? You know, where they're SUPPOSED to be?
20 years in the Navy. Back in 2014 we were getting ready to do a live fire exercise. I hailed a small boat that was near the area we were going to conduct the live firing and asked them to increase their speed by 4 knots to safely leave the area. They responded to me that they could not increase their speed because they have 30k lbs of seasbass on their boat. Well all of the sudden all of their lights went off and they wouldn’t respond to me. Then I see an amber light. I look through my binoculars and couldn’t figure out what it was. Then the light got brighter and we can see that the boat was on fire. We saw their life raft in the water and started sailing towards them. As we got closer, it was like a scenes out of a movie when this boat exploded. Not just any explosion, it was HUGE! We rescued the “fishermen” and found out later that the boat was a floating meth lab. Of course this was off the coast of Florida… 😂
I was drinking in an airport bar and met a woman who worked as a commercial fisherman, on her way to SE Asia for R&R with her family. Real salt-of-the-earth lady. She regaled me with stories about her work, all the good stuff about working in her world, all the reasons she kept doing it for decades.
I asked her what the scariest thing she saw out on the open ocean was and, without any hesitation, she said "Oh, an underwater UFO. I saw one rise up out of the ocean next to my boat and fly off into the sky." The matter-of-fact-ness of her answer bothers me to this day.
I believe it. The ocean is way more massive than land. It's impossible to imagine. That would be the best place for UFOs to hunker down
Was on a two week cruise on a huge ship and one morning there was a tonne of commotion coming from one side of he ship. It looked like a woman had fallen off the ship and was in the water below, face down in a summer dress - her hair sprawling around her as she lay face down and completely motionless in the water bobbing up and down as she was carried by the gentle waves of the ocean. You think you're tough until you see some s**t like that. People were crying, taking their curious kids elsewhere, others were frantically trying to find staff to go rescue her. As it turns out a woman had left her sun dress and wig out to dry on her balcony the night before and the wind that morning had blown it into the water. An announcement was made and everyone was so relieved and there was a lot of laughter. It was surreal to see everyone going from such worried, sad expressions (some were outright bawling their eyes out) to completely in hysterics laughing and hugging one another. I think we were all reminded of how precious life was that day, and it really was a HUGE relief. It was terrible in the moments where we thought it was an actual person. What made it believable is that you're up so high on this ship it's hard to see details down below because of the distance along with the waves and water obscuring finer details. My friends and I, who were on the cruise together, drank and laughed a lot that night. It was a very sobering event.
I was in a glass bottom boat in the 1970’s off the coast of Oahu. We were going out to see a pod of whales. The boat Captain was a grizzled old Hawaiian sun baked to the color of Mahogany. It was an older boat, retrofit with a glass bottom and bench seating. He was narrating over a PA as we left the dock.
We motored out for about 30 minutes and the view out of the bottom of the boat was disappointing, just long streams of bubbles obscuring the view. Finally he stopped the boat, and the view was simply amazing. The Captain pointed out a pod of whales about 1/4 of a mile away. They were cavorting about, diving and jumping. The Captain was explaining their behaviours, but keeping his distance. It was pretty cool.
All the whales suddenly dived and disappeared, emerging moments later, right next to our boat. They were swimming all around us, diving and jumping and splashing us with water, children were laughing, everyone thought it was part of the show. They were right there, almost so close that you could touch them. The Captain told us how lucky we were, to see them up close.
Suddenly, the mood changed when they started bumping up against the hull of the small boat. People were sliding all over the place, some fell onto the floor, children were crying. Most telling, the Captain had stopped narrating and had a look of abject terror on his face. I remember thinking what it must take to make this guy scared, and as he looked terrified we should probably be too.
Suddenly, as quickly as they appeared, the whales disappeared. They were just gone. People picked themselves up and sat back down, mothers consoled children, we started back to the dock. The Captain got back on the PA and tried to downplay the seriousness of the what just happened, but there was a definite quiver in his voice as we headed back to shore.
I know that must have been terrifying, but since you survived it also sounds kinda awesome.
I was underway from the Port of Houston to Cartagena, Columbia. The vessel cuts all lights off on the outside of the boat, so it's pretty dark outside. I would always go and sit out on the deck and listen to my headphones, and look at the stars. Well one night, somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean sea, I noticed a swarm of lightning bugs cross the boat. Totally blew my mind to see light out or nowhere. At least I think it was lightning bugs.
On the same trip heading back to Houston from Columbia, I witnessed a satellite crashing. At least, that's what I think it was. It steadily strobed and lit up the night sky and water for about 15 min till I couldn't see it anymore.
And on a different trip, I was in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. No moon, no clouds, no light pollution, the amount of stars that I saw made me cry. Never thought starlight alone could cast a shadow. Definitely mesmerizing I still remember it like it was yesterday.
USN Sailor. I have seen a lot of remarkable things, but the creepiest was a great white shark that swam (more like drifted) inbetween the two ships during an underway replinishment off the coast of Australia. I could make an educated guess on how big it was, but just let me tell you it was way, WAYYYY bigger than the biggest sharks I've seen on the Shark Week shows. Much longer and twice as massive as the "biggest shark ever seen" on the youtube videos I've seen. It didn't move a single inch... it just floated, mouth open, inbetween as everyone on the bridgewing exclaimed "Holy f*****g S**T!" It's teeth were as big as a man's head. And it had massive scars down its' back and tail from a ships propeller. I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it with my own eyes.
I am a recreational sailor who travels for weeks at a time at sea. I once saw a flame on the water not ten yards from me. Just freaking burning at midnight.
Former comercial fisherman. One morning we had a Russian Submarine surface about a quarter mile off the stern with it's periscope fully raised. We had a marine biologist from the state as an observer, and I'll never forget him saying "is that a god damn submarine". We were drinking coffee early in the morning when this happened, and the captain kinda just pretended it wasn't there. Didn't call it in on the radio or anything. In fact we assumed it was an American sub as we were near a US navy base. Coast Guard showed up and started trying to hail the sub via the radio, which the captain had left on an emergency channel to listen in. I'll never forget our faces as we hear "Russian submarine victor leonov please respond".
Nothing too extensive like some of the stories here, but I worked as a tuna fisherman for a tiny bit, where I’d spend 3-4 weeks out at a time, taking around 3 days of 24 hour travel to get where we (me and one other person - the captain who was a 5th generation fisherman) were fishing.
So many stories of insane things that I could be here all night - but one was near the end of the season, and we pushed out farther than we should have (over 100 nautical miles) where we had NO business being as a 37 foot trawler. And then we’re caught in a bad storm.
I had barely enough time to, very carefully, board up all of the windows before the boat started “scooping” when coming down one of the 12ft waves, the first third of the boat dives underwater before popping back up, only to travel up another wave and do it again…and again…as waves got larger and things got worse.
Basically, the captain and I stayed the cabin, bracing ourselves with each wave, staring at the radar in hopes we could stay in the position of taking the waves head-on and avoid being capsized. After a few minutes, and the fear that this 5th generation fisherman was exuding, I just accepted that I was going to die there - and the experience of that acceptance, and the event itself, had a profound effect on my perception and the way I’ve lived life afterward.
We eventually made it out, and didn’t say a lot to each other afterward. Lots of stories from that time, but this was the “creepiest”, I’d say!
If you're on a boat where you need to 'board up the windows' you never, ever, go more than a mile offshore !!! Even then think hard about it !!
I was on a 32ft speedboat and got caught by nightfall in between islands. No night lights on the boat, navigating using gps and depth finder. Captain knew the way like the back of his hand since he’d sailed those waters since he was a kid but for me it was my first time in the middle of the ocean at night. Pitch black but for the stars. As above so below, it seemed as if the boat was floating in the blackest void of the universe. Years later I saw the movie Life of Pi and the scene where Pi is in his lifeboat floating in the dark among the stars no above no below : it was exactly like that. I still have dreams about that night. . The engulfing dark and the silence that was not silent. Surreal.
We made it safely to port. Captain fitted the nightlights on that boat the day after.
It was 1998, I was only 11, was out for a quick boat ride with some family. Swiss Air Flight 111 had recently crashed a bay or two away. We saw a suitcase floating from afar, my dad quickly turned the boat back to shore.
Floes of ice passing by, covered in blood - then i remember that polar bears exist
Legitimately though, calm water and flat light. You can’t see where the sea and sky split, it’s really dangerous for helicopters and generally unsettling
I was in the USN back in the late 80s and early 90s. Cruising through the Indian Ocean in 100% blackness then waking up the next afternoon and looking over the rails and seeing 100s of sharks swimming alongside of us constantly. Every now and then we would get a "man overboard" alert. They never recovered even one of them at night. They were usually s*icides.
A toilet. I mean a literal regular household toilet floating hundreds of miles from land…and why was it floating? I’ll never know.
Somewhere in the Atlantic, nice cold as f**k night, decided to step out and look at stars. About ten minutes on and a boats mast pops up, sits there a few minutes and then back under. No alarms, nothing. Just some sub boys getting a bit of late night o2 in the middle of nowhere next to some friends.
Not so much creepy, as eerie, but being out in the blue at night in a lightning storm in a slack wind.
The ocean was very flat - no big rolling swells - just tiny little ripples. The whole world would be black, and then there would be a flurry of bolts, and the whole world would be silver. The ocean looked like nothing so much as aluminium foil that had been scrunched up, and flattened out - the water looked like mercury, and all the little ripples made these very dramatic black shadows.
I'm sorry I can't stop seeing a face in the clouds, or at least a mouth and chin. Think my brain is seeing things again
My old sergeant told me a spooky story once about how his father used to be a small time fisherman with his brother off the coast. Must've been the 1940s. He said one night 10-15 miles off shore they decided to catch a few hours of sleep late night light fishing but were awoken to the sound of a screaming lady. He said it wasn't just a panicked scream though, like a forced evil-like scream. Long and obsessively getting louder and louder. They spotlighted every direction and checked radar or w/e equipment they had and found nothing. The screams increased until it was on the boat and they booted up the engines and were jumping waves to get back to land in a fright. He said his dad's brother was never the same and didn't fish again after that. My sergeant said his dad was not one to tell a joke or mess around, claimed he was a serious dude and never told stories. True or not the way he told the story to me freaked me out and I remember being up until like 2am in some old a*s barracks that Elvis did basic at.
Since it was not too far off the shore, sounds like it could have been a bird, some birds sound terrifying, just like evil-like human screams. Take this barn owl for example (warning: LOUD) https://youtube.com/watch?v=XHz2FTZadqQ
Two things.
First was the amount of stars you can see from the middle of the Atlantic. Had a girlfriend with me and we would talk while watching shooting stars. I swear some of them were just...moving and not shooting but who really knows. Gave me the sense that humans are really just egotistical ants in the universe.
Second was when the ocean was smooth as glass. When I walked out the skin of ship, I silently gasped because I was really scared. The calmness of it all and the lack of distinction of the horizon was terrifying. I went back in the skin of the ship out of fear then came back out about ten minutes later and just breathed. The most terrifyingly amazing aspect of the calmness was seeing the details of the clouds in the ocean then the occasional ripple. Felt like I had crossed dimensions into a heaven I was not supposed to see.
The stars that were “just moving”, were more than likely satellites. They have their own beauty when you unexpectedly see one start to move and reposition itself.
I saw a bunch of stuff while in the Marines, nothing gory, the most interesting was a giant Great White off the coast of San Diego. Big, cut up, just floating there. We thought it was dead for a second, but it eventually swam off.
The coolest thing was essentially a ship graveyard in the Gulf of Aquaba, we saw at least 8 in 30 miles just stuck in shallow water.
The most depressing with sheer amount of trash in the remote islands of the Phillipines.
Crossing the Pacific and had a moonless still night, so unbelievably still that the horizon just blended with the sea and the stars reflecting in the ocean made if feel like was in space just floating. And the bright green phosphorescence trail in the ocean from where the ship passed through was the only other light. It was amazing
A huge explosion 4 miles behind me in the area I was fishing in when sailing back ashore, I fish on the reykjanes ridge, it's a active volcanic area where the American and European tectonic plates are separating, it most likely was a underwater volcanic event.
I've always found the dark of night eerie with the jet black sky and the somehow darker ocean waving by. It completely removed your frame of reference. As a former miner who found the true darkness of the underground somewhat meditative when I occasionally turned off my headlamp, I weirdly never got used to the void of the dark ocean at night.
However the eeriest thing that happened is that over the series of three days, several black birds hit the side of the ship and then died in the crates below. I would reach into a crate for some piece of equipment and pull out a rigid little black body. The birds don't bleed, they seem to just die. I couldn't help but take it as a bad omen however nothing did happen and birds are known to gravitate toward ships. One day during the same voyage, I reached into a crate and felt the wriggle of a live body and pulled out a live, but shook up, little black bird. We let it rest on the ship and gave it space until it was ready to take off. Even though I've seen some other objectively worse things in my career, for some reason the birds just stick with me and I find myself thinking about all those little birds often
I was crossing the south Atlantic on a super tanker (vlcc) from Saudia Arabia to Galveston. In the middle of the ocean, around noon, it was a quiet sea, nearly no wind at this latitude and blue sky. We saw that we were approaching a massive round black cloud on the horizon. It was really weird. Just one huge cloud at low altitude. The worst was that it was filled with lightning, every 5 seconds. The entire crew came on deck to see it... It was exactly like in the movie when the alien ship arrived at the beginning ..
In the 90s, we were sailing off the coast of Gotland when we saw a sub-hunting helicopter from the Swedish armed forces patrolling the area near us. Also nearby was a Russian freight vessel.
All of a sudden, our onboard compass went haywire for a bit, spun around like crazy, and then returned to normal as if nothing happened.
I suppose a russian sub was right under our boat, close enough to disrupt the magnetic field. Gives me the chills thinking about it
Oh hey one I can actually answer!
So this isn't the creepiest story, I'll admit that straight off. I was working on a tiny oil rig off the Gulf Coast, it was about 2pm. I was on what was called "sliver duty", basically you wait in-between two relatively close together walls on the exterior of the rig, strapped into a safety harness , while someone skirts through a long flow cable that you direct. Boring, but you get a nice view of the ocean for an hour or two.
Suddenly my buddy on the other end of the sliver starts screaming to look down, I do and saw the biggest sea creature I've ever seen in my life. End to end it must of been the size of most rural hospitals I've seen. Just pushing below the surface of the water, it raised its head out and...
I realized I was really dumb and was staring at an undersea cable placer.
Sometimes, during night time I have went out of the accommodation (leaving compartment onboard merchant ships) to breathe some fresh air or to take out the trash since the garbage station was outside. And when it is completely dark, and the water is calm, you hear the splashing water against the ship's hull. Well I can't explain why, but the ocean water was luring me, but at the same time you are terrified, since nobody will find you if you fall overboard. So sometimes I was just staring at the water in the dark, and inside me was some struggle, like some part of me wanted to jump in, while the other was terrified that it would be a one way ticket. Can't still find the explanation for this. This hypnotic, mesmerising feeling I get, and at the same time the chills running down my spine, that if I would fall in the water. It's game over for sure.
It's poetically referred to as Call of the Void and is the strong urge to step off a cliff, or into the ocean. It's very common, and very scary.
Used to deliver sail boats will living/based in saint Croix USVi. Once in a great while we’d run through a patch of bioluminescence and the hull or hills would agitate the water enough to give a light show.
One night delivering a Dolphin 46 catamaran from northern Brazil to alameda CA we ran through a patch off the coast of Nicaragua. It was like 0230 on my watch and the sight was amazing as I looked at two blue streaks extending behind us for 30 meters or so.
Two nights later at roughly the same time I ran into another patch but had what looked like two blue hued torpedoes shooting right at the front of our amas. Turns out it was a pair of dolphins wanting to play in the bow wake and scare the s**t out of me.
A friend told me this. He was a competitive endurance rower, rowing across the Atlantic. It was night and his little boat was floating right in the Middle Passage where many slave ships sailed hundreds of years ago. It was an extremely calm sea with no wind. He swears he could hear voices whispering in a language he did not understand. He also mentioned being in high seas at another point and he could look up into the waves above his head and see shark silhouettes. I like being on land. 👍
This sort of qualifies. Former navy here. Somewhere off the coast of Italy saw a very, very small boat, not much bigger than a rowboat, about 9 or 10miles offshore. This was sometime around midnight. There was no light from land, and no other ships around. It had a light. Our ship captain said it was a fisherman, and the fish would be attracted to the light at that time. Imagine being in a rowboat about 10 miles off shore in the middle of a pitch black night, waiting to see what finds you.
A daily occurance due to people fleeing conflict around the Med and north Africa.
Not me, my dad in Nam.... Was on an aircraft carrier. He said they were on the "nets" hanging off the side getting sun. A plane comes in to land and they stand up with their heads above deck to watch the plane land. As the plane comes in the stop cable breaks & in a second it snaps his friend's head clean off perched about a foot from him. Head goes flying like a football into the water body drop into the net.
Dad said they stopped the ship to "attempt" to find the head but zero chance. More of a courtesy.
yeah you stay the hell away from the stop cable on an aircraft carrier
I saw some dinosaur looking thing poking its head out of the water in an ammunition dumping zone off the coast of Vancouver island while fishing tuna. Soon as I got within 100 feet or so of it me and the deckhand both had a good look at it through the binos then it went underwater again.
Nessie! So that's where you went. I was hoping that someone on this thread would report a sighting.
It’s not at sea but underwater, there isn’t anything that geeks me out quite like a wreck appearing. There is only so much visual light underwater past 50 feet, you just can’t see very far ahead of you the deeper you go. So when you think you can see ahead clearly, and you’re following your compass in open ocean, and all of a sudden the hull of a wreck just blooms out of the deep like some dead thing that’s been waiting for you. Pee your wet suit.
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to how dark it can get. On moonless nights, calm seas can be a bit hypnotic.
Middle of the Pacific, went outside at 2am, saw a blue light in the shape of an orb about 30 feet away from the ship. It hovered next to us (we were going probably 12 kts) and then it took off faster than anything I had ever seen move.
I have also seen some weird floating things that looked like a lifeguard chair from the beach, but made of bamboo just floating way out in the Pacific. No idea what they could have been, not really creepy in and of themselves, but just being out there so far from land was weird. It also helps that I usually would see them on days where the ocean was super calm, like glass.
Ball lightning! Science still has no acceptable explanation. Either a proposed explanation can't explain why it's ball shaped. Or can't explain how it can pass through a window without leaving a hole. Blue is fairly rare, but not as rare as green.
Fast darting white lights in the middle of the night. They moved very erratically then stayed still, like drones, but very far away and seemingly too fast. Moved in straight lines too, never diagonal. We were at least 300nm from land, PAC
I posted this story a few other times. I was in the navy, sailing the black sea. We were far off the coast and I was watching the stars, chatting with a colleague of mine. It was late in the night. We noticed three stars moving from one side of the sky to the other, really fast. They were perfect aligned, forming a triangular shape. They were far from each other but moving in perfect synchrony. The moment they disappeared in the far end of the sky, a fourth star went after them, closing the shape as it was a rhombus. The fourth star was the fastest thing I have ever seen.
To this day I have no idea of what we saw.
One night on the 00-04 watch in the Persian gulf on a Military transport, the whole sky went from pitch black of 0200 to fully lit in a second. This went on for about 30 seconds then back to pitch black. We called up the neighboring ships and HQ no one knew what happened. Our best guess was a meteor.
Second story was a couple years before the first, cruising around the Philippines and see nothing at all visual and on radar, All of a sudden we see a faint white light about 100 yards off our port bow. Typically we don't let anything get within a mile of our ship. Grab the binos and head to the bridge wing and there is just a little banca boat with his outboard motor and a flashlight. Even with Radar, NVG's and an infrared camera we couldn't see this guys little 20 foot boat in a 6 foot sea without lights on.
Obviously more crazy stuff than creepy in my career so far.
The people are the craziest thing you will experience at sea, had one guy who wouldn't go outside the skin of the ship at night because the aliens would abduct him... again!
I've experienced that, the night suddenly lighting up like daytime. I was behind my apartment building walking my dog, and suddenly it was so bright. I swear I looked up expecting to see a UFO, or that when i got back in an hour had passed or something, but no. my husband suggested a cars headlights had washed over me and im thinking "noooo, im not so stupid i can't recognize car headlights 🙄"
Nothing too out of the ordinary, but two things stick out to me.
On occasion, I have to get in the water in the middle of the ocean for Man Overboard Drills. Looking down and seeing literally nothing is actually a little eerie when I think about it.
Seeing storm systems develop in the distance is pretty cool and trippy at the same time. You'll literally see massive storm clouds developing a water spout (although they seldom fully develop), and lightning light up the horizon. It's especially powerful at night to the point where all you see is white light.
Other than that, it's just occasional Marine life. My job is mundane but it has its moments.
Was on a naval vessel, transiting south between Florida and the Bahamas. I was the OOD. At about 2 am, I spotted a red flare just forward of the port beam. Slowed down, and pointed all of our radar in that direction. Absolutely nothing there. Changed course to go see if we could find something visually, but nada. For some reason, it still creeps me out.
I worked on a barge line on the Mississippi and we found a couple bodies per year. Sometimes they were clothed, sometimes naked.
One guy was only wearing a leather belt, and when the crew was trying to secure it with a pike pole, the body popped open and the odor was awful. It was pretty bad before it popped open…
Maybe a net would have been a better way of retrieving a rotting body ?
Some 20 years ago...
On the MV Explorer (since sunk) down near the Antarctic circle, sailing around the 'bergs and occasionally making landfall...
We rounded into a small bay area, and there, amongst the ice and coast was an unmarked sailing yacht. Which is odd as generally yachts have some identifying markings on them.
To add to it, they didn't respond to any radio contact, and whilst I wasn't privy to the conversation (and it was a long time ago), some crew went across via Zodiac and were refused boarding.
So basically a yacht, not a particularly large one, that was unmarked was hanging around in the inhospitable waters of the Antarctic and didn't want any help or contact.
Proper weird.
So I've worked in hospitality, including on a private yacht. This is in the Baltic. We were not near shore. It's very late. I assume everyone else had gone to sleep but I was not very sleepy after a pretty stressed day. I went on the deck and just looked at the ocean. Do you know that very strange feeling when you feel that somebody is looking at you? I could swear that there was something just below the surface. I don't remember how much time passed. It felt like a long, long time. I was just staring just at the edge of my eyesight, thinking that I would see something. I mean I guess it could've been fish or some sea mammal, but it felt wrong. I wish I had a more interesting conclusion than that. I actually don't even remember going back to my cabin that I shared with two others in the stew crew. The next morning I didn't talk about it, but then a few days later, I brought it up. No one thought much of it except one of the deckhands that had been working at sea for a long time. He said he had felt the same thing and seen the same thing several times, but only at night, and only when he was alone.
I have no idea what to make of it. But I really feel in my heart it was not an animal.
A glowing red orb flying across the water at night, about a foot above the water, 25m behind me- absolutely silent, from left to right very fast
Ball lightning. Red is the most common colour. Science still has no acceptable explanation. The best known explanation of lightning hitting desert sand can't explain the ones seen in the middle of the ocean.
Reefs in the middle of nowhere. You can anchor and see everything, but they don't get above sea level, so looking from the horizon, nothing's there.
Back when i was a cadet at a merchant ship, i used to be exhausted and over worked all the time that i started hallucinating stuff at night. My watch used to start at 4 in the morning , one fine day we hit a storm and the wind was coming with such a force that it was creating a wailing sound like somebody is crying outside. I went to check outside and saw a shadowy figure sitting at the corner, i knew i was hallucinating but still i sh*t my pants. Never went outside during a storm after that.
Not creepy, but totally weird.
2 Chinese boats, like small, old, fishing vessels, meeting up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean like half a mile behind us.
This was so random, within international waters but so freaking far away from China, I still wonder what the hell they were doing there. They had no AIS. The first one to arrive close by, passed next to us as if to check who we were and if we were keeping course (sailing vessel) and then went straight towards the other ship and mated.
Maybe drug trafficking or maybe just fishing. But yeah, still pretty far away from their most likely official harbor and kind of weird. It was litteraly in the middle of the pond, around 10 degrees North of the equator, so not your typical fishing route.
My paternal side fished off Gloucester Massachusetts for several years. One time they found some ship remnants, part of a life vest, and what looked like some personal items. Nothing identifying. They brought them to the harbormaster but there was no record of a late ship, missing fishermen or anything.
My uncles were also in Vietnam doing search and rescue for the Air Force. They never went into much detail but they said nighttime searches in the water were the worst because every shadow could have been a fishing boat ready to shoot them down. One of them picked up his high school friend who was shot down as well
I was the rescue motor whale boat officer on an aircraft carrier and we were crossing the Gulf Stream off of Virginia a couple of days after a hurricane had hit the Caribbean. It was like a swath of brown gunk between deep blue sides. So much debris. Captain wanted us to check out a half of a catamaran that was floating in the middle of the brown slick and rather than launch a helo he decided it would be good practice for the motor whale boat to go out and put rescue swimmers in. Problem was that just about the time the swimmers reached the half hull a looked down and saw a bunch of sharks. Swimmers saw them too—they about walked on water getting back in the boat. The cherry on top was that once we were back by the carrier the swells were too large for us to set the davit hook safely and it took 40 minutes before they lifted the motor whale boat back out safely. Good times.
I think I answered this a few years ago.
While sailing in Northern Alaska, during the northern lights. We saw, what we thought was a bright spotlight from some air craft at like 3am. It shined for about 10 secs. Went away. And shined one more time. And didn’t make any sound. It was high over some mountains, so we couldn’t quite see what it was.
Only 4 of the crew saw it. And we laughed that if we told anyone, not a single person would believe the way we would describe it.
An unforgettable night for us! That was a good crew to sail with.
We were in the Caribbean one night, short trip from Florida. It was my first night about 3:30 am local, I am standing on the deck overlooking the edge and out of nowhere this large rock that is sticking straight up out of the ocean just passes by within just a few feet 6-8 feet of the small ship. Its about 6 feet tall and dark gray I had one of my home made underwater fireworks with me It gives of a bright burning underwater glow.
I like to drop one every now and then just to see how far it goes before it goes out or I can't see it anymore. This one was the last one I ever dropped not only did it go way the f**k down ( l lost site) but seen sharks so I go up to the deck and look for whoever is controlling the ship the door is locked. Pounding on the door the helmsman comes to the door and it was quite clear he had just woke up. This is the last time I got on a ship. Never again unless I am driving. Got off next port flew home.
I worked on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska one summer. I got up one early morning before sunrise because I heard what sounded like a woman moaning not far from the boat. We were probably a few miles off the coast near Bristol Bay. It was really creepy the captain said it was seals. Shortly after that a massive storm blew in.
Did some scuba diving in the tropics. The most stunning thing I ever saw was a group of Manta rays, dancing around us. The scariest one was a flock ( sorry, non native speaker, must be a better term, like murmuration or parliament ;-)) of barracudas. There must have been more than a hundred of them, long as an arm, a third of that a mouth with really sharp teeth, and all moving together. They followed us for a while, then moved away. I found them way more scary than the hammerhead shark we had met before.
In English, groups of fish are usually just referred to as “schools” regardless of species, so it would be referred to as a “school of barracudas.” Though I honestly like your suggestions more - a parliament of barracuda!
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Me too, as long as I'm hearing them second-hand. No sea adventures for me, please.
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I love the ocean but I'm not a good or strong swimmer so I stay as close as I can to the boat while I'm in the water. One time this current swept me away from the boat and was several meters away. I started going back and on the way I felt being hit on my side by something so big the water got dark around me and I thought I was being attacked or being drowned. I felt being upside down and going under and I thought it was the end when I heard shouts and opened my eyes and saw I was near the foot of the ladder on the boat and grabbed on while the waves slammed at me. Then I saw them. The tail side of a huge whale shark followed closely by a baby whale shark. I was so shocked and dazed and so scared. I had no idea how huge they were and their mouths were, I'm only 5'0 and could have easily got sucked in. I was just crying, I was so weak and swallowed a lot of water. It was the scariest, most surreal experience I've had in the ocean.
Not in the ocean, but I was kayaking in a salt marsh when something bumped the back of my kayak. I thought it was a gator (scary enough) but then a dorsal fin runs along the edge and this stupid shark damn near flips me. (I remember it being huge, but it probably wasn't any bigger than my kayak.) It swam away and I paddled back to the launch site as fast as I could.
I prefer viewing the ocean from my desktop and I will never get on a boat of any size.
former u.s. navy, 86-95, 30 nov 1988 on board the u.s.s. nimitz, gulf of oman. two sailors were working on an A7 corsair fighter bomber. accidentally fired it's machine gun into the A6 intruder that the designated alert refueling tanker. we lost 7 planes and two men. i will NEVER forget the smell and the sight of jet fuel burning on the flightdeck at 0230 in the morning.
We took my friend's dad's 57 foot sailboat out into international waters off California. Shrouded in the fog , we saw a large grey ship, with Cyrillic markings on the side. Immediately made a fast u-turn back to Marina Del Rey.
Did some scuba diving in the tropics. The most stunning thing I ever saw was a group of Manta rays, dancing around us. The scariest one was a flock ( sorry, non native speaker, must be a better term, like murmuration or parliament ;-)) of barracudas. There must have been more than a hundred of them, long as an arm, a third of that a mouth with really sharp teeth, and all moving together. They followed us for a while, then moved away. I found them way more scary than the hammerhead shark we had met before.
In English, groups of fish are usually just referred to as “schools” regardless of species, so it would be referred to as a “school of barracudas.” Though I honestly like your suggestions more - a parliament of barracuda!
Load More Replies... Me too, as long as I'm hearing them second-hand. No sea adventures for me, please.
Load More Replies... I love the ocean but I'm not a good or strong swimmer so I stay as close as I can to the boat while I'm in the water. One time this current swept me away from the boat and was several meters away. I started going back and on the way I felt being hit on my side by something so big the water got dark around me and I thought I was being attacked or being drowned. I felt being upside down and going under and I thought it was the end when I heard shouts and opened my eyes and saw I was near the foot of the ladder on the boat and grabbed on while the waves slammed at me. Then I saw them. The tail side of a huge whale shark followed closely by a baby whale shark. I was so shocked and dazed and so scared. I had no idea how huge they were and their mouths were, I'm only 5'0 and could have easily got sucked in. I was just crying, I was so weak and swallowed a lot of water. It was the scariest, most surreal experience I've had in the ocean.
Not in the ocean, but I was kayaking in a salt marsh when something bumped the back of my kayak. I thought it was a gator (scary enough) but then a dorsal fin runs along the edge and this stupid shark damn near flips me. (I remember it being huge, but it probably wasn't any bigger than my kayak.) It swam away and I paddled back to the launch site as fast as I could.
I prefer viewing the ocean from my desktop and I will never get on a boat of any size.
former u.s. navy, 86-95, 30 nov 1988 on board the u.s.s. nimitz, gulf of oman. two sailors were working on an A7 corsair fighter bomber. accidentally fired it's machine gun into the A6 intruder that the designated alert refueling tanker. we lost 7 planes and two men. i will NEVER forget the smell and the sight of jet fuel burning on the flightdeck at 0230 in the morning.
We took my friend's dad's 57 foot sailboat out into international waters off California. Shrouded in the fog , we saw a large grey ship, with Cyrillic markings on the side. Immediately made a fast u-turn back to Marina Del Rey.
