Haunted Cosmos - Places You Shouldn't Go

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Ever been in a place and think, “Man, I should not be here?”Well, you aren’t alone, and this new episode of Haunted Cosmos is all about it! It may be a deviation from our normal topics, but remember kids: places are not just stuff either.So enjoy these stories of places you can’t go and people that went there anyways!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Want to keep nefarious fairy Bigfoots away and also avoid icky seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties in your daily shower routine? Then check out the vast array of homemade soaps from our friends at Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!This episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more!This episode is sponsored by Backwards Planning Financial. Visit Joe's website here or give him a call (615-767-2555).This episode is also sponsored by Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today.This episode is sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee! Visit their website here to get your first bag free!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully.This episode is sponsored by Rooted Pines Homestead. Visit their website here! Help further Christendom and get 10% off your next order when you use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS at checkout!This episode is also sponsored by the King's Ridge Elderberries! Check them out here and use code HAUNTED for 10% off your first order!This episode is also sponsored by Reformation Heritage Books! Learn more about the Puritan Treasures collection here and use code haunted for 10% off at checkout!Finally, this episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order.Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap, Backwards Planning Financial, New Dominion Design Co, Rooted Pines Homestead, Greytoad tallow, the Kings Ridge Elderberries, Reformation Heritage Books, Squirrely Joe's Coffee, Stonecrop Wealth Advisors, and our supporters at patreon.com. As Dante travels with the poet Virgil in the early contos of the inferno, readers doubtless begin to sense how deep the divine comedy promises to be. a journey from the lowliest and coldest pits of hell to the farthest and warmest reaches of heaven, written by perhaps the greatest medieval mind to ever exist. The comedy proves to be nothing short of indescribable in its brilliance, beauty, and since the medieval mind is marked by intricacy, complexity. Not one word is haphazardly chosen. Not one image invoked by the author is invoked on accident,

and not one character is placed into his role arbitrarily. Everything has its place, and everything plays the part assigned him by Dante. Everything, therefore, means something. And the reader who wishes to plumb the full depths of Dante's genius would do well to try and find all of those different meanings. For example, let us ask what it means for Virgil to take Dante into the second circle of hell,

past the limbo of the virtuous pagans and children dead in infancy, and show him that the judge of the dead, who proclaims sentence on those who must suffer torment, is the old king of Crete, Minos. Why Minos? Why is it fitting for Dante to place him as the one who pronounces the circle assigned to each soul and then cast him into that circle himself?

In answer, it will be best to remember Minos' story. Minos was said to be one of the people, first men to ever live. His throne was in Nosis on the island of Crete, where he reigned over many of the islands in the Aegean Sea. According to the myth, he was a wise man of great character who developed the first civil constitution for Crete, and who, being a son of the gods himself, was tutored in law and judgment by none other than Zeus. He founded the world's first navy and established the maritime supremacy that would, three generations after his reign ended, allow the armies of Agamemnon to sell east toward Ilium for the Trojan War. He was a great

king, who had many great sons, but he also had a dark side. Over against all the just rule and good laws he passed down to the Greek lands and all the heroic blood he provided to the race of men, it must be said that Minos was also oftentimes tyrannical to his people. Some vein of selfish hatred tapped deep into Minos's soul, and fueled the king during rampage after rampage of revenge, cruelty, and unspeakable violence to those who trusted him to preserve their lives. He was a wise judge and a cruel king, an archetype of the dichotomy in so many great men. Minos was the ideal choice for Dante's damned Judge of the Damned. There is another piece of the story that is worth mentioning,

and that is the real focus of today's episode. For you see, it wasn't enough that Minos was wise and cruel. Dante needed more than that to appoint him the serpentine prosecutor of hell. Minos also got the role because of his connection to the labyrinth. The divine comedy is a mosaic of concentric circles. Hell is a downward spiral of torment, purgatory and upward spiral of purification, in heaven an outward and inward, interdimensional spiral of transcending love

and paradise. But since hell must be hell, and not just a negative image of heaven, the downward spiral structure wasn't quite enough for Dante. It needed to also be a maze, a place of hopeless wandering, or all who enter feel trapped with no way of escape. Minos, therefore, was just the man for the job. Long ago, Minos's wife, Pacifé was cursed by Poseidon to bear the child of the greatest bull from her husband's herd. The result of the bestial and unholy union was the infamous monster, the Minotar, the bloodthirsty beast with the body of a man and the head of a bull.

The Minotar was brought up in the house of the king and as he grew proved to be an unruly offspring. He not only reminded the king of the vindictive wrath of the gods and the humiliating curse they had placed on his household, but once he was weaned, he could only be sated by living human flesh. The Minotaur, whose name was Astarius, began terrorizing the people of Crete,

by rampaging into their homes and devouring all the inhabitants he could find inside. Given the bull-like strength Asterius possessed, he could hardly be restrained by the entire king's guard holding on to his leash, and getting the leash on him at all was nearly a miraculous act. King Minos was desperate to find some way

to protect his people from being eaten by his own son without having to kill or exile the boy. Acting under the advice of the oracle at Delphi, Minos had a great labyrinth constructed. Austerius was then placed in the center of the labyrinth, promising to be too dim-witted to escape, and victims were periodically sent into the maze to be attacked and eaten by the monster

as his hunger grew too great. Of course, Asterius was eventually, eventually defeated by the hero Theseus, as he was helped by Minos' own daughter Ariadne. But that event doesn't concern us here. What does concern us is the horror of the young men or virgin maidens pushed into the entrance of the labyrinth, knowing that theirs is a death sentence of the most painful and terrifying variety, a place no person should go, but a place they found themselves nonetheless. This is a fear that seems to lie at the very heart of man's corrupted nature.

From the punishments of confined physical torment in Dante's Inferno to the child who gets stuffed into a locker by the school bully, from the dreadful anticipation of a monster snatching you from the shadowy hedge of a maze you're lost in to the utter darkness of the deep ocean, where all you can see is what your little lamp illuminates and all that you can't see overwhelms you. that man tells himself, whether they be mythical, purely historical, or purely fictional, are filled with stories of unfortunate souls, finding themselves lost in a place they were never supposed to be. What's more, and be honest with yourself here, this trope is very effective.

No matter how many times you hear such a story, your interest would rise at the thought of another. Depending on how loosely one defines claustrophobia, therefore, it may be safe to say that we all suffer from it to different degrees. The vastness of space between galaxies is just that, vast, beyond our comprehension. But if one were to find themselves floating alone through it, I'm sure it would feel like the tightest closet of darkness imaginable. One whose walls are always squeezing tighter and tighter. Think of the voyage of Caspian and the dawn. treader into the dark island where dreams, not daydreams, mind you, but dreams, come true. Or the bleak despair of Frodo, slashing his way through Shilob's tunnels.

Or the never-ending pain of Prometheus, strapped to a rock of eternity, only to have his liver eaten by an eagle each day after it grew back in the night from the previous day's attack. Or perhaps even the frantic fear felt by Adam and Eve the first time guilt came into the world. In a sense, all of these stories, and countless more, are stories like this, stories of the hopelessness that comes, in part, from the place you put yourself in. And when we realize this, when we understand that there's a common thread linking Adam hiding from God behind a bush, Austerius' victims, timidly stepping into the dark and foggy labyrinth he called home, and the hiker stuck in a slot canyon, watching storm clouds gather overhead,

we begin to reckon with the deep why behind both our fascination with and our deep unsettledness at these kinds of tales. They unsettle us because we can imagine the discomfort, outright pain, despair, and surrender these scenarios elicit from their victims. We can rightly guess the magnitude of these things in a way because at their base they remind us of the hopelessness we gave to ourselves when we brought a curse into the world. These stories unsettle us for the same reason they fascinate us. They are human stories. But not just any human stories. These are fallen human stories. And these are the kind of stories this episode will explore.

It will be a new style of show for us. We won't be talking about these deeper truths so much. Instead, we will be content to introduce them here and then let you connect the dots for yourself, as we indulge in the fascination a bit by telling you scary stories of people who should not have gotten into a place, but who got there anyway. And I think it will be easiest, like learning a new board game with the family, to simply begin with one such story,

a story of someone who found himself in a place which he ought not to have gone, and let your mind begin to see the dark weave connecting all of these things for yourself. I suppose there's nothing else left to say by way of introduction. So please, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. About 25 miles to the north of Johannesburg, South Africa, there lies a township called Kruger's Dorp. Just outside of Kruger's Dorp, there is a limestone cave system that tunnels deep in winding passages into the earth for many, many leagues. These scratches in the world attract thousands of tourists and scientists from all over the world every year, or at least they used to. And they do this partly because it appears as though many have always done this.

Fossils from the deeps of time saturate the area. Those with the right mixture of curiosity and means can't avoid this type of bait. And so the cave systems of Sturkfontein have sustained near constant exploration by both man and beast. This amount of study in tourism prompted whatever entity does this sort of thing to name it a world heritage site in 2000. But of course, long before that, it was a favorite haunt of archaeologists and cave divers alike. Despite the traffic into and out of it each year, though, the entirety of the system is far from being completely mapped. And while part of this is due to the sheer size of the gorge, two other factors also contribute. First, it's ever-changing nature, seeming to open up new caverns and underground museums by the day.

And second, the fact that much of the cave system is underwater. It is that second thing which concerns us today, because while underwater cave diving is a thing whose name alone strikes anxiety in the hearts of most, it is also a thing that a tight-knit community of thrill-seekers and explorers absolutely love to do. To be cradled in the cold embrace of water untouched by the hand of man deep in the heart of the earth, again, not a hobby for the faint of heart,

inspires a fierce longing for adventure in a select few. Whether it is the love of silence, for there is little else in those deeps, or a love of the high that results from overcoming the inevitable fear of the adventure, it cannot be denied that a growing number of people in the world just can't get enough of underwater caving. Naturally, as the sport itself grows in popularity, so do the places that are best for pushing its limits.

And given what's already been said about Sturkfonteen caves, it won't surprise you to discover that it is not only scientists who flood the area, but these kinds of athletes as well. To this day, nobody knows how deep the main shafts. of Sturkfontein actually goes. It may be that nobody ever will. Inside of that main shaft, quite a ways down already, there is an underground lake. The lack of any wind means that the surface of the lake

is disorienting in its stillness. It almost looks fake, like a glitch in the matrix or something. This, coupled with the crystal clarity of the royal blue water, make it a truly otherworldly and dreamlike place. When one descends below the surface of this lake, making some of the only ripples it has ever experienced in its long history propagate to the cave walls.

One finds an equally dreamy, almost eerie world below. Between the bubbles blown out from the scuba regulator, the clear water displays jagged limestone walls filled all over with holes of various sizes, all of which are passages leading heaven knows where, always ever deeper into the cave though. It's like an underwater ant-hill, or a complex city highway system that one could so easily get lost exploring. Because these thousands of passages have barely been explored at all, divers are told not to go

look at them lest they succumb to the temptation to enter one of them and get lost. Instead, there's a tagline anchored on one end to the cave's ceiling above the surface and on the other end to some piece of solid cave wall very, very deep below. Those who leave the tagline are either highly trained researchers or foolish hobbyists, who greatly underestimate just how disorienting the darkness makes navigation down there. You never leave the tagline. In 1984, a 29-year-old amateur diver named Peter Verhussel entered the Mystic Water in Sturkfontein's Lake, pulled his mask down over his eyes and nose, checked his regulator one last time, and then

signal to his two dive buddies that he was going to begin the descent. They did the same routine and followed him under. The trio glided softly towards the center of the lake where the tagline stretched, taut, down into the blackness that their lights could not reach. They grabbed onto the line, checked on one another to make sure they were still together, and then began a slow and steady descent through the cave's dark heart, being sure to scan their lights all around them to study the beautiful and dreadful display of other caves that lined the sides of this narrow lake.

About halfway down and a quarter of the way through their air tanks, the two leading members of the group paused to once more admire the scenery and check on one another. To their horror, they did not see Peter behind them. A sudden heart rate increase and widened eyes were quickly subdued when they saw him gliding back towards them from the night-like darkness. He had left the line just for the briefest of moments to check out one of the tributary tunnels in the wall. He couldn't help but get a closer look. The two friends chastised him via hand gestures and still wide-eyed stares, making their message to him clear, as if trying to beg him not to scare them like that ever again. Peter agreed, and everyone's breathing returned to normal.

Peter even made them chuckle with how light-hearted he was about the whole thing. He was always a charmer. They kept creeping ever downwards, like astronauts drifting outside of the ship in the vacuum of space, cold and lifeless. The water became darker with each foot down the men were. went, as the surface lamps lost their power against the great mass of lake that faced them. What they thought to be a strange and foreboding scene on the surface now seemed in their memory to have been a warm and homely place compared to where they ended up. The leader paused once more to chuck on his party. This pause was justified by his reasoning, but was doubtless

motivated some by his need to just take it slower, lest he grow overwhelmed by the manic stress that type of environment elicicicicicicicicicic. But to the immediate horror of both Peter's partners, Peter was once again nowhere to be found. This time, the fear was also not quickly doused by his return either. They must have counted five times each. Only two of them were on the line. Just before they were going to begin ascending to the surface, though, they happened to shine a light back over into a crevice they could have sworn they'd already looked in and found Peter. He was gazing into a little porthole that led somewhere even darker and colder than where they were now, utterly transfixed.

He looked like a child staring out of the window of a plane on his first flight once he had finally plucked up the courage to do so. Whatever beauty or nameless and ugly thing Peter was looking at, his friends would not leave the line to find out. They shook the light at him over and over and snapped him out of a stupor. He crawled through the water over to them and had a sincerely apologetic look on his face. He had gone back on his word, though he had not been able to speak it. All had known he'd given it.

He'd left the tagline once again. This time his friends were not so gracious. Peter was being stupid, and they let him know it with no room for other interpretations. He hung his head and swore, in a way one can somehow still do in the dark and underwater. And the pack continued on. Their fun adventure now tainted by the recklessness of Peter. And yet the beauty and epic scale and dread of it all continued to inspire them until soon they had forgotten. They had forgotten and forgiven the mistake.

They themselves could feel their own kinship with Dante journeying down into the most hellish bits of the earth, guided by the virgilian water that let them float gingerly on their way into the abyss. They wondered at the intricateness of it all, at how it could have possibly happened, how long it had taken to form. They wondered what kind of forgotten monsters might have called places like this home in ages past. Despite the ever-growing weight of water above them, the atmosphere at a certain depth began to be so still that it almost seemed vye and inviting in its own way. Heart rates plugged along at a steady pace, not too fast, but how could it be slow in such an alien world? And the dive monitors glowed with the message that with a lot of the tanks needed for the slow journey back upwards, it was time for them to turn around. But when they did, Peter was not there anymore.

The two men looked at each other with an exasperated scoff. He felt like a boy who cried wolf, but who was, of course, not a boy, and was also not actually crying for help. He was just being irresponsible and counting on others not to be. They scanned the water and waited for an inevitable glints of their friend peeking into one of those capillaries in the rock as if it was a portal into another world. They scanned and waited. They scanned and waited some more.

They scanned and waited until it was dangerous. for them to do so. A good deal of decompression stops waited for them on the trip up the line to the surface and they had no more time to wait. With a crippling weight of anxiety making their hearts race, they climbed as fast as their bodies would let them. Even faster than was wise for either man. Peter only had one tank. Every second was precious. They broke the surface with cries for help and a small group of other men in the cave pulled them out of the water and got from them whatever information they needed. These men, eventually followed by the Friends of Peter,

raced up and out of the cave in order to get help. Within hours, the rescue team had arrived, but they already knew it was too late. It had been hours after all instead of mere minutes. In a solemn air, they strapped on their gear and slipped under the blue horizon of death. The mission was just to recover Peter's body, for of course he would be drowned.

But after hours of searching, nobody was found. The friends, in between tears and swings between anger and sorrow, could not accept this. They needed to bring Peter's wife his body. Their friend, fool as he was, needed a proper burial. They began to put their gear back on, intending to search for themselves and come out as heroes, but the professional searchers forbid them to do it. Not only had they pushed their bodies too much in their rapid ascent, but they also had neither the training nor the tools to do such a thing.

it would require them to leave the tagline after all, and that was something no one was ever supposed to do except the real prose. And so, the search was ended. The lake was closed to divers. Peter was declared dead. His friends returned home and started the difficult chore of moving on from such a traumatic thing. This was the state of affairs for a full six weeks. Back in Sturkfontein, a team of geologists and archaeologists were mapping one of the dry cave systems

that lay adjacent to the main flooded one. At their depth, they knew they would already be very deep in the lake of that main one, and this, any time they thought about it, sent a slight shiver down their spines. Nonetheless, they worked diligently, lapping away at rocks and pushing debris back from what they figured could be fossils. They gathered their data and took their notes and added a nice chunk to the map for that particular cave. At one point, as they wandered through an unexplored chamber that was growing narrower and narrower. One of the men tapped his hammer on the wall next to him and sensed an alarming hollowness in it. A tap three feet to the right yielded a familiar thud and echo, but tapping right in front of him rang out with a lightness that felt almost artificial.

The wall had been eroded through by water, surely, and was now porous. He tapped more and more and eventually started beating on the wall with the help of his colleagues' larger hammers. Not long after, They heard the sound of thin rock bursting and falling to the ground away from them. They had found away into a new chamber. They excitedly handed hammers back as they slapped each other and noted the discovery on their maps. Presently, the man who had first found the spot poked his head through the window they'd just made and smelled a foulness in the cold air. This didn't stifle the moment, though.

He gazed all up and around with his headlamp shining bright and marveled at the great size of the room he'd discovered. It was breathtaking. Inside of a small shoreline of solid rock, there was a pool of water. No doubt it was fed by the great lake over in the main system. Amazing. The only other way into this new room was via one of the hundreds of tunnels lining the wall of the lake away from the tagline. But when he turned his light downward, his smile went away, and he quickly hushed his friends

behind him. There in the dirt of the thin shoreline were human footprints. In horror, the man fell back with a scream from the window. He gasped for breath and shouted all sorts of things about how they weren't alone and how something was living down there, how they needed to get out and do it fast. He was shocked into a fear equal to the excited happiness he had felt a moment before. His colleagues crept timidly to the window and shined their lamps through. There, in the middle of the pond that filled most of the chamber was an island of rock. On that dark and cold island, there was the body of a man.

He was surrounded by diving equipment. Peter Verhusel's body was eventually recovered from its island cemetery deep in Sturkfantin. He had entered one of the holes in the lake's wall and gotten lost. He had found this massive chamber on accident and had died waiting for his friends to find him. His cause of death was starvation. Three weeks alone, in an utterly light. sepulchre, where he grew hungrier and hungrier and more and more desperate every day. In the thin layer of dirt on the island, a message had been written by shaking hands.

It said, I love you, Cheryl and Ma. Perhaps in his last moments, and using his last bit of feeble strength, Peter had written a love letter to his wife and his mother. Well, big news, guys, after several weeks of delays in editing, a week of weather delays where our whole shipment spent a week in Pocatello, Idaho, Haunted Cosmos, doing your duty in a world that's not just stuff, is here. Luckily, we had many pallets to unload, but we also had an enormous army of child labor

with St. Brandon's Classical Christian Academy to unload the books for us. So that's how we keep our prices competitive here at New Christenom Press. We hope that you go pick up the book at Newchristinempress.com slash Cosmos. And hey, hey, Christmas shipping is going to be cut off. You've got to order the book by December 11. move the boxes. Ben, I'm trying to do an athlete. I carried a lot of them. Run the film. I carried a lot of them, right? December 11th, okay? You got to do December 11th. That's going to be the cutoff to get this book in your hand by Christmas. Look at this. Gold foil stamp, premium hardcover

edition. Custom end sheets. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Get your copy today. Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Haunted Cosmos. My name is Ben Garrett. with my regular co-host, Brian Sauve. Merci, my enemy. It is so good to be here on the haunted cosmos. Dude, what a strong hope. Donde estes la Quinceaniera. What a strong hope.

Stories of horror. Stories of horror. People dying alone in caves. And then we're like, and then we're like, we just come back and like, hey, wow. You got to be lighthearted, everyone. You know what I mean?

Like, this is a dark topic. I feel you. thing, guys. Today, like was said in the cold open, we're doing something a little bit different. Yeah. It's not like this big kind of meta topic. It's just fascinating stories that are also, if you really put yourself in the person's shoes, horrifying. And we just want to tell them, kind of ripping off of Mr. Ballin's YouTube channel, shamelessly. No. He, I mean, and I'm, you know what? And I'm happy about it. We would never. We would never, but we are in a very real sense. What? And you know what? I'm happy about it.

Are you kidding me? Brian, how are you doing today? I'm doing so good, Ben. It is good to be here. I'm excited to talk about because honestly, these are the type of stories. Let's be honest, guys. Can we be honest with ourselves for a minute? Maybe the ladies don't experience this. But every man, you know, he's looking for a YouTube video or something. He's like, where's that sermon?

Where's that really intellectual podcast on something very deep and important? And then he sees like a cave he never should have gone in, but he went in anyway. Yeah. And it's like, play. And three hours later, you're like, what just had? You're like sweating and there's Cheeto dust. Three hours late, you've watched, you're 50 videos deep. Yeah.

You know, and you're subscribed to the channel with the notification bell, which, by the way, you should totally do to Hon. Cosmos. Yeah. Because we're about to give you those videos. I'm sure that lots of people, other listeners, I've never done what I just described, but other people probably have. I've never done it.

I have never done it with the Cheeto dust thing. No, I mean, we don't have Cheetos in the home. Cookie crumbs. Yeah, definitely. I have, like, gone, yeah, gone. gone in on some cookies, dude, and like, next thing you know, you're 10 cookies deep, your 10 videos deep. And there's really no way, there's no excuse for what you just done.

There's no excuse. The last time this happened to me, it was the story of, I was with my dad and two of my older boys, and we were, like, looking for some specific car part. I think it was like a light bulb for my taillight or something. I was going to go get it and fix the taillight while my boys hung out with grandpa. And all of a sudden, my dad, who is exactly well. Like he does the thing. Yeah.

Like he's an engineer on nuclear missiles. Dude, he's one of us. And the next thing you know, we're like, is that a story about oil pipe workers who got sucked into an underwater oil pipe? Have you seen this? Oh yeah, dude. I almost actually included it. Dude, that is great.

These guys, just real quick. We'll get into the like whatever we're supposed to do next. The Rimmelady greedy. Dude, these guys, it's like an oil platform and they pump the oil through a pipe that goes under the ocean. Yeah. Some of them got scuba divers who go and like fix and maintain the pipe. They got sucked in.

And, dude, wasn't it like, they were like three of them. They like couldn't move. Hardly move. They barely fit. And it was like two inches. Yes. Between their, their goggles and they had to just try to shimmy. And they found air pockets.

Yes. In the oil pipe. Yes. Full of like oil sludge and it's rusty and sharp and they're all cut up because it like sucked them in powerfully and it ripped some of their regulators off so only some of them had scuba tanks. Yeah. And then like two of them, like all but one of them died.

One of them made it out. like shimmied without one of the tanks or something like that. And there are recordings that you can listen to, audio recordings of like the rescuers trying to get in touch with them and they're tapping on the pipes. Here I'm talking. It is man-made horrors beyond comprehension. It's like that one, dude, all the oil rig diving ones are some of the most nauseating.

So if you go in a, I can't remember what it's called, the deep sea oil divers. Do you remember what that? They have like a special name for that. Whatever. I don't know. They're really deep in the ocean, and they're so deep that it doesn't make sense to come up, like, each day that they're done working. Oh, yeah, I've heard this. Because the decompression stops would take, like, another 12 hours.

Right. And so instead, they put them in this little habitat. It's like a bell. Yeah, they call it the bell. And it's connected to the oil rig by this umbilical cord. Well, there's been a couple, at least, accounts of a collection of divers being in these bells. And then the umbilical cord gets broken. Come on.

And the bell just starts drifting through the sea. Come on. They're so deep that they can't, you know, they can't see them. They lose power. They're losing oxygen. They're losing food. And they just basically have to hope that someone eventually finds them. That is, and of course, you know, they usually don't.

Okay. That's horrible. Let me just walk you through a scenario here. You're on monster.com. You're typing in job postings. And one comes up and you're looking for remote work. and it's like triggers a keyword, like remote control deep sea underwater diving bell operator.

Yeah. And it says, like, you're going to live in a pod a thousand meters under the sea for like 90 days at a time in the middle of the ocean. You're going to, for this job, you're going to get $38 an hour, a lot of money. Yeah, pretty good. A lot, 30, 3850.

And you're on the clock, 24 hours a day. So you're like doing the math, listen, look at me, okay, enhance. Look at me. Don't do it. It's going to be tempting. Don't do it. Don't open that in a new tab. Don't send in a resume.

Don't do it. Your cover letter, if you do it, though, like, take his advice. Include your will in the cover letter. If you do it, know that the cover letter needs to be nothing more than just, I'm applying for this job. That should be enough. Yeah, that's enough. I mean, that should be enough. Anybody who would do that, they should just say, yeah, you're probably good enough.

Yeah, 100%. So anyway, this show is going to be about stories like that. We're just going to tell you some. Probably going to be less commentary, less banter than normal. Don't. Or like far more. Hard to say. Already we're doing more than I thought we would.

Hard to say with us. But before we do more or less. We're going to be giving away. We need to go through some housekeeper. With this show, we're well known for having one of the greatest Patreon communities of all time. Ever. Where if you like the show, if you like Honod Cosmos and you want to support us, which

you should. Yeah. Because the amount of time that we put into these episodes. It's a lot. Even this one. It's crazy. It's actually wild. So if you want to keep this show happening and help us make it work, help us do things like

now if you're on YouTube, there's like three or four cameras involved. There's another guy in the room that you don't even see. His name is Martine. And he's great. We call him Martina McBride. We do sometimes call him Martina McBride. Only when he's not here. He's now here, though.

So now he knows that. edits all of our videos now makes him way better. go on our YouTube. We're just about to cross, like, as we record this, 40,000 subscribers. Yep. Help us get to 100,000 subscribers. Road to 100K.

Because what YouTube is obligated to do then is send us a silver play button that we, I will wear it as a necklace. I'll actually, like, Flavor Flav style. For a whole episode. I'll actually. I'm letting you know right now, I will do that. I will wear the silver play button as a necklace for the first episode we have it the whole time if we get it.

He would do that. No, I will. If I wasn't committed to just taking the silver play button, for myself. No. Here's the thing, though, guys. I will be wearing the silver play button as first video.

I've already called it. It's on the recording. Any of you who used to watch Flavor of Love on MTV 2 with your older siblings? First of all, never heard of it. Don't do it.

Second of all, you know what I'm about to say. You got to say some flavor, flav lines if you do that. I will look them up. Stuff like this. Wow. Or like this. Flavvae.

Okay. Flavre, Flav. Which is the ladies like echoing. Well, now we're never going to get there because everyone stopped listening slash watching. We just gained probably 50,000 subscribers. But what we're saying is go to YouTube, type in Haunted Cosmos, hit that subscribe, hit that like button. Hit the notification bell. Slap that keyboard, enter key after you hit the comment, play the video on double speed six times for the first day that it comes out.

Just normal kind of normal stuff. And then hit command W if you're using a match. open a new tab, right? Something like. Or that's a new window. Command T is a new tab, Command W is a new window. Open Command T or Command W.

Go to Patreon.com slash Haunted Cosmos. Click on one of the tiers. Sign up for it. And here's the thing. Enjoy. You get a whole, there's like 75 episodes of the dusty tone. There's over 80 at this point.

Amazing podcast just for patrons. Second thing you're going to get, early access to the episodes at the top two tiers and add free access to the episodes on the other one. So it's like... Honestly, that lower tier,

even though it technically doesn't get early access, we usually open it up to them at least a day before. Yeah, usually they get somewhat. So go support the show genuinely, we can't do it without those guys.

100%. Help us get there on YouTube. And if, for people that sign up, the day this episode drops, we're going to be given away a handful of Dante's Peridoso. No, just the whole divine comedy. Oh, the divine comedy.

Oh, even better. Inferno, Pergatorio. Dude, nice. We're going to give... Which one is it? It's John Chiardi's translation with notes at the end of each conto to help you understand all of the symbolism.

Yeah. So it's incredible. It's the addition I have. I absolutely love it. He actually, John Chiarty's amazing. It's a great translation. So we're going to give a handful of those to,

for free to, a couple of people that sign up for Patreon, the day this drops. And then existing patrons as well, we'll do a giveaway for them, some of them to win the same thing. We always do both. So check that out, guys. If you haven't already,

sign up for Patreon. And I think with that, it's time for me to share another little story that I had. Really? That I actually was about to share before, but I knew we hadn't actually done the housekeeping yet. Ah, okay, I want to hear it. This is crazy.

Maybe this is the genesis of me being interested in stories like this. When I was a wee lad, I was driving in the car with my dad, and we were listening to, of course, Neil Borts, who is the king of talk conservative radio in Georgia through the 90s in early 2000s. Never heard of him, but go ahead. Yeah, well, me and my dad loved him.

and he was telling the story about this kid. He was one of those like, he talks for eight hours a day, every day, and he's like good at it. He was telling us a story about this kid who was playing hide and seek in a junkyard with some of his friends. Oh, no.

And he was really small. He was like a really small kid. And in one of the dumpsters, he found a microwave that has been thrown away. And he thought, what a perfect hiding place. This kid opens the door,

climbs in, somehow closes the door completely behind him, which I don't know how he even did that. Come on. But if you know anything about microwaves, they're not supposed to open from the inside. If you know anything about microwaves, don't get in one. Like in case, and they do that in case you are cooking guinea pigs or something like that, so the guinea pigs can't get out.

Well, this kid, he can't get out. He ends up dying in there. Dude, why? And it was this thing, like, and I know that's really sad. But it was this thing of like, dude, that's crazy that that's even possible. It's one junkyard, but this kid found the one place that you can't go. And he went there anyways. And they looked for him for weeks.

And it took like, I think, two months to find him. That is insane. Isn't that? You have just made me so sad. Isn't that so sad? And I hold you, if Paul didn't say to the Corinthians that I'm not allowed to sue you, just know that I would take civil action. But it's crazy because that's the kind of story that there's just something about it that grips the imagination.

It really draws you in. Yeah, these are the stories that keep you up at night. Yeah, 100%. Hey, let's, I'm going to take us into a story about MK. Vultra. Okay. I'm going to take you guys into that story now. And we'll just keep the stories flowing. We'll check back in with you guys, make sure you're okay.

Do some horrible jokes. Do a little bit of our normal, just, you know, shtick. And then we'll keep going. So check out this story. In 2014, a video titled, Son of an Area 51 technician was posted to YouTube. The contents of the video are fairly predictable.

A man claims his dad works or worked at Area 51 and saw some incredible things behind the veil of public knowledge. Yeah, sure, all very interesting. But the contents of this video are not what made it particularly famous. Rather, it was the comment section that proved viral in this case.

Near the top of the relatively quiet comments section, especially when compared to some of the bigger YouTube channels, a user by the name of Snake Bit McGee had written the following. This ain't nothing. I'm a long-distance hiker. One time during one of my hikes out by Nellis Air Force Base, I found a hidden cave. The entrance to the cave was shaped like a perfect capital M.

I always enter every cave I find, but as I began to enter this particular cave, my whole body began to vibrate. The closer I got to the cave entrance, the worse the vibration became. Suddenly, I became very scared and high-tailed it out of there. That was one of the strangest things that ever happened to me. Naturally, such a thing could not go unnoticed by the handful of people also interested in the original video.

But as these people told their friends about the comment, the virality eventually came. Replies poured in like a flash flood. Some believing the comments are outright, some demanding evidence of these wild claims, and some just curious about what it could mean if it is true and happy to be there. Eventually, the attention grew to where it could no longer be ignored or otherwise dealt with by further replies. As per usual, the skeptics wrote the loudest. The user would therefore have to oblige them and find this cave once more, this time with his camera in hand for ironclad proof.

He was more than happy to do this. But who was Snake Bit McGee? Back in those days, if one went to his own channel, One would find a small collection of videos showcasing the vast landscapes of the American Western wilderness. He really was an avid hiker. In fact, that's all his channel consisted of. What's more, he was a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, and his name was Kenny Veitch. Beyond that, little was known about the real man behind the name.

He had no family, and his occupation was vaguely kept secret. All the more power to him for maintaining privacy, despite a quickly growing niche-level, of fame, or infamy, depending on how you think about it, soon after he committed to finding the cave again, a new video was posted on his channel. In it, Kenny introduces himself and the objective for the day, to attempt to follow the same trail from before, the one that eventually led him to the strange cave he'd gotten so unsettled by. For the next 21 minutes and 58 seconds, Kenny plods through the shale and dirt and heavy sand of the desert mountains north of Las Vegas, only to find nothing.

Or at least nothing interesting to the people who tuned in to see this incredible cave. Some old mining shafts and oil drills and animal skeletons kept Kenny fascinated, but apparently only Kenny. Something unfortunate happens when we think life as viewed from a screen can provide an accurate representation of life actually lived. It's uniquely inhumane to watch a man appreciate nature's profundity only to then chide him for not finding the one thing that had he found it would have made you take interest in the rest of it.

Talk about missing the forest for the tree, or in this case the cave. But such is life in the modern world. The video was met with unanimous criticism, but not all of it was particularly mean-spirited. While a majority of people mocked Kenny and accused him of lying to them about the strange M cave, an almost equally large group simply encouraged him to try again, recognizing how hard it can be to navigate off trail in the backcountry,

and I think also coming to like the man behind the camera just for who he was. There was one comment that was an outlier, though. It neither accused Kenny nor encouraged Kenny, but instead chimed in with the foreboding warning. No, do not go back there. If you find that cave entrance, don't go in. If you do, you won't get out. Kenny didn't listen.

There's a good chance he never even. saw this comment to begin with. Either way, makes no difference. A few days after this very disappointing video was posted, Kenny made known his plans to go back out to try and find the cave again. He told friends that he'd be heading into the wilderness for a short overnight trip. They thought little of this news and assured Kenny that should he not turn up, they would be sure to send help for him in the area where he was headed. They thought little of this, not because they didn't care for Kenny, but because they actually knew him and his skill leveled very well. This was a man who had solo hiked countless stretches of unmarked desert.

He'd summited countless mountaintops, been in countless caves, many of which were too frightening and cramped for others to go in. He had played with rattlesnakes and built fires from scratch, and the list goes on and on. He'd even been rescued from a mountain top after breaking his leg, and had traversed 100 miles across the desert on a single cup of water in a single day and night of non-stop moving. That was Kenny, durable Kenny. Going into the wild was just what he did and always alone.

He often did so far more than a single night and he always came back. His friends therefore believed that this would be a light and easy trip for the man, but if only they knew. If only they knew that his objective was the one thing, it seems, that ever left him with real fear.

The one cave, like all the rest, that was beyond anything he'd ever encountered. The one thing that left him feeling conquered as opposed to conqueror. Kenny never came back. Searchers gathered in front of the old abandoned mine shaft where Kenny had been filming himself at the beginning of his previous video. It was there they found his cell phone sitting on the rocks. Inside of the mineshaft, hundreds of feet of tunneling bore straight down into the earth's bedrock.

It was silent and dark, and they found nothing in the rock. inside. Thus ended the search for Kenny Veach and, according to one final piece of evidence that came much later, thus ended Kenny himself. The following comment was left by a woman claiming to be his girlfriend on his M Cave Hike video that had garnered so much attention. It reveals a new side to the man behind the screen, one that few saw coming and one that could mean a far darker ending to the story than any expected. It reads, I am the girlfriend that Kenny spoke of, the video. So many people are wondering what happened and guessing different things. Your heart felt about the sadness around what has happened with Kenny. He has not been found and I feel that he

probably will not be found for many, many months, if ever. I want to share what I know and feel about what happened so that you might bring some closure and understanding in your own lives. Kenny absolutely loved hiking in the desert. It was his very, very favorite thing to do. We hiked and camped together all over the Nevada desert, sometimes nine hours in a day. We found many abandoned mining towns, usually referred to as ghost towns by Nevada hikers. We explored many caves and mine shafts. We were always careful how we explored them. But Kenny was a bit more daring than I was. He wore snake guards, sun-protected clothing, used walking sticks, brought enough water and food for the hiking hours, and had extra water and food in the car. I want you to know that I do not think Kenny had an accident.

I believe he committed suicide. He battled depression for many years and would not take medication or see a doctor. He quit his job a little more than a year before he disappeared. The search for him was started within a couple days of my call. Over 30 search and rescue team members searched three different times on foot. One helicopter flyover was done, and there was no trace of Kenny or any of his camping things. They found his car in the area I told him it would be. They did find his cell phone by the mine shaft in the house.

video. The Mineshaft was only about a four-hour hike from the car. It's my feeling that he left it behind so that he couldn't be tracked from the GPS in the phone. He also did not take his video camera with him on this solo hike. It was left in his home, so he had no intention of filming anything. So is that it? Could the answer be so hard in the oversimplification? Ordinary? Some think so, and some predictably think otherwise. Some believe that Kenny found that KV's again, and also found a dark secret hidden within. Many people have tried to follow Kenny's trails since his case went cold, and some have claimed to find odd-looking caves with even a vague M-shaped marking near the entrance or on the entrance, but to this day, nothing conclusive has

ever been found. What we do know is that Kenny was exploring near Area 51. We know he was not found in the mine shaft near his cell phone, nor were any tracks found near his cell phone. We know that where fences would be ineffective or unseemly, the military often uses machines that shoot high-frequency beams at trespassers. These beams make one feel hot and uncomfortable and nervous and strange all over to the point where they leave the area. It sounds like what Kenny claims to have felt upon his first approach to that cave. Maybe he wasn't making it up after all. The sun rises slowly as you walk away from all the fears and all the thoughts you left behind. The only thing that is going to scrub the memory of you opening after a horrible story about a man dying in the wilderness would be the seed oil free soaps of Indigo's country soap company.

We don't know if he died. Okay. Is this like an Enoch situation? No. The guy at the cave, M. Cave Ultra, he could have just been abducted. Oh, okay. So he's like being government experimented on. Dude, he's probably now like, like formed some sort of hybrid offspring with an alien or something like that. That is truly horrible.

Yeah, this story. You know what to protect you from something like that, though, is Indigo Sundry Seed. It really would. No, I'm serious. It would. With their 10% off automatic subscription price now and brand new products rolling out week after week, man, these guys are at it. This story, do you remember when you first heard this story? Yeah, I do actually.

Because I remember. It was like it was a while ago. It was a while ago. I'm trying to remember, was it astonishing legends or was it Mr. Ballin? I just heard it out in the internet while. Yeah, maybe it was just... Before I ever heard, like, heard a systematic telling of it. Right.

I just saw, like, little clips of it or people talking about it, and then I went and looked it up because it's so crazy. The way that he describes it, too, it might not have come across it in the story well, but like the perfection of the M... Yeah. Like, it was... It looked unnatural according to the guy, and then the feeling he got and the way that he, you know, the proximity to area 51,

and then he's got this, like, feeling that the government does use some of these devices they are developing or tested them that we know. Yeah. So you can imagine they probably have devices like this. It's like the, this is the dumbest reference I'm about to make. It's like the muggle repelling charm. Okay.

And Harry Potter that they use on the, whatever the Quidditch Stadium is. So that any time a muggle would get close to it, they'd be like, oh, I forgot, I left a teapot on or something. Dude, the government does that. Wow. The government are witches.

The government are witches and wizards in the world of Harry Potter. Yeah. Now, so true. It does make sense that somewhere around Groom Lake, Nellus Air Force Base, Area 51, would have places like this because, of course, Airy 51 contains aliens. And they have aliens, aka government macrobe demons that are trying to help the earthly scientists do things. but if you remember, if you recall,

I think it was season one, episode 10 where we talked about the evangelistic alien stuff. Okay, I think that it was in that episode where we talked about that guy who did the close encounters of the Fifth Kind documentary. Do you remember his name? I don't remember his name.

Are you talking about Jacques Valet? No, no. Dr. Steve Greer. Oh, yeah, Steve Greer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the more modern. Jacques Valet is older. Jacques Verlet is like still doing stuff. One of the things that Steve Gurr does

in that documentary, this is crazy. He goes, and they have like footage of all of it from beginning to end. He goes to the hills overlooking Groom Lake in Area 51, just outside of the fence where you like can't go in. And he films himself like manifesting with an alien that's somewhere across the galaxy. And then in the sky over Groom Lake, you see all these flashing lights. They're commuting with D. Like at will?

Yeah. Dude, it makes sense then that that, kind of area. Like we have these areas around the world that are sort of like nexus of these activities. I think Grum Lake is one of them. And so I think that genuinely it's possible that this guy actually did find something. And he was either unalived or he was taken, taken captive. Unalive just like Martin Luther King Jr.? Yes. The other- killed by the FBI. I don't see our published works. Why did she even bring that off? Dude, he was unalived by the government. Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. I mean Ruby Ridge.

It's a perfect segue. Waco, RFK, JFK. That documentary, though, the Trump, they tried. Steve Greer one is crazy because it really shows a lot of, and we actually released that episode before we'd even, I think, seen that or something. I can't remember the timeline, but the things that they do that they document in that documentary are crazy.

Like they use transcendental meditation to commune with the macrobes. with like these demonic angelic alien entities. And then they document lights in the sky and phenomena where they like zoom them in on their location. Yeah. And they basically invite them in. Right. To commune with them.

And some of them, dude, are so creepy. Like, it looks like a humanoid in the sky. Like a, honestly, it's creepy. It will make your skin crawl and be like, oh, wow, the world is not just stuff. Groom Lake is not just stuff. You'll say. And the Mcave is not just stuff. And Cosmos was right.

Again, I should become a patron. Ben, I wanted to talk to you about something. I'm concerned about you. What are you concerned about? Every time I see you, you have more and more indigo sundries products. I feel like you're overdoing it. Dude, give me one example. Dude, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

Do you see, like, where did you even get this from? What's the problem with having some soap on hand? Ben, we're at work right now. There's, there's... What? You don't want to smell good at work? There's gonna be no situation where you need Indigo Sundry soap at work. Have you ever gotten sweaty in this basement?

Dude, yes. Every time we're filming, I look at you and I go, he's so handsome. Well, then, well, then you're gonna need some soap so that you don't smell as bad. Do you see what's happening to you? Like, how are you even, I, are there fair, do you have fairies that give you this?

Dude, what are you talking about? Have you partnered with the fay? No. I'm a stone cold. Christian who likes soap. Dude, I feel, wait this. Is that Calendial? Oh, not so mad about it now, are you?

They make liquid soap now? Yeah, you didn't know that? Dude, I didn't know that. Well, they're literally... They're a sponsor in the show, you should know that. I have duties and responsibilities. Not all of us can just be indigo sundry maxing all the time. Okay, well, since you didn't know that,

I'm assuming you also didn't know that if you used their subscription plan, you'll get 10% off of your... 10% off? 10% of their already great prices? Oh! I'm telling you, are you kidding me? So the MKV Ultra stuff, the MK, the MKave guy, Veach, I just, we'll never know what really happened,

but we know for sure that he was on a live by the guy. Snake bit McGee, as he was known to only his closest friends. But yeah, he's probably, I mean, he's still like missing, presumed dead to this day. And it's been quite a few years. Never found a body. Very tragic story. Yeah. Now I think, though, we should switch gears a little bit.

and go from the sort of like government, macrobe horrors beyond human comprehension to just sort of, I don't know, happenstance that is a horror beyond human comprehension and talk a little bit about a place called Cedar Point in Lake Erie. In a place that you shouldn't go. In 1870, the economic boom in the U.S. met more and more disposable income for middle-class citizens.

In more purely metropolitan areas, this extra cash meant more development of what we'd now colloquially call nightlife. In the rural areas, well, the middle class was a bit different in the rural areas, and so extra income usually turned itself into extra land. But in the more suburban parts of the country, this led to the demand for more recreational activities open to the family. The demand was answered in various ways for various parts of the country, but what was the demand was answered in various parts of the country, but what was ubiquitous is that it was answered everywhere. On the southern shores of Lake Erie, a place that had blossomed into a popular tourist destination in the latter half of the century,

the answer came in the form of an amusement park named Cedar Point. It started with bathhouses and beaching resorts for the summer months that steadily matured into a water slide ride, one of the first of its kind that opened in 1890. Once the investors saw how much everyone loved the thrill of such a ride, the governor came off over the next 120 years as ride after ride was added, as the roller coasters got bigger and faster and more advanced. Cedar Point ditched the humble moniker of Bath House Resort Area and began to proudly wear

its title as one of the best roller coaster amusement parks in the nation. Even to this day, Cedar Point remains a great attractor of tourists to the area and a great entertainer of locals in the hot summer months. Its history is filled with laughter and birthdays and first dates and proposals and all the Americana glory one might expect to find in such a place. But between the streaks of light radiating from it, there are also dark sections, shadows of cold tragedy that the park would wish to forget. The year was 2015. The man was James Young, a 45-year-old single gentleman living in Canton, Ohio. For most of his adult life, James had served as a fifth-grade.

teacher in the local school for special needs children. Despite his passion for this work and the great reward that the job itself was, James had maintained a soft spot in his heart for his own alma mater high school. His dream for years had been to move back to that school and serve as a guidance counselor to the kids there, kids that reminded him so much of himself at that age. James was particularly qualified for this position. Not only did he have the credentials, he also had the sincere passion that doing a good job would require. Unfortunately, though he had interviewed many times for multiple years, the school had never actually been able to get the position open for him. Thus, he continued in his work with the fifth graders, and he was happy enough with it. But then in late May of 2015,

James received the long-hoped-for phone call from his old school. A position had opened up for guidance counselor, and they had the funds to pay him well. The job was his if he wanted it. Of course, He accepted. And so he embarked on the months-long wait through summer before he'd be able to begin. He knew he would have to fill his time to keep him from going crazy with impatience, and he also knew exactly how he would fill it. Though James was single, he still lived close to family and friends. He frequently would spend hours at his mom's house during the summer to keep her company and help her maintain the place. He also had a group of lifelong friends that were always game for evening outings throughout the season. He leaned heavily on these two outlets, and before he knew it, realized he was already in the middle of August, just a few days away from starting his dream job.

As a last hurrah before the school year, James and his friends took a short day trip to the paradisle shores of Lake Erie to go on the winding rides of Cedar Point. Hours rolled by, hours dripping with fun and laughter among the group of friends. Near the end of the day, James decided he wanted to take one last spin on the ride called Raptor. It was a newer ride at the time, fast and with an inverted rider design, that had riders strapped in and hanging down from the track, as opposed to seated on cars on top of the tracks. It was also comically loud, filling the air of the whole 10-acre park with the smooth rattle of new adventure.

Since the day was nearing done and the lines had lightened up, James felt it was the perfect time to hop on and take a spin with it. Fueled by the excitement of their friend, such a contagious thing, The rest of the group hopped in with James, and soon they were dangling from the track and inching forward to begin the fast and wild ride. The clinking sound of turning gears, pushing them or pulling them steadily up the hill before the first drop and start of the ride was like a ratchet, increasing the tension and excitement in the air. Soon the front row hung over a massive drop and felt the click of releasing gears that sent them slowly and then very quickly careening down into the loops and banking turns of the 4,000-foot track.

James and his friend smiled and shouted the whole way, loving every second. Then, much faster than it had begun, it was over. And the group of thrill seekers coasted back into the loading bay to disembark. Once they had, though, James felt around in his pockets and noticed his phone and wallet were missing. Once he realized this, he also remembered feeling two objects tap onto his hips in the middle of the ride and figured that it must have been these things. That meant he was fairly certain as to where he'd lost to. phone and wallet in the ride. Of course, they had fallen out. It also meant that when he walked

down the sidewalk with his friends and found the area where James had lost his things guarded with a high fence and warning parkgoers not to trespass, James felt confident that he could hop the fence and grab his things quickly, before anyone would be able to catch him and kick him out. After all, he could see his phone and wallet right there on the ground. He was a fit guy, he could hop a six-foot fence. It would be nothing and would take him no time. His friends tried to talk him out of it. They said that they could just go tell the park manager what had happened. They told him they'd have one of the park employees go in and grab his stuff for him.

That worst-case scenario, they'd have to wait until the park closed a little bit later. But James was hearing none of it. Before they could grab him, he'd hopped the fence and run the short distance to his phone and wallet. As he bent down to get them, he did not notice the sudden roaring sound stalking him from behind. He stood up and found himself flying violently down to the ground again. He'd never seen it coming. The iron bumper hanging down in front of the first riders had slammed into the back of James's head at full speed. Operators stopped the ride immediately. Riders confusedly looked around as they hung still in the middle of the track. They heard screams

and looked back and down to see a man lying on the pavement beneath them, fatally injured. Cedar Point was found to have had no fault in the accident. So obviously, like roller coasters are not just stuff. That's takeaway number one. Takeaway number two. We live in the 21st century. Roller coasters are big, heavy, fast, crazy, and they're usually guarded by a fence. Correct.

Normally, those fences will say, just like it did in the story, no trespass. Do you really need the sign, though? You know what? You raise a great point, Brian. That is a really good point. Whether there's a sign or not. Yeah. Okay, or a stockade or just, even if there's no fence.

Let's say you're in Japan and the signs in Japanese and it says it like, do not enter here. You don't need that. Let's say you're in Mexico, okay? And you're at a Cholo resort. And it says like, hey, oh me, don't enter here. Okay. Listen to it.

Don't go in. And I don't care if it's your. You can't have. You can't say that. Sure, I can. This is the internet. Okay, guy that just was like, hey, John. Oh, Brian, I got bad news.

The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself. And I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals, they're probably turning you into a girl.

Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie, all you've needed to do is go to Indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to indigo sundry soap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six-pack.

You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men-six-pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry's soap company is offering 10% off your order. If you just use all caps, discount code, Haunted Cosmos, no spaces.

Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description? Ben, you ignorant, nor do. me. It's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to indigo sundry soap.com. I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show.

Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things, and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified. We are living in the beginning of a new Reformation. Christian content is being produced at a rapid rate. Art, businesses, publications, ministries, and a thousand other mediums are acting as agents to get us out of our current anti-Christian world. And all of these mediums are going to need marketing to help them get more eyes and ears on them. New Dominion Design Co is ready to provide that help. Unashamedly Christian, New Dominion Design Co exists to labor alongside fellow members of the body of Christ as we engage in this great work of Reformation. With over 15 years

of design and marketing experience spanning across multiple industries, New Dominion Design Co was launched in 2024 to help like-minded businesses, ministries, institutions, publishing houses, and other content creators around the globe raise the bar of excellence in our Christian culture. If you're ready to build, New Dominion Design Co is ready to work with you. Visit New Dominion Designco.com. That's new dominiondesignco.com and reach out to Jenkins for all your graphic needs.

And as always, that link will be in the description. Oh, every, every Japanese sentence begins with, oh, no, dude. It was very tasteful. It was like, oh, I don't know. You're right. Okay. Yeah. You're right.

Here's the takeaway, though. Hey, this is takeaway number two. Probably my longest point. Don't. I don't care if it's your wallet. I don't care if it's your keys. I don't care if you're cat. I don't care if it's a first edition signed fellowship of the ring, signed by J.R.

Tolkien. in. Oh, oh, dude. Ben jumps the fence at me. Ben's like, look, you got, if you stay low.

He's like, his problem was that he stood up. Duck, dive, dip, dodge. Duck, dive, dip, dip, duck dive, dip, and dive. And you could get it.

Div dove. And then army crawl. I'm talking elbows, dude. Imagine there's barbed. So unless there's like something really good like that. Yeah. Don't jump the fence into a roller coaster area.

because you're going to run, you're going to get hit by a roller coaster and you're going to die. Yeah. Now, I think one question that is worth asking, and I would like to ask Veach, the guy from Mcave Ultra story. Yeah.

You know, if the M cave was under the roller coaster, would he jump the fence? Well, no, then you jump because that's a mystery that needs to be solved. You got to prove, okay, I'm just making sure we were on the same page. I totally agree. Absolutely.

If you got, if you've got, when you're Frodo, right, and you're trying to save the world, Did you jump the fence? You jump the fence in a mortar. You jump the fence. I think the analogy holds. You know, girls, a lot of ladies, when they think of like their death, they want it to be like, I want to go peacefully in my sleep, you know. Surrounded by my loved ones. Right. Guys, that is fine. Like, don't get me wrong. That'd be great. I wrote a song about it. But here's another great way to die. Jumping over a roller coaster guard fence and getting decapitated so that you can save your boys from the evil roller coaster. Right there. I think with that, it's time to go into the next set of stories. Yeah.

We've said a lot of meaningful things. I think we've made a lot of good points. So I think, Brian, you know, you're going to tell us about some manufacturing incidents, if I remember correctly. Yeah, this is, man, this is another one that the takeaways are. Just don't. Yep. Regina was born about an hour outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She was a good student who loved her family, friends, and animals most in the world.

world. In high school, as any good horse girl might do, she decided that her goal in life would be to attend vet school at Auburn University so that following her passions she might work with horses every single day. However, the passions of the human heart proved too strong, even for the strong-willed Regina. Sometime in the midst of her final year of high school and freshman year of college, she met a boy and fell in love. The two were committed to each other from Jump Street, and it was not long before both confessed their wish to be married. Her boyfriend, saving his meager minimum wage pay stubs from his job at Walmart, therefore proposed after buying a humble but nonetheless lovely ring from a local jeweler.

Regina, of course, said yes, and so a more unified life started for each of them. This included, unfortunately, moving together into a small house at the edge of Tuscaloosa before they got married. but soon the cold reality of adult life thrust itself into their happiness and demanded that they simply make more money. And here it's helpful to provide some broader context. In the later 1900s, Tuscaloosa boasted one of the largest unemployment rates in America. The economy was suffering its final painful breaths, and people were wondering if it might become a ghost town before long. But where most see massive problems, others see opportunity. For while the market was so bad, the price of real estate had plummeted,

meaning that you could actually buy massive pieces of land for pennies on the dollar. Into this opportunity, walked Mercedes-Benz, looking for the best location to build a new major production facility in the States. While the spirit of the place was low, the manpower was there, and again, real estate could be bought for a song. Mercedes therefore announced that Tuscaloosa would be the home of their state-of-the-art plan, promising hundreds of jobs to come along with it. But then, four other major car manufacturers decided to follow suit

and build production plants right there in Tuscaloosa. After that, a handful of smaller parts manufacturers also opened up shop in the half-dead Alabama town to support the now booming industry. Overnight, the place had gone from bleeding its manpower dry with despair to fielding the hopes and dreams of hundreds and thousands of people flooding in and trying to take a stab at the new opportunities. But the car manufacturing game is anything but rosy and fun.

It's very difficult work, done under a heavy hand and a tight schedule. The parts manufacturers that open next to them take these conditions to even more extreme levels, since if they don't deliver on their parts quotas, they can receive fines from the clients that bring their profit margins substantially down. Regina's mom had worked in one such parts factory, and it had nearly killed her. The hours were long and brutal, and the pay didn't really seem to reflect that. All the money that came in just led to new types of despair for the people. So when Regina told her mom that she would be taking a job at AGen USA, a part supplier for Hyundai and Kia,

her mom tried to talk her out of it. She'd been there. She knew that the carrot of a steady paycheck while enticing simply wasn't worth that kind of work. But Regina felt stuck. She'd moved in with this guy she loved. She'd bought a new car she was proud of, and she'd just put down a payment on a $4,000 wedding dress that she needed to start paying off ASAP. She delayed her schooling and changed all of her life plans to marry this man, and one thing it required of her is that she worked very hard for a time, for at least long enough to get their feet under them as a couple. Weeks went by, then months of 12-hour shifts for Regina, seven days a week.

At the end of this first deep dive into the manufacturing world, she realized just how right her mom. mom had been in this case. She couldn't do this forever. She could hardly do it for another day. She was beat down and tired and, frankly, not making a lot of money anyways. Confessing her foolishness to her parents and asking for help, she decided that she would quit her job at agent and find part-time work elsewhere. This was the situation when she arrived at work the following day. She clocked in and started her work over in a block of hydraulic arms that welded aluminum plates onto the door frames for the car company. She stood in front of her machine's computer and tried to focus on making sure it was all running smoothly. As with every day before,

if she didn't make her quota, she might not get paid. Presently, she noticed a flashing red light at the machine adjacent hers began to indicate a problem. Her colleague had left for the bathroom, but she couldn't just brush it off. She was on his team for that day. It wasn't just herself that needed to meet the quota, it was really the whole team. If one of her teammates failed, she could easily be found wanting to. So she double-checked her machine one last time and briskly walked across the cold concrete factory floor to the next machine. The screen had an error code that she'd seen before, and she thought she knew what to do. She unlocked the gate, guarding the arm, and cautiously entered,

fearing that it could come back to life at any moment. She grabbed the wrench from the shelf and stepped right up to the support. plate of the machine where it turned about vertically and where all the hydraulic lines and electronics were routed through. She used the butt of the wrench to pop out the bolt, which had jammed itself in the gears, and stood back satisfied as the machine churned back into motion. But she hadn't escaped yet. Like a vindictive enemy, the brainless arm with two welding probes at its end, swung around and rammed itself into Regina's back. Another worker heard her cry and turned to see the arm embedded in her spine.

He sprinted to the station and hit the emergency shutoff switch, but this did little to help. The shutoff told the machine to return to its idle phase, which meant pushing the bit end of its arm over to the far wall of the cage. It did this with Regina still skewered onto it and ended up pushing its probes completely through her torso as she was pressed by it against the fence of the cage. She made no sound, it made no movement,

but coworkers could see her eyes wide and open and moving all around. When plant managers finally called the EMTs, took a while for those managers to even be notified of the tragedy, it was far too late. Regina died soon after arriving at the hospital. She'd never been trained to actually fix any of the issues she was supposed to be looking for on the machine. She had only been told by her bosses to fix them.

Agent was found liable for the death and paid a settlement to Regina's family. Something similar happened to a man named Lawrence Davis, whose friends called him Day. After graduating from a military high school in Jacksonville, Florida, Day enrolled in job corps in order to figure out the career path he wanted to take in life. With a father who had died and a mother trying to raise Day's younger siblings, he thought it would be best for him to find a well-paying career as quickly as he could, which ruled out college. He needed to provide for his family before seeing to his own desires.

In Job Corps, he developed a real love for medical technology and spent all his time specializing on that particular field. Unfortunately, when he graduated, he found the job market totally dried up. He called all the contacts he had made in Job Corps, and while they loved day, none of them had any open roles that he could fill. This was incredibly disappointing news for the young man, and it left him a bit dejected at life, but he didn't stay down for long. He decided he would join the military to find some way of sending money,

home for his family. But even this didn't work out. Dave failed one of the written portions of the entrance exams and would be forced to retake the test some months later. While he studied, he still needed to find a job, really any job, to contribute to his home life. So he enrolled for work at a temp agency. Soon after enrollment, the temp agency called day and informed him of a job at the Bacardi Rum bottling facility that started that same day. Of course, he excitedly and a bit nervously, accepted the job before hanging up and calling his mom with the good news. He had a few hours to kill before his shift started, and so he went with his mom to the store where she bought him a new shirt, some work khakis, and slip-resistant rubber boots that he could use on the factory floor.

From the store, they drove straight to the plant where Day, after watching a 15-minute safety video, stepped onto the floor and began helping one of the Bacardi operators keep his station clean during a busy production schedule. After a while, a call came for help at the palletizing section over the intercom, and Day's handler send him over to help. When he arrived, he was struck by the complexity of the palatizing system. Hundreds of bottles would be sorted onto pallets, stacked, and wrapped all autonomously before being set down and moved by one of the forklift drivers. The operator who had made the call for help told Day that some of the bottles had fallen under

the pallet platform, which, as it was stacked with rows of bottles, would be lowered further and further down to the floor, and the sensor was not letting the completed pallet lower itself for pickup by the forklift. He assured Day that the machine was shut off and then pointed to where he needed his help to go clean up the mess. As Day climbed the 10 feet or so down into the palletizing pit, he realized just how dangerous of an area he was being told to enter. It was right under the pallet and right on the footprint of a massive plate that lowered the pallet down. He yelled up to ask again if he was in the right spot.

The operator now annoyed at the delay, just yelled back to get in there and clean out the broken bottles. A few minutes passed and suddenly the sensor stopped glowing and the operator could begin running his station again. Without a thought for day, he immediately pressed the button that would lower the pallet to the ground. But this was his mistake. See, Day had cleared the bottles,

but he hadn't cleared the area himself. He was standing in the perfect spot, or the worst spot, really, directly underneath the one-ton pallet above him, while not tripping any of the obstruction sensors. 2,000 pounds of pallet and steel plate pressed right down onto the man, who collapsed and tried to make himself as flat as possible, but failed. Day was crushed flat and died in a swift but agonizingly painful death. Well, guys, talk about lean manufacturing. No. I'm so sorry. I know. I'm so sorry. Listen. Before we get the emails, can I just say? It is tragic. No, there are two ways of dealing with tragedy, tragedy. And one of them is to laugh before the abyss. It actually, it's the, if any of you know of Norm McDonald, he has, he was pretty much the master of this.

You can't repeat. You cannot. We're going to. going to get censored by... No, I'm going to do one. Yeah, but you can't say the phrase that you're going to say. It's about 9-11. I knew it. I knew it. Look, he has this joke, okay?

Yeah, I know. It's 9-11 was a tragedy. That's actually part of the joke. But it's true. He said... I know what you're going to say. Do you know how many emails I have to answer after every episode? Look, he had this guy...

I'm so sorry. Ben said it. This is someone else's a joke. Ben said it. Here's the thing about joking. You're joking. It's a joke. You're not.

being serious. If you have a young family like me, then you work hard every day to ensure that you care properly for them. Providing for a young family is challenging with rising costs, and it doesn't look like things are going to change in the near future. Maybe you've thought like I have that I wish I had started investing years ago. Maybe then my family would be in a better financial position. Well, like they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, but the second best time is today. Don't let the benefit of time go to waste on your financial planning for retirement or inheritance for your children. Joe Garrisee with backwards planning financial works hard to help families achieve their goals. He's a Christian who works with one of the largest and

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Here's what Norm MacDonald did. He had this guy on, and he goes, for the eighth year in a row or something, Spirit Airlines has won the award for worst airline. And then he goes, that's strange. I think it should be 9-11 airlines. And the other guy is confused because that airline doesn't exist. It's not a real. And he goes, oh, that reminds me of that horrible tragedy.

And I, dude, the delivery. Here's the thing, though, like you're not David, nor my non-M McDonald. But in a very real sense, we all are David. Actually, though, type ofically, you ought to try to imitate David. I imitate Christ. And who is Christ? The better David. True and better David.

So true, king. Yeah, I mean, so this story, one thing I think that we could take away from it. Well, yeah, but I mean, it was woven together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The royal this. Is that if you own a complex. me. Gotta take better care of your people.

100%. You got to train them. Like you got to make sure that you're not sending people in. Like that poor guy with the pallet. Day. Dude, yeah, day, his coworker? Yeah.

Dude, worst coworker of all time. Imagine being those two guys who are like, hey, go clean out those things. And he goes and does it. Forgetting about him. How do you forget? I'm sorry.

Before you lower 2,000 pounds of pallet, down into the pit you just sent the temp. How do you forget? I genuinely believe this. However much that that company got like totally reamed over in the settlement, it wasn't enough. No, like the level of negligence, people should so many people should have been fired. I love how the sensors, this is such classic like safety feature to the sensors that were like not, can't lower that power, there's some bottles down there. There's a whole man. There's a whole man down there and they're just like, that's good. Well, you know, the engineer that designed it is like, we don't need sensors that measure for that.

Measure anything over five feet. Because who in their right mind would send someone down here to clean out bottles. Bodies aren't five feet tall. So, yeah, there's some parameter where the software is like, ah, it's fine. Yeah, it's so big, it's just the air. Ah, there's a person down there. But we don't, ah, we don't need to worry about people. One time, I was working for a feed store in college and it supplied feed to all the farmers and, like, the equestrian team at the University of Georgia.

In fact, my dad actually went to college with the owner of the store. Shout out to Bob Griggs. None of you care about any of this. What you might care about is how one time his wife Donna, who was also a manager, she was like, hey, Ben, I want you to go change the letters in the sign. You know, like, the old marquee style. The light box? Yeah, we didn't have the light box, but it was the plastic.

Yeah, yeah. And I was like, great. So I take the box of letters out. And there's this tool, this like suction cup tool. that you reach up and you pull the string and it pops the letter out. Well, it was broken. And instead of like going to be like, hey, could we order another one like before I try, I had a better idea. This is such a classic Ben thing to do. I don't even know what it is yet, but I can tell you already, having worked with Ben now for some time, the decision that's about

to be made is a bad decision. But it's vintage Ben. But it is on brand. I decided a better idea would be to go get the forklift. Yeah, naturally. Which I was good with, by the way, and put a tall palette of horse feed on it that I could stand on. Oh, it wasn't tall enough? No, it wasn't tall enough. So you had to raise the horse feed up while standing up?

Yeah. So I raised the horse feed up, and it was like. They didn't have that, but they don't have a ladder? Dude, it was maxed out. I mean, I must have been, God, like 20, 25 feet in the air. Yeah. And here's the kicker, though. I couldn't be on the palette while it was raised.

Uh-huh. Because I didn't have any help that day, and I was not about to ask Donna to help me. Donna would be like, you're an idiot. You're not allowed. Do you know what our insurance will do as you fall? So I raised it up,

and then I climbed up the forklift. Naturally. And then I did that. And man, let me tell you something. Did you get the sign changed? Oh, yeah, 100%. Dude, I was all worth it.

I take it all back. I'd take it all back. If I had fallen. Did you get caught? Um, Yeah, I mean, they had cameras. Were they like, what were you doing? I came in and she was like,

I was going to come out and yell at you, but I thought better to wait, because what if yelling at you makes you fall? But like customers were coming in the whole time, and they were looking up like, what the... I almost ended up on this show. Places you shouldn't go, but he went anyway. Hey, with Ben Garrett,

25 feet in the air on top of a horse feed palette. That reminds me, on top of a forklift. In the same way that I almost ended up, up featured on the show as a story. We get people all the time saying like, hey, y'all should have a guest on your show. Can I come on your show? Here's how you can make it onto the show by getting into a situation like this. Yeah. And then have someone send it in and we'll posthumously. And we might read it. Well, and the thing is, like, you really have to ask yourself the question, is it worth it? Right. And the answer, I think, to get on this show is probably, like,

hopefully, I was going to say hopefully no. The answer is. Yes, it is worth it. I'm just kidding. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. I can't emphasize this enough. Zoom in. Enhance.

Simply enhance. It's not worth it. Don't risk it. Don't do it. Okay, I think if there's one thing I've learned from this episode, it is, man, don't go near a cave.

Like nutty putty cave, that guy, the underwater cave guy, Bell's Canyon. Bells Canyon. Dude, caves are just, every time I see a cave video. I'm out. I'm like, what, what is there in there? And for that reason, I'm out.

There's nothing in there that could be worth the danger you are exposing yourself to. Elon Musk is going to have to send in a team of divers to rescue you from this predicament you found yourself in. Yeah. It also reminds me, if you've ever seen the office, there's that, there's that like cutaway scenes where they, everybody, and there's one where Darrell, thank you. There's one where Daryl, the warehouse guy, he's like, he's like, ah, guys, I don't, I don't got a lot of time. Like, let's just knock a couple of these out real quick. And he looks at the camera. He's like, wow, that person has got him or herself into a real predicament. We could have just pre-recorded like six of those, put in between these episodes. Have you seen? Are these stories? And it would

have fit. Have you seen the blooper where in like later seasons, I can't remember who it was. He was a white warehouse worker guy and he was buzz cut not the gay one and uh there's this blooper where pam is sitting down and she's like interrogating him like who did this who did this who mess it was her mural and yeah defaced her mural okay there you go and and he says like um frank and she goes frank did it and he was like uh i mean i don't know his last name but it was frank and she goes okay frank did it And he's like, sure, Frank did it, did it. That was all improv. It's all improv.

Dude, what a genius. My favorite part of that, this has nothing to do with the show. My favorite part of that whole warehouse scene is the Asian guy. He always comes back and he's like, in the Japan. Heart surgeon, steady hand. Number one, number one. Shout out to that guy. That's where I got my accent.

I mean, I think we've. My iconic accent. We've respected him so much. Yeah. Hey Ben, I just read that our great-grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant? Maybe it's grandma's butter recipe, or maybe it's Grato Talo.

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The fact that Gobeckley-Tepi contains advanced technology far beyond the time period in which it was made. Okay, nerd. I was thinking more in the vein of health and wellness in this cold, and flu season. Oh, well, were you actually thinking about how God gave us amazing small native berries called elder berries that actually carry all kinds of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and antiviral compounds that our bodies crave? And that Trevor and Autumn at the King's Ridge grow and produce the freshest elderberries and elderberry syrup known to mankind? Okay, so I'm guessing you were talking about that. But did you also know that they're running a special for haunted

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That's stonecroppadvisors.com slash haunted cosmos or just click the link in the description below. Investment advisory services offered through StoneCrop Wealth Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Guys, I think this has probably been, frankly, well worth your time. I think it's been one of the most profound episodes of Hontoc cosmos. Yeah, like we'll get back to our next episode, by the way. Oh.

It is going to be, like, if this is on one end of the spectrum towards utter frivolity, then this next one's actually the opposite. It's deep. Like, we've got some connections to history and mythology. Right. And the scene and the unseen. And the watchers. But don't worry, because a lot of people would still call the next one utter frivolity.

No, but for us. But it's not. So the thing is, you know what those people? You know what's wrong with them? This is like a pallet cleanser. Those people don't have friends. I'm convinced. We're just like...

I'm convinced that those people have never hung out around a campfire with the boys and been like, I'm going to scare you with a Wendigo story. And seeing the value in it. I mean, this is just like, this is a, this was an entertaining show. The next episode... I was entertained. It was a pallet cleanser. The next episode will be also entertaining.

But genuinely, like, the thing that I've been looking forward to the most since we started this show. So stay tuned for that. Thank you guys for listening. And enjoy this closing story. about no limits free diving. Place you shouldn't go, but they went anyway. Imagine you're swimming offshore somewhere in the ocean. You and your friends are eating good food,

playing good music, and taking turns diving and sliding off of the boat you rented for the day. The shore can be seen as a strip of white on the horizon with high-rise hotels and condos above it. Anytime you look that direction, your pulse quickens a bit at the thought of just how far you are away from land. But vibes are good. Everyone's having a blast.

and you soon forget the nauseating and inherent fear of being out at sea. At some point in the day, perhaps after a rest from all the sliding and jumping and horsing around, you decide to finally throw some goggles on and take a look at the wonderful world living beneath the water's surface. Others like the idea and decide to join you, but they're a bit behind and you're already goggled up and ready to send it down the slide and into the waves, thinking that would be a fun way to enter a tour of the vast expanse. Off to your left towards the shore is a sandbar that must

be no more than 40 or 50 feet down from the surface. But just before the sandbar reaches you, it stops abruptly and forms a cliff of ground earth so steep, you can't see the bottom. You realize that you're floating over a perilous drop whose black depths contain things you can hardly imagine. Things that probably no man has seen or even knows exist. You feel your heart leaping in your chest and a surge of panic sends you flying back towards the boat. You can't get out quick enough. Surely some lovecraftian monster will attack you out of the darkness and drag you into a horrible death. Surely the floating will fail and you'll fall like a dead weight in the air down into the lightless belly of the earth. You reach the boat, but that is when it gets really bad.

You feel that you can't move fast enough, that even with one foot on the ladder, something is still going to take you. But you do finally make it up unscathed and greet the puzzled looks of your friends with no ounce of shame at all. They don't yet know where you are and what it could mean. You stare out to sea away from the shore and see nothing but a sheet of ocean beneath a sky that now seems too big and you know that you don't belong there. This is what thalasophobia feels like, the fear of deep bodies of water.

And as long as you think of a scenario that works for you, you will probably agree that no one is immune to this fear. But you'd be wrong. Some people love nothing more than deep, dark and sometimes cramped places. Of course there are the scuba divers, but they bring some essential pieces of their home world down into the water with them.

Air is a safety blanket. But some people ditch the safety blanket. They just take a big breath of air and then kick as fast as they can down, down, down, as far as they can go. The darker, the better. These people are free divers. And an even smaller percentage of them

who just can't get enough of the sea, whether they love the rush of fear or they somehow feel at peace in a place that wants them dead, none can say, and they up the stakes even more. Instead of just using their own legs to send them downwards, they hold on tight to a motorized sled that follows a guiding tagline hundreds of feet down.

Once they're in content with their misery, they turn a valve on the sled that inflates a balloon and sends them shooting up to the surface again. If they did not do this, they'd never be able to hold their breath long enough for them to kick back up to salvation. This is called No Limits Free Diving. It attracts few, but those that attracts are obsessed with it. On October 12, 2002, married couple Audrey Mestri and Francisco Pippin Ferreris slipped off their boat and into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. They were both professional No Limits Free Divers, and they were in their prime.

Pippin had dove to a world record depth in previous years, and though he'd recently lost the record to another diver, was still pushing the limits of free diving any time he could. He was bold and sometimes brash, with a penchant for being a bit more careless in his prep than some would have liked, but he was also kind, and he was very sincere. He loved the ocean, and he loved his sport. Audrey was a French diver who had married Pippen about three years previous.

On this particular day, it was actually all about her. Pippin was supporting her on a new world record dive attempt she had trained for for months. Though the timeline had been pushed up slightly, and though the weather was less than ideal on that October day, and though she was using new equipment, she was far less familiar with, she was absolutely stoked to try and achieve this new record nonetheless. She gave her husband a funny and awkward kiss while she tried to get her fins on. He would be standing by with the other divers on their safety crew, treaded water over to the sled attached to the line she'd be riding, hopefully, down to about 561 feet of depth, and prepared herself.

She found her grip and held not too tight for fear of using excess energy. All she needed was enough to stay on while she drifted downwards. She took in a massive gulp of air and then swallowed it down, breathing in and swallowing more as much as she could to pack her lungs full of air. Then she gave one last signal and shot down into the water, gliding fast and steady on the line. The ride was going well for Audrey, and she could faintly see the dark orange flag

marking the end of her descent through the drifting mists of dark water. There was little sunlight so deep, and her eyes didn't have much time to adjust to the fading light. But just as she hit the 535 foot mark, so close to the end, a problem occurred. The incoming storm on the surface had churned up the tides, and it was causing the lighter and more delicate tagline

she was using to be tossed a little bit here and there. At this depth, she finally reached a kink in the line the sled couldn't charge through. She knew that the kink would eventually ride itself, but she would have to wait. 30 slow seconds drifted by until she was finally able to continue on, and continue she did, just about 20 more feet until she felt the thud of the sled hit the 561 foot mark. For a moment, she drifted down until she was eye-level with the floor. She did this both to confirm she had reached the depth and also to write herself and prepare for the trip back up to the surface with the inflatable balloon. The safety diver that was waiting for her down there hovered off to the side. He offered her a nod and a thumbs up for her job that was thus far well done.

She barely saw it in the scant light. Dangling there like a spider at the mercy of the wind as it makes its web, Audrey slowly moved her hand over to the valve she would turn to release air into the balloon, but when she turned it, nothing happened. The diver saw a quick jolt of panic rushed through Audrey before she composed herself and calmly tried again. But still, there was nothing. The spider was stuck at the end of her line,

drifting now hopelessly in the raging wind of infinite ocean that surrounded her. The safety diver sprung into action and swam to her. Of course, he could not just give her his spare hose. That would kill her. She was deep enough to where the air that she had swallowed on the surface was compressed to a fraction of the size it had been before. Her lungs were like golf balls. If the diver gave her his pressurized air,

it would expand too fast on the ascension and would cause her lungs to explode. Instead, he tried using his spare hose to manually fill the air balloon, but it simply wasn't enough. At an agonizingly slow pace, the sled started to rise with Audrey. What else could she do?

Holding on and just hoping for a miracle. The diver kept trying to feed more and more air into the balloon, but the sled was just not quick enough. Audrey held on, stoic but with panicking eyes, as she felt her death approach her. On the surface, Pippin was worried. The dive should have taken no more than three to four minutes, but it had already been seven. He dove quickly down and followed the line until he caught up with Audrey and the other diver. Once it was clear that Audrey was no longer conscious, they hauled her as fast. as they could back up to the air. She had been submerged for a total of eight minutes and

40 seconds, but still they could feel a pulse. Audrey could perhaps have been saved had their team brought doctors into the ocean with them. She might have made it if Pippin had not wasted another minute trying to resuscitate her in the water. She might have made it if Pippin had someone else check that her sled was working well and her balloon was ready to go instead of just him. She might have survived if Pippen had listened to any of the critiques he'd received from divers, telling him that he was rushing it, that she wasn't ready, that it wasn't a good day for this. But he did none of those things. Audrey Mestri was pronounced dead on her arrival at the hospital.

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