Lighthouse Horror Podcast - I'm a Government Rescue Diver. We have a STRANGE List of RULES | Scary Stories

Episode Date: May 10, 2025

Story written by Stephen & Rachel of Lighthouse Horror. For usage rights or more information, please contact us at [e-mail] Art from NinerioMore of the artist’s works at ninerioartsOriginal YouTube link: I’m a Government Rescue Diver. We have a STRANGE List of RULES.Merch: lighthousehorror.shopFor more stories like this one, check out my YouTube channel: Lighthouse Horror | YouTube Patreon: Lighthouse Horror | PatreonMusic:Lucas King - YouTubeMyuu - YouTube IncompetechDarren Curtis Music - YouTubeThank you for listening to this scary story! If you enjoyed this new creepypasta story, please check out some of my other horror stories. We'll be uploading new episodes every week, featuring ghost stories, haunted encounters, mysteries, true stories, creepypasta, and anything supernatural and paranormal. Don't miss out on the thrill and suspense that await you in each episode!

They told me you be coming in today. You're green, huh? That's all right, we've all been there. Call me Jim. I've been diving for 27 years, though most days it feels like a lot more. My knees crack when I crouch. My left ear doesn't work right since the incident.

And I smell like rust, even when I'm bone dry. Listen, you don't get to stay in this line at work unless you learn fast. Or get very lucky. Sometimes both You don't last unless you get good at staying alive You've probably seen the gear in the hangar already Those racks of suits tanks lined up like little soldiers

The dry suits hanging like empty skins That looks kind of cool, maybe even heroic Rescue diver Sounds noble, right? Let me tell you something early on The water doesn't care who you are Doesn't matter if you're saving a kid trapped in a bus or pulling up a briefcase some official once forgotten. The water will crush you all the same if you are not very careful.

I started in search and rescue. That was back when I still had the nerves for quick decisions. Lakes, floods, broken ice, things with victims. You'd think it would be the worst kind of work, pulling up people who weren't breathing anymore. But it made sense. It was honest. Somebody's missing. You go down there. You bring them back. You give someone answers. But then you get older. Your reflexes slow a little. The kids start moving faster around you. You stop getting the first call and you start getting asked for help with the weird stuff instead. Well, I moved to salvage. Contract John.

private calls. Sometimes it was for insurance, wrecked boats, lost cargo, you know, that sort of thing. Sometimes it was quiet government work. Things that weren't supposed to be found. Not supposed to be there. You learn not to ask why. You learn to keep your mouth shut. And eventually, well, you become the guy they send when things don't make sense. Not because you're smart, but because you're smart, but because you've been down there enough times to know the difference between normal and wrong. They don't send rookies to those calls, which is why I'm talking to you first. Training, sure, but also something else. You need to know the stories before you even dip your face under.

But I know, I know I'm getting ahead of myself. I always do when I talk too long. The stories can wait. Let's start with the company. Let's start with what you've actually signed up for. We operate under civilian contract, but most of our names don't come from the public. You won't see any press releases. You won't see our name on the side of trucks.

We don't even have a logo on our wetsuits. We get calls through closed lines, sealed folders, encrypted messages. Some come from the military. Some from insurance carriers that don't want to admit a payout. Others come from nameless people with very expensive watches and no last names. What they need is someone to go down there and get something. Divers are sent out with the understanding that they're not there to solve anything. Just to bring it back.

No analysis, no theories. Get it. Tag it. Surface. Doesn't matter what it is. A capsule, crate, a drone. a body, a hatch that shouldn't be where it is. You mark it, photograph it, you leave it alone until they send you the lift team. And you don't talk about it later. Even if it keeps showing up

when you close your eyes, the company doesn't joke around about privacy. If you're one of those folks who likes to post things, please don't be. Pictures, stories, videos, you're going to have to unlearn that. We don't talk to the media. We don't write memoirs. We don't give interviews. We don't go on Instagram, okay? There's a non-disclosure clause in the hiring packet with a lifetime duration. Most divers sign it without reading the fine print. Buried in the legalese is a single line. Company is not liable for exposure to content of non-empirical origin. It's not a typo. It's been there longer than I have.

Don't ask me what it means. Don't ask anyone. If someone's been doing this job long enough to have thoughts about that line, they don't want to share them. The pay is excellent. You will find that out very quickly. It'll hit your account fast and clean digits.

No deductions you don't recognize. No delays. Full medical. Good benefits. You'll think you've lucked into the best job you ever could hope for. The gears top the line. Every diver gets a full new kid every six months.

You'll wear things designed for depth and pressure most civilians never reach. You'll use trackers, comms, and imaging tools that aren't sold outside military circles. It's all real. It all works. They don't cut corners, that part's true. You'll also notice something else,

but not right away. Turnover. It's high. It's not announced. Nobody gets fired. Not really. People just stop coming back. You'll hear about someone transferring.

You'll hear a name. Once. Then not again. You'll find a locker that hasn't been touched in weeks. Boots inside still lined up like they're waiting. Sometimes the crew will make a quiet comment. He tapped out. Or she's moved on.

That's all they say. That's all they ever say. And that's probably enough for now. I mean, you're still new. Still dry. You'll learn more once you've had a few dives. The right stories always come up on their own. They always do.

But I've got a few for you already, actually. The kind of things that get passed down. You don't have to believe me. Hell, I wouldn't blame me if you didn't. But for your own safety, you better listen anyway. These aren't campfire stories. Their records. Field notes.

Pieces of something bigger that no one wants to talk about officially. I'm giving them to you now before you get too far in. So when it's your turn down there, you don't freeze up trying to make sense of it all. because you won't and you don't need to you just need to know what to look for I'll start with one

I think about more than I should the rookies like to call it the angel dive though that name doesn't sit right with me there was nothing wholly about that place the job came through a third party carrier

we weren't told who flagged the site just that there was a priority wreck along coast. Private vessel registered under a shell company. Coordinates pinned to a sheer cliffside that had collapsed during a recent storm. Half the rock face had come down into the water, dragging with it some old structures that weren't on any official chart. The sonar sweep showed something odd, a void under the rubble. Empty space where there shouldn't have been any. Looked like the land had been hollow underneath. Now that's not uncommon.

Limestone does that, especially near salt water. You get caverns forming over time, but this one was much bigger than usual. Long, deep. They sent us to explore it. Myself, two others, I won't name them. They didn't stick around long after this one. And I don't think they'd wanted brought up now. We made our decisions.

sent just after dawn. Water was calm. Visibility was better than expected. We move slow, clearing rock fragments, marking paths with lines as we pushed forward. The cavern entrance had cracked open from the cliff like a broken mouth, sharp edges, collapsed ledges, chunks of earth that still look like they might slide again if you touch the wrong piece. We got about 30 meters in when we found the first one. It was a figure, human-shaped, standing in the middle of a narrow ledge. Arms up, face half covered, like it flinched just before something hit it. We stopped moving the second we saw it.

At first, we thought it might be part of the cave, like a trick of the light, or maybe some stalagmine. formation, built over time around a frame. That kind of thing happens under water. But as we got closer, we could see the detail, the way the fingers were curled, the lines of a mouth barely peeking through the cracks between the knuckles. It wasn't just shaped like a person. It was a person. Or something meant to look exactly like one. A few more meters in. We found another, than another, than a dozen more. They were everywhere. Tucked into crevices, standing against the walls, crouched near the floor.

Figures, all made of the same pale stone or mineral, or maybe something else entirely. Every one of them was unique, different posture, different face, different moment. and none of them looked peaceful. One was on top of another, hands locked around the throat. Another had their arms wrapped around someone else's shoulders, the two of them frozen in a tight embrace. One had a weapon, looked like a blade, caught mid-swing, as if time had just stopped an inch from impact.

One figure knelt on the cave floor with their face lifted upward, mouth wide, frozen, in what looked like some kind of scream. You couldn't look at them all at once. There was too much to take in. We didn't know what the hell we were looking at. We kept our mouths shut down there. Of course, no talking at depth. But the cameras were feeding live back to the surface.

And someone topside made a comment over the earpiece said it looked like something out of Doctor Who, those stone creatures that only moved when he weren't watching. The Weeping Angels. I remember that show. The older version, anyway. Back when it ran in the 70s. The joke caught on,

and before we were even back on the boat, people were calling them the angels. They didn't really fit the name, though. They weren't all hiding their faces, and they sure as hell didn't feel like anything. divine. They looked more like the statues you'd find outside a church that had been burned down and never rebuilt. After we got back to the surface, I couldn't let it go. I started digging around quietly on my own time. No specifics, nothing that would break contract. I'm just reading. Old logs,

shipping records, sailors journals, anything that mentioned strange rock form. near the coast. It took a while, but I found something. A passage in a Dutch ship captain's log from the 1600s. His vessel had wrecked after a storm, not far from the same stretch of cliff. He wrote about hiding in a sea cave during the worst of it, and what he saw inside. Figures, he said. Stone people.

Dozens of them. He called them. the still ones. He wrote that they were sailors trapped after death. Not just any sailors, ones who had fought, or betrayed each other, or left something undone. People who had died with something unfinished. Rage, grief, love, regret? Whatever it was, it held on to them.

And the legend, if you believe it, says that the sea takes them. not just their bodies, but everything left in them that hadn't settled. The cave becomes a kind of purgatory, I guess, a holding place. And when the storms get bad enough, the earth opens up and lets you see what's been waiting underneath. The recovery team came in a few days later. We were told to stand down. They were supposed to clear the area, collect samples, and see what could be safely

removed. But nothing ever got lifted out. Equipment kept failing. Reports came back, scrambled. Divers rotated off the job without explanation. One of them supposedly claimed the statues had changed positions between dives, but nothing on the official scans showed movement. Just bad footage, they said. Compression glitches. Eventually, the company sealed the whole site. Quietly. They dropped rubble back into the cave from above. Reburied it.

Acted like it never been opened in the first place. No record, no follow-up. So if you ever see them during one of your dives, those figures, don't go near them, don't touch them, don't take pictures. Don't try to count how many there are

and don't linger. Just mark the location and get out fast. Something's wrong with that place. Deeply wrong. I don't know what those figures are or how they got there or why they look the way they do. I just know they don't belong. Not naturally. And if you've got even a little bit of common sense, you will keep your distance.

Some mysteries are meant to remain unsolved. Then there are jobs that don't involve legends, just people, real ones, the kind that do worse things than the sea ever could. We were told it was standard recovery, dead male mid-thirties, found floating near the edge of a restricted dock zone in a southern inlet. Water was shallow, current low. The body was wedged between two pylons, where debris tends to pile up. At first glance, it looked like the usual, a drowning. Maybe someone who slipped off a boat and wasn't found in time. It was supposed to be quick.

Get in, bag the body, mark the position, bring it up, hand it over. We'd done it a hundred times. The guy wasn't in terrible condition, considering the heat. Few days in the water, maybe a week. Skin was bloated, eyes clouded. no visible wounds from what we could see through the dry-suit window. He was wearing plain clothes, cargo pants, dark shirt, no wallet or ID. Pretty normal.

Except for the hands. You get used to weird positioning in this job. Bodies float funny. Limbs stiffen, joint swell, arms-bended angles you don't expect. So at first, the hands didn't seem that's true. strange. Just a little off. Wrong size, maybe, or maybe it was the color, paler than the rest of the skin, like they hadn't been exposed as long. Once we got them out of the boat, we noticed the fingerprints didn't scan. It's standard procedure now to run fingerprints immediately. We have a mobile

reader, connects directly to the lab, and flags anything on file. It's not perfect, but usually gives us a starting point. This time it kept failing. Partial match, no match, re-try, four different tries, no ID. We check the other hand and same thing. And that's when one of the texts noticed the line at the wrist, not a wound exactly, more like a seam. We opened the cuff and found zip ties. Tied, three per wrist, buried under the sleeve. Under that, epoxy. Thick, gray, hardened over rough skin like someone had tried to patch drywall. There wasn't even an attempt to hide it.

Whoever did it used construction-grade adhesive and a bundle of cheap plastic ties to keep the hands in place. They weren't his. He'd had his real hands removed. The ones attached to him had been taken from someone else. We tagged the scene, took samples, and filed the report like always. It went to local authorities under possible foul play, though that wasn't really in our jurisdiction. Once we hand something off, we're usually out of it.

The lab said the wrist cuts had been made post-mortem, no bleeding, no trauma response. Whoever this man was, he'd been dead before the switch. The police never followed up. Not with us, not officially. But a few months later, reports started coming out of Texas and Louisiana. Fragments of bodies found in lakes and shallow water channels. Limbs with different DNA. Heads missing.

In one case, a torso was found with two different sets of fingerprints The press called the person behind it, Frankenstein. Not because of any science or stitching, just the way he mixed and matched the pieces. There was no clear pattern to the victims. No age range, no gender bias. Some were known missing persons. Others had no records at all. The only thing that connected them was how they were found.

Always in water. Always taken apart and put back. together, never buried. We didn't stop with that first body. Over the next five months, I pulled up two more, one found in a canal tangle near Baton Rouge, another tangled in fishing net off the gulf. Same method. Same epoxy, same zip ties, same mismatched parts. Both of them were dumped in places, where only divers would ever find him. And both of them had prints that didn't match their wrists. This time, I didn't hand it off and walk away.

I got pulled into the investigation, worked directly with a homicide unit out of Louisiana. They'd been tracking scattered remains across multiple states, but until we started finding whole bodies with consistent post-mortem alterations, it hadn't clicked. The killer had a pattern, just not one anyone had mapped. He liked water. Preferred it even. He used rivers, marinas, cargo dunks. Anywhere the currents could carry away skin cells and confused time of death.

Everybody had something swapped. Hands, feet. In one case, part of a jaw. Not to hide the victims, but to leave his signature. Eventually, we did get him. Name was Gordon Ellison. 38 years old. Freelance Mechanical Engineer.

Quiet. Traveled constantly for contract work. Boat license. No priors. Clean enough to never make anybody look twice. They caught him at a service yard. Inside a dry docked trawler, he changed into a mobile workspace. They found gloves, tools, and samples in chemical storage.

The epoxy-matched resin. from the recoveries. So did the brand of zip ties. So did the make of bone saw, right down to the grind pattern on the blade. He's in lockup now. Somewhere they don't let him near water. And the man we pulled up that first day, the one with the wrong hands, finally got moved from unidentified to confirmed victim. His name was Thomas. 29, been missing almost a year. At least now someone knows where he ended up. This job isn't pretty. You get stuff like that sometimes.

Bodies. Deaths that weren't accidental. Scenes you don't want to think about later. You'll see the worst of what people can do to each other. You'll see what happens when no one's around to stop it. But the point of this work isn't just to pull up the wreckage. It's to give someone on land the missing piece. A body with a body.

the wrong hands might help connect the dots. A tagged location might line up with someone else's case. That kind of thing matters, even if it doesn't feel like much in the moment. It's not flashy work. Most of the time, it's slow, quiet, and thankless, but it's solid and, well, that matters. Because when we do it right, when we find the things that no one else could, when we bring back what someone up top needs to see. We give people answers. We help close doors that stayed open for far too long. We help the right people connect the pieces. That's what this job is about. Not buried treasure, not mysteries, just people. Most rookies like you don't see it that way. At first, they're chasing the adrenaline. But eventually they get it. One,

dive at a time. Now you'll hear a lot of wild stories in this line of work, but the weirdest ones don't come from rumors. They come from logs. And this one came across our desk last winter. A Cold War era submarine, Soviet built. Diesel electric class went missing in 1973. Last transmission came in the early hours of January 12, routine stuff. Navigation of navigation update. No distress, no odd activity. It vanished about 200 miles off the grid during a training circuit. Never surfaced. Never pinged again. It was assumed lost to an equipment failure or pressure implosion. Pretty common back then, especially with that generation of subs. The ocean swallows things quick. No debris was ever found. And for 50 years, that was

the story. Then last year, it showed up. Just like that. A routine sonar sweep by a NATO mapping crew picked it up on a shelf ledge. Full hall signature, no break, no disassembly, no scattering. Whole intact. Sitting upright on the ocean floor like it parked itself there and waited. coordinates lined up with the sub's last known position in 1973. We were called into inspected. The briefing was thin but specific. No sign of collision. No obvious pressure damage.

Paint still intact. Original paint based on spectral analysis. External lights were still operational. The subs outer shell looked like it had been laid down last week. Not five decades ago. No barnacles, no corrosion, no wear. Just dust. That was the first red flag.

Even in deep water, with cold temperatures and low current, metal ages. Especially on something like a submarine that's been exposed to pressure, salinity, and complete darkness for 50 years. But this one didn't show any signs of age. no chemical wear, no rust, no discoloration. The weld lines looked like they were done that same month. It wasn't just preserved? It was untouched. We approached from the starboard side and entered through the upper hatch.

The locking mechanism clicked like it'd been oiled yesterday. Inside, the air was dead still. Emergency lighting flickered on, as our movement triggered proximity sensors. Everything worked. Consuls lit up. Backup systems responded. Internal climate was stable.

There was no sign of the crew. Every bunk was made, every one. Every locker closed. Tools were secured in racks. Dishes were still stacked in a mess hall. No cracks. No algae. No water damage anywhere.

And more than that, nothing was broken. No collapsed bulkheads, no signs of emergency evacuation or decompression. Nothing? Like, they don't just step down for a break? The strangest detail was the clock system. Every Cold War sub ran on a synchronized network of shipboard clocks, military issue timing circuits, hardwired into the nav logs, engine cycles, and communications equipment. These subs were built for discipline. Nothing happened without a timestamp.

The clocks were still running. Every single one. From the bridge to the engine room was frozen at 1244 a.m. January 12th, 1973. Not burned out, not to the engine room. degraded, just stopped. The logs inside were another story. We pulled the hard copy books from the bridge, tightly capped, neat handwriting, daily notations. The final entry was routine, positional data, weather, watch notes. That one lined up with the timestamp.

But someone had kept writing after the clocks stopped. seven more hours of entries. No digital backup. No notes on anomalies or panic. Just logs about power levels, duty rotations, sonar sweeps. Normal stuff. Like they didn't even realize the ship had frozen in time. Then it ends.

No final sentence. No farewell. No trace of the crew. 47 men and officers. Not a single one on board. No signs of ejection. No escape pod usage. No recorded oxygen drop.

Their uniforms were still folded in lockers. Boots lined up under bunks. Everything right where it should be except the people. Well, we ran full diagnostics. Heat scans, subsurface radar, E.M. Fields, waves. Nothing unusual. No radiation, no evidence of tampering or sabotage. All records matched what the original Soviet reports had shown from 1973. Except for one thing. The subs ID tag

burned into the inner hall didn't match its original serial. It was off by two digits, a 32, where there should have been a 07. We sent that up the chain. Response came fast. Log it, tag it, seal it. They classified the site and pulled the team within 24 hours. Recovery was ruled out. No samples were allowed off the vessel. It was flagged as historic wreckage.

Preservation advised. That's the polite way of saying, leave it alone. Don't ask questions. And don't go back. I don't think anyone's been there since. Still down there. Fully intact. Waiting on that ledge.

With the lights still on and the table still set. Like the dive never ended. There's no damage. No clue all got there. No answer to where the crew went. And no way to explain what happened during those seven hours between the moment the clocks stopped ticking. and the last time anybody wrote something down. And like a lot of jobs we do, there's no follow-up.

Just a gap. No one since has been able to explain how a fully intact Cold War submarine disappeared without a trace for half a century and then returned in perfect condition with a light stall on. And that's the part that sticks. Not just the vanishing, but the timing. That sub went missing at 12.

44 a.m. All internal systems stopped recording data at that exact minute, but the crew kept logging entries for seven hours after that, which means either the clocks were wrong or something happened that didn't register on any system, something that took out 47 trained sailors without a single mark left behind. No wreckage, no flooding, no bodies, just silence. than nothing. There are more stories like this than people like to admit. Unsolved things. Strange wrecks, empty ships, instruments that stop working the moment you descend past a certain depth.

Divers who come back different. Or don't come back at all. These stories don't get published, and they don't make it into training manuals. They get passed around the same way I'm giving them to you now. I've never been a superstitious type. I'm not one of those guys who talks about curses or fate or ancient things in the deep. I trust data. I believe in evidence.

But I've been in this job long enough to know that there is a limit to what we can measure. And past that line, there's just what we've seen. See, you need to listen when someone older tells you about something strange they came across. You need to pay attention. Not because every story is true in the way a lab test is true, but because each one teaches you how to notice what doesn't belong. And knowing what doesn't belong, it's how you stay alive. That's why I'm telling you these stories. Not for fun, not to scare you.

Because this is how the job works. It's not all gear and skill and textbook protocol. Some of it's memory. Some of it is knowing what happens. to the people who came before you and why they made the choices they did. That's how we used to pass things down, before everyone had manuals. The ones who'd seen the worst would sit you down and tell you what they'd run into. Not everything had a perfect explanation, but everything had a purpose.

Every story has a lesson. That's what matters. And this one. Well, this one reminds you that not every disappearance looks like an accident. an accident. Some of them are something else. So here's the rule. When something looks too clean, too perfect, too untouched, you pay attention. If a wreck's been missing for 50 years and shows up with working lines, you don't just treat it like any other sub. You slow down. You ask why. You mark your time and you double-check your exits because nothing stays untouched that long by accident

and nothing stays hidden that deep unless it's supposed to. Now you'd think that was the strangest recovery I'd ever done. It wasn't. We got the call from a small port along the southeastern coast of Brazil. Recovery request. No name body, shallow depth. 80 feet down.

The local authorities had flagged it, but didn't have the name or gear to bring it up clean. We were contracted in. The water there is murky, greenish, thick with silt, stirred up by the tides and river runoff. Visibility is low, even on a good day. You don't see the bottom until you're basically on it. That part of the coast is a mess of old chains,

scrap, anchors, and half-buried steel from a dozen sunken ships, most of them rotted out since the 80s and 90s. You learn not to grab anything too fast. We dropped in slow and worked our way down along the line coordinates. The sonar picked up a dense metal signature, anchor chain, leading off from a collapsed hall nearby. The wreck was listed in records. Freighter sank in 1994 after a fire in the engine run. 37 crew all accounted for. No known missing passengers.

No official recovery attempts had ever been made. The cargo wasn't worth the trouble. The body was found 20 feet off the stern, tied directly to the anchor chain with two thick wraps around the ankles. The rope was fused to a calcified surface of the leg bones hardened over time. He wasn't floating. He was suspended slightly above the seabed, back leaned against the chain like he'd been placed there. No movement. No breakage. No visible trauma.

He was wearing a tuxedo. Black jacket. Tie still tight. shirt faded pale gray from the water. The fabric should have rotted years ago in that environment, but it hadn't. It was discolored and stiff, but intact. The skin was hard, smooth, gray-white, and calcified like coral. No signs of bloating, no soft tissue loss.

The face was fully preserved. His eyes were open. And his mouth was full of sea glass, green and brown mostly. The kind you find worn down by the waves. Dozens of pieces packed tight behind the teeth. Like someone had shoved a fistful in and forced the jaw shut afterward. There was no damage to the jaw line, though. No pressure break.

The mouth had been open when it happened, or stayed that way. The body was neutral in the water, not sinking, not rising. Still, we tagged and surfaced, then brought him up the next day in a sealed case. Local coroner was called, but they had no database match, no dental records, no ID in any missing person's log, domestic or foreign, no documents in his pocket, no tattoos, nothing. We tried everything we could to find a name. searched regional wedding registries going back 30 years. Checked for any men listed as lost at sea during their wedding season.

Searched the freighter manifest, thinking maybe someone had boarded unofficially. No match. No one ever came forward. We had a body, a suit, a date, and nothing else. When we were still on site, one of the locals, an older dock worker, mentioned something. he'd heard as a kid. He told us, They call him the groom of the babe. Said it like it was normal. Like everyone just knew.

He told us there was an old story that got passed down in those towns. Parents would tell it to young couples before their wedding day. A warning. More than a scary story. If you went into the water before you got married, alone, usually, and saw a man waist deep in the serve, hands folded, eyes open, it meant your wedding wouldn't happen, the groom would vanish, or the bride would walk away, sometimes there'd be a storm, sometimes worse. They said if you saw him, the marriage was already over, even if it hadn't started. So, couples were told not to go near the shore before the ceremony.

Superstition, mostly. Like walking under a ladder or wearing the wrong color. But people followed it. Even today. Local wedding planners build it into their schedules. No beach access, no dock photos, just in case. When we described what we'd found, the tuxedo, the anchor, the sea-glass.

They didn't even look surprised. Some of them nodded. They said, well, that matches the old stories. Said the man had no name. That he was cursed or betrayed, depending on who you asked. Some said he drowned himself

after being left at the altar. Others said he was murdered by a jealous family. The only constant was the water. The tuxedo, and the open eyes. One version even mentioned the glass, said it filled his mouth so he couldn't call out. That part stuck with me. Now, normally I'd write it off.

Folklore fills in the blanks where facts can't. But this wasn't a fuzzy sighting or a shadow caught on camera. This was a full body in normal wear. preserved beyond reason chained to a wreck from a ship that had no record of him and no way to explain why he looked like he'd been placed there instead of lost. There was no missing person, no crime report, no clue how long he'd been down there. He didn't match anything. But the anchor did.

Same metal. Same part number as the 1994 wreck. No question. Which means that either he went down with the ship and was somehow never listed, or he was put there afterward using salvaged chain. But the body hadn't aged like something from 94. It hadn't aged at all. Well, we handed it over, filed our report, and moved on.

No ID, no prints, no personal effects. no official record to match him to. The body was marked as an unidentifiable male, presumed historical. The file closed within a few weeks. Just another anomaly, boxed up and pushed aside. But while I still think about the way he looked, not panicked, not peaceful either. Just, well,

just still like he'd been waiting down there for someone to find him. So here's what I'll tell you. When you're working in unfamiliar places, listen to the locals. Not everything they say is superstition. Some stories are just for entertainment, sure, but some are warnings. Old ones. Passed down because people saw something once and decided it was better to remember. than to forget.

Figure out which is which and take the right ones seriously. Just in case. Well, that is all I've got for now. You've heard the stories. At least the ones I think you are ready for.

There are more. Plenty more. Some stranger than you'd believe. Some are a lot worse. But those can wait. You haven't been under long enough yet. These stories, well, they're just the first layer. Like the surface of the water, still and quiet from above,

hiding everything underneath. You can listen to me all day. Yeah, yeah, it might help. But it's not the same as seeing it for yourself. Feeling that pressure, hearing nothing but your own breath, finding something on the seafloor that no one was experienced. That's when it starts to change you. I'm not telling me stories to scare you, okay?

I'm not trying to build some big mystery out of things I don't understand. I'm just giving you what the manuals leave out. The kind of stuff the old timers used to pass down, diver to diver. And like I said before, every story has a lesson. Some of these lessons might just save your life. But don't forget, this job is a job. about stories, it's about doing. Diving. Recovering what others can't reach. Not because it's easy, not because it always makes sense, but because you can. That's the only real reason we're down there.

We're trained, we're calm. And when things get strange, we don't panic. We surface when it's time, and we shut up when the job calls for it. You'll earn your own story soon enough. Until then, keep your head clear, your gear clean, and your lines tight. Now enough talk. Suit up. We've got a job to do.