Lighthouse Horror Podcast - I’m an EMERGENCY Rescue Diver. There’s only ONE RULE for Lake Superior | Scary Stories

Episode Date: March 2, 2024

These are my rules to survive The Halfway People. But we had to break them...          Story from J Campbell Make sure to check out more of their work at u/Erutious Cover Art from Yuliya Volokhova                Original Post: Tommy Cold Toes : r/TalesOfDarkness  Original YouTube link: I’m an EMERGENCY Rescue Diver. There’s only ONE RULE for Lake Superior           For more stories like this one, check out my YouTube channel: Lighthouse Horror | YouTube  Patreon: Lighthouse Horror | Patreon Merch: lighthousehorror.com  Music: Lucas King - YouTube Myuu - YouTube  Incompetech  Darren Curtis Music - YouTube Thank 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!

Lake Superior never gives up her dead, her and all the other Great Lakes. They have enough secrets that would put a church bone yard to shame. As an underwater search and recovery team, we do what we can to bring those secrets back to the surface, for the cops, the grieving families, for justice. But sometimes, when the lake gives us a glimpse of what they're hiding, some of us don't live to tell the tale. I grew up around Duluth, but I've traveled across all the states around them. There are caves beneath those legs, trenches so deep.

You couldn't see the sun after a certain point. And in those caves are currents that will take you and never let you go. This isn't to scare anyone off from visiting, but be careful while you're there enjoying nature's bounty. I might get a call about you one day. I'm a diver. I've been diving in the Great Lakes since I was young. I can remember snorkeling with my brother when I could barely swim.

Growing up, we'd push each other to dive as deep as we could in those crystal clear waters. I ended up joining my college dive team as well as the rowing team. And after college, I decided I wanted to learn more. I learned as much as I could about diving. I became a volunteer diver for the local sheriff's department before finally joining their underwater recovery unit. The UWRU dives all over the state, but most of my calls are for people who had been lost in the Great Lakes region.

It's a lot of water, and it's easy to get in over your head, so to speak. I've seen a lot in my five years on the team, but I've been okay so far because someone was there to teach me the rules. My first day on the team, I met with my partner, Michael Drake. Michael had been diving in the area for decades and was a legend in his field. He'd saved a bunch of cave divers a few years back. He was finding bodies and lost items in the Great Lakes since I was a kid. He was the go-to guy for body recovery, and my supervisor said he'd asked for me personally. I've heard good things.

He said, shaking my hand as I took a seat. You're top of your class at Michigan State, took the dive team to nationals, and you've had nearly 500 registered dives. That's impressive for someone so young. I was tickled. But when he got serious, I knew he was. wasn't just gassing me up. Diving with the UWRU is a little different from what you're used to. Volunteer divers play by their own rules. He began. But here, we have set protocols that we follow when we dive. They may seem silly, but they're the sorts of things that

could save your life. So listen close. Now some of them were simple enough, and were things I already did when I dived. Check your gear before you dive. Always put out your safety markers. Dive in pairs whenever you're on UWRU business. Don't do long dives and caves you don't know. These were simple rules that most divers followed, but Michael had some that made less sense when I started out. They were rules that made more sense the longer I dove with him. Like the rules that made more sense the longer I dove with him. Like the rules about swirling algae. This is what he told me. If you see algae floating on the surface, that's fine, but if you see it moving in a circle, pack your gear and leave the area.

Okay, so that one seemed strange at first. I'd never actually seen algae swirling in a circle. The first time we encountered it, I was half in the water when he grabbed me by the shoulder. He was an older guy, like I said, but his strong grip left me no room for argument as he walked me back out of the water. Pack it in, he said, taking off his mask and walking back to the truck. What? Why? I asked, walking strangely in my swim fins.

This is the spot they think the kid disappeared in. We were looking for a boy about seven. He'd gone under further down. This part fed into a river. And this stretch of water in particular had a lot of roots and snags where a body could get caught. We were starting here because it seemed the best place to find him. The plan had been to work our way back up the stream. Now, it seemed, my partner was giving up, and I was very curious to know why.

The algae, he said, it's circling. He said it matter-of-factly, like it was as obvious as the mask on my face. And? I said, needing a little more than that. He sighed and rolled his eyes. Rule seven, we don't swim when the algae circles. As I took my gear off, I heard him call the head office, and tell them that we'd found the kid. He said the spot was good, and the algae was circling.

He also said, we would give it another half hour and then go retrieve what was left. I was as confused about what he was saying as I was by the situation. What was down there? And why couldn't we go get this kid? As he hung up the phone, he went to sit on the tailgate,

tapping the spot beside him. Sorry, kid. I forgot you're new at this. We don't go dive in when the algae circles. It means there's something down there that could be dangerous for us. I looked at the swirl of green, the path it took, was almost hypnotic. I wondered what could be beneath the surface. What is it?

I asked. Yeah, I got no idea." Michael said. Not sure I really want to know. But sometimes it appears, and when it goes away, there are signs left behind that something was there. It took about forty-five minutes for the algae to stop swirling and float on down the river. Once it was gone, we put on our gear and made our way to the spot.

Michael had been eyeballing it. And as we dove, we found what we were looking for. There was a skull and some bones left behind, but nothing much to identify with. They pulled the dental records after we brought them up. It concluded that it was the kid we were looking for. As Michael called it in, I got a good look at the bones. They were something. The kid had barely gone in an hour ago, but these boys were something.

But these bones were picked clean. It was like something out of a jungle movie. I wondered briefly if the Great Lakes could support piranhas. And I shook away the thought pretty quickly. The waters here were too cold for tropical fish after all. But that led to more questions. What had done this? And where did the rest of the body go?

If there were rules in place for it, then how often did it happen? Michael must have known I needed to talk. After we packed the remains away for the cops, he told me to come have lunch with him. We went to this little hole in the wall barbecue place called Smokies. When he slid a beer towards me, I started to refuse. We were on the job, and it was frowned upon to show up to a dive with a buzz on. But he pushed it closer, saying I would want it. As I sipped out it and ate the best ribs I've ever had, he told me about his early days

on the team. Yeah, when I was first starting out, my old dive partner told me that the UW only had five real rules. There's the one about not swimming when the algae swirls, and the one about not diving deeper than you can see the sun. Yeah, and there's also the one about not diving into caves you hear clicks in. if you find underwater caves. Don't surface into them and never try to take bodies from any depth below sunlight. Everything else, well, it's common sense."

I nodded, swallowing the ribs before asking what it was we were looking out for. Michael thought about it for a second, trying to find the best way to fill me in. Well, the Great Lakes area has its fair share of weird critters abode, and the lakes are no different. My old partner called them halfway people, though their real name is something long and hard to pronounce. Yeah, they once lived peacefully with the natives in this region, but the Europeans taken over the land seems to have angered them. Now that we've hunted off a lot of the local fish and marine life, some of them, supplement their diet with the occasional swimmer or unsupervised inner tuber, he said. I mold this over as I chewed at a rib, trying to decide if he was messing with me or not.

I'd been hazed before, you know, of course. And this seemed like a classic case of mess with a new guy. I was waiting for him to break into laughs and for him to talk about how he'd got me and how gullible I must be to fall for something like that. The longer it didn't happen, the more certain I became that he wasn't trying to pull a joke. Okay. So you're telling me that there are cannibal mermaids in the Great Lakes region? Well, no, Michael said.

They aren't really mermaids, not like we know him. And cannibal would suggest that they shared any kind of relationship to us. They are river spirits, and they have decided that we're tasty as hell. I'm not telling you these things to scare you, just to make you aware. We have rules for a reason, so be aware of them. And beware of the things they're there to protect you from. I told them I would. Though I certainly didn't believe in a bunch of flesh-eating murfolk, in the Great Lakes. region. I wouldn't see any of them for my first three years, but I would see the swirling algae a few times. And when I heard the cliques while cave diving, I always left the area.

The halfway people were always mindful enough to leave the bones of whoever they took, though whether that was kindness or not, was open for debate. They always sent enough back for identification. Usually. skulls or half-chewed fingers. Michael said it was just part of the job. Well, yeah, nothing much can be done about it, was his mantra. We can't fight him. And the couple of times I've seen someone try, it ends up being somewhere between frivolous, and yeah, I'm devastating. I didn't bother to ask him what that meant, and we proceeded with our job as usual. Believe it or not, there's always more than enough to keep a diver busy with the great legs.

If it isn't missing persons, then it's lost vehicles that have gone into a body of water. Or running the magnets or metal detectors for goods used in crimes. I've probably pulled about 30 handguns out of one leg, plus safes and other things that people try to hide in the lakes and surrounding rivers. The number of criminals who think it's a good idea to hide money in the water is astounding, and they always seem confused when the police tell them that it had fallen apart when they fished out the loot. Even the disappearances weren't all strange. The Great Lakes are a pretty great place to fish, swim, and take your boat out for the day in the water. They are also a great place

to get drunk and run out of gas on your jet ski, or flip your kayak over and discover, you don't have the upper body strength you thought you had. What I've learned over the years is that there's a lot of ways someone can get swept up in the current and float off for parts unknown. For every weird water disappearance, dozens were easily explained, though this didn't make them any less devastating for the families. The water doesn't discriminate on the people it decides to take. I have pulled out track stars to beauty queens, and everything in between. The water takes them all. And if you're lucky, you get a body back for a proper funeral. If you aren't, you get a handful of bones with lots of little teeth marks

in them and an odd sense of dread. I was nearly four years into the job when I first saw one of the halfway people. Four years in when we broke the rules and it cost us dearly. We were looking for a raft that had gone missing. The raft was from big-time rapids, a company that did tours for the rapids off the coast of Ohio. These rapids, they're not for the week of heart. The troop of Eagle Scouts who tried to conquer them started out with four rafts, 20 scouts, and four scout leaders.

When they came to the end, they had three rafts, 17 scouts, and three scout leaders. Two of them had fallen off when the raft was swept into a narrow offshoot, and they had been pulled from the water just fine. The other three scouts and their scoutmaster had been swept into a ravine and were now lost. The park service tried to find them from the air, but they couldn't spot any sign of the missing scouts. Search parties had been equally as unsuccessful. It was eventually decided that a team would need to follow them.

up the passage to retrace their steps. In the end, they hired us, and we took a small raft up the stream they were last seen in. The passage would have been difficult to see from the air with a dense tree cover around it, and the cliffs on either side were so steep that the search teams couldn't even get close to the ravine. The scouts would have had no more luck in steering their raft than we would. We held on as we were bounced around mercilessly by the rapids. There was no steering or paddling. The path was too narrow.

And so we were swept along as we hunkered down and tried not to get tossed out ourselves. I saw some scuffs along the rocks and some broken plastic pieces that might have been an oar once. And for half a second, I thought I saw a long red streak before we came skipping out into a small open pool in the middle of the canyon.

It was fed by several different streams and continued into a dozen others that I could see. From the middle, however, the water was calm, and the raft floated idly without using our paddles. As we sat there, Michael decided that this was where we should look. Okay, yeah. If they came into here, then they no doubt came to rest somewhere nearby. If they sank, then we could find their raft and radio for help. If not, then we can pick a stream and press on." He said, So we got our gear on and rolled out into the placid waters of the pond.

Looking down, I immediately knew we were in for a swim. The blue went deeper than I'd ever seen. And it wasn't until you really looked that you realized how deep it was. The pond seemed to go on forever. And the shore was lined with little eroded shelves that came up from the dark like monstrous teeth. On one of these was the ragged remains of a raft, and caught up in the debris was the body of a man. He was tangled up in one of the raveous. ropes, floating calmly in the depths. He was just about at that line, the imaginary line that

we didn't cross. Rule number three, don't dive deeper than where you can see the sun. Michael seemed to weigh his options before acting. Coming to a decision, he grabbed some rope and handed the end of it to me. He then signed out that he was going to attach it. When he He has it tied snug. He wants me to pull it back up, and he would follow with the raft. I nodded, made a circle with my thumb and forefinger as he swam down to set it up. I watched him go, keeping a hand on the boat for stability. It wasn't much.

It was a five-man boat we got from the same company the scouts had gotten theirs from. He was swimming back up, ready to help me with a rope. And a bright red flash stopped him mid-swem. It was hard to see through the water, but I was sure there was something poking through the front of his wetsuit. Suddenly, he was pulled into the depths, and whatever got him seemed a hell of a lot stronger than I was. He was reeled down like a fish on a line.

Before I could stop myself, I was swimming after him. I knew the rules. We never went into water too deep to see the light. But I didn't care. I needed to save him, and I was going to help Michael. But as I followed him, I could see something growing large as I followed the trail of blood. It was a honeycomb of caves dug straight into the side of the rock. I stopped and gawked at it for a second, in awe of how much effort something like this must have taken.

I didn't think at the time that they'd been made by the hands of anything and figured that they were just strange natural occurrences. The Great Lakes region was full of weird stuff. I figured this was just some odd natural phenomenon. I didn't know the caves, no more than I knew the basin we were diving in. All I knew was that Michael had been dragged down and the blood in the water was clear enough to follow his trail. As I headed lower, I took out my knife so I could mark my path. Cave Exploring 101 is always, don't explore caves that you don't know. I knew this. That was first day stuff.

So as I swam deeper, I scratched the wall so I wouldn't get lost when I needed to escape. It was easy enough to mark the walls, and the surface was smoother than I thought could occur naturally. There was no pebbling or rocks poking out. The walls were uniformly smooth as I followed them deeper into one of the caves. In the deeper I went, the more I heard the clicking, The clicking rule was another one I'd never really had to use. The caves we dove in were usually well-traveled, and the clicking I heard was usually just rocks falling.

This was different, though. That sound I'd never heard it underwater before, and it made me a little dizzy when it came too close. I wasn't sure what it was, but I could feel the hairs on the back. of my neck stand on edge as I swam deeper. Suddenly, the tunnel we were in pitched upward. I followed it up and found myself in an underground cave system. And just like that, I've broken another one of our cardinal rules. Do not surface in caves. As soon as my flashlight came out of the water, that rule made a lot more sense. The cave I was in

was huge, with the ceiling hanging would seem like miles above me. Stelagmites hung down like dripping teeth above my head. The flashlight I brought with me could only create a tiny island of light. Anything beyond three feet ahead of me was pure darkness. I turned in a circle trying to get my bearings, and as I did, I realized I could hear a noise in the nearby dark. It was a chewing sound, something like raw chicken being eaten with a toothless mouth. I spun around trying to find the source, and then my flashlight landed on four creatures that would haunt my dreams forever. The name Halfway, people, it made so much more sense

after seeing them. Have you ever heard the original Little Mermaid story? The one where they cut her fin in half to make legs, and each step looks painful. That's what these things look like. They were blue, their scales throwing up refractions on the walls and floors. Their arms and legs looked like flippers that grew out wrong. Their fingers were too thin. Their feet too thick, and their heads were the worst. They had human hands, but the lips and eyes were all wrong. Some of their lips were too thick. Some of them had eyes that were barely there.

But they all had teeth like jagged rows of sewing needles. They were hunched over something. bending down to tear off hunks of flesh. When the light hit them, they all sat up and hissed me. The gills on their necks flared open like wounds to reveal the red flesh underneath. And I saw Michael in the middle of it all. His dead eyes stared up at the ceiling as pieces of him were scattered among the rocks. I quickly dove back into the water and began kicking frantically back the way I'd come from.

My whole way back, I keep hearing the clicks I'd heard earlier. But now they meant something different. They were hunting me, tracking me through the tunnels. My blood ran cold, even as I swam as fast as I could out of those tunnels. I could be speared at any minute, the halfway people swimming out to corner me from any of the tunnels I had to swim by. I would be caught, just like Michael was. I would be dragged back into the darkness to join him.

These tunnels, they were their home, their territory. I made myself slow down and look for the marvellous. I'd made on the way down, but I worried I wouldn't have enough oxygen to make it. The needle on my tank was a little under halfway down the gauge. I needed to calm myself down, or else I'd use up my oxygen. I was probably about a quarter of the way out when something else joined the clicking. It was a scraping noise this time, like claws on stone. And it was getting closer, much closer than the clicks.

I had my knife in my hand, but I didn't think it could do much good against those things. So I started swimming faster, probably wasting more oxygen than I needed to. My arms were burning as I pushed myself beyond my limits, and the same thoughts kept running through my head. They could get me. me, and I would die beneath the water without ever having seen the light again. When I finally saw sunlight again, I almost yelped with joy. And when I rolled into the boat at long last, I cut the tethers and I stripped off my tank

and fins. I was looking for the paddles. When something hit the underside of the boat hard enough to almost, I was looking for the paddles. almost flip it over. I grabbed the oars and was soon paddling for my life as I made for one of the narrow streams on the other side of the lake. My boat was hit a second time, and I had to hold on for dear life as my tank slipped over the side and sank to the bottom. I didn't really care. It was just dead weight at this point. I paddled frantically, really putting that rowing experience a good use. When I squeezed into the stream, I pulled them in as the current

grabbed hold of me. My diving company found me about five miles upstream. I was panning and pulling myself away from the water as fast as I could. They got me checked out and they got me a clean bill of health, but I was in no shape to dive for quite a while. They found me with only about half my gear, no dive partner, and some pretty clear signs that I'd had the crap scared out of me. The boss came to see me at home a week after the incident, and as we sat in my living room, he asked me if I'd seen them. I asked him who, not wanting to sound like a lunatic, but he gave me a look that told me

he knew already. the halfway people. Michael did something to get their attention, didn't he? He asked. I nodded. I didn't really want to talk about Michael, but I felt like I had to get it out. He went too deep, I whispered, and the boss nodded. Michael probably thought it would be okay. He was always a little brash, wasn't it? especially when he was first starting out. But after seeing a diving partner taken by the halfway people, he was careful to follow the rules.

Was it your first time seeing him? I nodded, and he patted my shoulder in a knowing way. It's always difficult after the first time. If you want to quit, I understand. But I wish you wouldn't. You're a great diver, maybe even better than Michael, and I need someone like you on my team. Why don't you think about it and get back to me? It took some time, a long while, I suppose.

But I did eventually get back in the water. And over time, I began to feel comfortable with doing dive missions again. And so, I was careful to follow the rules after that, and I always make sure that the new guys understand just how important they are. We don't swim where the algae circles. We don't go into caves when we hear the clicks. We don't surface in underwater caves we are unfamiliar with. And above all, we never, ever dive. so deep that the sun can't touch us.

I know what lies beneath the surface now. I just hope no one else has to.