Lore - Legends 84: Dead in the Water

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

The vast oceans of our planet are more mysterious to us than the surface of Mars. And because of that, they have become the place where dark legends dwell beneath the surface. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Molly Quinlan Artwick, and research by Samuel Alberty. ————————— PRE-ORDER EXHUMED TODAY: aaronmahnke.com/exhumed ————————— Lore Resources:  Get Ad-Free Lore: lorepodcast.com/support Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop ————————— Sponsors: BetterHelp: Lore is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com/LORE, and get on your way to being your best self. Taskrabbit: Get ahead of your todo list right now and get $15 off your first task at Taskrabbit.com, or on the Taskrabbit app, using promo code LORE. Squarespace: Head to Squarespace.com/lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code LORE. ————————— To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to ads @ lorepodcast.com with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. To advertise on this podcast please email: [e-mail]. Or go to: https://advertising.libsyn.com/lore ————————— ©2026 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

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Visit O-D-O-D-com to book a demo. It's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. As long as humans have been sailing, we've had a challenging relationship with the sea. On the one hand, the currents of the ocean have been the lifeblood of human connection, the highway for trade, for travel, and in some cases, for takeover. On the other, riding the wrong waves can quickly land you in a watery grave. And while we've gotten better at predicting marine disasters, ships still suffer at the hands of storms, icebergs, tsunamis, and rogue waves. The sea is an unstoppable force, after all. And a ship?

Not exactly an immovable object. And so it's only natural that, historically, those who sail the seas were a superstitious lot. To avoid misfortune, there were rules to follow. You must never launch a journey on a Friday. You should avoid carrying passengers that are clergy, redheads, or women. And unless you want a storm to start brewing, you must never whistle on a ship. Some of these rules might sound a little ridiculous to us today. Others are undoubtedly a product of their time, but many sailors treated them as law. As odd as they seem, though,

it's only human to want to control things in the face of danger. But when you're at the mercy of the sea, the only thing you can really control is yourself. In seeking to make sense of the sea, people the world over have come up with a shockingly similar hypothesis. Boats didn't just disappear because of weather or wind or bad timing. These weren't tragic accidents or terrible mistakes. Instead, something stalked these ships with a deadly purpose.

They weren't simply lost at sea. They were hunted. And their hunter? A monster from the deep. I'm Aaron Mankey. And this is lore legends. As long as we've been crossing oceans, we've been worried about, what lurks underneath the waves. For example, Inuit people along the Bering Sea have long-told

tales of the Acklut, a ferocious creature the same size and shape as a killer whale. A fisherman being chased by one of these predators might think reaching shore would keep them safe. But sometimes, as they pull their boat up onto the ice, they'll discover that this is no normal orca. The killer whale's limbs would grow long and dark fur would sprout from its skin. and then finally a wolf would emerge from the surf, and the hunt would be on again. In Japan, people feared the Akugio, a mermaid-like creature with the head and arms of a woman, the body of a fish, and twin white horns. The Akugio was an opportunity killer.

It laid in wait just under the surface, waiting for a boat to sail too close. Hidden in the water, its back would act like a sandbar, causing the boat to get stuck, and then, with a flick of its tail, The Akeugio would capsize the boat and eat everyone on board. But I'm guessing that there was a particular image that appeared in your mind when I first said the word sea monster, a giant gelatinous head, long tentacles covered in suckers, and of course a wicked sharp beak. I'm speaking, of course, of the kraken.

Now, the idea of a giant squid-like creature can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle wrote of a beast he called Tuthos back in three feet. 50 BC. But the classic version that we picture today, and the word crack in itself, both come from medieval Scandinavia. Around the 12-100s, Scandinavian sailors returned to shore with fantastical tales. They claim they saw a creature with long, muscular tentacles strong enough to completely destroy a ship. Around the same time, a Norwegian manuscript called the King's Mirror told of an indescribably large fish in the sea near Iceland. The beast was the size of an ice. and its mouth was as large as a fjord.

It wasn't until the modern era that scientists discovered the legends of the Cracken may not have been legends at all. They might have been sightings of an incredibly rare but very real creature, the giant squid. These squids can stretch up to 43 feet in length and make their homes in the deep ocean, where light and warmth never penetrate. Even now, little is known about them. In fact, the earliest footage we have of a living one comes from just 20,000. years ago. Whether or not a giant squid ever attacked a ship, we don't know. But perhaps one day

we may learn that part of the Cracken myth is true as well. The Cracken, though, wasn't the only supernatural sea monster with a real-life counterpart. In New Zealand, the indigenous Maori told tales of the Tanifa, a race of divine water spirits. Individual Tanifa claimed water spirit streams or particular bays or sometimes even took over caves. And according to different troughs, they appeared in different disguises, as reptiles, sharks, octopi, or even unassuming logs. And while some spent their time kidnapping and eating humans, others delighted in helping them, and none more so than Pilarus Jack. In 1888, a steamship was heading from Wellington on New Zealand's North Island to Nelson

on the south. This region of New Zealand is a maze of inlets and winding bays, all difficult to navigate, but the ship encountered a surprising guide, a species called Rizzo's Dolphin. The dolphin swam with the ship through the passage before finally leaving it at a straight called French Pass. And for the next 24 years, it proceeded to do exactly the same thing. Polaris Jack, named after Polaris Sound where it seemed to live, would meet ships at either end of the maze and guide them through.

And because of this, it was widely accepted that Jack was a Tanifa. And while he seemingly wanted to help humans, he also, also had no problem leaving them to their fates. In one famous incident, a sailor aboard the SS penguin took a shot at Polaris Jack in the early 1900s, and although Jack survived, he seemingly remembered the attack and refused to guide the penguin ever again, which wasn't a good thing. In 1909, the penguin was shipwrecked on its way to Wellington, killing 75 people. It was probably an accident, or perhaps Polaris Jack took his revenge. All that said, whether Jack was truly a Tenifa or just a particularly clever dolphin is difficult to say. He wouldn't be the first

whale spirit to help a human, though, and he certainly wouldn't be the first to hunt one. Stop me if you've heard this one before. A ship full of explorers are sailing across the seas when they happen upon a small, strange island. It's low and sandy, not rising far out of the water. To the sailors, it seems like a promising place to stop. Perhaps they're hoping to find treasure, or in need of a resupply. Maybe they just want to rest on land for the night. Whatever the reason, they drop anchor and come ashore. Before long, the explorers grow hungry.

One decides to light a fire and cooks them all something to eat. It's pleasant there on the island. The breeze is soft, the fire is warm, and the ale is flowing. But as the flames grow higher, something happens. Perhaps the ground shakes or the waves rise. Whatever the sign, one sailor finally realizes what, going on. The island is alive. The sailors, of course, flee for their ship and cast off just in time, because as they retreat, they finally see that the mysterious island is not an island at all.

It's the body of a great whale, and it's now thrashing in pain at the fire on its back. Had they stayed one moment longer, they would have been dragged to the bottom of the sea. Now, this whale of a tail, with all its variations, appears across cultures and sentries. A letter from 300 AD refers to Alexander the Great encountering a whale disguised as an island and nearly losing his crew. 200 years later, the Talmud told the same story, but this time the captain was a hero named Rabah. In the 6th century, the Irish explorer St. Brennan took a band of monks to an island somewhere in the northern Atlantic. When they lit a fire upon it, they only had moments to flee as the island came alive. They spent hours watching a gargantuan whale,

illuminated by their fire, swimming off into the distance. And a few hundred years later, another mysterious whale story appeared, this time in 1001 nights. Like St. Brennan, Rabah, and Alexander before him, Sinbad the sailor also mistook a whale for an island with disastrous results. Over the years, this folkloric tradition came to be called the devil whale. With its immense size and volatile nature, the devil whale seems to be part of a metaphor for the sea itself. It's too vast to be known and too unpredictable to control. Or perhaps, like the Cracken, the devil whale could come from something more real. Even without supernatural powers, whales are colossal creatures, and being in their enormous presence can remind us just how

insignificant we are, especially if, like the devil whale, they decide to attack. In 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott was leading an expedition to the South Pole. The team had prepared for a hard winter, cold winds, and limited food. But they were surprised when a new threat appeared from beneath their feet. When crossing a field of floating ice, Scott and the others noticed a group of orca whales surfacing near the edges of the ice flow they were standing on. That fascination turned to terror, though, when one whale erupted through the middle of the sheet of ice, violently breaking the ice up around it.

The orcas weren't just friendly observers. They were actively trying to break the ice. beneath the expedition's feet. Scott and his expedition managed to get away safely. He later wrote that the whales were simply after their sled dogs, but it's easy to believe that the orcas may have wanted something more. Because whales are intelligent creatures. They can reason things out.

They can build a plan. And, in at least one case, it seems, they can even plot their revenge. It was the whaling capital of the world. Now, that might not sound like a big deal by today's standards, but you have to remember in the 19th century, whales were like the one-stop shop of the post-revolutionary war economy. Whalebone and Baleen was used in everything from corsets to carriage springs. Spermaceti, the white, waxy substance that came from sperm whales, was used for candles and lotions. And in the era of oil lamps, bright-burning, smokeless whale oil was a hot commodity.

No pun intended, I swear. Catching whales was big business, and in Nantucket, business was booming. But as we all know, the markets can behave a lot like the sea. Sometimes you're riding high, and sometimes it can all come crashing down. By November 20th of 1820, the 20 sailors of the Nantucket-based whale ship, the Essex, had been at sea for 15 months. They'd already bagged a few thousand gallons of whale oil on their way around Cape Horn to the Pacific, and now they were following a pod of sperm whales in the open ocean. According to first mate Owen Chase, things started pretty normal that day.

Most of the crew had left the Essex in three small whaling boats. Their plan was to harpoon a whale, tire it out, and then drag it back to the main ship. But not long after their launch, Chase's boat got damaged. He returned to the Essex to make some hasty repairs. And while on board the ship, he suddenly noticed a huge 85-foot male sperm whale acting oddly in the water. While the rest of the pod were busy trying to flee the small whale bird, boats, this one seemed to be focusing on the Essex. Chase would soon realize the whale wasn't actually observing the Essex quietly. He was making a plan. By the time Chase figured it out,

though, it was too late. The whale dove under the surface to gather speed, then swam straight at the Essex, ramming it hard enough to make the whole ship shudder. The impact punctured a hole in the hull, and water began to pour in. As Chase watched in horror, the whale repeated its attack, this time making for the bow. It crushed the front of the ship, and the Essex began to sink below the waves. Chase and the others still aboard quickly grabbed some supplies and sea charts. They loaded into the patched whaling boats, and they shoved off. The two other boats in the water soon came to meet them, and while everyone had survived the Devil Whales attack, they now faced a terrifying new reality. They were just 20 men in three small open boats. They only had food or

water for a few weeks, and they were thousands of miles from the nearest shore. The three boats struck out for Chile, but after a month at sea, as food and fresh water started to dwindle, the men were growing desperate. On December 20th, Hope arrived in the form of a tiny island. The men landed and found fresh water, seabirds, crabs, and some edible plants. But after just a few days, they had picked the island clean. Three men, two weak to continue, stayed behind, while the other 17 were forced to move on. And the tragedies soon began to pile up after that. On January 10th of 1821, the first sailor died and was buried at sea. Two days later, a storm appeared on the horizon, sending the boats in different directions and causing Chase's boat to lose the others. By the 15th,

Chase's boat was being harassed by a shark who smelled death upon them. Needless to say, things were bad. The food and water had completely run out, and by February, 8th, one of Chase's crew members had succumbed to starvation. The three remaining men in the boat were faced with an impossible choice, due the unspeakable or perish. With heavy hearts, they chose to live, and they ate the remains of their fallen comrade. Their seaman's sacrifice kept them alive for another ten days. When finally, on February 18th of 1821, a whole three months after the whale attack had sunk their ship, the men spotted sails on the horizon. Their salvation came in the form of a British merchant ship, the Indian. Imagine being on the crew of

that ship. You happen upon a tiny whaleboats in the open ocean, three starving men inside, and scattered around them, clothing, blood, and bones. Clear signs that to survive, these men had done the ultimate taboo. A few days later, another ship happened upon a second of the Essex whaling boats, and months later, the three men who were left on the island were found as well. Ultimate Ultimately, just eight of the 20 crew members survived their encounter with the whale. Owen Chase eventually returned to sea. He sailed for several more years, making trips to the same whaling grounds where the Essex had met its fate before retiring in 1840.

But although he was back on solid ground, he still felt like he was drowning. And even as an old man, safe on land, he squirled food away in his attic. He couldn't control the sea, nor the whale. But he would make sure that he was. would never starve again. For the most part these days, whales have lost their sinister reputation. Perhaps this is a symptom of something bigger. As technology's gotten better and sailing's gotten faster,

the world, it seems, has grown smaller. A voyage that once took ships several months now only takes weeks, sometimes even days. The ocean isn't a new frontier, but a well-mapped thoroughfare. And with satellite phones, GPS tracking, and safety improvements, it's a whole lot harder to get lost at sea. In this shiny new world, the sea beasts of old feel out of place. Strange new creatures of the deep are still being classified and cataloged,

and with every new corner of the ocean we explore, we leave less room for monsters to hide. It feels a bit like the Kraken and the white devil have served their purpose. They were used to make sense of the nonsensical, to explain why storms were whipped up, why rogue waves rolled in, and why even the most skilled captains, down with their ships. The same rings true for real-life whalers, were years removed from

Nantucket's heyday, and most of us are more likely to go whale watching than whale hunting. Still, though, whales hold a certain fascination for us, and for one man in particular, they became more than that. An obsession. In 1841, a young sailor had taken work aboard a whale ship in the South Pacific, and one day the sailor's ship encountered another vessel, and the two crews spent several days together. The sailor quickly found a friend in a guy named William Henry Chase, a crew member from the other ship, and before they parted, William gave the sailor a gift, a copy of his father's book. You see, William's father was Owen Chase, and his book, it was a first-person narrative of his survival after the whale sunk the Essex. As you'd imagine, this young sailor

couldn't get the story out of his head, not while he was harpooning whales, not after jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands, not even after he returned home. There was something in the tale of the Essex that had gotten under his skin, something about man and God and the fury of the sea. So in 1851, he put his thoughts down on paper, and that year he finally published his epic. Today it's a book that most of us had to read in school, all because a young sailor couldn't let go of a haunting tale of tragedy at sea. The man, of course, was Herman Melville. Author of the classic novel, Moby Dick. For centuries, the ocean has been a source of wonder and of terror.

I hope today's deep dive has given you a fascination for the folklore of the sea and a healthy fear of what lurks beneath the waves. But it's not time to jump ship just yet. We've got one more tail left that should give you another chance to plunge back into the abyss. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This episode was made possible by Chime. Let's be honest, everyone hates bank fees, right? That's where Chime comes in.

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Squarespace, build something beautiful. For a very long time, the sea and the monsters in it have been associated with the divine. In the story of St. Brennan the Navigator, it is God who reveals to him the true nature of that living island. In Moby Dick, the book inspired by the tragedy of the Essex, the fearsome Captain Ahab, seeks revenge against the white whale that took his leg. But his love larger battle is actually with God, who Captain Ahab believes is malevolent. It is his cursing of God, not just his quest for vengeance, that ultimately leads to his downfall. In many of these stories, whales and sea monsters are the instruments of the divine. They're often used to punish the disobedience,

like the biblical story of Jonah, who at God's command is swallowed by a whale. But in a very different twist, in one tradition, it was a sea monster who brought God to a nation. The Maldives are a small cluster of islands just south of India and Sri Lanka. Because of their location, they've been a crossroads for trade for hundreds of years. While historically the islanders were Buddhists, by the 12th century the country had completely converted to Islam. This wasn't strange, Arab travelers, many of whom were Muslim, traveled and traded there all the time. But what was strange was how the change happened. There was no war where Muslims conquered Buddhists. There was no influx of Muslim immigrants to the island. Instead, the reason for the whole country

conversion, at least according to legend, was one man and one monster. Sometime in the 12th century, a man named Abul Barakat came to the Maldives. Now, Abul was a merchant and he was a holy man who had committed the Quran to memory. But most of all, Abul was a clever problem solver, and before long he realized the Maldivians needed his help. You see, the Maldives were under attack. Every month, a strange creature would arrive there. It was massive, appearing in the guise of a ship all aglow with candles.

It was said to be a gin, a spiritual entity with supernatural powers. And specifically, they said it was the sea demon Rana Mari, and he was hungry. Every month when Rana Mari would appear, the Maldivians took a young virgin woman, dressed her as a bride, and brought her at nightfall to a temple on the shore. When the locals returned in the morning, the woman would be dead. Abul had been staying with an old woman when he came home one day to find her crying as she dressed her daughter in fine clothes. He learned that the Rana Mari had come once more, and that night his host's only daughter would be sacrificed to appease him. Abou quickly told her to dry her tears,

because he had a plan. That night, Ranamari approached the temple on the coast, just like it had every other month. And just like every other month, he went inside looking for his bride. But this time something was different, because while the figure inside was wearing bridal clothes and had a low, masculine voice, it was chanting something extremely powerful, the words of the Quran. When the old woman arrived the next morning at the temple, expecting to find Abul's corpse, she was surprised to find him alive. She was even more surprised when he told her of the previous night's experience and how the words of the prophet Muhammad sent the Rahnamari fleeing into the sea. She took him to meet the king of the king of the first. She took him to meet the king of

the archipelago, where Abul made a pact. He would stay one more month and send the evil spirits fleeing into the depths again. And if he once more saved a young woman from the Maldives, the king and the whole island would convert to Islam. And here is where the stories diverge. According to some traditions, a month later, Abul had the same interaction with Rana Mari and his recitation of the Quran was enough to save the island. In other versions of the story, he had a great battle with the monster, finally driving it off for good. But some believe that after the first run-in with Abul, Ranamari slunk off to the deep, never to be seen again.

Abul stayed the second month, waited in the temple, but no monster ever came. The power of Abul's faith saved the island from a terrifying sea monster, and in return, the Maldives converted to Islam. And as a result, the islanders were never again forced to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. This episode of lore legends was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing by Molly Quinlan Artwick and research by Sam Alberti.

Just a gentle reminder that my newest creepy history book Exhumed comes out on August 4th. It explores the roots of the New England vampire panic and the story of Mercy Brown specifically through the lens of centuries of folklore, medical advancements, and pseudoscience. It's available for pre-order right now, and if you pre-order it, it would mean the world to me. If you pre-order the hardcover, my publisher has a webpage. setup where you can submit your receipt and get a free gorgeous tote bag. Head over to Aaron Mankey.com slash exhumed to lock in your copy today. And if you don't like carrying ads on lore, don't forget there's a paid version available

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