The Ocean Is F*cking Terrifying, As Proven By These 18 Creepy Stories Shared By People Who Actually Work At Sea
3. “I sailed a 70ft yacht around the world a few years back. Southern Ocean, Cape Horn, Good Hope, Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, two equatorial crossings; the full deal. A creepy moment that is burned into my memory involved a near catastrophe halfway between New Zealand and Cape Horn. We ended up hitting really bad weather and absolutely huge seas — 50ft swells with massive troughs in between. We were running with the swells for days as they grew, skidding down them like a bloated surfboard, always worrying that the next wave would break behind us and roll us over.”
“At night it’s pitch black down there in bad weather — the sky and sea just form a huge black mass. The most terrifying thing is the sound of an invisible wave breaking behind you. At night, we run a red light to preserve night vision, so there’s basically just an eerie red glow emanating from below deck.
At about 2 in the morning, I was at the helm when a monster wave broke directly over the back of us without a second’s warning. Time slowed down like it does in those moments, and the last thing I saw was my own silhouette in the wall of water, lit up like an ominous red snow angel…and then nothing but cold blackness as the boat sunk into the sea.
Fortunately, she popped straight back up like a cork after a few eternal seconds, almost like a submarine surfacing, and we were still in one piece. Still cant forget that glowing red apparition of myself, though. The memory of it has woken me up in a cold sweat more than once.”
7. “Creepiest thing I’ve seen has definitely been seeing myself and other crew mates lose our minds. On one particularly awful voyage, everything that could go wrong went wrong and we found ourselves without food, water, and sleep for a very unhealthy amount of time. It started off with auditory hallucinations. Ships are noisy, and, you begin to think those noises are talking to you. I heard children laughing, a choir singing, and — creepiest of all – a particular splash sounded like it was calling my name from the sea. Combine that with visual hallucinations and then things get really terrifying.”
“I was convinced we were in the desert at one point with sand all around us and mountains in the distance. Another crew member freaked out and told us we were about to run into an apartment building. The creepiest thing I saw was an all-black flying pig with red eyes on the bow. I think the scariest, though, was when someone was convinced we lost part of our crew overboard. It turned into a massive, delirious argument over where everyone was even though we were all accounted for. That trip was brutal, and the captain put us all in a terrible situation due to sheer incompetence.”
10. “A few things come to mind, but I have to say, ‘Deadheads.’ In my younger days, I was captain of a dragger out of Kodiak AK. I will never forget my first week in the wheelhouse with the owner who was retiring and showing me the operation before I took over. After a night busting ice off the rails in freezing rain and 2m seas, he went to bed and left me to watch the wheel myself. It was clearing up with a medium haze and flat, calm waters. Most of the crew was sleeping or hanging out in the galley, so I was alone and the only eyes forward. I was drinking some nasty coffee and sucking down a Marlboro red when I saw what looked like an old pier piling, straight ahead. I kept looking at that spot, and, nope, nothing there. A few seconds later I swear I saw that thing again, but only closer. Nope, gone again.”
“I thought, ‘Shit, I’ve been up waaay too long and I’m fucking hallucinating.’ Then out of nowhere, this tree trunk shoot directly up into the sky from the water. This thing had to be 60ft tall and was about 30ft off the bow, dead center. I damn near shit myself. I pushed to port and rubbed the ‘tree’ with the right side of the ship. We were at a good 14knot clip, which is fast as hell for an almost fully loaded trawler. Then it shot down and disappeared about midship.
I later learned that these are pretty uncommon in the Aleutians, where we were fishing. They’re called ‘deadheads’ and only two of the guys on the boat had seen them before. They float vertically, and bob straight up and down. These things were known to destroy older wood boats and kill crews. I’m just glad I wasn’t dragging the net, as it would have cost us in the ballpark of $100k.
I’ve seen what most people would consider worse, but the fear that a huge bobbing tree in the middle of Alaskan waters come out of fucking nowhere tops my list.”
15. “So I’ve worked in hospitality, including on a private yacht. This is in the Baltic. We were not near shore. It’s very late. I assume everyone else had gone to sleep but I was not very sleepy after a pretty stressful day. I went on the deck and just looked at the ocean. Do you know that very strange feeling when you feel like somebody is looking at you? I could swear that there was something just below the surface. I don’t remember how much time passed. It felt like a long, long time. I was just staring…thinking that I would see something. I mean I guess it could’ve been fish or some sea mammal, but it felt wrong.”
“I wish I had a more interesting conclusion than that. I actually don’t even remember going back to my cabin that I shared with two others in the stew crew. The next morning I didn’t talk about it, but then a few days later, I brought it up. No one thought much of it except one of the deckhands that had been working at sea for a long time. He said he had felt the same thing and seen the same thing several times, but only at night, and only when he was alone. I have no idea what to make of it, but I really feel in my heart it was not an animal.”
