Divers Revealed Their Scariest Underwater Experiences

Loch Fyne in Scotland is known for attracting divers, but one underwater explorer got more than they bargained for during a visit. According to website Bored Panda, this person was swimming along a wall there, descending deeper and deeper – and then they found something. At the bottom of the lake were a number of carefully arranged garden gnomes, just waiting to be discovered. How did they get there?

One day, a guy was in the ocean in search of crayfish. These crustaceans are known to hide beneath rocks, so this fellow was scanning around carefully. The next thing he knew – smack! A huge impact to his side, so bad that his arm and ribs snapped. It was a tiger shark butting into him. As recounted by website Ranker, the guy managed to scramble out of the water before anything more serious happened, but maybe the shark would have ignored him. After all, this guy thinks the creature was simply “testing him out.”

One Redditor has posted a tale about his father, who went underwater exploring a submerged mining pit in Minnesota. As the dad was swimming around, he noticed what the internet user described as “a very, very ominous-looking stairway to nothing.” Sounds creepy, and naturally the Reddit user dubbed it the “Stairway to Hell.”

This one sounds like an old sailor’s tale, but make up your own mind about whether or not you believe it. On Reddit, someone described the time they were investigating an old ship filled with brass. Apparently, as this person approached the shiny alloy, an enormous eel with “ a head the same size as a horse's head, full of jagged teeth” slithered past. This person seems to believe that it was guarding the brass, like a dragon protecting gold.

As a couple were exploring the depths of the Great Blue Hole in Belize, a lemon shark snuck over to investigate. These things are pretty tame around humans, but you’d certainly get a fright if one swam up beside you. That’s what happened here, as told to Bored Panda, with one member of the couple freaking out – and betraying her partner. Instinctively, she pushed her loved one between herself and the shark. Thankfully, it swam away and they could laugh about it later. Still, though, it must have hurt to see where her loyalties really lay.

This poor person got quite the shock during one of their dives, as they’ve explained online via Ranker. They wrote, “My buddy and I crested over this mound of rock and there were about 20 baby dolls with cinder blocks tied to their feet just floating there eerily in the water. A couple of them were those creepy things that have eyes that blink.”

One Redditor took to the website to describe the time they were wading through a lake when they were young. They remember diving under the water, only to spot somebody beneath them. Apparently, someone was decked out in scuba equipment and watching the kid – but when the lifeguard went looking for this mysterious person, they were nowhere to be found.

When this person was diving as a child, they ended up encountering a sea monster. Well, it was a huge stingray. That might not sound too scary, but think of it from the kid’s perspective. As the now-grown swimmer told Bored Panda, “I wasn’t in any danger, but having a massive creature appear so unexpectedly, so close up, was absolutely terrifying.”

When two divers went out to explore a kelp forest in Monterey Bay off California, they were lucky to both get out. According to Ranker, one of them got caught up in the seaweed, and they really couldn’t escape. And worse, their partner had disappeared. So, they struggled and struggled, until eventually the other person reappeared as if by magic. They freed the trapped diver and they both resurfaced – but just in time.

A couple were once scuba diving in Egypt when they noticed a bizarre red creature, something one of them described on Reddit as the “strangest looking octopus I’ve ever seen.” The sighting made the couple giddy, and they took some photos before eventually deciding to resurface. Later, as they looked at the images they took, they saw no octopus. It turns out that they’d been photographing a rock. So, why had they imagined an octopus? Well, they’d both been suffering from nitrogen poisoning.

This person clearly thinks of themselves as something of an adventurer, but this particular experience still freaked them out. They had been out in Florida, swimming around and looking for manatees. They suddenly felt a little bump from below them – and it didn’t come from a manatee. All this person saw was the tail of an alligator. As they admitted on Reddit, “I’ve done shark dives in the Bahamas, run into bulls, tigers, the whole gambit, but that right there terrified me.”

This is as unusual a shark attack as you’re ever likely to hear, but no less scary for the victim. As per Ranker, this person was a part of a group dive to watch some sharks swim around, but there was no cage protecting them. At one stage, one of the fearsome beasts apparently got wrapped up in this person’s breathing apparatus. It almost ripped the gear away from the person, which could have been deadly. Rather than being eaten by a shark, this poor diver was nearly drowned by one. Luckily, the shark escaped from the equipment and the person was able to keep breathing.

The ocean can be a weird place, and this proves it. A Reddit user recounted how one day a diver was exploring the waters around Vancouver Island in Canada when they noticed something that seemed out of place. It was a freezer, locked tightly with a chain. Fearing the worst, the diver and their companions resurfaced and called the police. Eventually, the object was retrieved. And what was inside when they opened it up? Ten creepy dolls.

This is a warning never to go diving with jewelry. One person recalled on Reddit the time their parents were swimming through the waters of Mexico. Their mom was wearing a golden necklace, which garnered some unwanted attention. A barracuda had rushed over to stare at the shiny jewelry, which surely gave her mother quite the fright.

A person took to Reddit to tell a story about their dad, who once was out in the water to look at some mussels. He then felt a little nudge, which he presumed was a seal. It wasn’t. Instead, he was being butted by a great white shark. As this person tells it, their dad said to himself, “If it gets me, it gets me; I can’t out-swim it.” That was a calm way of dealing with the situation, and evidently it worked: after all, he lived to tell the tale.

If you’re trying out diving for the first time, you want the experience to go well. Sadly, this person had a nightmare. Out of nowhere, they found themselves shooting towards the surface, without any control. As they described it on Ranker, it was as if they’d been “plucked from the water.” What had actually happened was that their weight belt had slipped off them. No real harm done, but it wouldn’t have been a surprise if they had never gone diving again.

This person had a pretty harrowing diving experience, but it only became clear after they’d left the water. Bored Panda recounted how once back on dry land, they were walking around with a bag on their back. The thing was, though, that it seemed to be moving. They threw off their bag and checked it out. Inside was a squirming – and potentially deadly – sea snake. This person has absolutely no idea how it got there. Did it follow them out the water?

Even experienced divers can get freaked out, as we see from this story on Bored Panda. This person was once employed to clean out a water reservoir, but as they were doing so their light died. In darkness now, things continued to get creepier. Suddenly, this person heard a banging noise, even though no other divers should have been there. Terrified, they resurfaced and couldn’t find anyone around. Spooky.

It’s definitely a bad idea to get in between a humpback whale and her calf, as this trio learned the hard way. As per Bored Panda, the group were swimming around when they noticed the baby, but realized too late that they’d ended up in the middle of the creature and its mother. The elder whale wasn’t happy and it charged. Luckily, the three divers managed to get away from the situation with their lives.

This guy had just gone for a wonderful dive, and he was feeling good. And then, it happened. As he put it plainly via Ranker, “A moon jelly got stuck in my swim trunks.” A nightmarish situation already, but he went on in more detail: “Its stingers were in contact with my upper thigh for nearly a minute. Probably less than that, it just felt like a long time. It was terrifying.”

One person has posted a story on Ranker about the time they went spearfishing with their dad. The kid took a shot and managed to snag a gigantic amberjack, but then they got caught up in the line. You can guess what happened next: the fish freaked out and the kid got dragged along, taking a good old beating along the way. They were hurt pretty badly, but it could have been so much worse.

When this person was swimming in the waters of Port Elizabeth in South Africa, they sensed something was off. As they put it on Reddit, “I just [started] getting this cold, cold, cold, cold feeling running through my body.” The source of this chilling sensation? A shark had come over for a look.

This Reddit user tells a story about a guy called Carl, who was diving to collect clams. Everything was going well, until a speedboat powered over to the area where Carl was exploring. His breathing apparatus got sucked up by this new boat, which sharply pulled him up to the surface. He was lucky not to be really hurt, but he was apparently unperturbed. As the online storyteller tells us, “[Carl] survived, didn’t get the bends. Going out to do it again come September.”

This diver one day had the grim task of recovering a body from the waters of the Bahamas. But if that wasn’t grim enough, things were about to get worse. As told to website Inside Hook, as they descended into the depths, this person realized that a whole shiver of sharks were swimming around near the bottom. There were apparently loads of the things going around in circles, but the diver somehow made it out again safely.

These two siblings were left traumatized when they went for a dive towards a sunken school bus in Washington County’s Sand Hollow Reservoir. According to Bored Panda, when they made their way towards the old vehicle, they discovered something awful: it contained what looked like a body. Horrified, the pair resurfaced and contacted the authorities, who eventually retrieved the suspiciously weighted and wrapped package from the depths. As it turned out, though, it was just bags of sugar wrapped in bin bags and shaped to look like a human – someone had played a sick prank.

This person had a scary encounter with a barracuda, which had apparently snuck up on them. As per Ranker, the fish attacked and bit the diver, who struggled and thrashed and eventually made it to the surface. When they hopped on the boat, though, they realized that they were injured. A horrible, deep cut was on their chest. Turns out that barracudas can do some damage.

This Reddit user tells the tale of when he and some others went diving around an old oil rig. They had their fun, and then got out and back onto the boat, where someone else was fishing. This other guy had caught a fish, but as he was reeling it in, a massive shark appeared out of nowhere and snapped at the catch. This was obviously a wake-up for the people that had been diving, as this shark had been so close while they were in the water.

Three divers were once underwater at nighttime to catch some prawns. Everything was great, with their environment beautifully lit by the bioluminescence. As recounted on Ranker, though, all of a sudden the trio noticed a fourth member had joined them. Some guy, totally alone and not remotely dressed appropriately for a nighttime dive, was floating among them. He smiled, gave them a wave, and left. None of the other three knew who this guy was, and it absolutely terrified them.

This Redditor recalled one of their earliest diving experiences, which wasn’t a good one. Conditions had been awful, and the internet user and their brother got separated from the rest of their group. They surfaced and found that their boat had also disappeared. They were alone. As it happens, the boat had been forced to move because of the harsh weather. It came back for them, but only after an hour. That must have the scariest hour of this pair’s lives.

This person revealed a story told to them by their father, who was once a diver. Posting on Reddit, they explained just why their dad gave it up. They wrote, “Basically a small boat sank about an hour from our hometown and he was sent down to the wreck to find the bodies if there were any. He quickly located the wreck and opened up the door and a corpse littered with tiny prawns came rushing towards him and essentially ‘hugged’ him. That was the day my dad decided to quit diving.”

Anyone who’s seen Finding Nemo might have the wrong idea about sea turtles. The film depicts them as pretty cool and chill, but in this Redditor’s experience they have an aggressive streak. This person was diving once, when they caught the attention of one of the creatures. Rather than acting sedately around them, the turtle freaked out and attacked. It took a wrestle for the person to escape.

This poor person must be scarred for life. As they explained on Reddit, their dad once took them for a dive down to a sunken school bus when they were 14. Things were going fine, right until the kid noticed a lady floating in the vehicle. Terrified, they shot back up to the surface. Along the way, they noticed their father giggling. It turns out that the body had just been a mannequin. It’s a pretty twisted joke for a father to play on his child, though.

When this Redditor and some pals went for a dive, they found some stuff at the bottom of the lake. Success, you might think. Except their haul was pretty creepy. One of the group pulled a bag to the surface. And when they opened it, they discovered it contained several urns, each one bearing the same name. They’d obviously found someone’s resting place.

This person remembers diving deep, when they noticed a bad taste in the air they were breathing. As they put it on website BuzzFeed, “It had a weird metallic sugary taste to it.” They started to feel woozy, then, but they somehow managed to make it close to the surface before passing out. When they woke up, they were on a boat with ruptured eardrums. They’d never be able to dive ever again, but they were lucky to make it out of the water alive that day.

Yet again, the poster of this story on Bored Panda is speaking on behalf of their father. The tale this time goes that when this guy was a kid, he went diving around the Santa Cruz Pier in California. Here, he came across a shopping cart underwater. He swam to it, and there he found a human foot attached to the trolley by a chain. If true, that’s horrendous.

One Redditor has posted a story about a dam in New Zealand, which was once subject to damage. Apparently, some people went to investigate the site, but what they found there beggared belief. Some debris had built up in the water, things as big as logs. Except they weren’t logs at all, but enormous, monstrous eels. These creatures, the storyteller claimed, had been prevented from making it to the ocean to mate, so they’d grown unnaturally large.

This Redditor told a harrowing story about a lake close to his house. This place is so dangerous, the person claimed, that countless people had lost their lives there. It gets worse, though, because the waters there are apparently so treacherous that divers refuse to enter nowadays. So, that means that the place is full of bodies, because nobody dares to retrieve them.

This Redditor told a story that apparently happened to somebody else, so maybe we should take it with a pinch of salt? In any case, the tale goes that one day a guy was diving, when he stumbled across a skeleton in scuba equipment. The air tank on this person had been switched off. An investigation followed, which supposedly revealed that this person’s wife had killed him purposely by messing with the oxygen. How devilish.

When this person dropped something in the water, they got a nasty shock. In their words on Bored Panda, “I dropped my goggles and was trying to reach down in the river and grab it but I pulled out a sheep skull by its sockets. Wasn’t as creepy in hindsight but ten-year-old me was scared.”

As a ship captain and diver, this individual speaks of the fear of watching people go under – and then return late. The wait, as you might expect, is horrendous. Speaking to Inside Hook, this person said, “There are days when I can’t believe that I’m getting paid to do this, and days where I can’t believe they don’t pay me more to do this. I still wouldn’t trade what I do for anything. Love the dive industry – even when it’s bad – this is still the most beautiful, heart-wrenching, and gut-punching place to live and work.”