35 ‘Horror Stories’ From People Who Have Seen Things In The Ocean They Wish They Could Forget

I was in the US Navy for about 10 years, and have 10s of thousands of miles at sea in an aircraft carrier. Countless nights on the flight deck in the middle of the night and middle of the ocean...

Creepiest: A HUGE patch of the ocean glowing. Like nuclear waste in the Simpsons glowing. I've seen bioluminescent algae of a few kinds and this was nothing like it. I've never seen anything like it before or since.

Weirdest thing: hundreds of mile out to sea from land and there was a MASSIVE fire on the water. It was like the top of a gas refinery, but on the water with nothing under it but water. Flame going a few stories into the air.

Saddest: a fellow sailor trying to jump overboard. He apparently got a 'Dear John' email and pictures from his cheating wife and decided to end it. We were on the smoke deck, he bummed a cigarette, then asked the time, we said 2300... he replied "sounds like a good time to die" and in one motion tried to launch over the chest high wall (with an opening to the water below). Luckily we were faster than him. We grabbed his legs and wrestled him down and laid on him and basically hog tied him till the MAs (Navy cops) got there. Broke my heart because he was a good dude. I never saw him again. He got transferred off the ship shortly after. Not sure what happened to him but I hope he's doing better.

Funniest: 2 flying fish collide mid-air. I was smoking when we were in the Persian Gulf and saw the fish fly from a pretty far distance towards each other. I remember thinking 'there's no f****n way they're going to hit' them SPLAT SPLASH! I was in tears laughing but no one saw it. Everyone just thought I was a weirdo, but I got to see a miracle of nature lol

Contract Mariner. I disappear into the blue area for 6-8 months a year. Creepy? Not much honestly. The sound of moaning steel due to slack tanks when you’re rolling really hard can be a bit unnerving. St. Elmo’s Fire is pretty neat. Fata Morgana aka “The flying Dutchman” is pretty cool to see in real life. After awhile the only thing out there that really spooks you is a problem you have that directly influences your survival.

All the spooky s**t I’ve ever been a part of have been no b******t emergencies. Fire in the engine control room? Im the first responder down there to see if it’s an actual emergency or a f****d up Consilium sensor? Wall of toxic smoke from burning electronics and the high voltage room? Oh f**k.

Have an emergency weather sortie because we are dragging anchor and rolling 30 degrees with 50ft UKC and we’re getting pushed toward the island? f**k me 10 shots ain’t enough we are about to run aground in a 55,000 ton 800ft ship. Pucker factor. Oops now we get the hook up to get the f**k out of there we immediately lose steering and propulsion? Good s**t.

I’ve seen brand new million dollar sport fishers capsized and bobbing around like a cork 1000 miles from land.

I’ve seen tiny little song birds skipping along the surface just barely clinging to life but they’re flying as hard as they can to find land. Some of the saddest s**t I’ve ever seen are those little birds skipping off the water as they fly further out to sea hoping to all f**k they come across some land.

I dunno. I’m on the Yuengling at a port bar and I’m rambling. To answer your question TLDR style;

The creepiest thing about being out there are the bottomless depths of sadness, loneliness and heartache. You will go places in your mind that words will never be able to do any justice in trying to describe.

I'm not a sailor at all. But I did a few boat trips with a friend who moved boats around for a living. He was usually carrying boats from the French Riviera (Monaco, Nice, Antibes, Cannes) to Corsica.

My very first trip with him, we left from Monaco on our way to (I think?) Calvi. We left in the evening, and the trip started very well, with dolphins following us around...nice moment.

Around 2am, in the middle of a pitch black night, very far from any coast, we saw a tiny light in the distance, pretty much on our way. And as we got closer, we saw it was a tiny fishing boat. The kind that usually doesn't go very far from the coast...except we were more than 100km from the coast.

We slowed down as we got close to it, and yelled to check if someone was on it. No answer. So we decided to get close to it. And soon it became obvious it was empty. There were just a few bottles of water, some snacks, some fishing gear, even some dead fish in a bucket, and an old Nokia phone (still on!). But nobody on.

My friend called on the radio, explaining the situation. Italian coastguards told us to wait around till they arrived. We did, and when they arrived they told us they would investigate the situation. They took our ID, wrote down our explanation of the situation, and let us leave to finish our trip.

The whole thing was creepy to me, as it seemed obvious the owner had fallen from his boat, couldn't get back in, and drowned. I had this in mind for weeks, thinking we could maybe have rescued the guy if we had passed there slightly earlier.

After a while, this story faded in my mind, and I went on with my life. Till someday my friend called me to explain that he got a call from an Italian guy, who thanked him because he could get his boat back thanks to us. He was the owner of the tiny boat, who explained he was out fishing not too far from the shore, when he had a big chest pain. He made an emergency call and was soon rescued, but his boat was left to drift. Till we found it.

Learning that the guy was still alive, erased the creepy side of this story from my head, and I was happy about it.

Probably a giant squid...well in excess of 10m as a conservative estimate.

Clinging to the bow and hull of our emergency escape vessle which was hanging a few metres out of the water, and a few metres below where I was stood. In the depths of night while i nipped out for a sneaky smoke, and I happened to look down at the rescue boat and could see the shadow didn't look right in the moonlight.

Stupidly i used my phone torch (big no no when its darken ship) and scared the c**p out of myself. The vessle it was wrapped around is about 15m long, and its tentacles were wrapped up over the gunnels 2/3 of the way down the sides.

Within seconds it had detached and fell back into the ocean.
I can still picture its eyeball, the size of a football, staring right at me before it dropped into the ocean. It still gives me chills now.

I used to be an oilfield diver in the Gulf of Mexico. I'd say about 80% of the dives I logged were at night. Mostly 500 ft and under DSV's.

It's very eerie feeling sitting on the downline doing in water decompression in the middle of night. I'd always ask topside to turn off my headlight.

Like a worm on a hook. Just bobbing in the darkness.

The bioluminescent animals (or whatever they are) in the water is pretty amazing. Our toilet would fill up with seawater and if you took a p**s in it in the middle of the night it would agitate the water and it would glow sometimes

In 20 years the weirdest s**t I’ve seen is other people that work out here….

There’s about 40% of the sailors like what they do and are good at it. Another 40% that are good at it, but would do something better if the money was right. But there’s another 20%…. If they lived ashore for more than 6 months a year they’d end up dead or incarcerated. There’s no more “west” for them to go to so they went offshore and became our problem.

i have a friend who works on ships. he said the single scariest thing he had ever seen was looking out a window and seeing a wave that he said looked like it was 100 meters high pass right by their boat and suddenly disappear. he knew about rogue waves but he said seeing one that big, and that close, and watching it suddenly just vanish was so creepy and shocking that he was literally stunned for a minute.

Creepiest thing I’ve seen has definitely been seeing myself and other crewmates 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 when you’re going crazy, 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.

Other than that, there was this one time I saw three gigantic ships in the distance with no lights and they did not show up on AIS. Suddenly they were gone. It was extremely creepy.

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. She was a 130' Gidddings marine trawler. 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 2 meter seas, he went to bunk and left me to wheel watch. 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'm drinking some nasty folgers and sucking down a Marlboro red when I see 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, s**t I've been up waaay too long and I'm f*****g hallucinating. Then out of nowhere this tree trunk shoots directly up into the sky, this thing had to be 60' tall and was about 30'off the bow, dead center. I damn near s**t myself. I pushed to port and rubbed the "tree" with the right side of the bow. We were at a good 14knot clip which is fast as hell for an almost fully loaded trawler. Then it shot town 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 2 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, and 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 f*****g nowhere tops my list.

Right. Long time lurker, first time poster here.. I’m no longer at sea but used to as a younger chap with romantic ideas spend months on end on cargo ships. Mostly tankers, crude oil VLCC and refined product tankers but with a little time in oil and gas and towing, I came ashore in 2017 with a Master unlimited ticket, sailing as chief officer. My last ship was a self discharging bulk carrier. Anyway I digress.. it wasn’t so much about what I saw which was creepy I saw plenty of interesting things I wouldn’t have seen anywhere else. However, I was second mate on a tanker distributing refined oil products around the coast of New Zealand. A yacht had sailed from a port on the east coast, bound for another port just down the coast abit but it had disappeared. Solo sailor on board - aside from his dog. None the less, the search proved fruitless and it was suspended. However, for weeks afterwards at about 0130 in the morning the rescue coordination center would broadcast a plea at the end of the weather and navigation warning broadcast asking for the yacht to make contact if it could hear the message and was able to do so. I’d sit in the dark, chain smoking and working on my 7th cup of coffee looking out into the black imagining the guy who’s had a stroke or heart attack on board with the same broad cast playing out on his radio while his dog ate his face to keep from starving.. or imagining him having fallen over the side imagining what it’d be like watching your yacht sailing indifferently off into the distance with your dog in the cockpit pacing and agitated unable to do anything about it. Knowing you were f****d and had a matter of hours - if that left to live before the cold got you or exhaustion. Or, imagining the dog starving and dying on a yacht by itself weeks later listening to the same broadcast in the dark. The places your mind goes in the dark by yourself… They found the yacht in the end. The dog was still alive.

Empty boat far out at sea.

A man swimming alone in the Java sea. He had been floating for a couple of days and although several boats had passed him he didn't dare hail a ship not from Indonesia because he feared being taken as a slave or something it's possible he was a little mad but he did seem happy to have us turn up.

A dead human body. It was the tropics and it wasn't in good shape. We turned it over to the authorities at nearest land. There were enough teeth left to identify it by dental records. Here's hoping the man's family got closure. The body was double bagged and stored in the walk-in freezer until our next port visit. There was quite a bit of cleaning and decontamination involved, but that's the gist of it.

I worked on the sailboat one summer in the Bahamas and something that you see a lot when you’re in the ocean is kayaks and life jackets floating around and you always radio them in but they always just fell off a yacht or something and it’s never a big deal.
Once we found a kayak floating and it had a fishing rod in the rod holder which basically meant someone was using it

EDIT: didn't see how viral this went overnight - some people were asking questions, the coast guard doesn't really even look into this stuff unless there is a confounding report so we never received an update (not that I would have expected one unless there was a full scale search), we went up close to it and it had the removable seat cushion still in which further convinced us that someone had been using it, there was nothing else to see, the line was in the water, but we never really revisited it, we tried not talk about it because the kids on the boat got creeped out after the adults kinda freaked out and didn't control their emotions.

Not exactly in the water but body parts in a sea chest. (The sea chest is a hole in the hull which is used for water intake)

A cleanly bit in half great white shark.

I didn’t witness what happened. I witnessed the guy it happened to. Early 2000s and a man I know who looks like a biker who should be a pro wrestler is working as a union underwater welder. He’s working a contract on the St. Louis bridge across the Mississippi River. He would usually stop by after work and eat some food or have a beer, as I was on his way home. We’ve known each other a long time. I’ve never even remotely seen him scared or afraid. One day he shows up in the middle of the day, hours before he would normally be off work. And he looks terrified. I thought maybe he got robbed or held at gun point or something along those lines. He tells me he’s under the water welding like every other day and he starts to get bad feeling. He says you can’t hardly see anything down there on a good at day and that day was worse than normal. He stops working and he’s trying to see what ever it is he can see that’s giving him the feeling. He said he got a feeling in his stomach like it’s already too late and he turn his head and looks behind him and he can see something sparkly and shiny a foot or so away. He reaches out to try to touch it and realizes it his own reflection because he can see his hand reaching towards him. Said it took second to realize it but he looking into an eyeball as big as he is. Dark black and reflecting him in it. He bolts for the surface and gets out the water, quits on the spot, and comes and stops at my house and tells me this story. I’ve know him for years. He’s not the type that makes things up or even really has a sense of humor. He’s easily 6’4”. I believe he went through exactly what he said he did that day and that story and the way he looked have sat with me since. I assume he came across some granddaddy of a catfish down there but I don’t know. A six foot eyeball??

It's not my whole career, but I've been out at sea. Ironically, it's not the bodies of refugees in the water so much as boots, backpacks, etc. that have washed up on shore that stick with me.

Former Navy. The Indian Ocean is absolutely infested with sharks. You see nothing but dorsal fins extending all the way into the horizon.