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Today's podcast features three stories that will make you never want to go swimming again.
The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode.
The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description.
The first story you'll hear is called What Lies Beneath, and it's about a group of kids who ran into something horrifying in a hospital basement.
The second story you'll hear is called What Lurks Below, and it's about one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
And the third and final story you'll hear is called Thalassophobia and it's about a predator in the deep ocean that came up just to say hi.
But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious Delivered in Story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please get on a crowded elevator with the Amazon Music Follow button and at some point turn to face them, cover your nose and say out loud was that you?
Okay, let's get into our first story called What Lies Beneath.
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2013, three 12 year olds named paul, tim and max were living in new orleans and, even though they were too young to remember hurricane katrina from 2005, the devastation it left in its wake was around them every day.
Just down the street from their neighborhood was a row of houses that had all been abandoned after they were destroyed by the storm surge, and paul, who was the ringleader of the group, would routinely drag tim and max into that row of houses to look for treasure, but they rarely left with anything more than some old clothes and some broken kitchenware.
One day Paul told Tim and Max that if they wanted to find some real treasure, they would have to go looking inside of the abandoned hospital.
Despite it being completely boarded up, windows doors and a huge fence around it.
Paul said he had discovered an entrance in the back of the building.
Tim and Max were not nearly as excited as Paul about this idea, because all they had heard about this hospital was criminals lived inside of it.
And they'd also heard that the basement was completely flooded and basically the whole structure was not safe.
But Paul was really convincing because he told them they were being babies.
And so they said okay well, we'll go with you then.
So the boys drove their bikes the couple of miles over to where this hospital was, and they eventually reached the big chain link fence that surrounded the entire property, with no trespassing signs all over it.
Behind the fence they saw this ominous entrance into this underground parking garage that, even from the street level, you could look down and clearly see it was totally flooded with gross, stagnant dark water.
But the boys carried on, and Paul led them to a section of the chain link fence that had been cut open.
So the boys parked their bikes and locked them up, and then crawled through the gap in the fence and began walking up the small parking lot that led up to the loading dock of the hospital.
As they got closer, Paul pointed to a shed that was situated right underneath a broken out window on the second floor.
And it was immediately clear that people were using the shed to climb up and through that window.
Paul was the first one to climb onto the shed, and then from there he jumped up and grabbed the ledge of the broken window and hoisted himself up and then very carefully climbed through.
Once he got through, he turned around and yelled for the boys to come up.
Once all three of them got inside and they began looking around, they were amazed at what they saw.
There was all this medical equipment that had just been left out.
Clearly there had not been an attempt at salvaging anything inside of this hospital.
There were even blood samples still sitting out on tables.
That day the boys explored the entire floor they came in on, which was the second floor, and by the end of the day they left with a couple of random medical souvenirs.
Over the following few months the boys kept coming back to the hospital and had eventually explored every room on every floor except for one, the basement.
They wanted to go down there, but even paul thought it was a bad idea because it was completely flooded with disgusting standing water and there were no windows that went down into the basement, so it was totally pitch black.
But by the end of the summer they were getting bored with all the other floors of the hospital.
They had seen everything.
They had found everything.
There was nothing left to explore.
And so they decided, we're going to go in the basement.
So one afternoon they put on some dirty old clothes that they didn't mind ruining and they made their way over to the hospital.
They parked their bikes, they snuck through the fence, they made their way up to the shed, they climbed up into the second floor.
They walked down the second floor hallway down to the flight of stairs.
They went down to the first floor where the stairs stopped.
From there they walked over to an access door that led to another flight of stairs that just went down into the basement.
And so they open that door up, they step inside and they get their flashlights out, because it's pitch black inside of the stairwell.
And they shine their lights down the steps.
And it was a half flight of stairs that led to a dry landing.
And then there was another flight of stairs from the landing going down to the basement floor.
And the final steps of that second set of stairs were completely submerged.
So with their flashlights up, they walk down the first flight of stairs to the landing.
They turn around and they stop and they shine their light into the basement.
And what they see is just deep, dark, murky standing water.
And from their perspective, the basement was not some huge sprawling open space like you would imagine.
Instead, they were looking down at a wall because there was this hallway that ran perpendicular to the stairs.
And so it went all the way to the right and all the way to the left, but they couldn't see down either of them.
They could only see basically the landing of the stairs.
In order to look down the hall, they would need to go into the water and walk a few feet into the hall.
And so, as the boys are just scanning their flashlights into this murky water, inside of this small segment of the basement that they could see, Paul finally says all right, you know what?
Screw it, I'm going.
And he slowly walks down that final flight of stairs and he takes his first step into the water, and tim and max, they stay up on the landing.
They're gonna let paul go on his own first.
Paul takes another step and another step, and before long he says he's reached the basement floor and he's up to his chest in this disgusting water and so he's keeping his arms high up out of the water.
He's still got his flashlight and he wades out to the point where he can actually look down the hallway in either direction, and so he looks down one way and then he looks down the other way and then he turns around to face tim and max, who are still back up on the landing, And he says you can't see down either hallway.
There's huge filing cabinets and there's a generator down there and I can't see in either direction.
We probably can't go very far.
At this point, Tim and Max feel compelled to go down there with their friend.
And so they walk down that final flight of stairs into the water and they wade their way over next to Paul, at which point they shine their lights down the hall.
And sure enough, they basically can't see anything past maybe five or six meters down each hallway.
As the boys were standing in the middle of the hallway, not making any moves in either direction, they suddenly hear something down the far right side of the hallway.
And they shine their lights and they realize their view's completely obstructed and whatever's made this sound, they can't see it.
It's blocked by the generator and the filing cabinet.
And as they're shining their lights, they still can't see anything.
They hear a massive splash like someone cannonballed at the far end of the hallway.
And the boys do not stick around to try to get a better angle to see it.
They immediately turn around and run as fast as they can, or as fast as the water will allow them, back to the steps, back to the landing, back to the first floor, back to the second floor, down the hall, out the window, and they run all the way back to their bikes.
And by the time they're back there, they're panting, they're soaking wet, they haven't spoken yet.
It was like intuitive fight or flight and they were out of there and they're sitting there heaving and they look at each other and they start laughing.
It was like this adrenaline rush.
It was crazy what they were doing.
And they look back up at the hospital and they're staring at the second floor window, almost half expecting to see whoever it was that made this big splashing sound to suddenly emerge in the window.
But no one ever did.
And after about an hour of just staring at the hospital and seeing no activity whatsoever, they convinced themselves that whatever they heard down in that hallway was probably just something falling off a shelf, or maybe there's a bird down there.
But whatever it was, it was harmless.
Eventually, Paul says to Tim and Max that they should totally go back in there and try to figure out what it was that made that sound.
And initially, Tim and Max are like, I don't really want to do that.
But eventually, after Paul called them babies enough times, they said OK fine, we'll go back in the hospital.
And so they go back to the fence.
They walk up the parking lot.
They climb onto the second floor.
They walk down the hall.
They go down the stairs.
They get to that access door that leads down to the basement.
And before they just fling it open, Paul gets his flashlight up.
He turns the handle and he opens the door just a little bit and looks inside to see if anybody's in there.
And there isn't.
So he opens the door the rest of the way.
And he, Tim and Max go inside.
Once they're inside, they shine their light down to the landing and they can still see their wet footprints all over the steps.
It's silence inside of the basement.
They make their way down to the landing.
They turn around.
They shine the light into the water in the basement itself.
And now the water is completely calm again.
There's no motion.
It's still completely quiet.
And as they're standing there looking, it's clear all of them are hesitating.
They don't want to go back into chest deep, murky, stagnant water.
And they also don't know what it was that made that sound.
While they were outside, they're really confident it wasn't a big deal.
But now that they're in this dark basement, it seemed a little bit more intimidating.
And so Tim suggests they throw something into the water to try to get a reaction from whatever this thing is, if it's alive.
But they didn't have anything to throw.
And then Paul, out of nowhere, takes his flashlight and throws it into the water.
And before Tim or Max could react to what he just did, they all just stopped and listened to see if that would cause a reaction, from whatever it was down there.
And as the flashlight sunk to the bottom and completely out of view because the water was so murky, there was no reaction down there.
It was still completely silent.
Paul turns to Tim and Max and says the reason I threw it is now we have to go in because I have to get my flashlight.
So Paul, along with Tim and Max, make their way down that final flight of stairs.
They start walking into the water.
They get all the way up to their chest in water and they wait out until Paul is directly over the light.
He can barely see it to the murky water, but he can clearly see it below him.
And since he doesn't want to go under the water, he tried to use his feet to get the light up, but he couldn't do it.
And so he looks at Tim and Max and he goes, I'm going under.
He takes a deep breath and he goes under the water.
He immediately hears the muffled screams of Tim and Max up on the surface.
And as he's fumbling for his light, he feels one of them yank on his shirt to try to pull him up and out of the water.
Paul manages to grab his flashlight.
He comes out of the water and he turns and he sees Tim and Max booking it for the stairs.
And before he can even turn around and run after them, he realizes why they're running in the first place.
To his right, he can hear the sound of something huge swimming up the hallway towards him.
For a brief second.
He raises his flashlight and shines it down the hall and right at the filing cabinet, this dark silhouette that's in the water, that's lying horizontal in the water, is violently swimming up the hall towards him so fast.
There is a wake of water coming off of it.
Paul turns and runs towards the stairs, or as fast as he can go.
He's trying to wade through this water that's chest deep on him.
He gets to the stairs.
He runs up to the landing.
He can see his friends are up at the door leading out of the basement stairwell and they're yelling for him to hurry up, hurry up.
They got the door open.
Paul turns the corner and runs up to that door and right as he's leaving He can hear whatever it was that was swimming down the hall, has stopped and is now on the stairs.
He goes to the access door and he and his buddies run upstairs to the second floor.
They run down the hallway.
They get into that room.
They leap out the window onto the shed, onto the ground, and they run all the way out to the break in the fence where they hop in their bikes and they bike away.
And as they're leaving, they turn around to look and there's no one.
There's no one in the window.
There's no one outside on the property.
Whoever or whatever was chasing them is still in the hospital.
The boys believe it was an alligator living in the basement of this hospital, but they never found out for sure.
While they continued to urban explore around New Orleans, they never went back to that hospital.
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Our next story is called What Lurks Below.
Purley Beach is this beautiful little beach town in South Africa that's very popular amongst tourists.
There's lots of snorkeling and whale watching and horseback riding on the beach.
But behind this beautiful vacation town, down this bumpy access road going inland, you come to this unmarked settlement called Olukselwani.
That is like the opposite of a vacation.
Basically, everyone there is completely impoverished.
Beyond some seasonal cleaning jobs and the occasional gardening job, there's virtually no work in that area.
As a result of this crushing poverty, the men in this town have had to take on one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
It's called abalone poaching.
Abalone are a very rare type of shellfish that are illegal to be captured and sold, but there's this booming illicit market for them, their primary customer being the Chinese, who view eating abalone as a status food.
Abalone can only be harvested by hand, and one of the very few places you can find them is on Dyer Island, which is three kilometers off the coast of Pearly Beach.
And so the men of Alekselwani have become the primary labor force to go collect these shellfish for this illegal trade.
On a really good night.
These Alekselwani poachers will come back and make the equivalent of a couple hundred US dollars.
And they'll use that money to support their entire family.
Mom, dad, you know, grandparents, kids, nieces, nephews, everybody.
Because nobody else can work.
This is like the one thing that generates money.
So you're probably wondering, what makes this particular job one of the most dangerous in the world?
Well, I can tell you it has nothing to do with the actual act of removing abalones.
That's pretty straightforward.
It's the creature that lurks below you the whole time you're in the water pulling abalones off the reef that at any moment might come up and strike.
In the early morning hours of September 3rd 2017, a group of Aluxalwani poachers met on Pearly Beach to make their way out to Dyer Island.
Now, because they are so poor, they do not have the money to afford renting a boat to take them out to Dire Island, and so they swim out to Dire Island.
It takes them about three hours to swim out there, and then they stay there for three hours going down on a breath hold, over and over again, pulling abalones off the reef, and then they swim three hours back.
And so, this particular day, the poachers are pulling up their wetsuits, getting ready for the swim, and they're chatting nervously with each other, doing their best not to talk about the one thing they were all terrified of, which is what's swimming out in that water?
One of the men on the beach was a 34-year-old named Zalela, who had taken a break from abalone poaching because of how dangerous it was, but he just found out his wife was pregnant and so he needed the extra cash, so he was going with them.
South Africa is home to the largest population of great white sharks in the world.
Specifically, there is a stretch of water between Dyer Island and the shores of Pearly Beach called Shark Alley.
That is the highest concentration of great white sharks in the world.
So every time the Aluxalwaini poachers swam out to Dire Island, they had to swim over Shark Alley.
And then, once at the reef, removing the abalones.
That's where all the sharks would hang out, because they would eat the seals that were in the area.
So there's sharks all around them there, and then they would swim back over Shark Alley.
So, all in, they would be spending nine hours around some of the most ferocious apex predators in the world.
So that morning Zalela and the other poachers make it out past the breakers and they head out to this stretch of kelp that covered the first third of their trip.
Basically they would stay in this big kelp field because they said the sharks didn't like to come in the kelp.
But at some point they reached the end of the last bit of kelp.
And what was next was this open water swim up to Dyer Island.
This would be the most dangerous part.
And Zalela was the first person that was going to be entering the open water.
And the way they did it is in the open water.
They would intentionally space themselves out by a couple of meters in case one of them got attacked.
The others would have a chance to swim away and avoid being caught up in the feeding frenzy.
So Zalela leaves the kelp field and begins swimming across the open water.
And then after a little bit, the next poacher, he begins swimming.
And they had this practice where they would constantly be looking around and counting all the people they were with.
Because these shark attacks, when they happened, a lot of times they would get pulled under the water and you wouldn't hear it at first.
If there was a head missing, you stopped, and you stopped everybody else and you made sure no one was being attacked by a shark.
And so as this second swimmer is swimming along, he's counting and he's got a full head count.
And then he looks and Zalela is missing and he yells for the others to stop.
And as they're kind of poking their heads up to see what's going on, Zalela reemerges in the mouth of a great white shark.
It is violently shaking him side to side and Zalela is screaming out.
And the other poachers know they can't do anything to help him.
And so they turn and they swim as fast as they can.
And all they hear behind them is the sudden scream as his face would come out of the water and then go back down again.
And the violent thrashing of fins as a feeding frenzy began.
And so the others make it back to the kelp field.
And one of them had a cell phone wrapped in rubber.
So he pulls that out and he calls one of the poacher boats because even in an emergency, they don't call the police because they can't jeopardize their livelihood.
And so they call a poacher boat that comes over, scoops them up out of the water.
And then the remains of Zalela that came to the surface.
They were able to pull those into the boat and bring them back for a funeral.
According to police reports, in the last two decades five Aluxilwani poachers have been killed by sharks.
But to the Aluxilwani locals they say that count is not even close to accurate because a lot of times when people do get attacked and killed by sharks they don't report it to the police because they don't talk to the police.
And so they think it's probably closer to two or three dozen people that have been killed by sharks.
When interviewed, an Alekselwany poacher has said anytime there's a shark attack, whether it's fatal or not, they usually just take a week or two off and then go right back in the water.
Poverty has given them no other choice.
The next and final story of today's episode is called Thalassophobia.
In 1990, 46-year-old Alex Kerstich was a marine biology high school teacher by day and a documentary filmmaker by night.
In July of that year, he and three of his friends were in Mexico working on a documentary about sea life in the Gulf of California.
They had already shot a bunch of footage during the daytime, and now they needed to go out and get some nighttime footage as well.
On the evening of the 25th, Alex and his three friends boarded a 70-foot research vessel with all of their diving and camera equipment.
They waited until just before sunset to leave the harbor, and then it was a 30-minute transit to this area just north of La Paz that they had been told was very active at night.
Once the ship was stopped, they threw their anchor down and then turned on these bright spotlights and aimed them into the water.
And then one of the ship's crew members put a big piece of tuna onto his fishing rod and then cast it out into the water to try to lure some animals to the area.
A few moments later, a black mass suddenly came up to the surface, ripped the tuna from the line and then vanished as quickly as it appeared.
Alex and his three friends didn't get a good look at it.
They saw it happen, but they had no idea what it was.
So they told the ship crew member to put another piece of tuna on the line, throw it out there and see if they can get a better look at this thing.
And so more tuna was put on the rod.
It was cast out and then seconds later a black mass rushed up to the surface, grabbed the tuna and then went back down again, but this time with alex and the others looking really intently at it.
They picked up what looked like a red and white flash, like a strobe light on the skin of this creature as it descended down below.
And they looked at each other and they thought, could it be?
And so another piece of tuna was put on the fishing rod.
They cast it out into the water.
And this time, before anything could come up and take it deep down below they see a flash of red and white all over the place, like a bunch of strobe lights going off.
And then dozens of these creatures rocketed to the surface, fought over this tuna and then descended back down into the deep water.
And so now the men look at each other and they're grinning because they know the red and white flashing they are seeing is a trademark of a very rare creature.
It's their skin changing colors.
It's how they communicate with each other.
And this creature is so rare that at this time, no one had actually filmed it alive.
There was only footage of it dead after it washed up on shore.
And so suddenly, Alex and his team are thinking man, our documentary is about to become legendary, if we can just get in there and get the footage.
And so the men eagerly put on their dive equipment, got their cameras and prepared to enter the water.
Had they consulted with anyone who studied this rare creature, they would have been told that getting in the water with them was a horrible idea and could easily get them killed.
These rare creatures are called Humboldt squids and they are eight foot long apex predators that live in the deepest parts of the ocean.
Because they almost never come up to the shallow waters, we know very little about them.
What we do know is that, like all other squids, they have eight arms, along with two long tentacles that have all these suckers on it.
And inside of the suckers are these teeth, these little daggers that they use to latch onto their prey.
And they pull their prey in towards their center.
And at their center is this opening.
It's their mouth and it's called a beak.
And it literally looks like a bird's beak.
It's this hard thing that sits there and opens and shuts and they use it to bite into their prey.
And then inside of their beak is their tongue.
And on their tongue are hundreds of sharp little daggers, like more teeth, that they also use to shred their prey.
Typically, these jumbo squid will sneak underneath their prey and then suddenly shoot up, grab them with their two tentacles and then drag them down to the deeper water where they feel safe.
And then they begin the horrifyingly slow process of eating their prey alive, because they have a gag reflex that prevents them from eating quickly.
Humboldt squids are very intelligent, they're very social and they're very aggressive towards humans, especially when they are in a large group or when they are eating.
But of course, Alex and his three friends are not thinking about this.
They're just eager to get into those jumbo squid infested waters and get this footage.
And so they give each other the final okays, they're ready, their equipment's good to go, and they slip off the side of the boat into the water.
Once they were in the water, they sank down to 30 feet, at which point they spread out around the squid that were still darting up to the edge of the boat to try to get more tuna.
After a few minutes of alex and his buddies taking this great footage of these squids, a 14-foot shark suddenly comes into the mix and tries to eat the tuna off the side of the boat, but ironically on its way out.
After not getting any tuna, the shark got its tail fins stuck on the actual hook and then became bait for the humboldt squids, and seconds later these squids began ripping the shark apart, and so alex and his three friends decided to move closer to the drama to get some great footage.
As Alex is right up next to this drama unfolding, he feels himself suddenly sinking in the water.
And he's kind of fixated on getting the shot, so he's not really worried about why he's sinking.
He's thinking, maybe my buoyancy compensator's off, maybe my weights are too heavy.
But when he looks down he realizes in horror a Humboldt squid has wrapped one of its tentacles around his right swim fin.
And so he instinctively begins kicking the squid's tentacle with his left leg.
He gets it to release him.
And in a panic, Alex begins swimming back up towards the surface.
But he's still 40 feet away at this point from the boat.
And at this point, the other squid had been alerted to Alex as now being considered prey.
And so, as Alex is going up from behind, another squid comes up and wraps its tentacle around his neck.
And his neck was the only area on his body that was not protected by his neoprene wetsuit.
And so the daggers inside of the suckers on this tentacle dug into his neck, all around his neck.
So his neck's being cut into and he's being strangled and being pulled down by the squid.
And so Alex begins punching and squeezing and pulling on this tentacle, fighting for his life.
And he manages to get this squid, the second one, also to release him.
But by now he's been pulled down to 50 feet.
He's got a ways to go to get back to the boat.
And the other squid are all coming over.
They're converging on him because they're all communicating that here's our prey.
Here's our other meal.
And so Alex tries to swim as fast as he can back to the boat.
But he only made it a few feet before another Humboldt squid darted up and came right up to his face, wrapped both tentacles around his entire head, blinding him, and he immediately felt the beak pressed up against his face and it was opening and closing, trying to bite him.
But it was biting down on his dive mask that was basically saving him from having his skull crushed by this squid.
The squid became frustrated because it's not digging into alex's flesh, and so it readjusted its grip on him by sliding down to his midsection, where immediately it begins pulling him down violently in these pulsing bursts, and so all alex starts doing is punching and hitting and doing everything he can to get this thing off of him.
And then for some reason it does release him.
Maybe it was just so frustrated that it could not puncture into him, and so alex is now down to about 60 feet And he starts swimming as fast as he can with all these squids all around him.
But for some reason, none of them attacked him.
And so Alex swims up to the boat.
And before he actually gets on board, he looks down back into the water.
And there's just dozens of these squids that are flashing red and white at each other, just kind of hovering in the water, not making any move towards him.
It was like they were just watching him.
Alex sprinted up that ladder, got into the boat and shortly after his three friends came out of the water as well.
They were unharmed.
Alex had deep cuts all around his neck from where the tentacles had driven their teeth into his throat.
But besides that, he was physically okay.
Mentally, he was a train wreck and was very traumatized from this event, as you could imagine.
Today, his encounter with the jumbo squids is a thing of legend in the diving community.
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