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Hey Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Today's podcast will feature three underwater diving horror stories. 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 The Nest, and it's about a father and son who try out their new Christmas present.
The second story you'll hear is called "Collapse" and it's about two divers who get turned around underwater. And the third and final story you'll hear is called "Panic" and it's about five men who attempt one of the most dangerous dives in the world.
But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious Deliberden's 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 tell the Amazon Music Follow button that you're really sorry about all the hostility this year and offer to take them on vacation with you. When they agree, take them to Skinwalker Ranch and then punt them through the alien portal. Okay, let's get into our first story called The Nest.
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In 2014, 35-year-old Darren Spivey was a passionate scuba diver and he wanted to share that passion with his 15-year-old son, Dylan. So on Christmas Eve that year, he gave his son an early gift: scuba tanks. The pair was apparently so excited to use them that they planned on doing an early morning dive the very next day on Christmas.
Later, Dylan's grandmother would tell the media that her grandson actually didn't really want to go on this dive trip, but he knew his dad did and he adored his father and didn't want to let him down, so he decided to go anyways. The following morning, the father and son got up and they made their way to a local dive site, only to discover that the gate to the dive site was locked.
The father still really wanted to do this dive and so he decided he would take them to another dive site in central Florida which was inside of a wildlife management area that he knew was open 24/7 to hunters and hikers and divers. So the pair drove over to the entrance of this park and sure enough it was open and so they went through and began driving down these windy back roads until they finally reached this dirt lot that was right next to a pond.
They got out of the car, they put on their wetsuits and their scuba gear, and began waddling their way over to this wooden walkway that starts in the parking lot and goes all the way up and out onto the pond like a dock. And as they walked down this wooden walkway, they would have passed a number of signs telling them, do not dive in this pond unless you're an expert diver, because this is not just some pond, this
This pond was the entrance to the infamous and deadly Eagle's Nest, which in the cave diving community is known as the Mount Everest of cave diving. At the bottom of this little placid-seeming pond is a narrow hole that is a tunnel that goes straight down, and that is the single way in or out of this massive underwater cave system.
Expert divers will swim over to this hole and grab the guideline that goes down into this cave, and they'll follow it and they'll swim straight down until the light above them fades and all they can see below them is just black nothingness. And once they get through the end of this tunnel, it opens up into this massive chasm that's called the ballroom. And as soon as you get into the ballroom, if you stop and shine your light in any direction, you will not see a wall. No matter how powerful your flashlight is, you can't see a wall that's so big.
Divers that have been down there have said it feels like you're in outer space. This guideline goes straight down to the bottom of the ballroom at about 130 feet, at which point you see a sign that has a grim reaper on it that says "Stop! Prevent your own death! Do not go any farther! There's nothing in this cave that is worth dying for!"
Basically, this is your last chance to turn around and get to the surface relatively easily. Because from this sign, the cave splits off in two different directions, where the tunnel gets narrower and it kind of spiders around, and in certain points it goes all the way down to 300 feet. So beyond this sign, it is extremely dangerous unless you know what you're doing. And even then, it's still extremely dangerous.
There's also a current that runs through Eagle's Nest, so if you were to lose the guideline, especially in the ballroom, you could be blown away and then have a really hard time finding it again because it's pitch black down there and it's like finding a needle in a haystack. And if you're not holding on to the guideline, it's nearly impossible to find the one way out.
But as Darren and Dylan sat at the end of the walkway getting ready to jump into this pond, they were unfazed by the countless warnings, even though neither of them were expert divers. In fact, Dylan wasn't even a certified diver at all. This was one of his first dives. Before the pair jumped into the water, Darren texted his fiance and said they were at Eagle's Nest and they were about to do this dive and that he would call when they got back to the surface.
After that, he put his phone away on the surface and the two of them jumped into the water and started swimming their way over to the entrance to Eagle's Nest. Hours went by and Darren's fiance did not get a call from Darren. And so by the time the sun was going down, she decided she had to go check on them. So she hopped in the car and she drove to the parking lot at Eagle's Nest and she saw Darren's car and no sign of the boys anywhere.
Police were called and very quickly professional divers were brought to Eagle's Nest to go down and see if they were still down there. The divers got in the water, they made their way over to the narrow entrance, they went down the tunnel, they entered into the ballroom, and they stopped holding onto the guideline. They pulled out their flashlights and began scanning around the ceiling immediately inside of the ballroom because they had done this before and it was not uncommon to have fatalities inside of caves be near the entrance.
And as they're scanning around, they stop when they see Dylan's lifeless body trapped up against the ceiling about six feet away from the entrance. He had inflated his water wings, which are emergency flotation devices. His mouthpiece was out of his mouth and it would turn out he had no more air left in his tanks. After the divers retrieved Dylan's body, they went back into Eagle's Nest and they went all the way down following the guideline to the bottom of the ballroom where they found Darren.
He was laying on a little sandy hill, his mouthpiece was out, he also had no air left in his tanks, and he was laying right next to the famous sign that has the Grim Reaper on it that says "Stop, prevent your own death, don't go any farther."
Both Darren and Dylan's gauges showed they'd gone down to 230 feet. For reference, between 0 and 130 feet is considered recreational diving. And so in those depths, you can breathe regular air, so the same air you breathe on the surface as the air that goes in your tanks. You don't need really special training, you can kind of do whatever you want in those depths.
Below 130 feet you need to breathe a special gas mix, you need special equipment, and you definitely need specialized training. All three of those things Dylan and Darren did not have.
After an investigation was done into their deaths, it was determined it was an accident, and the going theory was they went through the entrance into the ballroom, they went all the way down, and then they went into one of the two tunnels that spiders off to the side, and they managed to go all the way down to 230 feet, and at that depth, they must have developed a nasty case of nitrogen narcosis, which is like being drunk.
And so in that state, they must have lost track of time and how much air they were using. And so by the time they got back to the ballroom to begin their ascent, they ran out of air.
The son must have run out first and grabbed his father, shown him his air gauge to point out that he has no air left. His dad, in seeing that, must have taken his regulator out and put it in his son's mouth, and they began buddy breathing as they ascended to the exit. Except the father's tanks also ran out of air very shortly after that, and the father passed out and sank to the bottom. The son managed to get a full breath of air and began trying to swim as fast as he could to the surface. He even inflated his water wings to make himself go faster.
Except in his panic, he must have let go of the guideline and swam all the way up and then hit the ceiling and then been not able to find the way out and ultimately drowned. Today, despite all the warnings outside and inside of the cave itself telling inexperienced divers to not go any farther, inexperienced divers continue to go into Eagle's Nest and inexperienced divers continue to die inside of Eagle's Nest. Mr. Ballin' Collection is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Maybe you'll find inspiration in the incredible true story of black female mathematicians at NASA in Hidden Figures, or the fantasy world of Throne of Glass. There's more to imagine when you listen. As an Audible member, you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog,
New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com slash imagine or text imagine to 500-500. Our next story is called Collapse.
Indian Springs is a very popular underwater diving location in Florida. Deep below the surface there are hundreds and hundreds of miles of tunnels that are both explored and unexplored. The majority of the unexplored tunnels are down at the 300-foot mark, which is significantly deeper than the average recreational diver goes. In fact, below 120 feet you need specialized equipment and training and very few people have that.
In November of 1991, a specially trained, specially qualified group of elite divers went to Indian Springs to conduct a research dive down at the 300-foot mark. They were basically looking for unexplored passageways that they could explore and map out. There was a number of divers that were going to be a part of this dive, but the only two that were going to be passing through something called Squaw's Restriction were Parker Turner and Bill Gavin.
Squaw's Restriction is this very narrow section of Indian Springs that's located down at the 120 foot mark. If you think of Indian Springs like an hourglass, you have a big open space up top, you get a big open space down below, and Squaw's Restriction is that tiny little space in the center of the hourglass.
Before they began this dive, they threw a line down through Squaw's Restriction all the way down to the 300-foot mark that had an anchor at the end of it. And this would serve as their guideline so that when they were going down deep, if silt kicked up or visibility was obstructed for any reason, they always had a way to reference where they needed to go up or down. On the morning of November 17th, Bill and Parker put on their dive gear, they fired up their underwater scooters they were using, and they began their descent.
They made it down to Squaw's Restriction and one by one they would lead with their scooter and their body would follow along past and each of them were able to get through without any issue. Once on the other side, they took note that on the wall next to them, and this will matter later on, they noticed a sign that had been placed there. It was a very distinctive up and down arrow to show upstream and downstream flows. And so they took mental note that there was this distinctive arrow sign right at the bottom of Squaw's Restriction and they continued down.
They stopped at 140 feet and they kind of looked around for a couple of minutes before continuing all the way down to 300 feet, which is where they were intending to go. And they explored for about 25 minutes before looking at their watches and saying, yep, we got to go back up.
So, with one hand on their scooters and one hand on the guideline, they begin making their ascent. And as they're getting closer and closer to Squaw's restriction, they start noticing these huge clouds of silt just in the middle of the water all around them. And they didn't cause this. They were not in an area where it was so tight they were kicking up silt. And it had been quite a while before they'd come down through Squaw's restriction, so this really couldn't be the silt that they had kicked up when they had first come into the cave.
And so they looked at each other and thought, hmm, that's a little bit weird. I wonder what's going on above us. But they both kind of shrugged and thought, eh, it can't be that big of a deal. And again, holding on to that guideline, they keep on going up, up, up until their hands stop because the guideline is now leading them into sand and rock and mud as if the guideline is going into the wall.
and they're looking at what they're holding on to and it doesn't make any sense. And without communicating at all, they both are thinking, "Okay, let's go back down and make sure we're in the right place, because it seems like we hit a dead end here." And so they turn around, and as they're going down the guideline now, again, there's no other lines down here. There isn't another way to get mixed up, but it's human instinct to think, "Let me just retrace my footsteps here."
As they're going down, they see on their left the distinctive up and down arrow that they saw when they came in. And that's when they stopped and looked at each other and they realized Squaw's restriction has caved in. We're trapped.
Each of the men had a slate where they could use a grease pen to write a message and hold it up and show their dive partner. And that was how they communicated. And at this point, Parker wrote, what are we going to do now? And Bill wrote back, let's look around. And so they turn around and they follow the guideline back up to the cave in and they start trying to clear the debris away. But they're finding it almost impossible because as soon as they move something out of the way, whatever is on top just pushes down into it and fills it back in.
In their attempts to free themselves, they had kicked up a tremendous amount of mud and silt in the air, and so they were not able to see each other, so they couldn't hold up their little plaques to talk to each other. So they both went lower in the water column to where there was no silt around them, and they both looked at each other, and that's when Parker held up his air gauge and showed Bill, "I only have about 10 minutes of air left." And that's when Bill looked at his air gauge, and he realized he too only had about 10 minutes of air left.
Parker scribbles something on his slate and he holds it up to Bill and it just says, "What are we gonna do now?" And Bill, not knowing what else to say, just wrote, "Hold on, I'll take a look." And so Bill leaves the guideline and swims over to another section away from Squaw's restriction in hopes he might find some other exit out of the space they're in, even though he knew full well there wasn't anything besides Squaw's restriction. And after a couple of minutes of looking around and not finding an additional exit,
He goes back over to where Parker had been when he had left him, except Parker's not here anymore. And Bill suddenly thinks maybe he's found a way to get through this. And so Bill, with almost no air left, grabs the guideline and swims up into the silty cloud and gets to the cave-in to discover it's still caved in.
However, he sees the base of Parker's tanks wedged in the obstruction itself. And he's looking at the tanks thinking, how did Parker get in that position? And then he realizes that's just his tanks. Parker is not attached to them anymore.
And that's when Bill realizes what Parker probably had done. Parker had tried to force himself through the obstruction and probably got about halfway before becoming completely wedged and stuck himself. And he had to make the terrifying decision to take one more good breath and then ditch your air tanks and try to swim on a breath hold to the set of spare tanks they had set up about 100 meters away above Squaw's restriction.
But at this point, regardless what's happened with Parker, his tanks were positioned in a way that it had created a little bit of an opening in the obstruction that Bill was able to swim through with his tanks on. Now he has almost no air left, and so once he got through, he realized he had about 30 seconds of air, and he swam as fast as he could to these spare tanks, expecting, hoping to see Parker on them, breathing and alive.
But unfortunately, right as they came into view, Parker wasn't anywhere to be seen. Bill swims as fast as he can. He actually literally runs out of air and is on a breath hold himself by the time he reaches these tanks.
He takes a huge gulp of air and after he calmed down, he took his light out and he scanned around and he found Parker and he was floating, deceased clearly, about 30 meters away and had made it pretty far on a breath hold but had just gone slightly off and he didn't have any of his equipment. It was all attached to his tanks and so in total darkness he was just blindly swimming and did not locate the air tanks and you can only imagine what his final few seconds were like.
Before all of this happened, when Parker and Bill were down at 300 feet, some of the limestone broke off from the ceiling, landed in such a way that it caused this huge underwater mudslide, and it all funneled down, completely blocking up squaw's restriction. The next and final story of today's episode is called Panic. In the early morning hours of February 6th, 2014, a van carrying five men finally came to a stop outside of a farm in Norway.
After a miserable nearly 15-hour drive, these five men who are from Finland were finally ready to begin their real adventure. They were going to be attempting one of the most dangerous underwater dives in the world. It is called the Traverse and it is a two-kilometer subsurface dive from one entrance of the Pleura Cave to the other. The entrance they were going to start in was inside of the frozen pond next to this farm.
Two of the five men had actually done this so-called traverse before because they were the ones that discovered these two entrances were actually connected. But no amount of experience was going to limit the amount of physical risk they would have to take in order to complete this dive.
The dive was so long, over two kilometers, that you actually needed a specialized underwater scooter that could propel you through the tunnel because you wouldn't be able to swim fast enough before you ran out of air. Which also meant if your scooter broke down in the middle of this pitch black underwater cave, you were screwed.
The majority of the dive was going to be through this really tight tunnel where all along the ground were these limestone rocks that kind of poked up, where if you weren't careful, if you dragged your dry suit along them, you could tear it open. And then freezing water would go into your dry suit and you would die.
Also, they were going to be using a diving rig known as a rebreather. So as a Navy SEAL, we used rebreathers. Basically, it takes your air and rebreathes it. So you're not breathing air into the water. You're breathing out into the system that scrubs your CO2 and then pumps it back into you.
and you also combine that rebreathed air with pure oxygen so you have a continuous cycle where you're just breathing pure oxygen. It makes for a really cool dive because you're looking around and there's no bubbles, but it's also very dangerous and your body doesn't really adjust well to having pure oxygen pumped into it. In fact, you can be poisoned from pure oxygen. And when you're diving at depth with a rebreather on the way up, you can't just rock it to the surface. There are these things called decompression stops along the way up.
where depending on how long you were at a certain depth, you need to wait at certain stops along the way back up to the surface and let your body decompress. If you don't do that and you just rush to the surface, you can get something called the bends, which is decompression sickness and it can be fatal.
Not to mention there's a couple other nasty side effects of using a rebreather like if you get water inside of your breathing loop it can actually get into the CO2 absorbent that sits inside of your rig and that can cause this acidic mixture to go back into your mouth but you can't take the mouthpiece out because more water will get into it and it'll flood your rig and then you'll just drown. So you need to just accept that there could be acid in your mouth and you need to either get somebody else to give you their mouthpiece or get a standby rig and breathe off of that
because there's no solution to this. You just got to have acid in your mouth. Also, if you panic for any reason on a rebreather, you'll be breathing really heavy and your system will not be able to scrub the CO2 fast enough and you'll have a buildup of CO2 in your body and you'll get hypercapnia, which can lead to disorientation and even passing out, which can be lethal underwater.
This dive was famously dangerous to the point where the best divers in the world wouldn't attempt it. They called it a death wish. But these five divers from Finland were determined and they were eager to make the traverse. So shortly after they arrived, they take a quick nap and then they get up and they're ready to start the dive. They decided to break up into two groups. They had a pair that was going to go down first and then two hours later the other three would follow. Once the first pair was in the water, there would be no way to communicate between the two groups.
So the pair cuts a triangle into the ice with the chainsaw. They hop into the beautifully clear water and very quickly they start descending down into this tunnel. Once they got down to the tunnel, they turned on their scooters and started heading out.
After a couple of hours, the pair reached the most dangerous part of the dive, where the tunnel basically nose dives and goes straight down to about 130 meters. And as you're going down, you have to be very cautious that you're going the right way, because there's all these dead end tunnels that look exactly like the way you're supposed to go. And they go pretty far out, but if you were to accidentally take a wrong turn and go down one of these dead man turns, you wouldn't have enough oxygen to complete the dive.
So it's a slow process of making sure you go down the exact right path. And then when you get to the bottom at 130 meters, there was this plate that had been left there to signify you've gone the right way. And then you turn and go right back up again. And you're pretty much at the exit at that point. But it takes quite a while to cover that last little bit because there are necessary decompression stops along the way.
The first group descended with no issues and didn't get sidetracked. They got to the bottom where that plate was. They turned and began going back up the ascent to their first decompression stop. The lead diver got through a particularly tight spot and then noticed that his partner behind him, his flashlight which was normally right up against him, he couldn't see it anymore. And he turned and he saw that his partner had gotten wedged in this one section of the ascent.
So the lead diver turns around and swims down to the trapped diver, who he can tell is panicking a little bit because he's trying to get himself free and he can't move. And the lead diver looks and he can tell that he is thoroughly wedged into this one little section. And the lead diver would say that what he thought happened is the trapped diver must have been going too quickly with his scooter and basically motorized himself into this wedge. Like it wouldn't have been humanly possible to swim fast or hard enough to get stuck as badly as he did.
the lead diver could tell that he was totally stuck. There was probably no way he was gonna get out of this. And so he tried taking some of his gear off, but they have such little space to work with, and the trap diver is starting to sense that this isn't going very well. And in a panic, he accidentally knocks his mouthpiece out of his mouth and can't find it again, and ends up inhaling a bunch of water and he dies.
The lead diver knows that he can't panic because he will end up burning through his oxygen, he'll probably get hypercapnia, he won't be able to get to the surface, and he'll die too.
So he tries to free his friend's body and he can't. And he's now realizing that the second set of divers that are coming in the tunnel, they're going to get to this point in the dive, which is very far into the dive, and they won't be able to get past his dead body. And they'll have to turn around, but they don't have enough oxygen, he didn't think, to make it back to the surface. And so almost certainly those three divers are going to get here and be trapped and are going to die too.
And so terrified and devastated and saddened by what's ultimately going to happen, he turns and starts heading for the surface. And he had to stop at each of those decompression stops. And you can only imagine what it was like to be sitting inside of this tight tunnel waiting for 30 minutes and 45 minutes at the different decompression stops, just thinking about what's inevitably going to happen beyond the dead body. They're going to get trapped. They're going to die. He's going to be the only one that gets out of here alive.
And at some point he makes it up to the surface and he just sits there and waits.
Meanwhile, the second set of divers did enter the water two hours later. They go down to the tunnel. They're making their way out. And they were farther spread out than the pair was. And so the first diver, the lead diver of the second group, he reached the dead body first before the other two had even seen it or knew about it. And he began to panic. And as the second and third diver come up and realize what's happening, they see the lead diver lose his mouthpiece and in a panic. He's moving around like this and he inhales water and also drowns.
And so now the second and third diver are dealing with the fact that they just watched their friend die right in front of them. Their other friend from the first group is dead and blocking their way. And the second and third diver, they also begin to panic. They don't communicate and one of them just immediately turns and starts kicking it out back towards the entrance knowing full well they probably don't have enough oxygen to get there. The other diver decided they were going to find a way to get past the dead body that was wedged in the only way up to the surface.
And so on their own, over a kilometer underwater in this tight little tunnel where they're totally trapped, they're relying on a flashlight for light. There's two dead bodies. This second diver begins removing pieces of their gear and pushing it through the little space between the dead body and the clearing that he wanted to get to to make his way up to the surface. And after pushing through all of his gear, including his tank, which is a big
commitment because once it was through he would have to go to the other side he couldn't get it back through and push himself through painstakingly with his hands all the way through this tiny little space that he could just barely get through and then he puts his gear back on and then knowing he had almost no oxygen left he had to basically rocket to the surface and just hope decompression sickness didn't kill him
The other diver who had turned around and gone all the way back to the entrance, they skipped all of their decompression stops as well. They got to the entrance just barely, but when they got there, the entrance was frozen over and they had to punch their way through the ice, which they were able to do. And they too got on surface once again.
The three survivors linked up, they called authorities, they went to the hospital, they would make a full recovery. They told authorities where their friends were in this cave, but no one had the ability to get down and retrieve their body. So they sealed off both entrances to this cave and called it a gravesite and said no one can go down there. But months later, the three survivors had such intense survivor's guilt that they would actually illegally go back to Pleura Cave and retrieve their bodies.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. If you enjoyed today's stories and you're looking for more bone-chilling content, be sure to check out all of our studio's podcasts, Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Bedtime Stories, and Run Full. All you have to do is search for Ballin Studios wherever you get your podcasts. To watch hundreds more stories just like the ones you heard today, head over to our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin. So that's going to do it. I really appreciate your support. Until next time, see ya.
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Please tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived. We know the six wives of Henry VIII as pawns in his hunt for a son, but their lives were so much more than just being the king's wives. I'm Arisha Skidmore-Williams. And I'm Brooke Ziffrin. And we're the hosts of Wondery's podcast, Even the Royals. In each episode, we'll pull back the curtain on royal families past and present from all over the world.
We rarely see Henry VIII's wives in their own light, as women who use the tools available to them to hold on to power. Some women won the game, others lost, but they were all unexpected agents in their own stories. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing, but more often than not, it comes at the expense of everything else, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes, you.
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