189. Cave Diving Horror: 3 Deadly Underwater Cave Exploration Disasters
episode
Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
42 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 29 days ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What prompted Kaylin to explore scary cave diving stories in this episode?
Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kaylin Moore. Now, when I announced that I was gonna be doing Dark Summer this year, I got a lot of requests from you guys for episodes that you wanted to hear about. Some of the heavy hitters like camping horror, spooky campfire tales, all that good stuff. But a lot of you also reached out to me asking for something that I hadn't necessarily heard you ask for before. And that was scary cave diving stories. And what clicked for me is there was a terrifying cave. And what clicked for me was there was a terrifying cave diving accident that actually happened earlier this year. One that I followed very closely as it was happening.
happening, one that honestly should have never happened in the first place. And that's the accident that took place in the Maldives. And that is what I want to cover for you today. And I also want to talk about some of the other scary cave diving stories that tie into that one because there's people involved in this story that were also involved in other terrifying cave diving accidents that I felt needed to be included in this episode. We're gonna get into all of that today. So thank you to everyone who reached out and sent that as a suggestion. But first, I wanna say thank you to everyone who participated in our back to school campaign. I had been hearing from a lot of teachers in our community saying things that did not make any sense to me, like, Caitlin, my school district won't help me pay for school supplies.
Necessary things like erasers, markers, pencils. I couldn't believe it. And I knew just from hearing from you guys that I needed to help as much as I could. We have gotten a lot of submissions from you guys. I honestly wish that I could reach out to everyone, but at this point, we've supported over. 40 classrooms, and there's more that we're getting to. This will be the final week. I actually have more support that's going to go out today. And we're going to finish up on next Friday, the 21st. For more information, you should sign up for our free newsletter. We've been doing it on Patreon. You just have to sign up for Patreon. You don't have to pay. That's where we've been doing a newsletter that puts together information on ways that we're supporting the community.
And it also just is where I keep all of the community projects that I'm working on and other updates in the Hearts Arts Pounded community. I keep it all in one place on this newsletter. So it's a great thing to sign up for. You get a little bit of behind the scenes on the episodes, all that good stuff. Again, that's over on Patreon and it's free for everyone. Okay, and with that, let's dive into this week's episode. It was mid morning on May 14th, 2026, out in the Indian Ocean. Six divers were gearing up on the deck of a boat, the Duke of York, getting ready for a diving expedition through the reefs down below. They were in the Maldives, a small country south of India made up of over 1,000 tiny coral islands.
But as this group finished preparing, one of the divers, this young woman, stopped. You guys go ahead without me, she said. Now, this was not supposed to be a hard dive, and it should only take an hour, but still, something stopped her. She watched as the group finished suiting up, slowly got in the water. They dove below the surface, and little bubbles came up from their oxygen tanks. And this woman figured she would see the group in an hour after they were done studying the reefs. But an hour passed, and the group was nowhere to be seen. Another thirty minutes went by, and then another, and the woman watched, waiting for the group's heads to surface, but they never did. So she grabbed the boat's phone to call for help, not knowing that below her was a cave system that was much deeper and much more complicated than anyone in her group had anticipated.
And time was running out. 51-year-old Monica Monafalcone was one of the divers who had gone down that morning, and she was the reason that that group was there that day.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
1 identifiedMore from Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries
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