Chapter 1: What are the three chilling stories featured in this episode?
Today's podcast will feature three stories about people who ventured off into the extreme cold and horrible things befell them. 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 Over the Horizon, and it's about a morbid discovery that was made on an oceanic voyage in the 1800s. The second story you'll hear is called Rite of Passage, and it's about a family that decides to do a famous ritual.
And the third and final story you'll hear is called Under the Tarp, and it's about natives in the Arctic who spot a group of outsiders acting very strangely. And what they find when they track them down is pure nightmare fuel.
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 four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursdays, and Fridays.
So if that's of interest to you, please offer to do the follow buttons grocery shopping, but don't tell them you've squirted an entire bottle of lime juice inside of their fresh milk. Okay, let's get into our first story, which is called Over the Horizon.
On the morning of September 23rd, 1839, an experienced sailor named Captain Brighton stood on the deck of his ship, which was traveling through the Drake Passage, which is located right along the northern coast of Antarctica.
He and his crew had sailed here because they were professional whalers, and they had heard there was this massive population of whales in the Drake Passage that basically were untouched by humanity because basically nobody sailed this far. This was a freezing cold, very austere part of the world, kind of a dangerous place to be.
But so far, Captain Brighton and his crew had not seen a single whale. And on top of that, the Drake Passage had proven to be as dangerous as expected. Just the previous night, the ocean around the ship had literally frozen, basically anchoring the ship in place. And so when this happened, Captain Brighton realized, like, there was nothing they could even do about this. I mean, they were stuck.
And if this didn't break up soon, they'd be stuck here all winter potentially, and it was unclear if they could actually survive that. But fortunately, also the previous night, this massive storm rolled in, which, you know, that's dangerous in and of itself.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the oceanic voyage in 'Over the Horizon'?
There's nothing. It's silent on the ship. And so Captain Brighton eventually just opens up this door and sure enough, he looks into this dark space and it's the captain's quarters. And there's a desk towards the back of this room and there's a man sitting at the desk with his back to them.
So Captain Brighton, he takes a cautious step into the captain's quarters and he calls out to this man who clearly appears to be the captain, but the man doesn't say or do anything. He's clearly focused on something at his desk.
And so Captain Brighton exchanged a worried glance with this man and then just decided he would walk across the room and go physically interact with this guy and make sure he was okay and see what was going on here. And so slowly Captain Brighton began walking across the room and as he did, he called out a few more times to this man who appeared to be the captain, but he didn't get a response.
And then finally he was right behind the man and he actually looked down and read what the man had been writing. This is what it said. Trapped by icebergs, despite all efforts, the fire went out last night. No hope remains. However, as unsettling as that would be to read for anybody in this situation, what was the most unsettling part was actually what was written right above that journal entry.
The date, January 17th, 1823, 16 years before. That captain and his entire crew were all dead and had been for 16 years. They got trapped in the ice just like Captain Brighton had, but it didn't break up. They were stranded and they all froze to death. And because it was so cold out in that part of the world, all their bodies were basically preserved in their final moments.
And so the captain of the ship before he died was making an entry to say what happened. And then down below, when Captain Brighton and his men went to go look, they found people playing cards who had literally frozen to death while playing cards. They found a woman lying in her bed with her dog. That's how they froze to death.
They found people in the dining hall and they died right where they were sitting. It was like all these people had been frozen in time for nearly two decades just floating around in Drake's Passage. And basically nobody had found them until Captain Brighton.
Our next story is called Rite of Passage.
On the evening of January 19th, 2022, a 40-year-old mother named Anna Uskova set up a camera and some lights at the edge of a clearing in the woods in St. Petersburg, Russia. Then she focused the camera on the spot in the clearing where she, her husband, and her children were about to perform a very important religious ceremony. So to set the scene here, it was late at night, so it's dark.
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Chapter 3: How did Captain Brighton's crew become trapped in the ice?
Like there's more to this story than the Inuit people understand. And it was sort of terrifying. And on top of just the way they were moving, there was something else these Kalunat were doing. In addition to these men just kind of lumbering along the coastline, a few of them were dragging this big sled. And there was a tarp over the sled.
Clearly something big or several things were under this tarp. But the Inuit hunters, they couldn't quite tell what it was. It was covered up. And so they're just watching these men in this weird parade along the coastline with the sled. And they really were like, we have to get out of here.
And so they ducked their heads below the icy hill to kind of stay out of view of the Kalunat, who to this point, it did not seem like they had spotted the hunters. And as the hunters are sort of trying to figure out what they should even do, they hear this awful guttural scream coming from down below where these men are, where these white men are.
And instinctively, the hunters, they grabbed their spears and they poked their head up over the hill, almost thinking maybe they've spotted us. Maybe they're going to attack us.
But no, when they looked down below, many of the Kalunat were still just kind of lumbering along, but one of them had stopped and he was kind of retching around like there was something wrong with him and he continued to scream out and then he just crumpled to the ground. But the other white men, it was like they didn't even react to it. except for the men pulling the sled.
They pulled the sled right up alongside this man who had just fallen to the ground after screaming, and they just sort of nonchalantly pulled back the tarp, revealing all sorts of bodies on the sled.
They picked the guy who had just fallen, and they threw him onto the pile, they covered him back up with the tarp, and then like nothing had happened, the men kept on pulling the sled, and this totally creepy procession continued down the coast.
At this point, the Inuit hunters were genuinely terrified, and without saying anything, they just scrambled back down the hill and ran back to their village. The following day, the Inuit hunters came back to that exact spot, that icy hill that looked down to the ocean below. Except this time, they had brought along several pounds of seal meat.
So the previous day, when these hunters had gone back to their village to tell the others about what they had just seen, oddly enough, the consensus became that, you know, of course the Kalunat are sort of dangerous to us and we should keep our distance. But from what you're describing, it sounds an awful lot like these men, these white men, must just be starving.
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