In Too Deep (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
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What is the main theme of today's stories?
Today's stories are about how sometimes doing what you think is the right thing can actually be the most dangerous choice you can make. 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 place because that's all we do and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, the next time you're walking into a building and the follow button is right behind you, obviously following you into the building as well, Make sure the second you go in, you turn around, make eye contact, and then you pull the door shut. Don't hold the door for them. Okay, let's get into our first story, which is called Tangled and Frozen.
On a Saturday afternoon in February of 2011, 18-year-old Michael Peary was 1,000 feet underground, crouched inside of a dark cave in Lafayette, Georgia, along with four of his friends. As Michael looked around, his headlamp beam bounced off all the low-hanging rocks and underground waterfalls and deep crevices, and it all just kind of felt like some kind of dark and otherworldly planet down here. So this cave that they were in was a famous cave called Ellison, and Michael and his friends had driven over 400 miles from their college town in Gainesville to see it. Ellison was almost 12 miles of tunnels and shafts and crevices, and thousands of cavers went through it every year. It was very popular.
Now, to be clear, caving as an activity was not really Michael's thing. He was a marketing major at the University of Florida, and he mostly considered himself to be a pretty quiet person and liked studying or playing in his school band or volunteering with his church youth group. And so crawling through a tiny, pitch black, very claustrophobic hole hundreds of feet underground was not really his first choice for fun. But Michael was not there today for fun. He was there because his close friend, a guy named Grant Lockenbach, had suggested it. So he had said, OK, I'll go with you. Just now, Michael looked over to where Grant was sitting with his girlfriend, whose name was Carrie. And also they were sitting with two of their other friends.
And the group of them were all looking through a backpack and sort of taking stock of the various pieces of gear that they had brought along with them. Now, they'd only entered Ellison just a few minutes ago. But already the group had stopped because there was something in this area that Grant really wanted to see. And when Grant wanted to do something, it usually happened. Hence why Michael capitulated and wound up in this cave, because Grant wanted him to. And so, you know, like normal, he went along with it. So Grant, he was the president of their school's Fellowship of Christian Athletes. which Michael, Carrie, and the other two friends were also members of. And when Michael had joined the fellowship, Grant had sort of taken him under his wing and told Michael that he had tons of potential.
In fact, he said Michael had enough potential to be the next president of the fellowship. And this had given Michael a ton of confidence. because he really looked up to Grant. I mean, a lot of people did. Grant was just cool. He was a few years older than Michael and was basically like a six foot tall ball of positive energy who was always looking for some adventure to go off and do. Grant had been exploring caves as a hobby for the last three years.
What happened to Michael Peary and his friends in the cave?
And he was actually really the only member of their group with any real caving experience. And it was actually this lack of experience amongst the other people that were with Grant, you know, including Michael, That was the reason they were going through an easier tunnel within Allison that was basically a straight shot through the mountain and did not require much gear like rope or climbing equipment. It was like very beginner. But despite that, despite the low level of difficulty of the caving route they had chosen, they'd brought that stuff anyway, all that extra equipment, because along this easier route at the place where they were now stopped,
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