I believe the exact term for it is thalassophobia. It wasn’t until I was in my teens and my best friend told me about what happened to his kid sister when they were little and were vacationing at Lake Tahoe that this deep abiding fear manifested itself.
There are a ton of myths and legends surrounding this lake. Everything from old Native American legends of burial ground hauntings to stories about the mob and how they’d dump the bodies of people they killed in the deeper parts of the lake. There’s also a lot of mystique surrounding the lake itself just because of how deep it is and because people who drown in the deeper parts of the lake rarely resurface. IF they’re found, they are more or less perfectly preserved even years later because of how cold the water gets the further down you go.
My family used to have a vacation home up there when I was young, and we’d do a lot of boating and swimming there each summer. At that point, I didn’t see anything the least bit unsettling about the lake or the surrounding area. On the contrary, I was always floored by how absolutely gorgeous it was. My favorite thing about it was how clear and blue the water is. When I’d go swimming, one of my favorite things was to wear goggles and peer down below me to see this vast, empty, blue void extending down and around me for as far as I could see.
I could see how this might bother some people and maybe if younger me had known more about some of the myths and legends I mentioned earlier and, specifically about my friend’s experience, I’d have been scared then, too. If I had known, then perhaps watching how the shafts of light dancing below the water and gradually fading into the empty blueish-purple void would have evoked a sense of dread and vulnerability. Or seeing the faint outline of aquatic plants waving further down would have reminded me more of hands blindly reaching out and grasping for anyone within their reach, but I digress.
Anyway, this friend and his family were vacationing, as I’d mentioned, near the lake. While they were there, they did a lot of swimming and exploring. On the second to last day there, his dad took him and his little sister out on a pontoon boat rental. They had life jackets on and he and his sister took turns jumping out of the boat, into the water, climbing back into the boat and then jumping back into the water. They repeated this a few times, but on the 5th or 6th time his little sister jumped, somehow, she slipped out of the life jacket and started sinking pretty rapidly.
It apparently happened so fast that by the time their dad, who had been keeping a close eye on them, dove in after her, she was already disappearing beyond the clear, well-lit surface into the hazy, bluish-purple depths of the lake. Their dad dove down as far as he could after her, but eventually, he couldn’t go any deeper and had to resurface. He frantically dove down again several times to see if he could spot her but didn’t see any sign of her. Climbing back in the boat, he grabbed his cell phone. Reception can be pretty spotty that far out, but he was able to contact the authorities who eventually arrived with a dive team to search for the missing girl. Honestly, at the point, I don’t think they were expecting to find her alive. Their main goal at that point was probably just to retrieve the body.
Their hours long search extended into the evening by the time they had to call it off. They were back at it first thing in the morning as soon as it was light enough to see but were unsuccessful that day as well. My friend and his parents extended their time out there as search and rescue crews tried in vain to recover the body of their little girl. There were even some people searching with dogs along the shoreline on the off chance she washed up there. It was a long shot, but it ended up paying off in a big way on the 4th day.
One of the dogs and its handler was searching on the opposite shore from the rest of their team when his dog started going ballistic. He’d apparently picked up on the girl’s scent (they’d been given a couple of pieces of her clothing for this purpose). Not only was she found, but she was found miraculously alive which no one could explain. The thing that really startled the rescuer, though, was that her face had deep scratch marks all over it and it was clear that the damage extended from her eyes to the rest of her face. It was so bad that she was left blind, but there were no other scratches on any other parts of her small body.
Later, when the police were trying to figure out how she had survived and how she had gotten the scratches around her face and eyes, they plied her with questions. She was 5 or 6 at the time, so her answers weren’t all that helpful. Based on what little she was able to articulate, she and her brother had been jumping off the boat to see who could make the biggest splash when she slipped out of her life jacket. All she’d say after that was that “the cold people from the bottom got her” and whatever that meant and whatever else she saw scared her so badly that she had to “scratch herself to make herself not see them.” She also seemed to be completely unaware that she had been missing for 4 straight days. The way she described it was that she was down there for maybe a few minutes before she escaped while simultaneously scratching her eyes and was almost immediately found by the “nice dog” and it’s shocked handler.
Now, I didn’t know this friend or his sister at that time. It wasn’t until years later when we were all teens that we met in high school, found out we used to vacation in the same spot and eventually became good friends. By that time, they were both pretty well emotionally adjusted. My friend’s sister was actually really outgoing and, despite her physical appearance (the scars around her eyes) and her being blind, she was well accepted by most of the other students and was pretty active. When I got to know her and her brother better, they confided in me what had happened when they were little. I got curious and probed her further about it and asked what she saw that scared her enough to hurt herself like she did. I’ve never seen someone’s demeanor change that quickly. Her normally upbeat and outgoing attitude changed in an instant and all she would say is that “there are things at the bottom of that lake no one should ever have to know about…”
I remember that conversation vividly to this day. The story itself was enough to make me deathly afraid of swimming in large bodies of water, but seeing the way she shut down so quickly; her unseeing eyes staring blankly at me and the tears streaming from the one eye that could still produce them is what really cemented my phobia.