Stories Of People Who’ve Encountered Cryptids

13.

Finally, “I was on a ferry for a school softball trip off Kodiak Island, Alaska in 2014. I was 18. It was 11 p.m. in May in Alaska, so the sun was thinking about setting, but it was still pretty bright outside. We noticed a pod of orcas swimming with the ferry’s wake, which is very cool but not, like, unusual. If you’re familiar with the dimensions of an orca fin, you know they’re about 4 to 6 feet in height and look like big black spikes coming out of the water. They travel and hunt in pods of anywhere between 15-40 whales. Apex predators. The beautiful demon murderers of the sea. Total assholes. Top of the food chain. So, we saw a pod of orcas, counted ’em to be around 10-15 with some babies scattered in there. It was very fun to watch, and it took ’em a good 30 minutes to all go by. We tried to get pictures, but it was just dark enough that our shitty phone cameras weren’t much good.

“Another 30 or 40 minutes go by, it’s about to get dark, we’re cold and sleepy and about ready to go in. No more orcas, haven’t seen one for, like, half an hour, and then, one of my JV girls spots another one. So, we all turn and look…but one dorsal fin is immediately followed by another, and another, and another, and then two more, and then two more after that, in two separate rows, and they’re taller, by a LOT, and jagged, like some have whole chunks torn out of them, and they’re all 8-10 feet high. They’re all attached to ONE creature, and we can just barely see its back slicing through the water, covered in these rows of spikes, and it Just. Keeps. Coming. This thing is, like, 20 or 30 feet from the ferry, running parallel to it, and we are all transfixed. There’s, like, 9 or 10 of us, and no one is saying a word because we’ve all turned to look at a whale, and we are all now watching something that is, like, horrifically, terrifyingly, obviously NOT a whale. Someone tries to take a picture, but it’s too dark at this point, and the only reason we can see this thing is the light cast from ferry portholes. It’s a tale as old as time when it comes to things that you REALLY fucking wish you had a picture of. But we all stand there completely scared fuckin’ stiff and in awe. We watch this thing just KEEP surfacing for a good six or seven minutes, which means that whatever it was was LONG. Like 60 or 70 feet long. Or longer. And covered in enormous spikes. Spikes that looked like they’d won thousands of battles with god-knows-what. It took what felt like an eternity for any of us to say anything after the last of it disappeared back into the strait. I mean, if you and, like, eight of your friends had just all seen something that all science had DEFINITELY pointed to not existing, and you had all seen the same exact thing, AND it was very OBVIOUSLY trailing, nay, HUNTING, not one but 15-something APEX FUCKIN’ PREDATORS, what do you even say to break that silence? That’s the thing that eats me about the whole thing is it was hunting. It was following them. It was literally hunting about 60 tons of toothy, angry, intelligent apex predators. Every once in a while, one of us will hit another one of us up and check in, like, ‘Do remember this? Was I hallucinating? Did we all see the same insane, worldview-melting, terrifying thing that night?’ And the reason I KNOW we did is because none of us talked about it after that, not during the trip, not after, not to any of our friends, because how the fuck do you even tell someone about something like that. Now, we have almost 10 years between us and that night; I assume some of them have probably told people. I know and tell people because I’ve seen a LOT of shit like that in Alaska and I’m That Bitch. Also, there’s a very rich history among native Alaskans of a Something that lives and hunts in the waters around Kodiak, and it’s important to tell its story because someday, it’s gonna eat a little too much plastic, and no one will ever watch it hunt a pod of orcas from a boat ever again.”

—u/slobone