The Silent Mysteries of Antarctica

[00:00:00] True tales of horror, bizarre happenings, unexplainable events. On our podcast, Disturbed, terror takes center stage, kidnappings, serial killers, hauntings, and the very essence of your worst nightmares coming to life on this weekly true horror show. Enter at your own risk.

[00:00:28] It's so cold that it makes the metal groan. Wind skims low across the deck of a Japanese research vessel. It's moving slowly through the Southern Ocean, just off the coast of Antarctica. It's deep into the night, and this level of darkness wraps around you.

[00:00:52] Now, the man on deck, his name has never been given, was part of a small night crew. Nothing official, just standard rotation. Equipment checks, temperature logs, watch duty, that kind of thing. It was routine, and he was tired. The sea was quiet in that strange, pressing way it gets down there when ice floats silently alongside you and even the ship's engine sound is distant and muffled.

[00:01:20] And that's when he saw it. Something moving in the water. He thought at first it was ice, a shift, maybe a chunk flipping over. But then it moved again, slowly and smoothly. Whatever it was, it was enormous, pale, and just beneath the surface. And it didn't register all at once. It was like seeing only part of something that's slowly coming into view in the fog.

[00:01:45] And then he noticed something that he wouldn't tell anyone about until years later. And even then, only anonymously on an internet forum. It was the shape of it. It looked human. He claimed that the forum looked vaguely humanoid. A massive head, what could have been shoulders, a torso, arms, and no movement like swimming or crawling, just drifting, with an eerie stillness that felt impossible to explain.

[00:02:14] And then it slipped under the ice shelf again. And it was gone. He didn't sound an alarm and didn't even mention it, like I said, until much later. Maybe he didn't trust himself with what he saw. Or maybe he didn't want to be that kind of person who starts talking about sea monsters right there on a scientific vessel. Either way, the sighting became just one more secret carried quietly out in Antarctica.

[00:02:43] But that story, that strange, wordless moment, didn't stay buried. Years later, it appeared in a cryptic post on a Japanese internet forum. A post that would slowly snowball into one of the most persistent modern sea creature myths in recent memory. The legend of the ninjin. Now, the word ninjin in Japanese just means human or human being. It's simple.

[00:03:09] The cold edges of online folklore, it's come to mean something else. A creature. A white-skinned and massive thing seen by crew members near Antarctica. Theories range from government cover-ups to undiscovered species, even to experiments gone wrong. Photos have circulated. Most are blurry, though. And some are clearly faked. Others might also be faked, but it's less obvious. Now, none of it's verified. There are no official records.

[00:03:39] No confirmed sightings. Nothing in any scientific journal. And yet the story lives on. But when this was first shared with me, I didn't need a monster in this story in order to make it intriguing. We were talking about Antarctica. A pretty remote location. What do you think can happen to our perception when you're surrounded by nothing but ice, the sea, and silence for weeks on end?

[00:04:07] And that's what we're exploring in this episode. Not just the stories of the ice, but the actual place. The people. And the psychological shadows that can form in one of the most isolated environments on Earth. My name is Edwin. And here's a horror story. To me, Antarctica had always had this strange pull. It's the most remote continent on Earth.

[00:04:36] It has no cities, no permanent residents, no roads. Just ice, the ocean, and a handful of research stations that operate year-round in brutal conditions. It's one place where, even now, the map still feels unfinished. That emptiness, blankness, it creates space. And not just for science, but for speculation. Because for all the cooperation and international treaties,

[00:05:03] Antarctica is still a place of controlled access, restricted zones, and research missions most people never hear about. And that's where conspiracy theories begin to grow. One of the most famous is tied to Operation High Jump, a real U.S. Navy mission in 1946. Officially, it was a military-led scientific expedition. It was led to test equipment and train in polar conditions.

[00:05:29] But the sheer scale of it, thousands of personnel, aircraft, warships, sparked rumors almost immediately. Why such a huge show of force? And why there? Some claim that it was an attempt to locate or eliminate secret Nazi bases left over from the war. Others say the U.S. encountered something unexpected and possibly not human. None of this has ever been proven, of course.

[00:05:57] But the theories continue, passed down through documentaries, forums, and a bunch of unverifiable witness accounts. And then there's the Antarctic Treaty System. It was signed in 1959 and still in effect today. It bans military activity, restricts resource exploitation, and designates the continent for peaceful, scientific use only. On paper, it's a model of international cooperation.

[00:06:24] In practice, though, the treaty adds another layer of obscurity. Because everything that happens there is quietly agreed upon between governments. And most of it never reaches the public eye. This might even be the first time you hear about a treaty about Antarctica. Satellite images of certain areas go missing. They say it's because of cloud coverage, which checks out.

[00:06:49] But tourists are restricted from visiting certain regions, especially inland. And while there are certainly logical explanations like safety, logistics, environmental protection, it still feeds the feeling that something is being hidden out there. It's not just random blogs pushing out these ideas. Even people who work in Antarctic science talk, carefully, about the psychological toll of the environment.

[00:07:16] Long stretches of isolation and total darkness during winter months. The way time flattens out when the landscape around you doesn't change for weeks at a time. It's the perfect place for stories to start. Or to spiral. So when someone posts about a massive, pale humanoid form seen flipping through the water, people pay attention. And not because they believe it, but because the story fits the landscape.

[00:07:44] Antarctica is already a kind of blank slate. It's remote enough that no one can prove you wrong. And strange enough that anything seems just barely possible. They say that when you spend enough time in an environment like Antarctica, with its endless white horizon and near total absence of sound, something starts to happen. Time stretches out. Days blur together. Your sense of scale changes.

[00:08:13] And what once felt massive, like a ship that you're on, it starts to feel like a lifeboat drifting on a planet of ice. Psychologists have studied this. Not just in Antarctica, but in places like submarines, space simulations, even Mars research stations in the Arctic. And what they found is simple and unsettling. Isolation messes with perception.

[00:08:39] Sensory deprivation, monotony, and extreme weather all combine to create a kind of a mental static. Something just beneath the surface of your awareness. You start to feel things that aren't there. And hear things. Even see things. There's a term for one of those experiences. The third man factor.

[00:09:03] It's when people in life or death situations feel an unseen presence guiding or watching them. It's been reported by mountain climbers, polar explorers, and shipwreck survivors. Not a ghost or a hallucination in the cartoon sense. It's more like a quiet certainty that you're not alone. Even when you are. In Antarctica, this is more common than you would think. Scientists and crew members who have worked there for long stretches of time

[00:09:32] often report strange dreams, persistent feelings of being watched, or a sense that the landscape itself is pressing in on them. It's not supernatural. It's psychological. But it feels real. And in an environment that's already otherworldly, it doesn't take much for the brain to misinterpret what it's seeing. Like a shadow under the ice. A shift in the light. A whale surfacing in the distance that, just for a second, looks like something else.

[00:10:01] Combine that with fatigue, disrupted sleep cycles, and the stress of constant environmental awareness. And then the brain starts doing what it's evolved to do. To find patterns. Assign meaning. And create shape from noise. Now, that might be one of the reasons why stories like the Ningen resonate. If you're staring into a vast, silent sea, expecting something to break the surface, your brain might offer something up. A suggestion or a shape.

[00:10:30] Something that looks like a body drifting just below the ice. It's also worth noting that people who spend time in extreme environments often don't talk about these experiences until much later. If at all. There's a stigma, especially in scientific or military context, around admitting that your perception might not be trustworthy. But these effects are well documented, and the conditions that cause them are exactly what you find in places like the Southern Ocean.

[00:11:00] So when that anonymous crew member said that he saw something massive and human shape beneath the water, it might have been exactly what he believed he saw. That doesn't make it real, but it also doesn't make it meaningless. Then again, we weren't there. What do we know? The original post didn't go viral right away. It actually wasn't even particularly detailed.

[00:11:27] Just a short, anonymous entry on a Japanese forum in the early 2000s. Two channel. Which, at the time, was one of the Internet's largest and most chaotic message boards. The poster didn't give a name. Just a story. Something white. Something human-like. Spotted near Antarctica by a Japanese research crew. Other users began to add their own fragments. Some said that they had heard similar things. A few claimed that they had seen photos

[00:11:55] or that the government agencies had quickly shut down public discussion. That part, the supposed secrecy, added momentum. The story might have stayed buried in forum archives if it hadn't been picked up by Mu, a long-running Japanese magazine that focuses on UFOs, cryptids, and the unexplained. In the mid-2000s, Mu published a feature on the Ninjan, complete with dramatic illustrations and speculative commentary.

[00:12:23] It didn't claim the creature was real, but it treated the idea seriously enough to catch attention. For many in Japan, this was the first time the Ninjan entered public consciousness outside of obscure online threads. Illustrations began appearing on cryptid blogs and paranormal message boards. Artists tried to imagine what a 30-meter humanoid would look like, drifting under Antarctic ice. Some drew them with no facial features at all,

[00:12:52] just smooth skin, long limbs, and a blank stare. Others gave the Ninjan a whale-like appearance. It was aquatic, half-evolved into something beyond recognition. I also think that having a lacking fixed image only made it more compelling. It was always described in approximations and always out of focus. And then came the videos. Clips started showing up on YouTube.

[00:13:18] There were low-resolution footage of something moving beneath the ice, or distant white shapes breaching the surface and then sinking again. Most were clearly explainable. Chunks of ice flipping, marine mammals, camera glitches. But a few weren't so easy to dismiss. It became part of a growing digital folklore. A cousin to other cryptids like the Slender Man, the Rake, the Fresno Nightwalker, creatures born in chat rooms,

[00:13:47] and message boards. Now, what makes the Nijan different is that it's still tethered to a place that feels genuinely unknown. Unlike most cryptids, it's not lurking in the woods outside town or spotted in someone's backyard. It's Antarctica, a real place, but also a kind of frontier. The place so alien to most people that stories about it feel almost like science fiction. But throughout the research about such place,

[00:14:16] I stumbled upon more stories. And it made the area even more terrifying. The Vostok station doesn't get visitors. It doesn't even get much sunlight, depending on the time of year. It just sits in the middle of East Antarctica, over two miles above sea level, resting on a glacier so thick that it hides one of the largest subglacial lakes on the planet.

[00:14:41] The temperature there has dropped as low as minus 128 degrees Fahrenheit. Just about the coldest place humans have ever lived, even temporarily. It was built by the Soviets in the 1950s and remains one of the most isolated research outposts on Earth. For much of the year, it's unreachable. No supply flights, no way in or out. A skeleton crew stays behind through the Antarctic winter. They live in a windowless complex,

[00:15:10] buried partly under snow, surrounded by silence so complete that it's often described as oppressive. In the 1960s, during one of those long winter rover missions, a strange report quietly circulated within Soviet scientific circles. Not officially published, not in the paper or anything, but passed around through internal communications. Stories from the Vostok crew about things that they couldn't quite explain.

[00:15:40] According to these alleged accounts, several of the researchers began to experience intense psychological effects after just a few weeks of complete darkness. That in itself isn't unusual. The phenomenon is well known, like I mentioned earlier. But this case stood out. Multiple team members began reporting the same thing. The sense that they weren't alone. Vostok is a small station,

[00:16:07] and everyone knows where everyone else is at all times. This was something else though. Presence. Sometimes felt at the edge of vision, and other times as an overwhelming sensation of being watched. Even followed down narrow corridors inside the station. In one instance, a scientist reportedly locked himself in his room for two full days after claiming he heard breathing in the hallway when no one else was awake.

[00:16:36] Another crew member, in an unverified but persistent account, claimed to have seen a figure in the weather observation dome while the station was locked down for a storm. He assumed there was a colleague until he counted everyone inside. There was nobody missing. Everyone was there. None of this ever appeared in an official Soviet report. At the time, admitting psychological strain could have been seen as a sign of weakness,

[00:17:04] especially in such a politically sensitive, high-profile research operation. But years later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, details started surfacing. Quiet mentions in interviews, offhand references, and research discussions about mental health in extreme environments. Modern psychologists who study Antarctic conditions now recognize that these experiences aren't rare. There's even a term for it.

[00:17:34] The Antarctic Syndrome. Symptoms include depression, paranoia, hallucinations, even temporary psychosis. All heightened by the fact that you're thousands of miles from help, trapped in a featureless landscape with no sun and nothing but time. What makes the Vostok case unusual is how specific and shared the experiences were. Multiple people over a long period reporting similar sensations,

[00:18:02] even describing the same hallway or corner of the station where the presence was most intense. None of them, it's worth noting, had any prior history of mental illness. Whether it was a group psychological response to extreme stress, or something else entirely, the accounts from Vostok remained one of the strangest unsolved incidents from the early era of Antarctic exploration. And even decades later, when those corridors are empty,

[00:18:32] you get the sense that maybe the silence isn't always just silence. Operation High Jump was real. You can find the Navy records, the mission reports, even black and white newsreel footage of the ships leaving harbor. It was 1946, less than a year after World War II ended, and the U.S. launched one of the largest Antarctic expeditions in history.

[00:19:02] 13 ships, over 4,000 personnel, dozens of aircraft, I'm talking a full naval task force, all heading south. The official line was that it was a training operation, a way to test military equipment in extreme cold. Some mapping, some science, nothing unusual on paper. But there's a detail that people keep circling back to. The mission was scheduled to last six months,

[00:19:32] and it was called off after eight weeks. The public explanation was weather and logistics, a few accidents, harsh conditions, and sure, all of that's believable. Antarctica doesn't exactly make things easy. But still, the scale of an operation and the speed of its conclusion left room for questions. Questions that never really got answered. Then there's a quote. It comes from a Chilean newspaper called El Mercurio,

[00:20:01] published in March of 1947, shortly after the fleet returned. Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the mission's leader and respected polar explorer, was interviewed. According to the article, Byrd warned that America should prepare to defend itself against, quote, flying objects that could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds. That's a quote. Translated, repeated, debated, endlessly.

[00:20:30] It's never been confirmed in an official U.S. transcript. I mean, I couldn't find it. Some researchers claim that the original newspaper clipping actually exists. Others say that it's been misattributed or sensationalized. And that's where the theory starts. Some say the U.S. fleet encountered something unexpected in Antarctica, something they weren't prepared for. Not Nazi bases or submarines, though those rumors circulated too. This was something airborne,

[00:21:01] something unknown. Others say the early termination of the mission wasn't because of poor planning, but because whatever was found had to be quietly contained. Some of these ideas drift into the extreme, lost civilizations, extraterrestrial craft, they all circle back to the same tension. The official story doesn't quite line up with the size, the cost, and the abrupt end of the operation. It doesn't help that Antarctica

[00:21:30] is easy to keep secret. There are no locals, no press, no tourist infrastructure back then. And if something happened down there in 1947, only a small number of people would have seen it and fewer still would have been in a position to talk about it. The mission was quietly folded back into Navy history. Bird went on to lead other scientific expeditions. No further comment was made about the quote, and nothing classified about the mission has ever been released

[00:21:59] to suggest anything unusual occurred. Still, people remember. A six-month military operation cut short without warning, an admiral's offhand remark about high-speed craft near the poles in a continent that seems tailor-made to hold on to its secrets. I don't know. In the end, there may be nothing more to it than bad weather and unfortunate crashes, but Operation High Jump remains a quiet riddle in the history of Antarctic exploration.

[00:22:33] Lake Vostok doesn't look like much, just more ice in a place already defined by it. But buried more than two miles below the surface of East Antarctica, it's one of the most mysterious bodies of water on Earth. Massive, ancient, and sealed off from the surface for at least 15 million years. The lake stretches out about 150 miles long beneath the ice sheet. It's a place where sunlight has never reached, where pressure is extreme,

[00:23:03] and no known ecosystem should have survived. And yet, it has life. In the 1990s, Russian scientists worked at the Vostok station built directly above the lake. It began drilling down, slowly, cautiously. The idea was to reach the lake without contaminating it, to preserve whatever might be down there. But even before they broke through, something strange happened. The team began detecting a magnetic anomaly,

[00:23:33] a large, powerful distortion in the Earth's magnetic field located right beneath the lake surface. There was no clear explanation. It wasn't just a minor fluctuation, either. The reading suggested a concentrated magnetic signature spanning a large area, too strong and too uniform to be a random geological feature. Some speculated it could have been a natural formation like a large iron deposit or boundary in Earth's crust.

[00:24:03] Others quietly wondered if it might be something else, an artificial structure, geothermal vent, or even something as wild as an ancient impact site. There's no evidence for any of that, but the anomaly hasn't been definitively explained either. Then, in 2012, after decades of drilling, the Russian team finally reached the lake. They broke through the ice cap and extracted a core sample.

[00:24:33] What they found was unexpected. Signs of microbial life. Tiny, resilient organisms that had apparently survived in total isolation. In pitch black, high pressure, oxygen starved water. This discovery was huge. It suggested that life could exist in places long thought sterile, in environments once considered too extreme to support biology. But it also raised questions. If life could survive there,

[00:25:02] could it also survive in places like Europa or Enceladus, the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn with subsurface oceans? But not everything about the Lake Vostok mission has been transparent. Russia declined to share its samples widely with international researchers. There were delays in publishing the findings. At times, the communication about the drilling progress was minimal, even when funding and oversight were shared with global scientific bodies.

[00:25:32] This led to speculation. Some of it understandable, and some of it exaggerated, that there was something the team didn't want to publicize. Add to that the presence of that unexplained magnetic anomaly and your just inviting interpretation. To this day, much of what's beneath Lake Vostok remains unknown. There's still no full survey of the lake bed. The source of the magnetic disturbance hasn't been located. The microbial life

[00:26:02] is being studied, but details remain limited. And since reaching the lake, the drilling efforts have slowed, restricted by environmental concerns and the sheer difficulty of working under that much ice. It's probably nothing more than science playing out at the edge of what's possible, but there's something unsettling about the lake that's been sealed for millions of years, untouched by time, and then disturbed for the first time by human hands, only to respond with silence

[00:26:31] and a magnetic shrug. Mount Erebus doesn't look like what you would expect from Antarctica. Rising more than 12,000 feet above the icy expanse of Ross Island, it's one of the few consistently active volcanoes on Earth. Smoke drifts from a summit year-round, and beneath the crater is a lava lake, one of the only ones on the planet that's still bubbling continuously for decades.

[00:27:01] It's a harsh, beautiful, and surprisingly violent place, surrounded by glaciers and frozen sea. Researchers from all over the world have studied Erebus. They've installed seismic monitors, thermal cameras, and acoustic sensors. Some live for months at nearby McMurdo Station or in remote camps closer to the volcano itself. The goal is to understand how Erebus works and how its unique environment might help us

[00:27:30] understand the planet's deeper geology. There's something else people have reported here, something less measurable. It usually starts quietly, just a sound, not even a boom from the volcano and not wind, something else, something strange. Voices. Voices. That's what some scientists and mountaineers have said over the years. They weren't full conversations, just murmurs, indistinct and faint,

[00:27:59] almost like hearing someone talking in the next room when you know no one's there. Some describe it as whispering carried on the wind. Others say it's more structured, speech-like patterns, barely there. It's unsettling, but not unheard of in extreme environments. As we know, the mind can do odd things in isolation, but what makes Erebus interesting is that it may not be the mind playing tricks. At least, not entirely.

[00:28:28] Acoustic researchers have studied how sound travels around Mount Erebus and what they found is genuinely strange. The combination of super-cooled air, high-altitude winds, geothermal vents, and thick ice walls can create complex sound reflections. Whispers bounce in strange ways. Frequencies bend, and some sounds get amplified and others seem to vanish. And occasionally, you get what's called acoustic mirages, sounds that appear

[00:28:57] to come from somewhere they're not. In other words, the mountain has a voice of its own, and under just the right conditions, it might sound a little too much like ours. There are real recordings from Erebus that capture this phenomenon. Long, eerie tones layered with wind, distant rumbles, and faint, almost melodic sounds. To scientists, they're fascinating. To someone alone in a mountainside in freezing darkness, they can feel

[00:29:27] like something else entirely. I try to access some of these sounds, but they're in research depositories, and I was only able to access the research about those specific sounds that seem more around seismology and volcanic activity recordings. I can imagine the eeriness of something like that. Mount Erebus is also the site of one of the deadliest aviation disasters in polar history. In 1979, Air New Zealand Flight 901, a sightseeing flight over Antarctica,

[00:29:56] crashed into the side of the volcano during whiteout conditions. All 257 people on board were killed. The wreckage remained partially visible on the eyes for years. And while the cause was ultimately attributed to navigation error and poor weather, the crash added another layer of gravity to Erebus, already a place of fire and ice, and now, also one of quiet tragedy. No one's ever claimed

[00:30:26] to see anything unusual at Erebus. It's not a place known for ghost stories or myths, but those who've worked there long enough tend to agree on one thing. There are moments when it feels like you're not alone, when the mountain sounds less like geology and more like something breathing just out of sight. When you walk across snow that hasn't been stepped on in a hundred years, or sit in a station buried beneath the ice thick enough to hide a lake, you start to understand

[00:30:55] why stories like these exist. But here's something else to think about. What if this world isn't as empty as it looks? A figure beneath the water, barely visible through shifting ice, an unexplained magnetic force sealed beneath a forgotten lake, voices that drift through volcanic steam, too structured to be coincidence and too strange to trust, a military expedition that packed up and left with no real explanation,

[00:31:24] and always, in the background, the same hum of uncertainty, something people can't quite name, but keep trying to describe. In all these stories, there's a pattern, not of creatures or cover-ups necessarily, but of perception pressed to its limit. Antarctica strips away distraction, it forces people to confront scale, silence, and time in a way that few places do. It's why we like to keep the TV on,

[00:31:54] or maybe this episode in the background. Silence just opens up the way for the mind to do things to us. And if there's one thing that the human brain doesn't like, it's the unknown. So we fill it. With stories, with shapes, with whispers in the wind and shadows under the sea. And until something offers us answers and whether these are real or not, they'll keep lingering in that cold, dark silence

[00:32:23] of Antarctica. This episode of Horror Story was researched and produced by me, Edwin Covarrubias. What other remote places give you the creeps? Which reminds me, if you want to hear more creepy stuff, come find me on my new show called Paranormal Club. It's on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. You can find it by searching for

[00:32:52] Paranormal Club on your app. These stories are also available without ads if you try out Scary Plus over on scaryplus.com. Remember to tap follow on this show so you can get another story next week. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon.