Creepy Classics & Monster Bash News

Dark waters run deep...and they are scary! When I was a kid I loved swimming. Swimming in swimming pools. Not in lakes, or even in the ocean. This was before the time of the JAWS movie. I always had a fear of swimming in waters that had creatures living in it. Creatures you couldn't see. The mystery of what's below the surface.

Perhaps this deep seeded dread began with things my Grandmother Adams said when we were vacationing with the whole extended Adams family. We were either at Geneva-On-The-Lake in Ohio or at Erie out on Presque Isle. Both of those areas on the southern beaches of Lake Erie. She would tell us kids, me and my cousins, not to go in the water after eating. We'd get the bends and go under the water and drown. My older cousins added serious concern about some mysterious force called the "undertow." Where the water itself, like a living behemoth, would grab us kids from under the surface and drag us out to perish.

Those vacations were fun. Staying in cottages and enjoying the sun and reading comic books. But it was perhaps the beginning of the ominous feeling of something dark and bad beneath the surface of open bodies of water. This dread made the jump into the movies I watched and the books I read.

While still in elementary school, I would get books on the Loch Ness Monster from the school library or from Scholastic Book orders. This Loch Ness Monster, perhaps a hold-over dinosaur, that may have lived in northern Scotland fascinated me. It was scary, it was in a very dark lake. I would stare endlessly at the hazy photos in some of the books. Humps, fins, and large things underwater.

I was still very young when I saw both the movies DINOSAURUS and GORGO. These films depicted dinosaur sea beasts in deep waters at the beginning of their respective films. I imagined myself in scuba gear in the murky waters, suddenly realizing I was next to a hundred foot monster. It was truly a frightening thought.

As a young adult I still had this underbelly fear of dark waters and mystical (and some not mystical) beasts that lived there. I was drawn to movies like THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD, 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS from Disney with that massive squid, and more obscure movies like THE SECRET OF THE LOCH.

As an adult, after I was married, we took one vacation overseas. Where? I bet you can guess at this point. Scotland and the Loch Ness region. We stayed in the town of Inverness on the north end of the lake. The countryside was beautiful with green rolling hills. We spent a week traveling to all the little villages around the lake. Eating in the small pubs and chatting with friendly locals. On one day we took a tourist boat from near Urquhart Castle (that was on the edge of the loch). It was exciting. But, looking overboard as we cut through the black water, my mind drifted. What if the boat sank and we had to swim in this water?

The thoughts of splashing and swimming in that legendary lake terrified and panicked my brain. My thoughts still going back to my grandmother's words of warning and my cousins' talk of undertow...that branded me with fear of dark waters.

-Ron Adams 
Ligonier, PA 
October 2025