Last year, I came across a tick-tok of a big cargo ship lumbering through a treacherous part of the North Sea.

It's pitch black all around in the video, hundreds of miles of ocean sprawling out in either direction.

All that's really visible are the large, heavy waves throwing the boat around.

And then, just in the distance, comes a wave, three times the size of anything around it.

This is what's known as a rogue wave.

It bashes into the front of the ship, briefly sending part of it underwater.

But then it emerges and continues its trek further into the inky blackness.

This is the North Sea, a horrifying 200,000 square miles of frigid water between Norway and

Great Britain that have carried tides of death for centuries. Right now, it's a source of horror

content on TikTok and YouTube, but did you know that people have been terrified of the North Sea

for thousands of years? This is Heart Starts Pounding, and I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. And today,

I want to take you through a history of

horror in the North Sea. I want to tell you about the creatures the Viking saw that took down

entire ships, the lost city, the sea swallowed whole, and a very real and very horrific

accident that happened there more recently. In my mind, this episode gets less fantastical

as we go, starting with folklore and ending with real world horror. Episodes like this make me

even more thankful that I get to tell these stories by the fire in the rogue detecting society

headquarters, because I think I would literally rather be shot into the sun than have to sit on a cargo ship in the North Sea.

And actually, speaking of icy remote locations, I just did a bonus episode selected by the

High Council tier on Patreon about Antarctica conspiracy theories. Was there a giant door found on Google

maps in the middle of the continent? What could

possibly be hiding down there? You're going to have to listen to the episode to find out,

...