Welcome to Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.

Summer arrived without a thaw.

Alisha and his crew suffered the teeth of ice through June, then through July, and on

into the darkening fall.

Winter was coming again.

So for these lost explorers, it had never really left.

The men were trapped, stranded and alone in a frozen cove off the northwest coast of

Greenland.

In his published writings, Alisha seemed like a stalwart voice of reason in the midst

of a crew who were spooked by shadows, but his private diary tells a different tale.

In the days after Alisha rebuked his men for ghost hunting on the ice, he had his own

series of visions that left him shocked.

Waking dreams, he called them.

And they were intense.

One minute he wrote he was on the frozen ship, the next though he was transported back to

his family home, right into the dining room, and the whole family was gathered around

the table, feasting and laughing.

He would have held onto that vision as long as he could, but it seemed like a trance

that was out of his hands, until that is a few days later when he was trying to build

a fire, and a strange glow like a spirit light surrounded his hand in the darkness.

He wondered if this was the end, if he was preparing to cross over into the spirit world.

In the end, Alisha and his men only survived the unrelenting cold because they began to

...