Edgar Allen Poe's Maelstrom is one of those wonderfully romantic literary devices, a huge

gaping whirlpool that swallows entire ships whole. Maelstroms are, of course, real, but

is there actually one somewhere in the world with the gargantuan dimensions described

by Poe, and is it truly a real hazard to navigation? The Maelstrom is up next on Skeptoid.

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You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com

into the Maelstrom or not. Today we're going to go in search of a real live sea monster,

one that has graced the pages of fiction and non-fiction alike. The legendary Maelstrom is a

whirlpool that eats men and ships alike. Anything that gets caught up in its great funnel is such

to the depths and crushed forever, never to return to the surface or the light. Does such a mighty beast

actually exist somewhere in the world? The word Maelstrom comes from the Dutch for grinding

current, and has come to refer to any current-induced whirlpool. There are a lot of them throughout

the world, including famous ones that reappear with each tide. Maelstroms first became infamous

among the public at large when Edgar Allan Poe wrote his fictional 1841 short story,

a descent into the Maelstrom, in which an ancient mariner recounts his tale of being a

border ship that was sucked down to its doom. Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror,

and admiration with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be hanging as if by magic midway

down upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth,

...