Picture this. It's 1964, and you're on Atlantic City's Steel Pier. It's a man-made peninsula that extends

a thousand feet into the Atlantic Ocean. You can hear the crashing of waves and the roar of a crowd

all around you. And standing at the edge of a 40-foot-high diving board is a

horse with a bikini-clad woman on its back. It was a white horse. He didn't dive immediately.

And I did not have the sense that he was afraid at all. But he just seemed to me that he was just taking it in, was enjoying his moment in the spotlight.

And then without warning, he took off.

Now the whole thing lasted, I guess, 30 seconds, 20 seconds.

That moment just feared into my consciousness.

So that's Cynthia Branigan.

She witnessed this very real, very bizarre spectacle when she was just 11 years old.

And she never forgot the day that she watched this horse dive into a small pool of water and emerge unhurt.

It would forever change her life.

I'm Dylan Theris, and this is Atlas of Skira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, the story of the diving horses of Atlantic City, how they got there,

what happened to them, and how this one woman fought to save the very last of them. That story,

after this. So I'm here with Diana Hubble. She's a reporter for Atlas of Skira, and she wrote a big piece on these diving

horses of Atlantic City. Welcome back to the show, Diana. It's great to see you again. Yeah,

it's great to be back. Horse diving sounds fairly dangerous. Oh, yeah, 100%. It's not an inherently

safe thing to do. There were definitely a few broken bones that we know about

between, for both horses and humans. And in the early days of horse diving, there is one

human fatality that we know about.

Diving, 40 feet, has its own dangers. And then you're adding, like, I don't know how much

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