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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/PCTWH on 2024-11-02 14:45:28+00:00.

Firstly, a quick introduction. I’m Cheryl, and my husband is Mark. We’re a husband and wife couple who were planning to start the Natural World Adventure Vlog, but my husband’s injuries will make that impossible. We just want answers to what happened in the cave. But I think it’s best to get everyone on the same page about Rock Well.

Rock Well Caverns is a recently opened show cave somewhere in England. The exact location isn’t something I can tell you right now, as news of this event seems to be getting removed for some reason. This might be tourism related, or it might be to prevent public paranoia. You’ll see the caverns have a sort of “spooky” theme, with witches and skeletons and the like around the front entrance. This is sort of what attracted us to it: a new, unheard of location with a theme perfect for the Halloween season, which is when we planned of launching the channel.

Okay, I’ll speed up a little for Mark’s sake. I’ll get through the backstory and caves, then Mark can take over. With the condition his mouth’s in, we have a system that allows him to dictate words to me using eye tracking software. 

We arrived pretty early.  I think we were the 20th or so visitor into the caves. The mouth was pretty unassuming, just a crack in the side of the valley wall, barely squeezing the metal walkway between the jagged sides. We travelled in groups of ten to prevent the cave getting clogged with visitors. It was like walking through a portal. The warm Summer air of outside quickly became colder, almost slimier, once we entered the Caverns. It smelled of limestone, the smell so thick I was almost worried my nose would clog up with limescale. The group was ushered into a chamber, one lit with thick red lights that cast elongated shadows across the damp walls. This is where we were told the backstory of this place.

According to local legend, plants and crops around the town started to die off one week after a supposed witch was executed in the town centre. Their roots turned to stone and flaked away. People who drank the water from the well wouldn’t fare much better. Some would pass, as our tour guide called them, “intestine stones”, others would have their insides turned to rock. They’d fall to the ground with a bone-cracking thud as the petrified organs slammed into their ribs. This was believed to be nothing more than a morbid tale inspired by the town’s name, until a cave explorer discovered an underground lake. A petrifying well.

Maybe you know of the petrifying well in Mother Shipton’s Cave, North Yorkshire. A thin trickle of water coats any object placed under it with minerals over the course of months. This lake is like that, but stranger. The body of water is stagnant, and, perhaps because of that, the effects are much faster. It takes seconds to coat something, not months. Nobody knows why. The visitor attraction is partly a way to get funding for experiments on the lake, but the working theory is the water’s lack of movement, as well as lack of exposure to weather, allows the process to happen faster. My husband and I disagree.

Deeper into the cave, our tour guide pointed out inscriptions on the walls. They are apparently indecipherable, but they could be phrases in an ancient language eroded to incomprehensibility. Mark’s telling me he took some close up shots of these, but with the camera in the state it’s in, they’ll be unrecoverable. From memory, they seemed almost geometric. The “erosion” theory seems like a stretch, with how preserved the shapes are. Mark also tells me of the rocks found on the floor. Some child in the first group found a gemstone, barely reachable from the walkway. I can remember a conversation between tour guides about whether he could keep it. Management got involved, but we’re not sure what came of it. Mark believes this detail is important, and I almost forgot to mention it. I was more shaken by the gust of wind from deeper in the caves. It smelled even stronger than the cave’s natural atmosphere. It almost felt sandy. I remember brushing some kind of powdered rock (it felt like salt) off my face.

The next chamber of the cave is the petrifying well. I’ll give you a description of the room, before I let Mark give his side of the story.

The chamber is a massive dome shape. A row of electric lights were supposed to illuminate the pool, but some were out, coated in some kind of sediment. The dim light illuminated a milky pool below, surrounded by beaches of rough sand. We were on a metal platform, ten metres above the pool. Around the railings, a series of metal wires acted as safety nets in case anybody lost their footing too near the edge. The smell here was the strongest, even the tour guide suggested only having a brief look at the pool and regrouping outside the chamber. In hindsight, everything was leading to what happened.

Before Mark takes over, I’ll say right now that the doctors found no evidence of head trauma. He is in relatively sound mind, and I believe everything he’s told me. I’ll let him talk now.

“Why me?” I can’t stop thinking that. I’ve been told that if I have a positive outlook, it’ll be better for me. Well, finding shoes in my size was always a hassle - I’m glad I’ll never have to do that again. Anyway… I’ll start properly now.

I had this feeling in my stomach when we entered the chamber. It was like I swallowed an entire ice cube, but I just chalked it up to the stench that place gave off. The best description I can give is “it smelled like an old, damp church in the rain”. The walkway was thin, the water was bubbling, the lights were dimming. I should’ve run out of there. But I just needed some footage of the pool. Everyone else had left, and they were congregating around the tour guide as I slowly walked back towards the crack in the wall that formed the chamber’s entrance. I didn’t even get halfway when a powerful gust of wind blew me back, it forced my scream of fear back into my lungs. I think you [he’s referring to me, Cheryl] were out of the chamber when this happened - I let you go ahead so you could hear what the guide was saying. Each backward step I took felt lighter than the last, until I was totally weightless. The camera I tightly held onto flew out of my hands as I was launched over the railing.

It felt like it took several hours. Flying over the safety nets and several metres into the pool can’t have taken long, but my head was racing. Nothing seemed real. I couldn’t process what was happening as cold cave air rushed past my head. Then I felt a splash.

Sound became muffled. Powered by nothing but adrenaline, I forced my head above the water. For a split second, I thought the stories of the petrifying pool were exaggerated. That I was safe in the water. I reasoned that the heaviness on my lower body was due to my clothes being waterlogged, and that the tingling feeling on my face was just sediment from the pool. Luckily, I hadn’t fallen too far away from the walkway, and underneath it was a rocky outcropping, just above the waterline. I’m not sure how I made it there, but when I did, I flopped onto the rock. It felt… strange. Not the rock, but the impact. It was like my entire body was wrapped in a hard, rough bandage that dulled all sensation. Something was on me. I could barely see it in the dim lighting, but my coat and trousers had turned to stone and fused with my body. My vision became hazy and filled with dark splotches as I began to panic. I could hear you [me, Cheryl] screaming my name as lights scanned the pool, so I tried to call back. But pain surged through my body as I did. My coat crumbled away, and it must’ve taken some flesh with it. The parts of my chest that weren’t numb burned and screamed in agony. In a panic, I tried to grab my chest, but my left arm began to flake away. By the time I grabbed my crumbling body, it was only a stump. The water on my face hardened into dust. I brushed it off, with sharp stings of pain as the rock was torn away, before everything turned black. 

I jolted back awake. At first, I expected to be in my bed, maybe wrestling with you for the covers, but the stench of limestone quenched that fantasy. The lights were mostly out now, the cave became a wall of darkness. Everyone was gone. I assume they left to get help, to start a search party. The skin I had left was sweaty and clammy. Intense nausea throttled my stomach as I rolled around on the rock. I couldn’t feel it, but I knew fragments of rock were chipping off my body. Even my mouth was turning to stone. That was all I was - a lump of stone with a head. My face bled, and I could feel several layers of rock scraping against each other as I moved. Well, I couldn’t feel the rock, but I could feel the vibrations made by the friction, and the echoing of these vibrations in my teeth. I lay in a panic induced haze, when I heard a splash. A light flicked, illuminating the outline of a humanoid figure in the pool. That thing wasn’t human. It was too thin. It looked more like a skeleton linked by just enough muscle to hold it together. I kicked and rocked, trying to move away from the water, when my shin slammed into the metal support of the walkway. As a metallic clang echoed out, I could feel my crumbling away. 

Something grabbed me and scraped my chest with what felt like a blunt metal pole. The light flickered again. This skeletal figure had me pinned down with its finger, and was scratching something into my skin. I tried t…

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