A ghost in the darkness

Illustration: Ian Legge

The opening to the underwater cave was barely wider than her shoulders. When she slipped through, Stephanie Schwabe entered a world few have ever seen, a world of absolute darkness now brilliantly illuminated by her lights. The crystalline walls of the cave glittered like jewels. Bone-white stalactites and stalagmites reached out towards her as she swam deeper and further into the Mermaid’s Lair, on the south side of Grand Bahama Island, to her destination, nearly 300m away, and 30m deep. For all its strangeness, it was a routine dive for the 40-year old underwater explorer rated as one of the top divers in the world – except for the fact she was alone.

Usually, Schwabe had dived with her husband, British cave explorer Rob Palmer. He was an expert on the Blue Holes of the Bahamas, a system of spectacular submarine caves that includes the world’s deepest known Blue Hole, a vertical cave given its name because the water of the cave is much darker than the blue of the shallow water around it. It is a world of skeletal calcite appendages and vast hidden cathedrals, inhabited only by small colourless species of sea life, many unknown to science.

Even today, most of the caves remain unexplored. The Mermaid’s Lair, an extensive horizontal cave, was an exception. It had been explored previously by Palmer and Schwabe together, but not this day. Palmer was dead. He had failed to surface after a dive in the Red Sea earlier that year. Schwabe was left to continue alone their challenging and dangerous work, researching the water-filled Bahamian cave systems.

It was late August 1997, and Schwabe, a geomicrobiologist, was there to collect sediment samples for another scientist who was studying dust from the Sahara Desert that, centuries earlier, had been carried by winds across the Atlantic Ocean and deposited on the floor of the Mermaid’s Lair. The day had already been unexpectedly eventful. When she was driving out to the dive site, Schwabe had been forced to stop by a poisonwood tree that had been blown down by a storm the day before, blocking the road. It took all her strength to push it aside, and in the process she suffered serious skin irritations from alkaloids in the sap. She decided to continue, however, and having reached her destination, climbed into scuba gear and began her dive, focused on collecting the samples and exiting quickly.

Once she reached the floor of the cave, she spent half an hour diligently gathering the red dust samples. When she was finished, Schwabe packed her equipment away and for the first time since she had reached the spot, lifted her eyes. She suddenly realised that she could not see her guide-line. She searched for it, at first calmly, but then with increasing anxiety, but could not find it. Cave diving is technically challenging. Unlike other forms of diving, in an emergency, the diver cannot ascend directly to the surface, but often must swim horizontally, sometimes through a maze of narrow passages. The guide-line is vital to get safely out of such complex submarine cave systems. It is literally a lifeline.

Without it, a diver can quickly become disoriented, eventually run out of air, and be asphyxiated. Schwabe experienced a growing sense of panic. She immediately realised her mistake. When she dived with Palmer, she often relied on him to serve as her guide. On this dive, she had inadvertently fallen into the same old pattern, and lost sight of the line. ‘I had based my dive on the unplanned assumption that he was there’.

But he was not there and had not been for months; she was alone. She checked her tank gauge, and realised that she had only 20 minutes left. Schwabe’s panic turned to anger.

She flew into a rage, furious at Palmer for his death, her sense of loss as palpable as the terror she felt. Angry, too, at herself for making an elementary diving mistake that threatened now to claim her own life. ‘For all intents and purposes, at that moment, I had given up on life. I was ready to leave this world. I was so depressed and I missed Rob. I had had enough of the pain.’

Then, at the height of the rage and sadness, Schwabe said, ‘I suddenly felt flushed and it seemed like my field of vision had become brighter.’ She vividly felt the presence of another being with her. There was no doubt in her mind that someone was with her in the cave. She believed it to be her dead husband. She heard his voice, communicating mentally with her. ‘All right, Steffi, calm down. Remember, believe you can, believe you can’t, either way you are right. Remember?’ It was something Palmer used to say to her acting as an invocation to her inner strength. Schwabe was stunned by the intervention, but it was a help to her, and she did calm down. She sat there on the floor of the cave, ‘trying to get a handle on why my brain was going this route’.

About 15 minutes had passed since she realised she had lost the line. Time was running out. When she looked up again, she did so with renewed resolve and calm. She methodically scanned the cave. She thought she saw the flash of a white line.

Simultaneously, she felt as if the presence had gone. Schwabe was alone again in the cave. She looked up once more to where she caught a glimpse of her guide-line, and she saw it again. Schwabe immediately swam up to the line, and followed it out. Eventually she saw the blue entrance, where light filtered into the cave. She thought to herself, ‘today was not a good day to die’. She felt as if she had been saved by a presence she was sure was her deceased husband.

SURVIVING THE IMPOSSIBLE

Steffi Schwabe’s story is an extract from John Geiger’s book, The Third Man Factor, which compares the experiences of adventurers and explorers at the edge of death. In many cases, they sense an incorporeal being beside them who encourages them to make one final effort to survive.

If only a handful of people had ever reported such experiences, they could be dismissed as the delusions, however, over the years the experience has occurred repeatedy, to aviators, divers, mountaineers, polar explorers and astronauts.

The phenomenon has been explained as everything from hallucination to divine intervention. Recent research suggests it may be part of a hard-wired neurological response to extreme situations, a so-called ‘angel switch’ that empowers people in extreme danger to rescue themselves. Whatever the truth, the ‘third man’ phenomenon has a profound effect on all those who experience it.

• The Third Man
Factor by John Geiger
is published by Canongate, ISBN 9781847674197, priced £12.99