Bone-chilling footage of large ship passing over diver unlocks 'new nightmare' for viewers

The ocean is almost as frightening as it is fascinating, as what to some holds leagues of unexplored wonders is simultaneously an endless nightmare that you can't escape from to others.

You don't even need to consider all of the dangerous and killer animals that roam through the endless waters to be scared of the ocean, as the simple premise of something like thalassophobia is the intense and persistent fear of large, open bodies of water.

Thankfully you can probably avoid even dipping your toes in the sea for your entire life if you so wish, yet the rise of the internet has seen a number of horrifying videos that share an experience that will haunt your nightmares.

One notorious one sees a passenger on a cruise ship throw their GoPro camera overboard to see what lies underneath the vessel's hull, yet there's a diver that seemingly went one step further and found themselves right underneath a passing boat in what turned out to be bone-chilling footage.

Shared on Reddit by u/Electrical-Aspect-13, the video shows a first-person perspective of a diver at the bottom of a river, only to find themselves trapped underneath a passing ship that is dangerously close to the river bed.

The start of the video shows a large black object rapidly approaching and filling up the screen, and only then does the diver appear to panic, covering their eyes with their hands as the rest of the screen goes black.

The ship itself is almost on top of the diver as it continues forward, presumably completely unaware that it was mere meters away from striking someone underwater, and the nightmarish footage lasts for a few seconds that end up feeling like hours.

While it might seem incredibly unsafe for a ship to be that close to the floor, it's actually an extremely common passage and something that is very much taken into consideration during pre-arrival and pre-departure calculations.

Large freighter ships constantly go up and down the St Clair River, calculating the precise and close distance they can get to the river's floor (Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images)

This particular ship is sailing down the St Clair River in central North America, and it also appears as if the diver was aware of how close these boats find themselves to the bottom and set it up so that they'd be caught underneath in a close shave.

One particular detail you might have managed to catch is the rope that they have attached themselves to, presumably to stop them floating up to a dangerous level where the ship would actually hit them.

Some have wondered whether this was a set up, speculating that if the diver "did it for content he would have had more camera control. Bro is panicking like a total f***wad," but another noted that "one thing is having the idea, other is doing it."