I Pulled the Dead Out of an Appalachian Reservoir. The Water Was Not What Killed Them.

I took a winter job pulling junk off the bottom of a drained reservoir in the Blue Ridge. Coldwater sits over a town the state flooded in the seventies, the church and the school and all of it, sixty feet down, and when they draw the water off for dam work the whole drowned valley comes back up into the daylight. Old cars and foundations. The graveyard they were supposed to move and never finished moving.And bodies.The first one we found was laid out on the open mud with his face to the sky, a good thirty feet from any water that could have put him there. The county called it a drowning. Everybody called it a drowning. But there is a way to read a body that has come out of a lake, and the old warden who taught me how to read it said the same thing every time we pulled one up that winter. Wet on the outside. Dry where it counts. Went in already gone.This is the story of what was really killing the men of Coldwater, and what kept carrying them back up out of the deep to be found. It is also the reason I still drive out to that ramp once a year and will not walk down to the waterline.DarkHorrorNarrations Merch Store Is Now Live: https://darkhorrornarrations.com