Catfish

The Catfish is a scary urban legend about a giant fish that lives beneath a dam in the Ohio river. Two divers encounter it when they go down to recover a submerged car.

Back in the 1950s, the government constructed a dam on the Ohio River. A decade or two after the dam was finished, a motorist accidentally drove off the road and his car plunged into the river beside the dam. Emergency units couldn’t get there in time and the driver was presumed to have drowned.

Maintenance workers at the dam reported that one of the inflow pipes in the dam had become blocked. The dam was shut down for a few days, and two divers were sent down to the bottom to recover the motorist’s body and make repairs.

Only one diver returned. He scrambled out of the water as quickly as he could and started screaming and shouting. He claimed that when they had been trying to open the car door, they saw a huge shadow above them. When he looked up, he saw a giant catfish about the size of a car swimming above them. Nobody believed him, but he refused to go back into the water for fear that he might get swallowed whole.

As the people on shore were waiting for the other diver to emerge from the murky waters, they saw a pair of severed human legs surface near the wall of the dam. They watched in horror as a gigantic catfish reared out of the water and swallowed the legs in one gulp. Then, it disappeared back into the depths. It had attacked the second diver and sliced him in half with one bite.

They say the car is still submerged at the base of the dam because nobody dares to go down and remove it. The catfish had grown to such a monstrous size because of the ideal conditions for catfish at the base of the dam and the abundant food that was pulled in by the flow of the water.