Episode 3: What It Left Behind

Leaving a place doesn't always mean leaving it behind.

Three days after returning home to Kansas City, Sara begins having dreams about Table Rock Lake. In them, she drifts above the flooded valley, suspended in dark water while something ancient moves below.

The lake is hundreds of miles away.

Yet every night she wakes with the same feeling:

Cold.

Not the room.

Her.

In the final chapter of Something in the Water, Carolyn explores what happened after the trip ended—and whether some encounters leave behind more than memories.

Local divers speak quietly about cold spots that shouldn't exist. About moments of disorientation in familiar waters. About the persistent sensation that something beneath the lake is watching from below.

No disappearances.

No documented tragedies.

Just stories.

And the feeling.

Across Indigenous traditions, the Underwater Panther was never simply a monster. It was a force—a boundary between worlds. Those touched by it were sometimes believed to carry a lingering awareness of what lies beneath the surface.

Sara was eventually asked whether she believed something followed her home.

Her answer was simple:

"I think I got noticed by something very old that doesn't notice people very often. And now I know it's there. And it knows I know."

Table Rock Lake remains as beautiful as ever: blue water, green hills, children leaping from docks on summer afternoons.

But beneath the surface lie flooded towns, forgotten roads, and older stories that may never have truly disappeared.

Case file closed.

Or perhaps merely submerged.

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