North Sea Incident: 3 Vanished Without A Trace

We found the boat first, docked at the access ladder, engine off, half a tank of fuel. We found the camera's second, face down in a lower corridor, the battery died during the night of September 15th, food, phones, wallets, everything you take home with you. The three men who brought those things were gone. My name is Detective Sergeant Neil Ashworth. In September 2021, three men went missing from an offshore structure approximately 20 miles off the North Sea coast. The structure was not on any current maritime chart. No registered owner, no decommission record, no regulatory status of any kind. As far as any official system was concerned, it did not exist. The three men are Daniel Ashcroft, 28, Luke Garner, 27, Kieran Price, 29, childhood friends from Hull, no criminal records, no history of mental illness, no debts, no disputes, no reason for any of them to disappear. They found the platform through a forum post on an urban exploration site. The post has since been deleted. The account that posted it was created the same day and never used again. We've been unable to trace it. What follows is their footage. We are releasing it because in three years of investigation, we have found nothing that explains what happened to these men. If you recognize anything, the structure, the equipment, the markings, anything at all, the contact number is on your screen. The case remains open. The footage starts with water, grey water, flat. The North Sea on a calm September morning. I was holding the camera one handed in the bow of a rented, rigid inflatable. The outboard loud behind us, cold spray off the hull every few seconds. Kieran was at the back by the engine, steering and talking. He hadn't stopped talking since we left the coast. For months he'd spent convincing us this was worth doing and his voice had that sound. The sound of a person being proven right. Luke was at the front, sitting with his back to where we were heading, watching the water go past beneath him. He hadn't said much since we launched. That's Luke. He talks when he has something. Otherwise he's just there. I turned the camera forward. The platform, far away still, maybe two miles, but already the biggest thing on the horizon, rust orange and grey against a white sky. The drilling derrick first, a metal tower rising from the center of the structure with nowhere left to go. Below that, the accommodation block, square and heavy, rows of dark windows. Below that, the legs, four thick steel columns going straight down into the water. On the side of the accommodation block, large painted letters, faded but still readable, scarven. That was what the forum post had called it. Kieran called out from behind me. There she is, told you she was real. I didn't answer. The engine dropped and the spray stopped, and for a few seconds the only sound was the idle of the outboard, and that shape ahead getting bigger in the frame. Up close it stopped looking manageable. Up close it was just metal and rust rising straight out of the sea. The platform groaned, a deep sound that came and went with the swell, and Kieran brought us around to the east side where the access ladder was bolted to one of the legs. Luke looked at it. Bolts look fine, it'll hold. That's how he works. He's been sizing up structures since he was 15, pulling himself up derelict railway bridges with us while Kieran and I were still deciding whether to climb. We tied off. Kieran went first, then me one handed with the camera, then Luke. The climb was loud, boots on metal rungs, a hollow ringing that carried up through the entire structure and echoed off the steel decking above. Half way up I looked down. The boat was small and white on dark water, the tall line going taught and slack with the swell. We pulled ourselves up onto the lowest deck, pipes and valves and junction boxes around us. The wind constant and carrying salt and old diesel from whatever this platform used to pump. Nothing moving, no sound except the wind and the groaning of the structure below us. Kieran said, "Right, let's see what we've got." The first door into the superstructure was a heavy steel fire door, stiff from years of nobody touching it. Kieran put both hands on the lever, not locked, it swung inward. Everything outside was 12 degrees in damp and the air from inside was warm and close and thick, old metal, rubber, something faintly sweet underneath that none of us could name. Three decades sealed in the same steel box. I hit the camera light, cream walls gone yellow, metal floor, footsteps suddenly sharp and echoey where outside they'd been swallowed by the wind. We followed the corridor, every door we passed was shut. Half way down, a workbench against the wall, a wrench laid across an open valve housing mid-turn, like someone had set it down to go do something and never came back. Thread tape still wound around the pipe joint next to it, the loose end curling over the edge of the bench. Next to the bench, a whiteboard bolted to the wall, a work roster, 28 names. Some shifts ticked off, the last column half filled, like someone got halfway through and stopped. Hard hats on pegs along the corridor. Kieran picked one up, turned it over, read the name, put it back. Luke counted them, 14 hats, 28 names. Why would you leave your hard hat, Kieran said? Not a question. I filmed the roster, then the tools, then the corridor ahead. This isn't what a decommission looks like, I said. When they shut a platform down, they strip everything. This looks like they just stopped one day and walked off. Luke said, or ran. Nobody laughed. We kept moving and reached the mess hall. In the room, tables bolted to the floor, bench-seating. Strip lights hanging dead from the ceiling, a serving hatch at one end, a menu board on the wall with the last meal still written in chalk, lamb stew, mashed potato, the handwriting slanted and quick, someone who wrote that board every day without thinking about it. Kieran read it out and grinned, classic. He set up camp at the table nearest to the window, sleeping bags on the bench seats, gear on the table. The window faced east and through it the sea stretched out flat and gray with no edge, no break. While Luke and I sorted the gear, Kieran picked up the camera and wandered off down the corridor without saying where he was going. He came back a few minutes later and put it on the table. I didn't ask. I set the camera facing us. All three and frame for the first time. Kieran tearing into an MRE. Luke by the window, hands in his pockets, dark against the pale glass. I dropped onto the bench and rubbed my face. We'd been up since four. Kieran said, "We're here. This is day one on the scarven." He held up the MRE like a toast. I said to camera, "Day one, September 12th, it's not what I expected. It's like everyone just left in the middle of a Tuesday." The boat down there looks really small from up here. Nobody said anything. Somewhere below us the platform groaned, a long low sound that came up through the floor and into the bench. I reached forward and cut the camera. Later, darker outside. I held the camera at arm's length, pointed at my own face. Behind me the mess hall was just shapes and passed that the corridor where the light gave out after a few meters. Signing off from day one on the scarven, bit creepy, a lot of stuff left behind. We'll do a proper exploration tomorrow. Kieran's already planned the whole route. From somewhere near the window, Luke's voice, good night. Camera off. Kieran had a route planned before I'd even opened my eyes. He'd drawn it on the back of an MRE packet, accommodation deck first, then operations, then lower levels. And he was lacing his boots and talking through it when I turned to the camera on. Luke was eating. We started on the accommodation deck. First corridor passed the mess hall, doors on both sides. The same shut doors we'd walked past the day before without opening. Kieran opened the first one. Bunk room. Four beds. Too high. Too low. Matrices still on the frames. Sheets still on the mattresses. Then cotton gone yellow. The pillow on the top bunk nearest to the door still had a dent in it. Below the lower bunk, a pair of steel-toed work boots on the floor. Laces tied. Leather gone stiff and dark. Nobody had untied them, whoever took those boots off was planning to put them back on. On the small shelf above the pillow, a photograph of a woman and a child in a garden somewhere, a stick of deodorant with no cap, a wristwatch with a metal band. The watch had stopped, the photograph was sharp and unfaited because no light had touched it in 32 years. Here and filmed it from the doorway, then said the thing he'd say all day, "Why would you leave this?" Next room, clothes folded in a small cabinet, a paperback face down on a bed, spined cracked open at whatever page someone stopped reading. Halfway through, they didn't finish. A coffee mug on the floor by the lower bunk, dark ring dried inside, next room, a half-written letter on the desk. The handwriting was neat at the top and got looser toward the bottom, the way writing gets when you're tired and still pushing through. It stopped mid-sentence, mid-thought, like the pen had just been set down for a moment. I didn't read the words, felt wrong, but I filmed it. Next room, a wallet in the open locker, driver's license still in the clear pocket, the face in the photo, young and serious, a packet of cigarettes on the shelf with three left. But he took anything. Kiran opened every door, he was counting, that's eight, that's nine. He kept filming and he kept saying it, "Why would you leave this?" But by the sixth or seventh room, his voice had changed, quieter. Luke stopped going inside after the fourth room. He stood in the corridor and looked in from the doorway and then moved to the next one. "I asked if he was alright," he said, "Yeah, just a lot of bedrooms." Rec Room Television bolted to a wall bracket, VHS player underneath, power light dead. A stack of tapes on the shelf, action films, comedies, the kind of thing you'd watch on a rig in 1988 when the shift was done. Board on the wall with three darts still in it, two in the twenty, one in the wire, a calendar pinned next to the dartboard showing October 1989. Nobody ever turned the page. Through a boot room where 30 pairs of workboots sat on a metal rack, some with names on the heels, some without. Through a laundry room where a yellow hive is jacket still hung from a peg above a basin. Kiran had stopped talking. "I'd known him since we were eleven and that didn't happen." He walked through the rooms and filmed and said nothing and after a while I noticed he was pointing the camera at things I wasn't. Corners, ceilings, the space behind open doors, operations room, main deck, heavy door not locked, inside a desk, two chairs, a radio unit with the handset still in its cradle, banks of dead dials on the wall, a shelf of binders, and the logbooks, three of them, thick, hard bound. Kiran pulled the first one down and opened it. Shift reports, handwritten, one entry per shift, the same format every time. Date, time, crew on duty, weather, operation status, anything to note. Page after page of men doing their jobs and writing it down because someone told them to. A note about a faulty valve, a note about a supply delivery, a birthday, someone had drawn a small cake in the margin, third logbook, the last one. Entries running through September 1989 into October, same format, two or three different people taking turns with the pen, weather observations, maintenance notes, pump pressures, and then they stopped, October 11, 1989. The last entry, O-600, wind northwest 15 knots, seas moderate, crew change over completed, pump three back online after seal replacement, coffee machine and mess still not working, parts on next supply run. That was it, no sign off, no final note, nothing that said the person writing knew they were about to leave and never come back, just a broken coffee machine and parts that were never ordered. I read it out loud, Kieran stared at the page, Luke leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. "That's the last thing anyone wrote on this platform," I said. Luke said, "The coffee machine. The coffee machine." I kept the camera on the open logbook, the handwriting was steady, whoever wrote that entry was not panicking and not afraid. They were finishing a night shift and expecting to do the same thing tomorrow. There was no tomorrow entry. We went down, lower accommodation deck, one level below where we'd been sleeping, narrower corridors, lower ceiling, the walls painted green instead of cream and the air, thicker, damper. My camera light was the only light and it didn't reach far. Kieran ahead of me, Luke behind, end of the corridor, a door, steel, same as every other door on the platform except this one had been welded shut, not a patch job, not a quick tack, thick beads of weld metal running along both sides of the frame and across the top, multiple passes, ground smooth in places. Someone had brought welding gear down here and spent hours making sure this door would never open again. The seams were clean and deliberate. Kieran put his hand on it, ran his fingers along the weld line. "What's behind this?" Luke said, "Don't know, don't need to." They welded it shut from the outside, something was in there they didn't want out. Or they didn't want anyone in, they sealed it for a reason. Kieran looked at the door. I knew that look, same one he had when he found the forum post, when he booked the boat, when he spent four months wearing us down. "Workshops, two levels up," he said. "I saw a grinder, cutting discs. No, that was me. We're not opening it. We don't know what's behind it and we don't know why they sealed it and we're not cutting into it." He didn't argue. He put both hands flat on the steel and just stood there. I filmed him doing it because something about it bothered me and I didn't know what it yet. I looked at Luke. Luke wasn't watching the door, he was watching Kieran. The look on his face wasn't one I recognized. He caught me looking and it shifted, but not all the way. We went back up, window going dark. The platform made noise, it had the night before, but tonight I was hearing it differently, throning from below, wind through the derrick, rising and falling, something metallic shifting on an upper deck, a door or a panel, all of it explainable. Kieran ate and stared at the table. Luke ate half his food, zipped up his sleeping bag, turned toward the wall. I asked if he was alright, he said, long day. I sat there after they were both down. Luke mess-hall, camera light, nothing outside the window, no lights on the water, no moon, just black. I thought about the coffee machine, the supply run, 28 names on a roster and 14 hats on pegs and a door at the end of a corridor that someone welded shut and walked away from. Camera off. Luke said it at breakfast like it was nothing. I want to swim the lower levels, Kieran looked up from his MRE. Luke was already pulling his hoodie off, folding it on the bench. He'd made the decision before he said it. The lower levels were flooded. We'd found that the day before, the stairwell at the far end of the lower accommodation deck went down one more flight and hit black water. Luke wanted to see what was below it. Just goggles, he said. Just a look, five minutes. Kieran thought it was a good idea, of course he did. I said I wasn't sure and Luke listened and then did the thing anyway, which is what Luke does. He'd been swimming competitively since he was 12. I knew arguing was pointless so I stopped. We went back down to the lower accommodation deck to the stairwell at the far end. The one that stopped at black water. Luke stripped to his shorts and a t-shirt at the top of the stairs and put on the goggles he'd brought from the boat. Sheep ones. The rubber strap was already going. He stood on the third step with the water up to his ankles and looked down into it. The water was dark. The camera light barely touched the surface. Whatever was below it wasn't visible from up here. He looked back at me. Time me. He took three breaths, pulled the goggles down and went under. I started timing when he went below the surface. Kieran crouched at the top of the stairs, elbows on his knees, looking down. The water settled and went still within seconds. No movement. No bubbles. Just black water and a flooded stairwell in the sound of the platform around us. One minute. Kirin said, "He's fine. Two minutes, neither of us said anything. Three minutes. I leaned further down the stairwell. The water was black. I couldn't see him. Couldn't see anything below the surface. Three and a half minutes." Kirin said, "He's done this before. He can hold his breath for ages." I didn't answer. Four minutes on the clock. He came up, not fast, not panicking. He surfaced in the stairwell, pushed the goggles onto his forehead, and grabbed the step above him. Breathing hard but not gasping, he just held on and looked at the wall in front of him and breathed. Kirin called down. What did you see? Nothing. Luke. I need a minute. He climbed the stairs slowly, water running off him, hand on the wall for balance. Got to the top and sat on the floor with his back against the corridor wall and his legs still stretched toward the water. His right hand was in a loose fist, closed around something. We waited. Kirin bouncing on his heels. I kept the camera on Luke. After about a minute, he opened his hand. An ID card, laminated, water logged at the edges, lamination peeling at one corner but readable. I zoomed in, a photograph, Luke's face. Not similar to Luke's face, his face, same jaw line, same eyes, same way his hair sat. Beneath the photo, a name, Luke Garner. Beneath that, a role, maintenance technician. Beneath that, an issue date, it says 1990, 30 years ago. The card sat in Luke's open palm, water dripping off his wrist onto the deck grating and nobody said anything. Kirin reached over and took it. Turned it over. Turned it back. Photo. Luke. Photo. That's you. Luke said nothing. Luke, that's your face. I can see that. Luke took the card back. He looked at it, turned it over once and his face went flat. Confused, not scared, just closed. That's a one and a billion coincidence, someone with my face and my name, that's all. I was filming when he said it. What the camera caught was this. Luke was not convincing himself. He was deciding to be convinced. His face did something quick around the eyes, a tightening that lasted half a second and then smoothed out, and if I hadn't been recording, I'd have missed it entirely. But I was recording. Kirin looked at me. I looked at Kirin. Luke stood up. He pulled his hoodie on over the wet t-shirt and said, "I'm going to get changed and walked off toward the superstructure." Kirin and I stood at the railing. "That's not a coincidence," he said. "I know. So what is it?" I don't know. He looked at the door where Luke had gone, then down at the water. What else is down there? We didn't talk about the card again. Luke came back from getting changed, and he was Luke, quiet, present, functional. But from further back than before, he answered when you spoke to him. He ate when we ate. He came with us to film the upper decks. And something had shifted. He was doing everything the same, and none of it was the same. Kirin noticed. I caught him watching Luke twice that afternoon. Both times he looked away when I turned to the camera toward him. That night Luke took the card out of his pocket and set it on the mess hall table next to the salt shaker. Didn't say a word about it. Just put it there and went to sort his sleeping bag. Kirin looked at it. Luke went to sleep early. Kirin stayed up, not talking, food half eaten. Camera off around ten. I woke it two in the morning. No reason, no sound. Just awake. The mess hall dark. Luke breathing on the bench across from me, the platform groaning and shifting in the wind. I reached for the camera. Kirin's voice, quiet from his sleeping bag, you're awake. I turned to the camera. He was on his back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He hadn't been asleep. The card on the table. Luke breathing. The two of us looking at each other across the dark mess hall with nothing to say. Camera off. I found Kirin at the welded door at mid-morning, both hands on the frame, still. He heard me come down the corridor and didn't move until I said his name, and then he turned around like I'd caught him at something. Nothing on his face, just, "Hey, come on," I said. He came. Luke had been quiet since the dive and today was worse. He ate. He answered when you spoke to him. He was there, but with that half-second gap now before his eyes came back. Like he was somewhere else and had to travel to get to you. The ID card was gone from the table. He'd pocketed it in the night. I didn't ask. We spent the morning on the upper decks. Kirin filmed valve clusters and equipment housings and a winch on the crane decks seized solid with rust. He was efficient. Didn't say what he'd been thinking about down at that door, and I didn't ask about that either. Lunch in the mess hall, Luke at the window, the sea, the same gray it always was. Kirin disappeared after we ate. I gave him ten minutes. Then I went down. He was there again. Same spot. Both hands on the weld seam this time, fingers tracing the line of it, slow like he was reading something in the metal. Kirin, he turned. Don't you want to know? He said. "No," he looked at me. "No," I said again. "I want to leave. Today, pack up and go. The footage isn't enough yet. It's enough." One more night, we've come this far. He looked at the door, then back at me. One more night, and we'll have everything. I told him we'd ask Luke. Luke was where we'd left him, still at the window. I put it to him straight. I want to go. Kirin wants one more night. What do you think? Luke looked at me. Then it Kirin. Nothing. Luke had an opinion about everything. Which pub, which route, whether the forecast was worth waiting out. He always had a view and he always said it. If he went quiet when you asked him something directly, in three years I couldn't remember it happening once. He stayed. Late afternoon I climbed to the helideck on my own, just to be somewhere open. The ladder was fixed to the outside of the accommodation block and I came up onto the painted circle above everything. The sun had been behind cloud all day. Now it was below the cloud, right at the horizon, and for about forty seconds it lit the whole platform gold. The rust went orange. The gray paint went warm. The sea to the west went gold all the way out. I kept the camera running, forty seconds. The wind was the same, but the platform looked different. Almost like somewhere a person could be. Then the sun hit the water and it was over. Everything went gray again. I kept that footage. Out of everything I shot on the scarven, I kept that. We ate early, didn't talk much. The platform had been groaning all day. The usual sounds, legs under pressure, wind through the derrick, but after dark something on the deck above the mess hall started moving. A heavy scrape, a knock. Not constant, every few minutes, but each time it came it was a little slower, a little heavier, weight shifting across steel. Kieran said, "Structure cooling, metal contracts when the temperature drops." Luke didn't say anything, the sound again, slow drag, then a knock against something solid, then silence. Happens in old buildings, Kieran said. The metal just moves. Luke looked at the ceiling, then at his food. He put his fork down and didn't pick it up again. Nobody said anything else. Kieran washed his tray at the hatch and did not look at the ceiling. We got into our sleeping bags. Kieran set the battery lantern on the table and left it on. Nobody told him not to. We lay there with the light going and the platform working above us and Luke on his back with his eyes open, staring at nothing. I put the camera down and closed my eyes. The sound came again, slow. The full weight of it traveling across the deck above us, one side to the other, and then stopping. Kieran was right, structures cool, metal moves, nothing up there. I lay still and listened to it anyway. I woke up and Kieran was gone. No sound had woken me, no door, no footsteps. I just opened my eyes in the mess hall with the lantern still on and looked at his sleeping bag and it was empty. The zip was open, his boots were gone. I looked at the. Luke. Luke was already awake. On his back, head turned toward me. Eyes open. He'd been awake before I had. I don't know how long. We looked at each other. Neither of us said where. We both knew. I picked up the camera. Luke got out of his sleeping bag. We walked out of the mess hall and down the corridor in silence. The camera light ahead of us. Our footsteps, the only sound on the platform. Past the operations room. Door still open from yesterday. Past the upper stairwell. Down. The air got colder as we went and the metal walls got closer, and the sound of the wind above us faded until there was nothing except our feet on the stairs and the quiet of a platform at three in the morning. Lower accommodation deck, green walls, low ceiling, the thick damp air. My light reached about 10 meters and the rest was black. The door was open. The welds had been cut. Clean lines, precise. The angle grinder taken through every bead on both sides of the frame and across the top. Grinding dust on the floor. The cut edges still bright where the metal was fresh. He'd done it over hours while we slept. The door stood open about a foot. On the floor next to the door, the angle grinder from the workshop. Two spent cutting discs. A pair of welding gloves laid on top of each other. Small room. Three meters by three meters. Steel walls, steel floor. A single pipe along the ceiling. Nothing in it. Cold. Colder than the corridor. Colder than anywhere on the platform. The kind of cold that comes from 32 years' sealed shut, Kieran was standing inside, facing the far wall. Not moving. I stepped in. Luke behind me. The room barely fit the three of us. Kieran didn't turn around. I came up beside him. On the wall, at eye level, a Polaroid photograph pinned to the steel with a single thumbtack. The thumbtack was rusted. I raised the camera. The photograph showed a corridor. This corridor, green walls, the door we'd just walked through visible in the background. Three figures standing at the entrance. Us, Kieran on the left, Luke in the middle. Me on the right with a camera in my hand. This camera. The image was taken from inside the room looking out. The angle was roughly where I was standing now. The clothes were right. Luke's hoodie was zipped to the same height. I was holding the camera one-handed, left hand. The way I always held it because my right hand was the one I used for doors and railings. The camera strap was looped twice around my wrist. I do that. Nobody told me to do that. I just do it. Kieran's posture was right. The way Luke stood slightly behind him was right. The edges of the Polaroid had yellowed. The colors had faded. The thumbtack had left a rust ring on the white border. This photograph had been on this wall for decades. Next to the three of us, slightly apart, almost at the edge of the frame, a fourth figure. A man in dark work clothes turned partly away, face in three-quarter profile. Enough to see the shape of him. Not enough to know who he was. None of us knew him. I held the camera on the photograph, pinned to a wall in a room that had been welded shut for 32 years, and I filmed it because I didn't know what else to do. Kieran didn't move. Luke didn't move. I could hear Luke breathing behind me and I could hear the platform and that was all there was. I turned the camera away from the photograph, slow toward the door, the open door the corridor, going into dark where the corridor turned, and my light gave out. The footage cuts there. Outro. We never found them. The platform was located on the 3rd of October 2021, three weeks after the disappearance. A friend of Kieran Price recognized the structure from footage Kieran had posted online before the trip. A search team reached the platform by helicopter the following day. The rigid inflatable was still tied to the access ladder. Fuel sufficient for the return. All personal equipment remained aboard, clothing, phones, wallets. The camera was on the floor of a lower corridor, outside a room that had been cut open with an angle grinder taken from the platform's own workshop. The battery had died during the night of September 15th. There is no footage after the final scene you have just watched. No sign of the three men was found on the platform. No sign of the three men has been found anywhere. The structure has been identified as a former exploration platform operated by North Sea Energy Solutions, a subsidiary of Grampian Petroleum. The subsidiary was dissolved in 1991. The platform was decommissioned in 1989 following an internal incident that was classified at company level and never made public. The company no longer exists. This photograph was recovered from inside the sealed room, pinned to the wall with a thumbtack, the only item in the room. Forensic analysis dates the print to the late 1980s. The three figures on the left have been confirmed as Daniel Ashcroft, Luke Garner, and Kieran Price. We identified the fourth figure through employment records in the Grampian Petroleum Archive. His name was Robert Calder. He was a crew member on this platform. He was reported missing on the 9th of October, 1989. His disappearance was the reason for the evacuation, the reason the crew left their belongings behind. I don't have an explanation for that. If you recognize anything in this footage, the platform, the equipment, the markings, anything at all, the contact number is on your screen. Case number N, CA4471, North Sea Missing Persons Unit, filed October 2021, last reviewed March 2024. Still open. And that's where it ends. I'm Rex. Thanks for listening. Let me know your thoughts in the comments, subscribe, and hit the bell. Until next time. Good night.