Just had the darnedest thing happen to me - strange enough that I wanted to register just to post it.

Had a character that teleported via a pool to GC 4 when he was on GC 1. So, I start heading back upn to explore the levels I missed. But when I tried to go up to floor 2 from floor 3, I instead ended up in a golden room, standing on a golden portal, with a metric crapton of high-level monsters. So, I went through the portal, ended up in Oree's lair, and got disemboweled by a mistresses and dark knights before I could move.

Anything like this happened to anyone else?

nope, but seems that tunneling to lower levels somehow leads to much more deadly monsters...