On January 1st 2005, some Odessa teens decided to spend New Years night partying in the catacombs. However, in the drunken revelry a member of the group, a girl named Masha, became separated and lost in the catacombs. She spent three days wandering in the freezing cold and pitch black before she died of dehydration. It took two years before the police were able to locate her body and retrieve it from the catacombs.
The Odessa Catacombs are a network of estimated 4000 kilometres-long tunnels stretching out under the city and surrounding region of Odessa, Ukraine. The majority of the catacombs are the result of stone mining.Most of the city’s 19th century houses were built of limestone mined nearby. Abandoned mines were later used and widened by local smugglers. This created a gigantic labyrinth of underground tunnels beneath Odessa, known as the “catacombs”. Today, they are a great attraction for extreme tourists, who explore the tunnels despite the dangers involved. Such tours are not officially sanctioned because the catacombs have not been fully mapped and the tunnels themselves are unsafe. There have been incidents of people becoming lost in the tunnel network, and dying of dehydration or rockfalls.
Piblokto, also known as Arctic hysteria, is a condition exclusively appearing in Inughuit societies living within the Arctic Circle. Appearing most prevalently in winter, it is considered to be a form of a culture-bound syndrome, although more recent studies question whether it exists at all.
Symptoms can include intense hysteria (screaming, uncontrolled wild behavior), depression, consumption of feces, insensitivity to extreme cold (such as running around in the snow naked), echolalia (senseless repetition of overheard words) and more. This condition is most often seen in Inughuit women. This culture-bound syndrome is possibly linked to vitamin A toxicity. The native Inughuit diet provides rich sources of vitamin A and is possibly the cause or a causative factor. The ingestion of organ meats, particularly the livers of arctic fish and mammals, where the vitamin is stored in toxic quantities, can be fatal.
In this video, we have four kids wandering around looking for a ghost in an abandoned school in Iraq (one description says India, but since they’re speaking Arabic we’ll go with Iraq). The boys are kind of wandering aimlessly through stairwells and empty classrooms for a solid two minutes, which would arouse suspicion under our “Why is anyone filming this?” rule if not for the fact that we know they are explicitly waiting for the lights to suddenly dim and for a hallway full of disembodied 19th century clothes to start doing the Monster Mash. That doesn’t happen. What happens is much creepier. A headless goddamned ghost appears right in goddamned front of them. You literally see it materialize on camera. As they swing the camera lazily through the room, the ghost just walks very purposefully toward them like it’s delivering a pizza, while a long, low moan emanates from its phantom lungs.
YouTube commenters seem to think the ghost is simply one of the boys who went to go look out the window; that the bright light coming through obscures his head and gives him a washed-out ghostly look for the camera. But again, watch the video — when the camera sweeps across the floor a few seconds earlier, nobody is standing there.
If this is all an accident of the lighting and their shitty cell-phone cameras, then it was a lucky damned accident, considering they were specifically there to hunt ghosts in what they thought was a haunted abandoned building. If they doctored the video with effects later, then this is a remarkably subtle job. These are giggling teenagers goofing around, and we’re pretty sure they gave us a creepier ghost effect than any of the Paranormal Activity movies. So good job, guys — you successfully creeped us out, one way or another.
Roopkund (Skeleton Lake) is a glacial lake in Uttarakhand state of India famous due to more than five hundred human skeletons found at the edge of the lake. The location is uninhabited and is located in Himalaya at an altitude of about 5,029 metres (16,499 feet). The human skeletons were rediscovered in 1942 by a Nanda Devi game reserve ranger H. K. Madhwal, although there are reports about these bones from late 19th century. Earlier it was believed by specialists that the people died from an epidemic, landslide or blizzard. The carbon dating from samples collected in the 1960s vaguely indicated that the people were from the 12th century to the 15th century. After studying fractures in the skulls, the scientists in Hyderabad, Pune and London determined that the people died not of disease, but of a sudden hailstorm. The hailstones were as large as cricket balls, and with no shelter in the open Himalayas, many, or possibly all of them, perished. Furthermore, with the rarefied air and icy conditions, many bodies were well preserved.
What is not determined was where the group was headed to. There is no historical evidence of any trade routes to Tibet in the area.
In 1865, a St. Louis newspaper reported that a trapper named James Lumley was working late in the mountains, much like the dudes from Fire in the Sky, when he spotted a “bright, luminous body in the heavens,” followed by an explosion. Instead of sticking around to get picked up by it, though, he kept his distance, and the next day he found a large stonelike object with “curious hieroglyphics” carved into it, broken glass, and traces of a dark liquid. But perhaps the most amazing story of old-timey UFOs is the one that took place in Aurora, Texas, in 1897: As reported by the Dallas Morning News, a mysterious “airship” crashed down on the small town, and when the authorities examined the remains of the pilot inside, they found him to be “not an inhabitant of this world.” The pilot was buried in the local cemetery, and supposedly his grave is still there, although unmarked.
We’re not saying it was a real spaceship; we’re just pointing out that even this story predates The War of the Worlds. The sci-fi tropes that this seems to be referencing didn’t even exist yet.
Sticking hundreds of small denomination coins into tree trunks is apparently a popular way of getting rid of illnesses.
At least that’s what the staff at a holiday attraction in Gwynedd discovered after investigating the story behind several coin-covered tree trunks in the vicinity of Italianate village Portmeirion. The first tree was cut down four years ago, in order to widen the path to the picturesque settlement founded in 1925, and within only a few months it was covered with 2p coins. Now there are seven such tree trunks in the area, so estate manager Meurig Jones started an investigation to uncover the origins of this unusual habit. She managed to track down coin-covered trees back to the 1700s, when they were apparently used as wishing trees. People believed that a person suffering from an illness could hammer a coin into a tree trunks and the tree would take the illness away, but if someone removed the coin, they themselves would become ill. Whether some folks still believe this legend, or they do it simply because it’s fun is still a mystery, but the fact is this bizarre habit has spawned some pretty unbelievable sights that apparently unique to the UK.
The Keddie Murders is an unsolved 1981 American quadruple murder that took place in Keddie, a former resort town in the foothills of Northern California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Glenna “Sue” Sharp, 36, and her five children had been renting the cabin since November 1980. On the night of April 11, 1981, Sue was home with her daughter, Tina, her two youngest boys, and a young friend of the boys, Justin, who was staying the night. Her oldest son, John, and his friend Dana Wingate, had spent the day in nearby Quincy and were also going to stay the night at cabin 28. John and Dana were last seen hitchhiking from Quincy to Keddie. The crime may already have been in progress when they arrived at the cabin. At approximately 8 am on the morning of April 12, Sheila Sharp, upon returning from the sleepover next door, discovered the bodies of Sue, John and Dana in the cabin’s living room. All three victims had been bound with medical tape and electrical appliance wire.
Examination of the bodies determined that each of the victims had been bludgeoned with a claw hammer, and Sue and John had been stabbed repeatedly, including both being stabbed once in the throat. An inexpensive steak knife discovered at the scene had been used so forcefully that the blade had bent approximately 25 degrees. In 1984 the cranium portion of Tina Sharp’s skull was recovered near Camp Eighteen, a geodesic distance of roughly 29 miles from Keddie. Months later, after an anonymous caller to the Butte County Sheriff’s office claimed the skull was Tina’s, the Camp Eighteen area was searched again for several hours over a period of days. The jawbone and dozens of other bones were found, along with other potential evidence. From these discoveries, no new information regarding the crime surfaced in the media. The murders remain unsolved to this day.
In 1963, in the wake of the atrocities of the Holocaust, Stanley Milgram set out to test the hypothesis that there was something special about the German people that had allowed them to participate in genocide. Under the pretense of an experiment into human learning, Milgram asked normal members of the public to ask questions to a man attached to an electric-shock generator and shock him in increasing measure when he answered incorrectly. The man was an actor, the shocks fake; but the participants didn’t know this. The terrifying part? People overwhelmingly obeyed the commands of the experimenter, even when the man screamed in apparent agony and begged for mercy. A little evil in all of us, perhaps?
Walter Ernest O’Neil Yeo was a sailor during World War I, and is thought to be the first person to benefit from advanced plastic surgery, namely a skin flap. Yeo was wounded on 31 May 1916, during the Battle of Jutland, while manning the guns aboard the battleship HMS Warspite. He sustained terrible facial injuries, including the loss of upper and lower eyelids. He was treated by Sir Harold Gillies, the first man to transfer skin from undamaged areas on the body. Gillies opened a specialist ward at Queen Mary’s Hospital for the treatment of the facially-wounded.
During the long process of surgery, a ‘mask’ of skin was transplanted across Yeo’s face and eyes, including new eyelids. By July 1919, he was found to be fit for active service again and was recorded as having completed courses in September 1919. He underwent a further operation in August 1921, after which his disfigurement was recorded as ‘improved, but still severe’, and he was recommended for medical discharge, which took place on 15 December 1921.
