Real Scary Stories: The Mysterious, Cold War-Era Vanishing At Dyatlov Pass
DyatlovPass.com/Russian National ArchivesFour of the nine Russian hikers in 1959, days before they all died of still-mysterious causes.
The Dyatlov Pass incident is one of the most enduring and confounding mysteries of modern times and a horror story of the highest order. The story begins on January 27, 1959, when 23-year-old Igor Alekseyevich Dyatlov and his fellow students and researchers at the Ural Polytechnic Institute embarked on a hiking journey.
The ten-person party aimed to reach the summit of Otorten, a mountain in the Northern Urals. But after setting out on their journey (with one turning back due to illness), they were never seen alive again.
When their bodies were finally found weeks later, the grim discovery only raised more questions and provided few answers.
Dyatlov had told his sports club that he’d notify them via telegram once they returned, but an ominous lack of communication led to growing concern. On Feb. 20, army and police investigators were sent to investigate. What they found six days later were dead bodies — in a state so bizarre they looked like they came straight out of a nightmare.
The tent had been cut open from the inside. The team’s belongings, including shoes, had been left inside. Investigators then discovered eight or nine sets of footprints in the snow that were clearly made by shoeless individuals — with the tracks leading into the woods nearly one mile away.
They found the first two bodies in a forest next to the remains of a campfire. Despite temperatures of -13 to -22F on the night of their deaths, both Yuri Krivonischenko and Yuri Doroschenko were dressed in nothing but underwear.
Wikimedia CommonsThe hikers’ tent, pictured here on Feb. 26, 1959, was cut open from the inside. Some of them seemed to have left their shoes inside.
The next three bodies were found on the way back to the camp, also in various states of undress. They were deemed to have died of hypothermia.
But half-naked bodies in below-freezing temperatures weren’t even the strangest finds. When the other four bodies were found in a ravine two months later, after the snow started to melt away, everything got spookier.
Two of them — Lyudmila Dubinina and Semyon Zolotaryov — were missing their eyeballs, and both had broken ribs. Dubinina’s tongue was missing. Nikolay Thibeaux-Brignolle had suffered severe fractures to his skull, the kind that result from a car accident. Two of the four were wearing clothing that tested positive for radioactivity.
More than six decades later, despite Russia’s intention of reopening the investigation and solving the case, no clear-cut explanations have been put forward in this baffling horror story.
DyatlovPass.com/Russian National ArchivesTwenty-one-year-old Yuri Doroshenko was found dead on February 27, 1959, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and no shoes.
Investigators looked to the hikers’ diaries and undeveloped photographs for clues, but all they pointed to was how the weather and visibility worsened as the hikers’ journey continued. That would explain why some died of hypothermia, but it leaves the missing eyeballs and tongue a total mystery.
One theory posits they headed west by mistake and ended up on the slope of a mountain the indigenous Mansi people call Kholat Syakhl, or “Dead Mountain,” where the Mansi then ambushed the hikers.
Some have suggested a forceful avalanche was to blame, or that they might’ve been driven insane by hypothermia. Still others believe the murders were part of a Soviet cover-up of secret radioactive weapon testing, or that they were killed by aliens.
There’s no clear-cut evidence for any of these theories, however. Real-life horror stories often end without answers.
