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Bermudadreieck
Ein Gebiet im westlichen Atlantik zwischen Florida, den Bermudas und Puerto Rico, seit Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts mit dem unerklärten Verschwinden von Schiffen und Flugzeugen verbunden.
Fort Bhangarh
Die Ruinen einer indischen Stadt aus dem 17. Jahrhundert, vom Archaeological Survey of India offiziell zum meistheimgesuchten Ort des Landes erklärt — nach Sonnenuntergang ist der Zutritt verboten.
The Valley of Death in Kamchatka
A narrow hollow at the foot of Kikhpinych in the Kronotsky reserve, discovered in 1975: dead animals and birds are found on its floor regularly, and people who linger there become dizzy and weak. The answer was found almost at once and turned out to be chemical — hydrogen sulphide and other gases seep from fissures and pool in the hollow in still weather. The valley is still lethal and closed to visitors, and the name stuck long before the explanation did.
The Devil's Settlement near Kaluga
A rock outcrop in the forests of the Kaluga region, wrapped in stories about the devil building it in a single night. The place is interesting without them: goblin's gold moss, which glows in the dark, grows on the stones, and ferns live in the crevices that have no business at this latitude — relicts that survived the ice age in the rocks' microclimate. The botanical anomaly is real, and the explanation for it was found later than the legend was.
The Black Lady of Nesvizh Castle
Belarus's best-known ghost is Barbara Radziwiłł, the Polish queen who died in 1551 at twenty-nine. The story goes that her husband Sigismund Augustus was so undone by her death that he had her spirit summoned; the rite went wrong, and she has walked the galleries of the family castle at Nesvizh ever since. The castle is real and on the UNESCO list, tours run daily, and the Black Lady is the one exhibit that does not appear in the museum inventory.
The Adzhimushkay quarries
Limestone workings outside Kerch where, from May to October 1942, a garrison of soldiers and civilians held out after the city fell and they went underground. The Germans blew in the roofs and pumped gas into the galleries. Of some thirteen thousand people, a few hundred survived. The diaries found in the workings afterwards are among the hardest documents of that war. Part of the quarries is a museum today; the rest is closed, because remains are still being found there.
The White Caver
The underground counterpart of the Black Climber, known to everyone who goes into caves across the former Soviet Union. What makes him white is calcite, settled on his clothes over years below ground. Meeting him traditionally means the party has lost the route. Cavers have a half-joking initiation rite for newcomers in which he is described — a rare case of folklore whose carriers know perfectly well it is folklore, and which is none the weaker for it.
The Black Climber
A figure in black who appears in the mountains: in some accounts he helps the lost, in others he leads them off the path. The legend is common to Soviet mountaineering as a whole and has been recorded in the Caucasus, the Tian Shan and the Pamirs; each region has its own version of who he was in life — usually somebody who was abandoned on a rope. The story has a practical point, and it explains its durability: it says out loud what actually happens in mountains, and what that world fears more than dying.
The Dead Road
Construction Projects 501 and 503: the Salekhard–Igarka railway, driven across the polar tundra by prison labour between 1947 and 1953. After Stalin's death the work was abandoned in a single day. Some seven hundred kilometres of track remain in the tundra, along with locomotives, bridges and camp compounds with their watchtowers and barracks — all still standing, because removing it would have cost more than leaving it. It is called the dead road not for its ghosts: it leads nowhere and never did.
Myasnoy Bor
A tract of land outside Novgorod where the encircled Soviet 2nd Shock Army was destroyed in the spring and summer of 1942. The dead are counted in tens of thousands, and a great many of them are still unburied — search teams have worked here every season since the 1980s. Stories of voices, footsteps and the sounds of fighting in this forest are known to everyone who has been there. This is the case where the folklore needs no explaining: the place is exactly what it is described as.
Kapustin Yar
A missile range in the Astrakhan region, closed off since 1946 so thoroughly that the full set of stories grew up around it that grew around Area 51 in the United States: downed craft, underground hangars, tests of unknown machinery. Some of the rumours have an obvious source — rocketry really was tested here and a nuclear device detonated in 1957, and for years any flash over the steppe had no official explanation. The range is still in operation.
The Shushmor tract
A remote stretch of forest and bog where the Moscow, Vladimir and Ryazan regions meet. Its reputation is old: people were disappearing regularly on the post road here as far back as the late nineteenth century, and the district authorities tried to find out why. In Soviet times the stories gained a stone structure somewhere in the thicket that nobody has found since. The place is genuinely hard to cross — peat bog, no landmarks and no signal — and that explains a good deal of the reputation, though not all of it.
The Devil's Cemetery
A clearing in the taiga of Krasnoyarsk Krai, about which the same thing has been said since the 1930s: a round burnt patch where cattle die, machinery fails and people feel ill. The site is linked to the Tunguska explosion, which happened four hundred kilometres to the north. Expeditions have gone out since the 1970s, and the central difficulty is that nobody finds the clearing twice: the descriptions agree, the coordinates do not. Some researchers think the zone existed and has grown over; others think it never existed.
The Medveditskaya Ridge
A ridge of hills on the border of the Volgograd and Saratov regions, considered since the 1990s one of Russia's principal anomalous zones. People come for ball lightning, which is observed here more often than usual, and for the "tunnels" — regular-shaped underground cavities that enthusiasts attribute to an unknown civilisation and geologists explain as karst and old workings. The place is also known for a thoroughly earthly feature: the ridge attracts thunderstorms, and its trees really are struck by lightning more often than those around.
The Black Hand and the Red Spot
Two stories from the same body, usually told back to back: the black hand that reaches out from under the bed or out of the wall, and the red spot on the ceiling that grows every night until it swallows the people living there. Both work the same way — the threat comes not from outside but from the flat itself, from the furniture and the walls, which is the one place a child cannot get away from. Folklorists have recorded them in many variants across the Soviet Union since the 1960s, and they remain the most durable layer of children's urban folklore.
The Queen of Spades: calling her in the mirror
A Soviet children's ritual: in a dark bathroom you draw a staircase on the mirror in lipstick, light candles and call the Queen of Spades three times. If she comes she may grant a wish or she may strangle you — there are as many endings as there were courtyards where children played it. A direct relative of the English-speaking Bloody Mary and a dozen similar rites worldwide: always a mirror, darkness and a threefold call. The mechanism is the same everywhere because the job is the same — to turn fear into a game with rules.
The Red Film
A late-Soviet legend: somewhere there is a special photographic film on which people come out undressed. It was usually attributed to a foreigner, a Japanese or a German, who asked to be photographed in front of a monument and then left with the film. The story rested on two things at once — on scarcity, under which any imported object was credited with impossible properties, and on adolescent curiosity, which had no other outlet in the country. No such film ever existed, of course.
The Coffin on Wheels
The best-known Soviet children's horror story, told in pioneer camps after lights-out. A voice on the radio announces that the coffin on wheels has set off and is coming down the street, then into the yard, then up the stairs; the floors are counted aloud, and on the last line the teller grabs whoever is next to them. The device is purely theatrical — the whole structure exists for one second at the end, and the fear is generated not by the plot but by the countdown. The pin is at Artek as the country's most famous camp, but it was told everywhere.
The Black Volga
A black car with no plates, sometimes with white curtains or red tyres, that drives around the city taking children. The legend circulated across the Eastern Bloc from the 1960s to the 1980s — in the USSR, Poland, East Germany, Hungary — and in each country somebody different was behind the wheel: state security, priests, foreigners, vampires. The Volga itself was not chosen at random: an official car, unavailable to an ordinary person, and therefore the country's most recognisable symbol of an authority you cannot hail.
The Kyshtym dwarf, Alyoshenka
In May 1996 Tamara Prosvirina, a resident of the village of Kaolinovy near Kyshtym in the Urals, brought home a creature about twenty-five centimetres long with an elongated skull and large eyes. She called it Alyoshenka, fed it, and told neighbours a son had come to live with her. She was taken to a psychiatric hospital; the body was filmed and photographed in the meantime, and that autumn it vanished without trace. What makes the case unusual is the sheer volume of material: video, photographs, dozens of interviews. Later genetic work points to human remains — most likely a premature infant with severe developmental defects.
The Quiet House
The central legend of the Russian-speaking internet: the network supposedly has a floor, and standing on that floor is the Quiet House — a point where a person learns everything and stops existing. A whole pastime grew up around it, netstalking: hunting for the network's "deep levels" through random addresses, fragments of video and strings of digits. The text that started the mass spread, "The Quiet House and 49406", was posted on the 4stor forum in 2013. Not one confirmed "level" has been produced in years of searching — which does the legend no harm at all: its subject is by definition impossible to show.
The Rake
A hairless creature on four limbs, sitting beside a sleeping person's bed. It appeared around 2005 as a collaborative forum project: several users agreed to invent a monster and supply it with "historical evidence" — extracts from a 1691 ship's log, Spanish chronicles, diaries. Every document is fictional and was written the same evening. The case is interesting as a rare documented example of folklore being manufactured deliberately and from nothing.
Smile Dog
One of the first internet horror stories built around a file rather than a text. It appeared around 2008: a journalist visits a woman to ask about a picture called smile.jpg that drives mad everyone who sees it; the woman refuses to talk and eventually sends the file. The trick is that the file does not exist — every "original" circulating online appeared after the story did. The reader has to imagine the image, and imagination does the job better than any drawing.
The Bloop
In 1997 hydrophones belonging to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded an ultra-low-frequency sound in the South Pacific loud enough to be picked up by sensors three thousand miles apart. Its profile resembled a biological one, and for two decades the Bloop was the leading exhibit for anyone who believes in undiscovered giants in the ocean. NOAA settled it in 2012: an icequake, an iceberg fracturing off Antarctica. The sound stopped being a mystery but remains one of the best-known audio files in internet history.