Urban Legends
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Barsa-Kelmes

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added1980

A former island in the Aral Sea whose Kazakh name means "go and you will not return". As the sea retreated it stopped being an island and became part of a salt desert. In Soviet times it carried stories of time slips: people who left for a day and came back weeks later, watches running behind. They ran in the magazine Tekhnika — Molodyozhi in the 1980s, which is where they spread from. No instrumental confirmation ever appeared, and the place has since become a monument to an ecological catastrophe instead.

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A stretch of the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges on English Dartmoor, where unexplained crashes began in the early 1920s: drivers and motorcyclists described hairy hands seizing the wheel and wrenching it towards the verge. After several deaths in 1921 the local press took it up, and engineers who examined the road found a plainer cause — a badly cambered surface that pulled vehicles off line. The road was rebuilt, the crashes stopped, and the legend stayed.

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