Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #11 - The Khamar-Daban Incident
Episode Date: June 14, 2024What really happened to a group of seven hikers in the Khamar-Daban mountain range in Siberia on August 5th, 1993? Did six of them really begin to bleed from their eyes and ears before they all died i...n a state of utter madness? And if so - what, exactly, killed them? We look at the known facts and examine some of the conspiracies today and present a possible answer. WATCH THIS EPISODE: https://youtu.be/SFJ1tRqiWJIFor Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com
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Welcome to another edition of Time Sucks, Short Sucks.
I'm Dan Cummins and today we will be exploring a strange and disturbing Russian mystery.
On the morning of Thursday, August 5th, 1993, in the Russian Republic of Buryatia, a hiking
trip into the Khabar-Daban Mountains of southern Siberia that began near the shore of Lake
Baikal, the deepest, oldest, largest freshwater lake on earth, went terribly, terribly wrong.
According to the most common depiction of events, the account most often portrayed on a number of
conspiratorial and or paranormal podcasts and YouTube channels, while descending down from
Retransliator Peak at approximately 7,861 feet above sea level, one of seven Kazakhstani hikers, 23-year-old Alexander Krishin, a
young man bringing up the rear of the group, started to abruptly scream.
As his fellow hikers turned to face him, they watched in horror as he began to bleed from
his eyes, from his ears.
Bloody foam bubbled up and out of his mouth.
It was as if something inside of him was being torn apart.
He then fell to the ground, began to violently shake and convulse.
The group's leader, 41-year-old Ludmila Korovinna, now rushed to his aid.
And just after making it to his now unconscious and dying body, she started to scream out
in pain herself.
And then she also began to bleed from her ears, from her eyes, and froth at the mouth.
She too now fell and began to convulse, collapsing atop Christian's
now limp dead body. 24-year-old Tatiana Filipenko fell next, grabbing at her throat as if she
couldn't breathe, scratching at her now bleeding eyes. She fell to her knees, started to crawl
like an animal, and when she made it to a nearby rock, she began to bash her head into
it over and over and over again. Each hit harder than the last, blood sprained
everywhere until her body, like the others, fell limp and started to spasm. One by one,
in a manner of minutes, six of the seven hikers all succumbed to the same peculiar strain of
madness. Only one would survive and live to tell the tale of the six mysterious deaths
on a Siberian mountainside that
have captivated and confounded internet sleuths to this day. What really happened
on the mountain that day? Something that the Russian government has worked hard
to cover up? Something paranormal? Nothing abnormal at all. What is the truth at
the bottom of what has also been called Buryatia's Dyatlov Pass. The Kamar-de-Bahn incident.
Hello, Time Suckers!
Thanks for checking out this extra content.
Here's how I'll be sharing this odd story I'm sharing with you today. Hello Time Suckers! Thanks for checking out this extra content.
Here is how I'll be sharing this odd story I'm sharing with you today.
Following a summary of this internet mystery and getting to know a bit about each of the
seven ill-fated hikers, I'll walk you through the known details of the hike itself and then
discuss some of the many conspiracies that attempt to uncover what some believe really
happened, before sharing what we feel is the most reasonable explanation regarding the true tragic fate of the six hikers who died
on a cold Siberian mountainside just over 30 years ago.
Six young hikers were led on this expedition by 41-year-old Ludmila Korovinna, an extremely
experienced and heralded hiking trip leader known for meticulously planning all of her trips down to the very last detail.
The other hikers, ranging in ages from 15 to 24, had all been led on trips with her
before, and all had reportedly respected her wilderness survival knowledge and trek planning
immensely.
This should have been yet another successful hike.
No one should have ever even really struggled, let alone died.
Outside of any unexpected tragedies or extreme weather, it's believed that Ludmila estimated
that the approximately 50-mile, somewhat difficult, but not grueling hike should take six or seven
days.
An adventurous hike that began at the Marina train station, Merino train station, excuse
me, along the shore of Lake Baikal and was supposed to end back at the massive lake at the town of
Sliud Janka, about 30 miles from that station.
The group began their hike the morning of August 2nd.
To make it to the beginning of their trek, the hikers had traveled roughly a thousand miles east by train from the Petropavlovsky
district where there were all members of the Azimut hiking club.
Azimut being Russian for azimuth which is the angle between north measured clockwise around
the observer's horizon and a celestial body such as the sun or the moon. So pretty cool name for a
hiking club. Too bad it wasn't going to bring them any good luck on this particular trip.
This group was one of many, many hiking clubs in Russia at
this time. Following World War II, hiking became an extremely popular activity in the Soviet Union,
part of what loosely translates to their sports tourism. Essentially, hiking has been treated
more like a proper sport in Russia than it has a leisure activity for almost a century now.
Instead of joining a rec league basketball team or maybe some company intramural softball team for decades in
Russia, you might instead join a hiking club and take part in multi-night
arduous outdoor adventuring, testing your skills and starting fires, foraging
for food including knowing what food to forage for, navigating by compass or
even the stars, knowing how to pack and set up a tent on a windswept side of a rugged
mountain miles and miles from the nearest road, etc. Learn how to be strong and survive for Mother
Russia. Do not expect sport drink and GPS to always be there like a lazy western capitalist scum.
The popularity of hiking clubs can be traced to Soviet-era urbanization. Millions of peasants,
whose ancestors had long been serfs of
some sort, growing crops on small plots of land in the countryside, were now
forced to live in various cities as part of Joseph Stalin's ambitious plan for
the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. They began in the late 1920s.
And now instead of living out nature, Russia's working class primarily were
living in these drab, quickly built, Spartan and communist apartment
buildings. Very congested, polluted, frankly depressing as fuck factory towns.
Hiking clubs were formed by the Communist Party as a direct response to this.
As a way to keep the national morale from plummeting to dangerous, I don't give a shit
about Mother Russia, please just kill me and put me out of my misery levels.
Any town of any decent size would have one or more
of these clubs and millions of Russians would take part
in these clubs or other sports clubs to increase their
quality of life and reconnect them with the natural beauty
of the massive nation that they've been separated from.
Economics also a factor in the formation
of these hiking clubs.
Doesn't cost as much to hike and camp as it would to
play tennis, ski, etc.
With hiking, nature provides all the facilities other than the trail.
And the average Russian citizen living in communist Russia or living in Russia directly
following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, they didn't have much discretionary
income.
But they could afford a sleeping bag, a decent pair of shoes, a tent, maybe enough cheap
vodka to help them forget that they would
never be able to afford much else, I'm guessing.
In 1974, the country had 1,419 official government-sponsored sports tourist clubs and 4.1 million people
trained in sports tourism courses.
While we couldn't find comparable figures from the 1990s, it seems the hiking clubs
were at least as popular, if not more so, than they were back in the 1990s. It seems the hiking clubs were at least as popular, if not more so,
than they were back in the 70s. So more popular when this episode's disastrous hike took place.
And Ludmila Korvina was one of these trained hikers. She had taken numerous sports tourism
courses. She actually had a Masters in Sports in hiking. Masters of Sports being an honorary title
awarded by some kind of panel of three judges to outstanding athletes of various disciplines.
Pretty funny for me to think about them having this for hiking.
You hike very nice, Luzmila.
You know trail much good.
You put one foot in front of other foot many time with little complaint.
You do not forget bug spray or fall on poison ivy.
You remember Band-Aid for Footblister.
You find many good root and berry to eat and comprehend how North different from South on Compass.
I have trophy for you and certificate.
You can keep certificate. Must give trophy back. We need metal for Cold War.
Some like that.
Anyway, Ludmila and her six fellow hikers, who were essentially her students,
people who did not have a degree in sports and hiking, and therefore needed to shut the fuck up and
fall in line and listen to the master, traveled to the Kamar-Daban mountain range in a sparsely
populated area of Siberia, as if there are other kinds of areas in Siberia, as part of
Russia's year-long Turriata campaign in 1993 to encourage a bunch of hiking in the
mountains. Russia the most hike-happy country in the world it seems. The word Torriata means
God's garden in the Livonian language. Well this was a big government campaign one of many calling
upon Russians to get out enjoy the most remote and beautiful areas of their homeland which is
pretty cool. Imila and her group
had actually traveled to the Kamar-Daban mountains with a second group of
hikers, of which her 16 year old daughter Natalia was a member. And Natalia's
hiking group took a much more difficult path. Ludmila planned on meeting up with
her daughter at a lake just about halfway through the hike, a little over
halfway. And now that we understand a bit about Russia's cultural focus
on hiking and what this hike was supposed to be,
why this group was going,
let's meet the hikers themselves.
Group leader, 41 year old Ludmila,
was extremely experienced.
Was known for really pushing the group she led
to their physical and mental limits
in a way that earned the respect and admiration
for most of the young hikers under her guidance.
But it also led to occasional concern from other hikers and some will blame Ludmila for the deaths
of the hikers on her trip after this terrible tragedy, you know, thinking she had pushed them
too hard. In a 2018 interview with the Russian newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, rescuer Yuri
Golius recalled a previous encounter he had had with Ludmila.
He said, I knew her long before this incident. Very beautiful, strong-willed, sporty.
Once we crossed with her in the north of Baikal in Hakutsk.
Ludmila with two boys, aged 16 and 17, came down from the mountains to our camp.
The guys looked too worn out. One of them couldn't even lift an axe to chop firewood. We gave them tea, bread. They attacked as if they had never eaten anything.
Corvina said she was practicing a survival school when a group goes camping with a minimum of food
and clothes." So yeah, she liked to push things and do like, yeah, extreme kind of, you know, hiking.
This particular hike though is not supposed to be that extreme. 23 year old Alexander Christian was the second most experienced hiker of the group
and Ludmila's right hand man of sorts. The young iron hammer to her strong lady cycle.
Alex was a student in Moscow, had been going on hikes with Ludmila since he was a little kid for
over a decade. He was physically the strongest member of the group,
very close with Ludmila, so close she considered him to be a son. She also considered him a son because he had been dating her daughter, Natalia, was reportedly planning on asking young Natalia's
hand in marriage at the conclusion of this hike. So that sucks. 19-year-old Denis Schwatschgen was
a last-minute addition to the group as he replaced
another boy whose parents changed their minds and decided not to let him go.
A great call in retrospect.
Despite being a replacement, he was another experienced hiker and had gone on several
trips with Ludmila in the past.
The final boy was 15 year old Timur Babanov.
He was the youngest in the group group but he was definitely not weak.
A very big, very mature kid for his age. He was almost seven feet tall, could
reportedly deadlift over 800 pounds, had a full beard, worked in a steel mill and
shared custody of his two kids with his ex-wife and was said to be a responsible
father. I'm young but have lived a much life for Russia. And I'm being ridiculous
of course, he's 15. I don't know how big or mature he was.
But another experienced hiker. I feel like in 1993 about 90% of Russians were experienced hikers.
Timur had also gone on trips with Ludmila specifically before.
Grew up in a very outdoorsy, frequently hiking family. Of course he did. His mother had no
reservations about entrusting Ludmila with care of her son,
and she was quoted in another article published in Kamsa Molska Pravda in 2018 as saying,
I trusted Ludmila as myself. Many times she and Timur and I went on hikes of different categories.
24-year-old Tatiana Filipenko, oldest of the three girls in Lyudmila's group.
She worked as a secretary, loved the mountains. She had gone on, of course,
many previous hikes. However, none as difficult as this one before.
All of her previous hikes ranked as either category one or two hikes.
As far as degree of difficulty, that's the easiest two categories.
This hike was considered either a three or four, sources vary.
For context, the most difficult hikes in Russia are ranked a six.
Next member of the group, 16-year-old Victoria Zelosova.
Lyudmila was originally against taking Victoria, as on a previous winter hike with her, she
had broken down from fatigue.
And a breakdown like that can obviously endanger everyone in your hiking group, especially
if you run into unexpected problems such as very dangerous weather.
She ended up on this trip because according to Ludmila's friend,
Valentina Yasukova, Victoria wanted to go on the hike so badly she had her mom vouch for her.
She was much stronger now and that a similar breakdown would not happen again.
Ludmila obviously relented and allowed Victoria to join the group.
And poor Victoria's mother, my god, how much did she later beat herself up for, Ludmila obviously relented and allowed Victoria to join the group.
And poor Victoria's mother.
My god, how much did she later beat herself up for, you know, vouching for her daughter
to go on this ill-fated hike?
Seventeen-year-old Valentina Udochenko, the only survivor, is perhaps the most interesting
member of this hiking crew.
For at least two years leading up to this hike, she was being trained to be an assassin
who specialized in killing hikers by the KGB.
And I think it's weird that that hasn't come up much in speculation regarding, you know, how the other members of her hiking party died.
No, of course that's nonsense.
No, Valentina had grown up on a farm, was again an experienced hiker, had been a long time cross-country skier, and this was her third hike with Ludmila. Every member of this group, even as
youngest members, had extensive experience hiking and had gone on
previous trips with Ludmila. This is important to know when it comes to
trying to explain the very confusing events that led to the deaths of every
member besides Valentina. This was clearly not a group of rookies, right?
Not a group of people unfamiliar with the great outdoors and prone to making
stupid mistakes. Despite some of the members being you know pretty young this crew knew what they were doing when it came to being out in the elements
and now let's get into the tragic events of the Camarga demand incident and
Look into the group's last hike in a little more detail
Long before ever traveling east towards the mountains Ludmila have been planning this trip meticulously with the help of her friend Valentina
Yaskova for months Yaskova will later recall,
We planned a diet for every day. As usual, Korovina made a clear route with a time
keep with a timekeeping by the hour, ordered who should take what things etc. The group traveled
by rail from the very rural Petropavlovsky district. Only about 12,000 people live in this roughly 625
miles square collection of farms and villages. To Marino station on Lake
Baikal where Lyudmila reportedly checked with the worker at a local weather
station and was assured that the weather would be good and safe for their hike.
After receiving assurances that they'd be okay, the group set off on August 2nd
and frustratingly I'm sure were met almost immediately with a very unexpected storm
Russian meteorologists even less reliable than American meteorologists perhaps
Most Western sources state that they did not encounter a storm until the third day of the hike
But Russian contemporary sources report that they hit bad weather on the first day that it relented a bit on the second day
Then the storm came back with a vengeance on the third day. So let's go
with that. Journalist Vladimir Zarov, who visited the area five years after the
incident to investigate, recounted that summer and especially July and August
that year were especially rainy. The meteorologist I talked to later hadn't
observed that weather or hadn't observed that weather for almost 30 years.
So yeah, it's a really rough summer as it turned out.
In spite of kind of late summer early fall, I guess, in spite of the incredibly unlucky
and unsurprisingly bad weather, the group still made good progress the first two days,
reaching their planned campsite on a mountain pass near Retransliator Peak by the night of August
3rd. Ludmila had planned on having the group forage for food but the weather had been so poor
up until this point that foraging was impossible.
Evidence of this lack of foraging was found by lead rescuer Yorigolius who stated in an
interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2018 that his rescue team found the campsite on
the night of August 3rd into the morning of the 4th and noted that
At this place we found one empty jar of stew.
Cold, rain, snow is blowing and Corovina, it turns out,
ordered to divide one can of stew into seven servings.
I thought maybe I'll find wrappers from candy or chocolate, nothing.
Also, they found no evidence of roots or berries or anything that the group would have foraged.
The weather cleared up enough on the morning of August 4th that according to Goliath's original 1993 report, the group now is able to spend much of the day foraging the edible
golden root. Golden root, also known as rhodiola rosea, is a flowering herb that
has been used in traditional medicine in Russia for centuries. The plant's roots
are considered in adaptogen, which means they may help the body adapt to stress. Rhodiola has been used to
treat a variety of conditions over the years, including fatigue, high altitude
tolerance, inflammation, anxiety, depression, anemia, and headache. Sounds like some
good shit to have on a hike way up in the mountains. And it is so cool that
nature just like provides that to hikers in a way.
Large amounts of golden root were found in each member's backpack.
Two large bags of golden root were found near Ludmila's remains.
She was likely planning on bringing a bunch home.
You can dry it for long-term storage, grind it into a powder,
sprinkle it on whatever, brew it into some tea, you know, lots of stuff.
And very cool how she knew so much about the wilderness.
Despite camping in the woods a lot growing up, just right playing in the woods a ton. I don't
have a clue what you can eat and what you can't eat. Storm came back strong the afternoon of
August 4th. The group made an early camp on a rocky plateau well above the treeline near 8,000
feet in elevation. It doesn't seem that they made their campsite in an ideal location on the night of
August 4th. You know, the storm just shifted their plans a bit. According to Valentina's
later recreation of the night of August 4th, from her 1993 official testimony, the group cooked
dinner on their small gas camping stoves at the campsite, set up two tents, submits unseasonably
cold weather with heavy rain. Heavy rain that would turn to snow.
How cold it was in the mountain we do not know. Sources don't provide the exact temperature
in these mountains that day other than it was in the low 30s Fahrenheit. But we don't know how bad
the wind chill was. And actually with the low 30s I'm not even sure I really buy that because a bunch
of snow you know fell the night of the fourth. So I'm guessing it was colder than what sources say.
Winds blown real hard.
One of the most frustrating aspects of digging into Russian sources, especially from this
era, is that compared to most Western sources, they're just not good.
I found myself with this story wishing that Russia had maybe placed a little bit less
emphasis on hiking clubs, a little more emphasis on these are
the details you need to tell a good story journalism clubs.
To be fair though, a lot of the best Russian sources on this from 1993 or the years directly
following 93 have never been digitized and thus are not available online or even in English.
So maybe, given the benefit of the doubt here, more detailed sources do exist, just not in
an easily accessible the doubt here. More detailed sources do exist, just not in an easily accessible
form over here. The group attempted to sleep during the storm the night of the 4th, but
the tents were reportedly literally ripped open by strong winds around 4 a.m. It doesn't
make it clear if the winds just opened what would be the natural opening to the tent or
actually ripped holes in the fabric of the tent. But woke them up, they got wind, they
got snow blowing their tents now.
Very, very strong winds.
The group was able to prepare the tent,
but the tents, plural, the two of them,
but then one of the two tents had its frame
completely torn out of the ground.
These tents were pitched in rocky, barren,
pretty loose looking soil underneath the snow,
sometime around 6 a.m.
And now they're up for the day.
Sometime shortly after 6 a.m., the group, now surrounded by heavy snow, attempts to pack up and hike towards the treeline.
Sometime between 6 and 10 they get going. And then around 10 a.m. at an elevation of just above 7,800 feet disaster strikes.
This is when Alexander suddenly dies.
Chaos ensues as the group can decide between continuing towards
the treeline or attempting to help other members. The account the only survivor,
17 year old Valentina Udachenko gave shortly after being rescued is as
follows. It's originally written in Russian of course. I've changed a few
things to the translation for a US audience such as converting meters to
feet, adding a few appropriate adjectives for a little better narrative flow
so I don't just sound like I'm parodying
a Russian accent again,
without changing the underlying truths of the report.
At 10 a.m., Christian, the 23-year-old hiker,
Alexander Christian, told the group
that he was wet and freezing.
It was snowing.
It was a thick, heavy snow.
No landmarks on the horizon were visible.
We packed our backpacks and started going down the slope towards the valley of the snow
river.
After walking about 30 feet, Krishan, walking at the end, he suddenly fell.
We tried to pick him up, but then he fell again.
Ludmila, our group leader, ordered the rest of us to continue to descend and she herself
would stay next to him until he was ready to hike again.
However, she then almost immediately stopped the group and asked for one of us to approach her.
Tanya, 24-year-old Tatiana Filipenko, set the tent back up and others hid inside it.
I approached Corovina and Sasha, which is what we called Alexander Christian. Sasha's eyes were
huge and blank, like he was not really there.
Then when I got closer I could see blood oozing from his eyes and ears, and foam coming from
his mouth.
Then he seemed to stop breathing.
Korovina checked for his pulse and found that his heart was no longer beating.
She now asked me to take Vika, 16-year-old Victoria Zalasova, down the mountain.
I tried to, but she suddenly bit me and then fell limp.
I now dragged her towards the others, but then Tatyana began to hit her head against the stones.
Denis, 19-year-old Denis Shvachkin, ran and hid behind some stones and locked himself in his
sleeping bag. I now crawled back up the slope to Korovina and found her dead. She was not breathing.
I next moved over and tried to pick up Timur, 15 year old Timur Babanov, but he had now also died. When I realized that no one was moving, I started going down
to the treeline. I got dressed and I got into my sleeping bag and covered myself
with a tent. The next morning I went back up and everyone was dead. Can you imagine this scene from a horror movie unfolding in the middle of what was supposed to be a challenging but also pretty peaceful and serene hike?
I mean this would be terrifying to experience at any age.
But as a 17 year old? Oh my god.
In a matter of minutes she watched everyone else in her hiking party die.
And not just die, but die in an over the top,
what the fuck is going on here fashion.
She must have been nearly scared to death that she'd be next.
Well, Valentina now quickly took a sleeping bag,
walked down the mountain into the trees below.
She spent this terrified night in the forest,
backing up a little bit.
And then the next morning, she heads back up to where everyone has died.
The storm has passed and she does close the eyes of her dead comrades as well.
After that, she hikes down along the ridge, follows a row of power poles coming down from a nearby relay tower,
and then she just keeps going down until she runs into the Snezha River,
and then she follows this river downstream until a group of Ukrainian tourists find her.
It took four days for Valentina to be rescued, four days following her friends dying.
She spent two of those days waiting along the river to see someone before a man named
Alexander Kvitsnitsky spotted her.
He and some fellow Ukrainians were kayaking down the river and here's how Alex will describe
encountering Valentina.
He said, a girl standing on the shore screams, waves her hands. Yes, it
was so desperate that we immediately realized that it was a disaster. When she
came ashore she rushed to one of our participants and cried on her chest for
a long time. She confusedly told me that people had died and how scared she was.
After this Valentina was taken to Slyudyanka, a city of about 20,000 people sitting on the banks of Lake Baikal,
arriving there on August 18th, where she met with the rescuers who would soon attempt to find the bodies of the six dead hikers.
She spoke primarily with Yuri Egevenyevich, who years later in 2018 recalled how he was impressed by Valentina's composure. I still remember how she answered my questions in detail and clearly,
he said. She told me about the route, the weather, how they moved. She also closed the eyes of the
dead comrades. That's self-control. A typically bad weather continued throughout the month of August,
which greatly hindered the rescue operation, and the hikers' bodies wouldn't be found until
about a month after they'd died. When the rescue team finally made it up to the mountain, they packed a half dozen corpses into plastic bags. Then they sat atop those bags,
using the stiff frozen bodies, now covered in slippery plastic as sleds to quickly make it
back down the mountain, something that is apparently quite common in Russia.
They call it comrade coasting or skeleton surfing. Sounds pretty fun. Or they definitely don't do
that. And I made that up and they respectfully carry them out. The bodies
were taken to the city of Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Republic of Buryatia
where around 440,000 people live by helicopter for autopsy examinations. The
bodies were found to be lightly dressed, some not even wearing their shoes, which
the doctors performed the autopsies found to be actually in line with the type of mania typically brought about by hypothermia.
Which is, yeah, people with severe hypothermia will take off their clothes sometimes due to a
phenomenon called paradoxical undressing. And this happens when the body dilates blood vessels in an
attempt to warm freezing tissue in the limbs, which can cause the person to feel warm. However,
this actually increases blood flow to the skin causing heat to be lost to the
environment. Over time the muscles that constrict blood vessels become exhausted.
Allowing warm blood to rush to the extremities which can feel like a hot
flash. This can make people with severe hypothermia who are already confused and
disoriented feel like they're burning up so they start to take off their clothes.
However taking off their clothes will of course actually cause them to grow cold faster and potentially die that much quicker.
The autopsy report concluded according to Constantine Yugoff, head of the Bureau of
Forensic Medical Expertise of the Republic of Buryatia, the deaths were due to hypothermia.
That's what it concluded. Some sources add that five of the deaths were due to hypothermia and
that Ludmila actually died of cardiac arrest to hypothermia and that Ludmila
actually died of cardiac arrest before hypothermia took her.
Bodies also found to have a slight protein deficiency from under eating and
signs of pulmonary edema due to altitude sickness.
Pulmonary edema is a condition that occurs when fluid builds up in the lungs, makes it hard to breathe and it can't account for
the hikers fr frosting at the mouth.
The bodies were interestingly found with no physical injuries, like the kind you would for sure get if you violently bashed your head into a rock over and over. And what about the bleeding
from the eyes or the bleeding from the ears? Well, pulmonary edema does not account for that.
High altitude sickness can cause you to bleed from the eyes though. It can cause retinal hemorrhages which are small areas of bleeding in the retina at the
back of the eye but generally it doesn't do this below 9,000 feet. They were at an
elevation of less than 8,000 feet but it is possible for it to cause it this at
8,000 feet. Extreme changes in atmospheric pressure can also make you
bleed from the eyes. Perhaps the intense storm at that altitude led to a quick change in pressure.
Altitude sickness, also known as acute mountain sickness, can cause ear bleeding in the form
of ear barotrauma.
Barotrauma is an injury to the ear that occurs when there are rapid changes in altitude and
pressure such as when flying or scuba diving.
And these changes can cause the eardrum to rupture and bleed.
It can also lead to other symptoms like ear pain, pressure, dizziness,
ringing in the ears, hearing loss, and nosebleeds.
So although extremely rare, as in I can't find a concrete example of this definitely happening online,
it is theoretically possible that during a high altitude hike in the middle of a windy storm
that can definitely cause a quick change in atmospheric pressure,
you could have hemorrhages and ruptures that could lead you to both bleed
from your ears and your eyes.
And also, you know, frost in the mouth,
the pulmonary edema.
Finally, it is rare, but definitely not unheard of
for you to have a seizure,
even if you've never had one before
due to nothing more than high altitude exposure.
That is a phenomenon.
Combine that with hypothermia, which causes confusion. And you do have at least a theoretical natural reason for Valentina to see the
terrible shit she claimed to see. After the investigation, Valentina returned to
her home of Petropavlovsk. The investigation was quickly closed at
least to Russian authorities. They were satisfied with hypothermia being
listed as the primary cause of death. The internet, however, especially in recent years, not even close to satisfied with this
answer.
Suspicion surrounding the deaths has grown and conspiracy theories, some of them pretty
wild, pretty entertaining, have popped up in large numbers in the last decade.
And let's look into some of those conspiracies now.
Right after today's mid-show sponsor break.
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And I'm back.
Now let's check out some entertaining, if not maybe super plausible conspiracies regarding
the Kamar-Daban incident.
Many if not most of the conspiracies revolve around allegations of some type of government
cover-up.
What are you hiding Russia? Answer us!
We will not stop wildly speculating on Reddit and 4chan until you do.
So why did this group of experienced hikers break down so quickly?
Why did Ludmila change her mind about ordering the group to move towards the treeline in safety?
How did Alexander, the strongest hiker in the group, die so quick?
Why was Valentina the only one that didn't fall to mania and die?
Why was Tanya bashing her head into a rock?
And what's really up with all the eyeball blood?
Many of the theorists interested in the Khmer deban disaster, excuse me, come from Dyatlov
Pass online groups and websites.
We covered the Dyatlov Pass incident way back in episode 62, January of 2018. And we still don't know what happened there.
Not for sure.
Most likely hypothermia though.
Maybe something called a slab avalanche.
But ultimately it's still a mystery.
Are these two Russian hiking disasters connected in some way?
Some think so, but don't have any real evidence other than they're both groups of Russian
hikers that died in a terrible and still not fully explained tragedy.
A lot of people though do think both groups succumbed to hypothermia.
And now I should add most of the conspiracy theories regarding this disaster seem to stem
from alternate testimony Valentina gave in the summer of 2018.
Not from the original testimony back in 1993 that she gave just days from the disaster.
As you probably noticed when I went over her testimony she didn't say everyone bled from their eyes and ears and foamed from their mouths.
Only Sasha did that, the first hiker to die.
Her second account was published in the July 24th edition of Kamsamolska Pravda.
The journalist who interviewed her, Natalia Varsagova, stated that Valentina originally
refused to be interviewed.
She reported that Valentina was living in a quote, old shabby food and industry hostel Jesus an old shabby food industry
hostel. That doesn't Russia does not translate well to English all the times.
So whatever the fuck that is sounds terrible. She said Valentina initially
slammed the door on her face when she found out she was a journalist and
yelled I'm not going to talk to you. Then when Natalia wouldn't leave she asked
why are you bringing back to this nightmare?
I've been living with my husband for 15 years.
He only found out two years ago that I was there.
And she added, I don't want to remember anything.
But then few minutes later, she did relent
and she tells a more intense story.
And this is when she spoke of all the other hikers reportedly
bleeding from her eyes and ears and foaming at the mouth,
not just Sasha, like originally stated.
This is when she spoke of Tanya bashing her head into a rock over and over, slamming her head harder
and harder until she died. And this is when she talked about numerous hikers convulsing.
Initially in her first interview she said Tanya hit her head into the stones and some sources
say there was a translation error in this first account. That essentially she originally only said
she crawled over towards some rocks,
then slipped and fell and hit her head on a rock.
That she did not, intense horror movie style, bash her head into the stones over and over.
So that's a big difference, right?
Six people, all bleeding from their eyes, ears, foaming at their mouths, convulsing,
one of them slamming her increasingly bloody face into a rock over and over again until
she's dead.
That's an extremely different scene than one hiker having some sort of seizure, bleeding
from numerous holes in their face, head.
Another hiker slipping and falling and hitting their head on a rock.
And then the hikers, you know, losing consciousness and dying of something as common as hypothermia.
One scene, something out of a paranormal horror movie.
The other is seen from a sad movie about some hikers getting pounded by an unexpected storm
on the side of a mountain, bitter winds ripping apart their tents and chilling them to the
bone, chilling them to their deaths.
Could this entire mystery be based on nothing more than a mistranslation of an interview
that was given 25 years after the incident, full of misremembered and or exaggerated details.
Details that then get further exaggerated in one podcast and YouTube video after another.
Yes, that is very possible. But since we're here, what are some of these conspiracies again?
Let's go back to the Russian government. Most popular theory is that the deaths came from a
chemical weapon, specifically a Russian nerve agent known as Novichok. A nerve agent developed at a Soviet Soviet State
Chemical Research Institute between 1971 and 1993. 1993 same year as the hike.
I can see how the conspiratorial mind can connect these dots. The piece is
fit. Signs are all there if you just open your eyes. I believe here is that the
autopsy reports were faked in order to cover up the fact
that this Navichuk, this incredibly powerful nerve agent used by the Russian government
as recently as 2020 in an attempt to assassinate former opposition candidate,
Putin critic and corruption activist, Alexei Navalny. However, as far as we know,
this nerve agent is deployed in either liquid or powder form, not as a gas. They could have been in the air in the
mountains that day. And more importantly, it does not make you bleed from the eyes.
It constricts your pupils. It can blur your vision through excessive tear
production. It doesn't make you bleed from the eyes. It doesn't make you bleed from the
ears. One site I found said it could affect body temperature regulation and
induce hypothermia and also give you pul pulmonary edema leading to that foaming at the
mouth. Some think well what if it was converted into a gas in some
new form? Well that's true. Why would Russia want to risk letting Western
medical authorities figure out that they have a new form of a dangerous chemical
weapon by testing it on random hikers in their own nation. That is not Russia's style.
I feel like they'd be much more likely to poison some of their prisoners,
right? Or use it at this time in the 1992 slash 1993 war in Abkhazia, fought along the Black Sea
far from Siberia. Also, Komsomolskaya Pravda is a Kremlin-backed news media organization
frequently accused by the West of being nostalgic, being sympathetic towards the Soviet Union,
being kind of like, you know, there's a puppet of like Putin's government. There were no suspicions
of nerve gas prior to this 2018 Pravda interview with Valentina. Why would this, you know, basically
government-sponsored or at least government or government supervised paper suddenly open the door to
speculation about the government's, you know, military doing something this
nefarious? That doesn't again feel like Russia's style. Part of the conspiracy
regarding the nerve agent theory is that the autopsy reports again were faked.
Could they have been? Well, yeah sure. I mean any autopsy report could
theoretically be fake. That is something you cannot disprove. But in each case where you think this has happened, you
got to ask yourself, well, why? What is the motive? And in this case, I don't think the
Russian government has a motive to gas these hikers. Could it have been an accidental gassing?
Sure. But that still doesn't fix the problem of the symptoms described by Valentina actually not matching what this chemical weapon would
do to you. So could it have been some new and improved chemical weapon that does
make you bleed out through your eyes and ears and go crazy and do shit like smash
your head into rocks until you kill yourself? Sure. Again, theoretically, you
know, anything's possible in the way that you could just imagine up all
kinds of scenarios. But if there was a weapon that did that and it was actively being tested in 1993,
why hasn't there been evidence of it being used again and again since? That doesn't make any sense.
Why aren't other people bleeding out of their eyes and ears and foaming at the mouth and convulsing and smashing their head into shit?
Convulsions foaming at the mouth are symptoms of various chemical weapons attacks,
but also bleeding from the eyes and ears doesn't seem to be.
To me the Russian military nerve agent conspiracy just don't make any sense, right? The evidence just is not there.
So let's look at some other theories.
A related theory to the nerve agent possibility is that the hikers were killed by some secret
experiments where they were testing a weapon that we don't even fucking know about.
But again, why would Russia do that to their own hikers? And if they did test it on these hikers, by some secret experiments where they were testing a weapon that we don't even know about.
But again, why would Russia do that to their own hikers? And if they did test it on these hikers, why didn't other hikers on the mountain get sick? That's something else that there's a problem.
Or where there's a problem. We don't know how many groups were hiking in that area at that time,
but we know at least one other group was. There was that second group with
Ludmila's 16-year-old daughter Natalia. They were within just a few miles of the group when they died. None of them were harmed.
Also, I should point out Russia in 1993 was in turmoil.
Less than two years before the hike, on December 25, 1991, the Soviet hammer and sickle flag
lowered for the last time over the Kremlin. Earlier that day, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned
his post as president of the Soviet Union, leaving Boris Yeltsin as president of the newly independent Russian state.
And then when the hike occurred, Russia was headed towards a constitutional crisis.
The following month, September of 1993, a constitutional crisis arose in the Russian Federation
from a conflict between President Boris Yeltsin and Russia's parliament president,
and Russia's parliament, excuse me, President Yeltsin
performed a self-coup, dissolving parliament, instituting a presidential
rule-by-decree system. The crisis ended in October with Yeltsin using military
force to attack Moscow's House of Soviets and arresting lawmakers. So Russia is not
a real organized cohesive nation when they're supposedly planning and pulling
off this top-secret weapons testing. And the biggest problem with any conspiracy regarding the Russian military being behind
this is why allow Valentina, the lone survivor, to survive?
Why let her wander around the woods for four days before she's rescued?
Why let her tell anyone what she saw?
It would have been so easy to also kill her.
In particular, why allow her to live for decades in obscurity no less, following the disaster and then give another more sensational interview? They could have easily killed her
in the 25 years between the disaster and her interview. That is not like Russia at all.
So I'm going to say again, no theories regarding this being some sort of state sponsored attack
slash experiment makes sense. What are some of the other more outlandish theories? Reddit user CloudyNoel, chatting about this on an Unsolved Mysteries subreddit, brings
up the interesting possibility that the hikers died from quote, a tree in the area that gives
off a toxic gas.
Okay, yeah, sure, why not?
We've all heard about toxic gas trees make your eyeballs bleed
I mean as a parent I can't tell you how many times when Kyler and Monroe have wanted to play outside
I've warned them careful for toxic gas trees. You don't want to bleed to death out of your eyes
There are no fucking trees to do that
cloudy noel
Gets the fuck off reddit yet needs to get a fuck off reddit
Excuse me get outside
more.
Why didn't Velatina succumb to this toxic tree gas, Cloudy Noel?
Do some of us have toxic tree gas immunity?
Another Reddit user, this is just nonsense letters, atapidai330, just nonsense, really
went fucking wild with some string and some tacks in their war room.
We're hard to connect a lot of dots that the rest of us can't see
When they theorized that the deaths were due to quote
Wolf slash bear traps that you spring-loaded sodium cyanide and that kills quickly
Mammals including humans in a way that resembles the deaths described desperate to breathe convulsing foam in its mouth
Okay, cyanide bombs are a real thing.
And they have been used a lot in animal traps.
Actually, used a lot even by the US Department of Agriculture in the US.
But the way that they're designed, you have to fucking bite them.
Right?
A spring inside the trap propels a single dose of sodium cyanide into the animal's mouth.
The sodium cyanide combines with water in the mouth to produce poisonous cyanide gas which will then kill the animal in a way
that causes internal bleeding, seizures, and lung failure. Right? But there's like
they'll put some like food bait on top of the spring loaded device and if
you were to grab with your hand it wouldn't have the same effect as it would
if you grab with your mouth because it's supposed to shoot it directly into your
mouth. Also these hikers were headed down the ridge in a snowstorm, you
know, so like let me get this straight. So they see somehow through the snow some
fucking bait food on the ground and then also think I should eat that and then
also decided to bend over and grab it with their mouth. And then this is a
single-dose situation so that would only kill one of them. So they'd have to do
that six times in a row. Like one person did that and all of a sudden start like frosted the mouth and convulsing and dying and another person, the other people are like,
Oh my god, what fucking happened to Tommy?
And they're like, oh hey, hamburger on the ground. And then I'm just gonna get that out of my mouth.
And then they start convulsing and another person's like, oh shit, what happened to fucking Tommy and Svetlana?
Oh, hamburger. And then he's like, that is preposterous.
So no, that never happened.
Another theory posed by Reddit user Donny Dodo,
still drawing from the Unsolved Mystery subreddit,
is that Valentina killed all her fellow hikers.
They posted, won't lie, I think she poisoned them.
Occam's razor, you know?
Okay, first, no investigators ever accused
Valentino of doing this. Not ever. Also, I don't think Donnie Dotto understands how
the principle of Occam's razor works. As a refresher, this principle often applied
to debunked complicated conspiracies is defined as follows. Suppose an event has
two possible explanations. The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct.
So the simplest explanation.
Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation.
How is a 17 year old hiker randomly murdering six fellow hikers out of fucking nowhere?
Poison them in a way that mimics the effects of altitude sickness and hypothermia,
a simpler explanation than the hikers dying of altitude sickness and hypothermia.
It's not. It's nonsense.
The Kamar Dabin Incident Wikipedia page has some very wild possibilities.
My favorite is that the hikers while foraging for the golden root
ended up accidentally picking and ingesting a massive amount of magic mushrooms.
I can't believe this is per Wikipedia.
I know Wikipedia sometimes has some dumb shit, but I can't believe this is actually on Wikipedia's page for this incident.
It says, another theory suggests that the hikers might have hallucinated and got sick due to a mushroom poisoning.
Corovina was known to be a forager and she taught the art to her students.
One of the hikers might have accidentally added poisonous mushrooms to their breakfast.
An overdose of psilocybin might cause psychosis, convulsions, cardiac arrest, and send a person
into a coma. A common hallucination caused by psilocybin is to see other people cry blood.
That is a bunch of nonsense.
The footnote, the source for this assertion is a Medium.com article written by some random
user Natasha M. who clearly doesn't know much about mushrooms and doesn't back up her assertions
with any sources. Seeing other people cry blood is
fucking not a common hallucination for magic mushrooms. Not at all. Magic
mushrooms would be way less popular right now if it was like common. Like most of
the time when you fucking ate magic mushrooms you just started to see people
cry blood. Hey dude you wanna go travel some shrooms this weekend? Can't fucking
wait to watch everyone bleed from their eyes. I just tripped onto mushrooms at a Red Hot Chili
Peppers concert in the Gorge Amphitheater in central Washington and while the guys certainly
look different on the big led screens, maybe had too many pores on their skin, maybe too much hair
on their arms in my mind, maybe sometimes flea look like a mummy, other times you look like an elf,
no one was bleeding from their eyes.
Also you don't overdose on magic mushrooms. They don't put you in a f**king coma and give you cardiac arrest. The estimated, check this out, the estimated lethal dose of psilocybin,
I think I might have mentioned this on the psychedelics episode, is approximately six grams
of the active psilocybin drug substance and you would have to ingest approximately 22 pounds of fresh
mushrooms to get that much psilocybin. And since shrooms tend to act as an
appetite suppressant, for everyone I know who eats them at least, you know
gassy stomach, light nausea, common side effects, you'd have to eat 22 pounds of
magic mushrooms and they're light by their size So that would be like a way bigger fucking batch of food than if you try to eat like 22 pounds of beef
Like just to get that inside of your stuff. It's literally impossible and you and you'd have to fucking do it fast
before you know
You the appetites oppressing effects started to kick in and you know, you start to get sick
You have to really quick to theoretically die
effects started to kick in and you know you start to get sick you have to really quick to theoretically die. Lethal overdose from eating mushrooms is
therefore nearly fucking impossible since no one's gonna eat that many
mushrooms in one sitting ever. According to the Guinness Book of World Records
the largest meal ever eaten by one person in one sitting was a 19-pound meal
eaten by a 23 year old woman in 1985 and she didn't only eat mushrooms. Also think
about this, think about how hard it would be to find this many mushrooms. Also, think about this.
Think about how hard it would be to find this many mushrooms. For six hikers to all die in this way,
they would have needed to eat over 130 pounds of magic mushrooms in total.
And then, Valentina would have had to have eaten a bunch more mushrooms
on top of that to see all the bleeding eyes.
So let's get the fuck out of here with that.
Another Wikipedia theory is that the nearby Lake Baikal is known to be a quote toxic
waste dumping ground. And I don't know that that's true. And if the waste was
washed downstream the hikers might have drank the toxins in their water. This is
an I can't believe this is so bad this is on Wikipedia because it's nonsense.
The lake sits at an elevation of just under 1,500 feet
They died it just under 8,000 feet. No river in the world
Flows upstream from 1,500 feet elevation to 8,000 feet. That's how fucking rivers work
So for this scenario to work, they would have had to have gotten out of the train when they made it to the beginning of their hike
immediately filled up their canteens with nasty ass fucking toxic lake sludge and then carried that sludge up the mountain for several days before six of them quickly then died from the poison water in a matter of minutes. Again get
the fuck out of here. Finally I looked in the comments under a YouTube video
titled the Kamara Daman incident on Nick Crowley's YouTube channel for more
conspiracies. And while none of them are worth mentioning here, I do want to share one user's
thoughts just because they're so absurd and they really cracked me up. It doesn't seem like they're
joking here based on a lot of replies that were under this. At Michelle Black 3398 posted,
before my dad went to the forest army, that's weird, or NFA, He told me to never go into the woods without a gun for protection, a flashlight for obvious light, a
long book to keep yourself sane and to not kill your friends, and a mirror to tell if your friends are real or not.
First reply underneath this at Levit posts, oh shit, the mirror is pretty smart. I never thought of that.
No, it's not smart. This is fucking ridiculous.
You need a fucking long book so you don't murder everybody
and also a mirror to make sure that they're real.
Right, so what?
So clearly what? Valentina forgot to bring a mirror,
became convinced her fellow hikers were not real,
and then only because you didn't have a long book.
Thought, well, if I don't have anything to read,
I guess I might as well kill all my friends.
When has a long book ever stopped a mass murder? Holy read, I guess I might as well kill all my friends.
When has a long book ever stopped a mass murder?
Holy fuck, I need to kill everybody here.
But I'm not even halfway through Ulysses by James Joyce, and I need to know what happens
to Steve and Leopold and Molly before I fucking kill everybody.
So what actually happened?
The conspiracies out there about this are just ludicrous.
Reconstruction of the events using all the available reliable evidence does paint a pretty clear picture of how this hike ended in tragedy. The group leaves for the hike
August 2nd after Ludmila correctly plans for all of them to have just enough to eat and plenty to
eat if they can scavenge a bit, forage for some more food while they're on their hike. And you do
really have to plan to barely have enough food for a hike like this because you have to carry it all.
You have to carry it all on your back.
Plus, all of your gear, right?
Sleeping in a tent, a coat, you know, clothing for a variety of temperatures, etc.
Ludmila checks with a local weather station, is assured that weather will be good for the
trip, good enough to hike, good enough to forage, but then a massive and very unexpected
storm moves in.
Brings a lot of rain, unseasonably cold weather, some snow up in the mountains. On August 2nd, August 3rd, August 4th makes it impossible for the group to scavenge for food,
leading to a lower caloric intake, which would result in the slight protein deficiency
revealed in the autopsy findings. On the morning of August 4th, the weather clears up. The group
spends hours scavenging for some golden root to get a little more food and probably take a bunch
back home. I doubt they were worried about starving.
By the afternoon of August 4th, the storm moves back in, so the group makes camp where
they were at, above the tree line, not an ideal location on this barren hillside.
But hey, the storm has fucked things up.
They cook up some food on the camp stove.
They attempt to sleep for the night.
The tents are then battered by the cold storm, torn up a bit around 4am.
All repaired, but I bet a bunch of cold you know wind got in lowered their body temperature the winds
and damaged the tents again around 6 a.m. group gets up prepares to head back you
know get back to hiking get down the hill shit has gone awry the cold winds
moving quick enough to rip their tents the wind chill is significant because
they're hiking in August I highly doubt they brought heavy winter gear with them on a roughly week-long hike
They wouldn't have you know had the room for that. They weren't preparing for that
So they start to get cold very cold dangerously cold and sometime between 6 and 10 a.m
Lude Meal and her crew began marching you know, they're marching down the hill through the snow. They're getting very cold
Freezing wind headed towards the treeline
Maybe they would have made it into the trees where the trees would have
deflected some of the wind chill and maybe things could have been very different.
But Sasha, aka Alexander, is slowing them down.
He's not feeling well.
He has hypothermia.
He tells the rest of the group that he's freezing.
His condition deteriorates rapidly and then he dies.
Why did he bleed from his eyes and ears?
Probably a combination of suffering from the effects of changes in
atmospheric pressure brought on by the storm and altitude sickness. Lude Mila, devastated
I'm sure. Sasha was about to become her son-in-law. She's long seen him as a son. She decides
to stay with him in an emotional moment. Then he dies. She changes her mind, attempts to
continue to lead the rest of the group, but she's also freezing. You know, not sure what
she was wearing. When she knelt down to try and take care of him. She begins to succumb to hypothermia.
Tatiana tries to set up a tent to get out of the cold and the wind. The group
just you know try to hide in it but then they they're not getting warm enough.
They panic. They start to move towards the treeline in a disorderly fashion.
People are dying. They're freaking out. Thanks to their hypothermia
making them feel too hot. They start to engage in some paradoxical undressing, which makes things worse.
Ludmila, shortly before she dies, orders Valentina to drag Victoria down to the treeline, but she refuses to go.
Victoria was the one who broke down from fatigue on a previous hike. She resists. She is not thinking clearly. She is confused.
She is scared. Another symptom of hypothermia is confusion.
She bites Valentina's hand.
She fucking loses it.
They're all losing it.
Tatiana may have banged her head on a rock due to stress, but not enough to kill herself
or even cause a fractured skull, according to the autopsy report.
She might have just slipped.
Valentina, after dragging Victoria towards the rest of the group, sees that Ludmila has
died or at least lost consciousness.
Dennis has went to hide behind some rocks still above the treeline.
He's in a sleeping bag, but because he's still exposed to the wind the cold his temperature continues to drop and he's dying.
Valentina now the only one in the group still focused on making it to the treeline.
Who knows why why it was just her maybe her fucking coat was a little better than the other's coats.
She gets down there so the effects of the wind chill will be mitigated.
She attempts to carry Timur the the youngest down, but gives up.
He's not thinking straight.
No one's thinking straight.
She goes down to the treeline alone, sets up a tent, gets in her sleeping bag, also
suffering from hypothermia, does not leave again until the next morning.
The weather clears up a bit.
The next morning the storm has let up a little bit.
The temperature has increased.
Hypothermia no longer a present danger, danger clearly because she comes back out of the
tent, head back up to the tragic scene, notes everyone has died, takes supplies,
covers the bodies, closes her eyes and leaves. She survives alone until August
9th and after making her way to a river to the south of the original hike she
is luckily found by a group of Ukrainian kayakers. And that's it. Not very fun or interesting,
but it all matches up with testimony given at the time by Valentina,
accounts of her rescuers and search party members,
the autopsy report,
and just what we know about altitude sickness and hypothermia.
Some will likely feel this explanation still does not explain why Alexander
seemingly suffered from extreme altitude sickness
after having plenty of time in the mountains to adjust. But I think those people are missing something very
important. They didn't start their hike at high altitude. They started around
1,500 feet down by the lake and it took them you know excuse me and it can take
between one and three days for the effects of high altitude sickness to
really kick in. And he's only been up in the mountains for a few days so actually
it checks out the timing of the onset of his altitude sickness would be normal.
And you can experience altitude sickness at elevations as low as 6,500 feet and they climb
to above 8,000 feet.
And hypothermia certainly would have worsened its effects.
One more note on hypothermia.
In her 2018 interview, survivor Valentina Urochenko was asked if Ludmila was to blame
for the deaths of the hikers. And response no way it was very cold at the top early
morning we were sleeping she woke us up told us to pack things and go down to
the gorge she tried to save us she just didn't have time very cold at the top
yeah it ended up being some of the worst weather in 30 years in that area that
summer I delayed the rescue team by around a month.
So a nasty storm slowed them down.
They got caught in it.
They camped somewhere where they surely didn't plan on setting up their tents.
The wind battered them, tore their tents, caused them to get even colder.
Chaos ensued thanks to altitude sickness and a lot of hypothermia.
Tragic but not really a mystery.
Or maybe I'm just being too skeptical and rational.
And the Russian military did kill them
in an experiment with toxic trees
they've been fucking around with
that no one's ever seen since,
even though they died above the tree line.
Or maybe they were gassed with a nerve agent
that has not been used in gas form to our knowledge.
Or someone left out a shit ton of sodium cyanide
loaded exploding fucking bear traps along the trail
in an area of the mountain not really known for a lot of bears.
And they were dumb enough to use their mouths to pick up the bear trap bait one after another
six times.
And Valentina forgot to mention that to her rescuers.
Or they collectively ate about 150 pounds of magic mushrooms they just found.
And had some very intense trips.
Classic everyone's bleeding from their eyes kind of trips.
Or they just didn't think to have everyone pack a really long book.
And Valentina got so tired of having nothing to fucking read, she had to kill everyone!
Perhaps with these numerous very viable possibilities,
the Kamar-de-Bahn incident will continue to endure.
And that's it for this edition of Time Sucks, Short Sucks.
If you enjoyed this story,
sorry my allergies are out of control today, check out the rest of the Bad Magic catalog,
beefier episodes of Time Suck every Monday at noon Pacific time. New episodes of the
long-running paranormal podcast, Scared to Death, every Tuesday at midnight with episodes of
Nightmare Fuel. Thanks for the feedback from a lot of you Time Suckers about Nightmare Fuel
recently, twice a month. Thanks to my son and summer employee
Kyler Cummins for the initial research today. Good job dude. And thank you to
Logan Keith for recording and uploading today's episode once again. Please go to
BadMagicProductions.com for your bad magic needs and have yourself a great weekend.