Creepy Stories From Chernobyl

On April 26, 1986, one of the world's worst disasters occurred in the Ukrainian city of Pripyat (then part of the USSR). There was an explosion caused by a flawed reactor design at the Chernobyl power plant, which spewed radiation into the air. Only Chernobyl and Fukushima have been rated as a level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale—that's the highest the scale goes. 

The city of Pripyat was evacuated, and a total of 31 people died as an immediate result of the accident itself, while as many as 500,000 were affected. Pripyat became a tourist attraction in 2011, and is today captured by photographers who snap haunting images of abandoned toys and dilapidated buildings, sometimes referred to as "ruin porn."

Lore and legends surround the area, from ghosts and Chernobyl mutants, to a strange ominous black bird that some believe to be the harbinger of disaster. 

The Pripyat Amusement Park should have been a fun addition to the town. It was slated to open on May 1, 1986, just days after the disaster. Obviously, the park would never open, and has simply been left to rust. 

The amusement park had a Ferris wheel, bumper bars, a paratrooper attraction, and swing boats. High levels of radiation still exist in the mossy areas of the park. It's now a popular backdrop for ruin porn photographers. The park is also used a setting in the game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. 

It bears similarity to Six Flags New Orleans, an amusement park which has been eerily abandoned since Hurricane Katrina. 

Photographer Darmon Richter claims that the abandoned Chernobyl we often see in photos is not real, but rather a facade meant to make money off of people who love "ruin porn." Richter visited Pripyat and said that the city was desolate in many ways and still dangerous. However, he says, a lot of the chilling photos we see online have been manufactured by photographers looking to create the perfect horror.  

"I observed countless instances of tourists moving these artifacts around, or repositioning furniture for a better shot. I watched a photographer arrange stuffed bears and little dolls so that they sat in line along the edge of a bare, metal-framed bed," he wrote. 

He also alleges that the site purposefully profits off of disaster tourists. Can you blame them?

The documentary The Russian Woodpecker explores a conspiracy theory as explained by Ukrainian artist Fodor Alexandrovich. The theory indicates that the meltdown was actually orchestrated in order to cover up the failure of the Russian Woodpecker. The Russian Woodpecker was a radar array meant to detect missiles before they'd even been launched, and was so named for the loud tapping sound—similar to a woodpecker pecking on wood—the device made. But it cost $7 billion and it didn't work. The Woodpecker, formally called Duga-3, was located very near Chernobyl. 

Alexandrovich's evidence: The Duga-3 probably didn't work because of the Aurora Borealis messing with signals, with the Soviets may not have accounted for—and it would have been very bad for Soviet leaders to admit they screwed up. Furthermore, Chernobyl's instability was already well-known, as they'd had issues with the reactors before, so a meltdown would make a convincing story.
 

How likely is this to be true? Well, it's a complicated plan that would have had to be perfectly executed to succeed, and that seems pretty unlikely. But some weird stuff did supposedly happen while the crew was making the documentary, including visits from the secret police and the sniper shooting of one of the crew members during the Euromaiden protests. 

Here's a weird one. A Russian scientist who managed to survive the disaster moved to a very small Greek island called Gavdos with six other Russian scientists. They easily made a home there, but some conspiracies suggest that the scientists actually went to the island in an attempt to seize control of the earth or to become immortal. 
 

Gavdos has about 50 permanent residents, though it's a popular spot for tourists in the summer. In mythology, the island has been thought of as the real Ogygia, Calypso's mythical island home where the sorceress kept Odysseus captive for seven years.
 

VICE spoke to a filmmaker making a documentary about the group, who said that the scientists work on various inventions from inside a compound. They have seven acres of land given to them by a priest, and they are kind to other residents of the island, often working on various projects free of charge. 
 

Some think the Russian scientists are spies; others think they've survived due to the island's healing properties; but the scientists themselves seem consumed with the idea of immortality and with Greek philosophy. They're even building a temple they call The Temple of Apollo. 

There's an alien conspiracy that revolves around Chernobyl. Not that aliens caused the disasters, but that they saved the human race from utter annihilation. 
 

According to the conspiracy, people spotted UFOs around the same time as the Chernobyl explosion. One witness reported seeing an object for about six hours. Those who believe that this object was both real and piloted by aliens suggest that the aliens helped tone down radiation levels, preventing an even larger blast. Though the damage was certainly terrible, it wasn't as apocalyptically bad as believers say it could have been. 

A doctor claimed to have seen a similar UFO three years later at a time when a reactor was sending off high radiation levels. Similar conspiracies surround the Fukushima disaster. 

According to legend, several people began to see a large, winged creature with red eyes in early April before the Chernobyl disaster. The creature became known as the Black Bird of Chernobyl, and many have drawn parallels between this creature and America's Mothman. Both creatures were supposedly seen right before disasters: the Mothman was spotted right before the Silver Bridge collapsed in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a tragedy that cost 46 people their lives. They're also similar in appearance: large, black, winged figures with glowing scarlet eyes. 

Survivors of the Chernobyl disaster reported seeing the creature flying away from the reactor. Reports of the bird stopped immediately after the disaster. Those who believe that the bird was a paranormal entity regard it as a harbinger of terrible things to come, while others believe it was merely a black stork. 

Elephants are cute, so you'd think anything named after their feet would also be cute. You'd be wrong, however, as this particular euphemism refers to a flow of hot lava that will kill you after 300 seconds—that's a mere five minutes—of exposure. And not quickly, either, but you will die within two days. 
 

According to Kyle Hill in an article for Nautilus, this black lava was discovered by emergency responders who entered a steam corridor underneath Reactor 4. The crews' radiation sensors warned them to stay away. 
 

What happened was this: the radioactive particles got so hot, they melted and turned into a flow of lava, which in turn melted through the bottom of the reactor vessel and all the way down until it cooled enough to form the big glop you see above. 
 

Photos of the "elephant's foot" were taken via a camera on wheels. It was determined that the blob consisted mostly of concrete and other materials that the fuel melted on the way down. Still, going near it was a bad idea, and we wouldn't advise going near it even today. 

One common story is that the blast mutated humans into flesh-eating zombies that will devour any disaster tourists or researchers that cross their paths. 
 

One piece of "evidence" was a grainy video shot from a helicopter that appeared to show said zombies ripping a man apart limb from limb. In reality, this video was from a 2007 Ukrainian video game called S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl. In the game, the zombies are mutants that are created after a second disaster, 20 years after the first, during repopulation efforts. Someone later posted the video on YouTube trying to pass it off as real. It's not. 
 

The idea of Chernobyl zombies was revisited in a horror flick called Chernobyl Diaries in which a group of young disaster tourists decide to check out Pripyat, only to—spoiler—get attacked by zombies. 

As with any site where a number of people have lost their lives, Pripyat is rife with ghost stories. Andrei Kharsukov, a nuclear physicist from New York, told one such story after visiting the area in 1997:

Kharsukov said he went to the power station at 7:30 a.m. and went to the Reactor Four sarcophagus, which is where the explosion occurred. He could not go inside due to radiation, but as he took radiation readings, he heard someone screaming for rescue from a fire inside. 
 

"I ran upstairs to tell someone, but they said that when I entered the reactor control room, I was the first person to open that door in three years, and the only way to get inside the old reactor is through the doors I came in through. If someone had gone inside the reactor when I was not looking, they would have tripped an alarm that goes off when the reactor door is opened mechanically.
 

"The reactor door requires a password and a handprint, yet someone, or something, was inside. Later that evening, as we were eating dinner outside the building by the river next to the plant, a flood light turned on in the room of the installation. There was no way anyone could be inside. As we ate, we figured there was a power surge or something. Then just as my colleague said that, the light turned off."

Many reports of deformed and strange beasts near Chernobyl can be found all over the Internet, indicating that radiation had severe effects on the animal population. 

To be sure, some severe mutations were seen right after the accident. The piglet in the photo above suffered from dipygus and is on display at the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum. It was born near the site of the explosion.  
 
Contemporary animals, however, are typically okay, even though their internal radiation levels are higher than most. They do not suffer significant genetic mutations, though some species have issues. For instance, some birds have developed smaller brains and some rodents have decreased litters or do not live as long. In fact, animal populations seem to be doing better now than they were when humans were farming there before. Scientists continue to debate, however, what the long-term effects of exposure will be for the animals that live there.