In places where people have tragically died, various paranormal phenomena are often observed. If there was a cataclysm that collapsed buildings and was accompanied by large human casualties, you can see glowing lights on the ruins, meet ghosts, hear someone's screams … Technical progress has added to these phenomena also strange phone calls from the numbers of dead people.
Today we will tell you about the mysterious cases that took place in those places where the water element raged.
Thailand. 2004
On December 26, 2004, a tsunami caused by a powerful earthquake swept across the Indian Ocean and killed about 230,000 people on its shores, including over 5,000 in Thailand. And after a couple of days, local residents began to report the appearance of ghosts in the places of destruction, about groans coming from under the landslides, about cries for help heard from the beaches. Of course, rescuers tried to look for victims in those places from where screams were heard, but either they did not find anyone, or they bumped into the bodies of those killed during the tsunami. Some of the messages belonged to volunteers, who claimed that they heard screams and crying where they had checked everything for a long time and from where the corpses had already been taken away. There were several reports that strange screams and groans came from a large pile of rubbish, but when it was taken apart, not a single person was found under it.
Then came a wave of reports from taxi drivers from the Patent area, one of the worst tsunami-hit cities in Thailand. They encountered ghostly passengers who stood on the side of the road and stopped the car, asking to be taken to the airport. On the surface, they seemed quite material, but when the taxi approached the airport, these passengers literally disappeared into thin air.
Many families complained that they were bothered by strange phone calls, when shouts in foreign languages were heard in the receiver, as far as could be understood, with pleas for help. When checking, it turned out that the phone numbers from which these calls were made belonged to the deceased foreign tourists who became victims of the disaster on December 26.
Two reports came from night guards from Patong Bazaar, which is located near the beach and was also damaged during the tsunami. One of them in the middle of the night heard a woman's scream from the side of empty shopping stalls, after which he refused to go to work in the dark for a long time. Another claimed to have seen the figure of a woman wandering along a dark beach and loudly calling for her child. After a few steps, this woman in the truest sense of the word evaporated before his eyes.
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One local resident said that after visiting the Wat Baan Muang temple, where the bodies of the dead were temporarily deposited, for a long time she could not live in peace.
“Fear enveloped me, and because of this I could not sleep at night,” she said. - Even when I heard the howl of the wind, it seemed to me that it was screaming spirits. I believe in ghosts and will always believe. The tsunami happened so quickly that many tourists did not even understand what happened when they died. They probably thought they were still relaxing on the beach when they were already dead and became spirits.
Japan. 2011
The invasion of ghosts and other anomalous phenomena in Thailand then lasted no more than two weeks, after which they stopped at once. The situation was different in Japan, where in March 2011, the strongest 9-point earthquake caused a devastating tsunami that struck the coast in the Tahoku region. The disaster killed about 16,000 people and also destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the largest nuclear accident since Soviet Chernobyl. In Japan, anomalous phenomena after the disaster lasted for several months.
Entire areas were devastated and resembled the scenery of science fiction films about the Apocalypse or some kind of exclusion zone. Similar to what happened in Thailand, locals soon began to meet ghosts here. There are stories of whole queues of ghostly human silhouettes lining up at the entrance to ruined supermarkets, strolling through abandoned parks, as they did in life, or wandering among the ruins of their ruined houses.
Eyewitnesses said they saw ghostly silhouettes of people, as if trying to escape from the approaching wave. These ghosts ran by and immediately disappeared into thin air.
The surviving local residents met their neighbors, who allegedly also escaped, and even talked to them, but later it turned out that in fact they had died, and therefore they were communicating with ghosts.
An elderly woman from Onigawa, who died during the tsunami, then here and there appeared in the refugee camp and asked for tea. As soon as people saw her, they immediately realized that it was a dead man: the woman was already beginning to decompose and left behind pools of rotten sea water. However, the eyewitnesses did not have enough spirit to tell her about this directly, and they just silently handed her a cup of hot tea.
Japanese taxi drivers, like their Thai colleagues, talked about ghostly fellow travelers. Especially often those appeared in the city of Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, in which at least 6,000 people died, and the bodies of many were carried into the ocean. One of the drivers said that two months after the disaster, he put a young woman in a taxi, who asked to take her from the Ishinomaki area to the Minamihama area, completely destroyed by the tsunami. When the driver told the woman that there was not a single whole building left, she calmly asked: "So I died?" - then turned into a haze and disappeared.
Other taxi drivers also reported that passengers disappeared into thin air, who at first seemed quite real people. In one such case, the passenger gave the taxi driver the address, but when they arrived at the house, it turned out that the building was completely destroyed. The driver turned to tell the passenger about this, but there was no one in the back seat.
Local resident Kaisho Aizawa saw ghosts several times. She said:
- There are ghosts without heads, with severed arms or legs. There are those whose bodies were completely cut in half. These people were killed or mutilated during the catastrophe, and they remained then in such a state, as if suspended between two worlds.
Another Japanese man from the tsunami-affected area said that he saw the ghosts of drowned people, smeared with mud from head to foot.
USA. 2005
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the American city of New Orleans and surrounding Louisiana in a violent storm caused by Hurricane Katrina. More than 1,500 people died and hundreds of thousands were evacuated as much of the city was covered with water. As soon as the water began to disappear, inexplicable phenomena began there too.
Local residents and rescuers said they heard strange screams, groans and voices coming from nowhere, now from the rubble. However, if these rubble were dismantled, then they found either corpses that had already begun to decompose under them, or they did not find anyone at all. Just like in the tragedies in Japan and Thailand, survivors have repeatedly observed the silhouettes of ghostly people wandering around the destroyed homes.
A number of similar reports came from soldiers of the National Guard (in the United States, these are mobilized reservists), who worked with rescuers and were stationed on the premises of New Orleans Sophia B. Wright High School. These stories, in particular, were covered by journalists from the CBS-5 television channel. The soldiers said that many times they encountered unexplained phenomena, especially when they worked at dusk. So, sometimes in the dark they heard the fearful giggling of children and saw the shadows flickering against the background of destroyed houses. At the same time, if they examined the ruins, they did not find there either children or anybody alive.
One of the mobilized reservists ran into a ghost right during a short sleep break when he settled down in some school building to relax in his sleeping bag.
“I opened my eyes,” the soldier said, “and saw a little girl in the doorway. This was not a game of my imagination. Then the girl disappeared, and needless to say that no one else saw her here, and in general there were no children in these rooms.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №8. Author: Valdis Peipins