Caves and dungeons have long been considered mysterious and dangerous places. Daredevils who risked descending into the area of eternal darkness, sometimes met white glowing ghosts, who did not need to leave one stone wall and enter another. In the caves, one could often hear quiet voices: they resembled a whisper, and sometimes an insinuating hypnotizing melody was felt in the sounds. What is hidden behind such stories, which sometimes freeze the blood?
New Athos cave
White translucent ghosts can be found in deep basements, in intricate quarries, and in natural caves. Of course, they are also in the most grandiose cave of the former USSR - Novoafonskaya. One of the experienced travelers conveyed his impressions of what he saw in the following way: “From the first hall, called“Abkhazia”, there is a walking one and a half-kilometer path along eight grottoes. The emerald mirror of the underground lake sparkles under the arches. Next comes the "Hall of Georgian Cavers", named after the first explorers. This is a grandiose underground palace with a length of 260 meters, which can accommodate three football fields. This underground palace, like all the following seven halls, demonstrates to the audience all the variety of precious treasures that the water flowing through cracks has created over thousands of years, dissolving rocks and carving halls and passages in the thickness of the mountain.creating an amazing stone lace of stalactites, stalagmites, stone columns and delicate lime curtains and drips. " And among all this beauty, the first explorers of the cave encountered white ghosts.
White speleologist
Here is what one of the members of the Moscow group of speleologists who carried out a topographic survey of the cave said. “Suddenly, at the other end of the hall, about fifty meters from the tent, there was a noise. Everyone instantly woke up from half-asleep - there was no one in the cave except the speleologists. The noise approached, someone's confident footsteps were distinctly heard. Someone opened the tent curtain and shone a powerful lantern into the darkness. A ray of light ran across the floor of the cave, "feeling" every suspicious place, but found nothing. A calm voice rang out: "It seemed, in the dark, what could only be imagined." The lantern went out, and again there were distinct footsteps. “Probably, this is the 'white speleologist',” one of the seasoned guides said lazily. The footsteps froze a few meters from the tent, and then began to move away.
Most often, a translucent ghost - the "white speleologist" appears in the most famous quarries near Moscow Syana. In the caves there is even a grotto called "White", and in it a stone grave with the inscription: "White among us."
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Master of the Sablin Caves
There are white ghosts in the Sablinsky quarries, well-known to those who love underground travels in St. Petersburg. Here is how Yuri Lyakhnitsky, a St. Petersburg geologist, a well-known expert on the Sablinsky caves, tells the story of the appearance of a ghost: “Many years ago a gentleman decided to explore the caves alone. It was in winter, when the entrances to the underground cavities were covered with continuous ice. The mountain caver slipped and drove down at great speed. Striking his head against the wall of the catacomb, he broke his cervical vertebra and died instantly. It is unknown who buried him in the underground gallery of the "Pants" cave and put a cross on the grave mound. Since then, the spirit of the deceased speleologist has been hovering through all the caves."
The mysterious creature of the Sablinsky Caves not only hovers, but sometimes leaves material traces of its stay. Several years ago, a 16-year-old teenager succumbed to the temptation to wander alone through the stone labyrinths. For this purpose he chose the cave "Pants", the same one where the grave of the deceased caver is located. A mysterious creature lured the "brave man" into the farthest corridor of the ten-kilometer labyrinth. Only a week later, rescuers found the half-dead boy and barely pumped it out. After this incident, a frightening inscription appeared over the caver's grave: "Vengeance awaits everyone!"
Ural harbingers of trouble
Especially many legends about the ghostly inhabitants of caves and mines were formed in the Urals. The ghost of a woman dressed all in white appeared to the Ural miners on the eve of the collapses in the mines. In the essay "Ural mines", written by Mikhail Frantsev, who worked at the beginning of the last century in the Office of Coal Mines of the Perm Province, the following case is described: “It's a dead night in the mountains. A trembling ray of the moon slides over a black cross, which stands at the very top of the mountain. A dark shadow fell from the cross on the piles of stones overgrown with gray moss. Several old pines are quietly talking among themselves under the gusts of the wind. A handful of mining workers have gathered at the entrance to the mine, waiting in line to descend. In the silence, one of them is heard saying something:
- So, we are going, we have gone far, already began to disperse for work, the carriage rolled up, and one of them said: “It’s not okay, guys, that we went down into the mine, listen… again!” We stopped, began to listen, suddenly we heard that someone was crying in the distant workings, quietly, so pitifully crying … Let's go there - there is no one. At first it was still heard, and then it completely fell silent … So and so. And then it happens that she herself seems to be all in white, they say, her face is closed, and in her hands a candle burns with green fire, and she herself is standing and also crying … It’s not good, they say, she’s killed about the dead.”
Mountain elder
And in the mines of the Far East, there are ghosts warning of roof collapses. According to a certain IK, in 1943, being a student at a technical school, he did an internship at a Far Eastern mine. Once, when their brigade was given an outfit, the foreman suddenly announced that he would not go to work at the appointed place, since he had seen the mining "owner" of the mine there the day before. He was an old man with a long gray beard in a canvas shirt and homemade shoes - as in the old days they dressed. The old man said that people had already taken enough ore from this face, and that he, the mountain owner, forbade them to come here again. Frightened by this vision, the brigadier started to run. Of course, this explanation did not satisfy the authorities. The foreman was selected and removed from work as allegedly suffering from delirium tremens. The brigade was still sent to the “forbidden” slaughter. On the same day, a landslide occurred there, people were crushed to death …
Eyewitness scientist: an attempt to understand
Petersburg geophysicist, candidate of technical sciences V. Bondarenko tried to solve the riddle of underground ghosts. He rejected the mystical stories of the appearance of white transparent figures and approached this phenomenon from a scientific point of view. The geophysicist put forward a hypothesis according to which ghosts are generated by infrasonic signals, which, in turn, are precursors of landslides and collapses. Infrasound also affects the brains of people underground, so they have different visions.
Bondarenko himself saw with his own eyes a ghost in the Pavlovsk underground at the end of the 40s of the last century. As a schoolboy, the future explorer climbed there in search of captured weapons. Putting his head into the hole connecting two parallel tunnels, the boy saw a phantom: “The figure, dressed in a loose robe that falls to the very ground, glowed quite brightly, but the main light came not from her, but from a staff with a luminous ball at the end, and if from the figure itself the light went bluish, then the ball emitted a warmer, yellow light. It was difficult to discern whether it was a man or a woman from such a distance. Having finally come to my senses, I, trying not to make noise, squeezed back into my side and prepared to give a goo, but my legs became like cotton … I only had enough strength to hide and hold my breath. Even scared to death, I was thinkingthat the owner of the luminous figure is hardly able to squeeze through this hole (of course, I heard that ghosts can pass through walls, but did not take it seriously)."
Apparently, this meeting predetermined Bondarenko's further interest in underground anomalies. By the way, he had a few more occasions to observe the mysterious phenomena of dungeons - in the Crimea and the Urals. These were moving vertical pillars of light and harnesses that quickly moved through underground tunnels. However, when the researcher tried to shoot this phenomenon on specially processed supersensitive photographic film, it was these frames that turned out to be overexposed each time.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №35. Author: Mikhail Taranov