It would seem that Aksai is an ordinary provincial town in the Rostov region, no different from other similar Russian cities, but this is not so. It turns out that there is a whole system of underground passages under it.
The first catacombs were dug at the beginning of our era and had a cult significance. Subsequent generations expanded the underground city, entangling it with a network of labyrinths. These dungeons are filled with secrets and mysteries. Locals experience superstitious horror when they talk about what is happening in the Aksai catacombs.
In the 18th century, the dungeon was used as casemates for captured Turks in the Ust-Aksai Stan at the fortress of the customs outpost. At that time, there were about 30 underground structures, including fortress cellars.
Today, according to researchers, the length of the underground city exceeds 100 kilometers. There are few daredevils to visit the dungeon, and those who ventured, they say in Aksai, are missing. In addition, livestock constantly disappears here, and after a while only gnawed bones are found.
Vyacheslav Zaporozhtsev, the curator of the local fortress museum "Customs Outpost of the 17th Century", can tell a lot about the anomalous phenomena taking place in the catacombs. But most of all, he was impressed by the meeting with the ghost, which made him believe in everything that was said about the dungeon.
Closing the museum one evening, Zaporozhtsev saw through the basement window that a light was on there. The man remembered well that, leaving, he turned off the electricity. He had to return, he unlocked the massive basement door and looked down.
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A cat who lived at the museum followed Vyacheslav. As soon as the door opened, the cat hissed, the fur heaved on it, and he ran away like an arrow. But the man did not pay attention to this, he was more concerned that no matter how he flipped the switch, the light did not go out. I had to go downstairs.
What he saw in the dungeon did not fit into any idea of the material world. A woman was walking along the bypass gallery of the basement, or rather, she seemed to be floating in the air. Her black hair was loose and prevented from seeing her face. The night visitor was dressed in a white dress with a wide hem and an elegant corset in the style of the 19th century.
She slipped silently past the shocked guardian without even hitting him. The frightened Zaporozhtsev recoiled, and the lady entered the wall and disappeared. Frightened, Vyacheslav, literally flying up the steps, jumped out of the basement and only then noticed that the light had gone out by itself.
“The woman in white has been seen here before,” Zaporozhtsev says. “In addition, a mysterious knocking is often heard in the museum from somewhere under the walls. Probably, someone's restless soul has settled in our dungeons. Alas, no historical research has allowed to reliably establish to whom it could belong."
There is a version according to which the ghost woman is the daughter of the chieftain. Allegedly, in the 19th century, a band of robbers raged here. Their chieftain instructed his daughter to guard the treasures, so she does her father's will after death.
One of the local historians said that the granddaughter of one of the robbers came to the regional party committee in the middle of the 20th century and offered to exchange the secret of the treasure for permission to live in a nursing home at the church. But she was considered insane, and when they realized, she was no longer alive.
There is an assumption that the basement of the museum is not a permanent habitat of the ghost. Perhaps he (she) comes here from the basements of the very customs outpost, next to which there is a manhole leading directly to the Don.
Two hundred years ago a strange man appeared in Aksai who called himself a merchant. True, as it turned out later, he was a member of the secret Masonic order of the Jesuits. Efim Kolupaev, that was the name of the overseas guest, was known in these parts as a famous murderer.
He invited rich travelers to his house to stay, killed them, took valuables and threw bodies into the river through this hole. The scammers buried the plundered good somewhere in Aksai, but where, no one still knows.
Another version claims that Kolupaev was looking for something in the catacombs, and these were clearly not treasures. He hired large groups of excavators, studied the area and spent so much money on it that it would be enough for several treasures.
Whether he found what he was looking for remained a mystery. But about the object of his search, you can make an assumption. In the ancient books of Jesuit Masons, there are records that the land under Aksai is somehow connected with a certain shrine, which, perhaps, still remains in these lands.
In Soviet times, it was planned to build a bunker in the catacombs in case of a nuclear war. Thorough surveys of the soil and terrain were carried out. In fact, initially the military planned to use not Mukhina's gully, but the ancient catacombs of the Kobyakov settlement for their needs.
But a terrible tragedy forced them to abandon their original plan. Once a soldier, sent to the catacombs to investigate the length of underground passages, disappeared. The search group sent after him also suffered losses - two more soldiers disappeared. All three were found, rather, what was left of them.
The soldiers' bodies were cut in two, and the cut line was as neat as a laser. No blood was found on the bodies; they were only slightly melted at the incision site. The radios also fell under this “knife”, and so that not a single crack remained on the electronic boards.
Naturally, this incident was reported to Moscow. And from there came an urgent order to stop all work, remove people and equipment, and brick up the entrance to the underground with a thick layer of concrete. The question remains: what is it that scared the military, armed with modern technology?
Soon after the military left there, an amateur explorer Oleg Burlakov died in Aksai. He, too, was found cut in half, with only bones left of his upper body.
Riddles always attract people. And recently, diggers arrived in those places, taking a dog with them. But the dog did not accompany people for long. At one of the corners of the maze, he whined and rushed out. The Diggers, frightened, backed away. And just in time.
In the place where they stood a minute ago, the walls parted, and then closed again. Elsewhere, the daredevils barely managed to move away from the collapsing floor, which after a moment took its original position. These are all very much like traps. But for whom they are arranged remains a mystery.
Ancient sources say that the local population sacrificed people to the Dragon living underground. It looks like a fairy tale, but quite recently, after a collapse in the basement of a cannery, the watchman looked into the hole and saw a huge snarling creature, moving briskly in the dark. The hole, of course, was walled up.
It is believed that the monster does not live in a dungeon, but in water. Geologists claim that there is a lake below Aksai at a depth of 40 meters, and an underground sea at a depth of 250 meters. In addition, another underground river flows under the Don channel in the Aksai region.
In the place of the Aksay bridge, cars or trailers often disappeared. Divers, sent to search, found a bottomless funnel here, pulling everything into itself with such force that even steel safety cables are stretched to the limit.
They say that UFOs often fly out of the dungeon and dive underground again. Once people saw humanoid figures in a luminous ball, another time such a ball was so bright that its light reached warships, which fired at a mysterious object, but to no avail - the ball disappeared underground.
Once as many as three UFOs appeared over the road in the area of the Aksai bridge. They blinded the drivers and the traffic stopped for a long time. After help was called, the objects quickly disappeared underground.
Of course, there is a scientific explanation for everything mysterious, even if only in the form of a hypothesis. A. Olkhovatyi, a scientific expert of the Ecology of the Unknown Association, believes that all these UFOs are ball lightning arising from tectonic processes, and it would be more correct to call them NGOs (unidentified underground objects).
In the light of this hypothesis, we can conclude that the sliding walls of the catacombs are the result of a small earthquake, and the roar of the monster is the rumble of tectonic magma. It turns out that there is a volcano under the ground next to an underground lake.
How until now hot magma did not meet with cold water and an explosion did not occur - this hypothesis does not explain, as well as the appearance of a ghost woman, as well as human figures inside "ball lightning".