Read the beginning: Leningrad swamps: mystical secrets and the missing
In the swamps in the north of the Leningrad region, local residents and tourists have been missing for twenty years. Missing - more than a hundred, found corpses - 19. Scientists and police in confusion. However, there is one version.
Zmey Gorynych
There is only one reasonable version - snake bites. Scientists say that only one poisonous snake is known in the north of the region - the common viper, but the venom of this snake does not cause fever. Also, harmless snakes, copperheads and several species of legless lizards live in these parts. That's all the creeping bastards of the Leningrad region. But locals say that this is not a complete list. Some researchers also say that in the swamps of north-west Russia, there are signs of the existence of reptiles unknown to science.
“At the beginning of the 1980s, they began to inform us about flying snakes that live in our swamps,” says Alla Titova, a Tikhvin local historian, the former head of the ethnographic department of the Vepsian Forest park. - No need to laugh, no fiction, such snakes have long been known to science, however, they do not fly in the literal sense, but are simply able to jump far. Such snakes live in South America. The bite of these snakes is deadly. I began to study archival records and literature, to communicate with old-timers. I managed to find out that the "flying reptile" or "Serpent Gorynych" in the minds of local residents is a dangerous, but common and not at all mystical animal. Locals talk about meetings with these reptiles, as about meetings with bears and wolves.
Cryptozoologists, researchers from the Labyrinth society, who have long been in contact with the residents of the Tikhvin district, are also sure of the existence of "flying reptiles" in the Leningrad region.
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“These snakes have a very unusual appearance,” says Ilya Agapov, deputy head of the Russian Geographical Society “Labyrinth”. - On the head of males, there is a small growth, similar to a cock's comb. These snakes also behave in an unusual way: eyewitnesses say that the miracle snakes can make half-jumps, half-flights: from the ground up to ten meters, and from trees up to fifty. That is why they were called "flying reptiles". There is nothing supernatural in the existence of this type of reptile - in endless swamps many animals unknown to science can live. This is Loch Ness, not explored far and wide! And the type of such snakes has long been known - the palm snake that lives in the jungles of Brazil and Indonesia. She makes gliding jumps, pulling in her belly and spreading her ribs like wings.
It is no coincidence that we decided to tie naked corpses with these snakes. For many centuries, the locals passed on "safety techniques" from grandfather to grandson when they met these reptiles. First, if the snake has jumped, you need to run in a zigzag, and this is logical, in the air the snake cannot change direction, it flies straight.
The second recommendation is that if the snake rushes, you need to rip off your clothes and throw them at it. While she is busy with the rag, thinking that it is an enemy or prey, you can run away. It happened that people came running from the forest completely naked. While running away, they threw off all their clothes.
However, there is one catch in the second recommendation. The described behavior of snakes, in fact mindless animals, contradicts scientific canons - snakes do not behave like that. It's one thing to expel a person from your territory, but in order to pursue … The plot, you see, is familiar - to take off your clothes. And if we assume that cause and effect are often confused in folklore, everything falls into place.
The only officially documented case of the capture of a "flying reptile" was in 1942. The soldiers of the army of General Vlasov, then he was still fighting on the side of the Red Army, caught a strange snake in these places and kept it in a barrel for several days. There is an archival record of how it was planned to transfer the snake to Leningrad for its study. But serious hostilities began, and everyone forgot about the snake.
After the war, according to local residents, the creatures disappeared. And the thing is that local forests and swamps began to be treated with herbicides. So it turns out that the old people remember everything, and the young people laugh. By the way, because of those herbicides, even the population of frogs has decreased several times. And after the collapse of the USSR, when everyone was abandoned, the wild life in the forest and in the swamp began to improve. Here is the reason that people began to disappear since 1993. And finally, one riddle: folk tales about the Serpent Gorynych were born in these parts.