It is difficult to find a geographic point in China with the same grim reputation as the Heizhu Gulch in Sichuan province in southwestern China. Although this name translates as "Black Bamboo Ravine", everyone calls it the Death Valley or the Bermuda Triangle of the Celestial Empire, which is not at all surprising, given the sad "track record" of this place. Not a year passes so that people or pets that accidentally wander here do not disappear without a trace in the local forests.
Heizhu Hollow is nestled on the eastern slope of the Ma'an Mountain, about 200 km from the capital of Sichuan, Chengdu. The people living in the surrounding villages experience a superstitious horror of the forest thicket. Entering the Black Bamboo Hollow is not easy, but getting out is much more difficult, sometimes simply impossible. They say that it is possible to take some of the local residents as guides only at gunpoint or for so much money that they would be enough for a couple of scientific expeditions. But even for a lot of money, it is not so easy to find those who wish: the guides stop rooted to the spot in front of the Shimen Pass (Stone Gate), which opens the way into the bamboo jungle.
In March 1966, traces of six military cartographers were lost at the entrance to the forest. After some time, a local hunter accidentally came across one of the missing. Half-dead, he was barely brought to his senses. But the soldier was never able to tell intelligibly what happened to him and his comrades.
In 1976, a group of forest inspectors plunged into the hollow - and, as it turned out later, to their own destruction. Two of them were never found. Those who were lucky enough to get out of the forest told about the instantly descending strange fog. A thick veil covering them was accompanied by sounds unusual for the human ear. According to the hands on the clock, the fog lasted about twenty minutes. Meanwhile, in the imagination of every one, he dissipated after a few seconds …
When the number of missing persons exceeded a hundred, any expedition to the Heizhu Hollow began to be equated, if not with a trip to the underworld, then certainly with participation in hostilities. The road obviously ran at one end - the remains of people and animals lost in the thicket were not found, they seemed to fall through the ground. It was this circumstance that most of all confused scientists who were trying to find the keys to solving the mystery of the Valley of Death.
While science was demonstrating its impotence, the people, like weeds, bloomed all kinds of assumptions and conjectures about what happened to those who disappeared in the forest "Bermuda". Some have agreed that in Heizhu, they say, a gigantic cannibal panda is raging, devouring its victims whole. Others argued that a mysterious fog hides a visit to earth by an alien starship, whose sole purpose is to kidnap the Chinese and rush with them to distant worlds.
The proliferating mystical and fantastic theories about the secrets of the Heizhu Hollow eventually forced a group of serious scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to organize a kind of "crusade" in search of the truth, whatever it may be. One after another, perfectly prepared and equipped expeditions of geologists, biologists and other specialists often visited mysterious places with the sole purpose of solving the "Sichuan rebus".
Have you managed to achieve this? The head of the last and most representative expedition, Yang Yong, answered this question in the affirmative in an interview with a journalist. According to him, the researchers walked around the Heizhu Valley literally meter by meter and did not find any evidence of the presence of supernatural forces in the bamboo thicket. But there it was possible to identify a structure of geological rocks that is unique in its complexity and diversity, as well as to record sporadic emissions of deadly poisonous vapors, which turned out to be the product of rotting of some tree species. An extremely difficult climate with unexpected and dramatically changing weather conditions has also been noted. And the victims of the deadly tricks of nature, according to the scientist, really were hiding under the earth's surface, from time to time, unexpectedly opening up holes.
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According to Yang Yong, the combination of such fatal natural factors caused the deadly nature of this area. But for the locals, Heizu Hollow is still a cursed place, and casual visitors to Death Valley almost never return from there.
From the book: "The Cursed Places of the Planet." Yuri Podolsky