In August 1985, Vladimir Gerbel, a school drawing teacher from the village of Shukonskoye, located on the banks of the Dvinskaya Bay, instructed his students to make and bring figures from tree bark.
The presented works, of course, did not go beyond the usual children's creativity. But one, made by Seryozha Radko, attracted attention. More precisely, the material from which it was made. The matte black was certainly heavier than any bark, and had a fibrous structure, reminiscent of petrified wood.
Where did he come from? To the teacher's questions, the boy replied that he had found a "hefty black log" on the shore three kilometers from the village and with a knife he cut off a small piece from it.
Unfortunately, Vladimir Gorbel was not curious enough. The next day the weather turned bad, and he decided to postpone the search for the deck until better times. But these times never came - at least for Seryozha Radko. The nine-year-old boy disappeared, and searches for him were unsuccessful. True, some inhabitants of the village claimed that they had seen him on the shore the day before.
A couple of months later, a short note about an unusual mineral appeared in the Polyarny Vestnik, but no connection was made with the child's disappearance. Another piece of evidence about the strange find - this time on the pages of the regional multi-circulation "Zaonezhie" (October, 1989):
“A team of workers from the 4th dredging detachment of the TsRSU, while clearing the channel of the old Ladoga hydraulic system, found a pair of massive black objects 7 meters thick and about 3 meters long in a layer of silty deposits. Their outlines resemble cylinders rounded on both sides; the surface is severely eroded. Their artificial origin is not excluded."
Over the years, similar cases were recorded in Karelia, in the Murmansk and Vologda regions, in the Komi Republic. But the ominous connection with the disappearance was not established until April 1995.
The reason was the disappearance of a group of fishermen in the village of Divya. In the early morning of February 17, six men - workers from the local timber industry enterprise - set out for ice fishing. And nobody came home the next morning. The missing were searched for several days. Personal belongings were found on the ice, installed tackles glittered in the holes.
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Around - no wormwood, no cracks. A criminal case was opened, but the investigation practically stood still until mid-April. When the ice shell was opened, six (!) Huge black cylinders were found at the very line. They turned out to be dilapidated and had significant cavities inside.
The coincidence of the number of missing in winter and the number of unfortunate finds was obvious. By the way, they were quickly and aptly christened black sarcophagi. The investigator in charge of the case wondered if something similar had happened in the past.
The responses were overwhelming. Of the seven documented finds of black sarcophagi, five were accompanied by the disappearance of people! In reality, there could be more of them - after all, tourists or hunters rarely register their route.
Analysis of the material of the sarcophagi showed that their age is 240-270 years. It was possible to find formations of biological origin inside. But all this did not help much in answering the main question: what happened to the missing people?
Black sarcophagi reminded of themselves again in 1998. The direct participant and witness of the dramatic events survived thanks to a fluke, and his story sheds light on a mysterious story.
Nikolai Maevsky was a passionate lover of underwater archeology. Being a naval officer and having good diving training, he repeatedly conducted descents in the waters of the Gulf of Finland. During one of the dives, he discovered a massive black object at the bottom near Primorsk, which, in his opinion, was a fragment of an old sailing ship. The sailor tried to lift him to the surface.
In the material of the criminal case, there is a detailed story of Mayevsky about the future:
“I prepared my gear and dived. Soon I found this long piece, looking like a gnawed cucumber, on the abandoned buoy. He lay half buried in the sand. Having tied it with a thin nylon cord, I got up."
Mayevsky did not succeed in pulling the piece ashore with the help of the machine. The cord slipped off, and the wheels of his Moskvich were stuck in the sand. Then Mayevsky decided to reliably strap the piece and raise it, tying two car cameras to the ends. He intended to inflate them with air from a scuba tank. The memories of what happened in the minutes that followed will be surprisingly clear. Although everything did not last long, Mayevsky will remember them as if he had watched the events for many hours.
“This time, I grabbed a pneumatic hammer to punch the holes for the lines. The work progressed slowly. Then it seemed to me that the surface of the wreck was smoking, as if a jet of dark steam was escaping from under the drill. Then a real fountain hit … Instead of turning off the mechanism, by mistake I increased the air supply. The hammer drill roared. The bit of the drill cracked something in the depth. Bloody fragments flew from the hole.
I jerked the puncher up. There was a sound muffled by the water, and a large chunk broke off the surface of the wreckage. A cavity opened under it, from which a huge turbid bubble burst out. Following this, the upper part of a human body appeared. The skin looked surprisingly white. The collarbone protruded noticeably. Below was a huge laceration wound from a puncher. Chunks of meat hung from the edges. A swirling trail of blood spread in the water.
But the most frightening thing was the face of the creature imprisoned in the tree. Undoubtedly human, devoid of the slightest signs of vegetation, it was distorted by a grimace of pain and indomitable anger. The creature looked at me like a vampire from its coffin, its mouth frantically opening and closing. His gaze possessed an attractive, hypnotic power. With my left hand, I tried to push off the debris, but the creature suddenly grabbed my wrist.
The fingers clenched with inhuman strength. I felt a sharp pain and suddenly saw the rubber of the wetsuit crumbling under the creature's hand. Then I felt a sharp pain, as if from a burn. Blood gushed out - already MY blood, and I began to lose consciousness. And the creature pulled me closer and closer, as if trying to devour. With the last of my strength, I lifted the punch, which I continued to hold with my right hand, and, turning it on, drove it into the underwater monster."
Possibly 'black sarcophagi' were alien capsules?
Mayevsky survived, but lost his hand. According to doctors, the damaged brush was exposed to the strongest solvent.
So who are they - creatures from black sarcophagi? The clue, perhaps, is provided by the essay of the monk Ignatiy Kurlyatev "The Book of Secret Knowledge", written in 1653. The chapter "Signs and Miracles" says:
“And in order to avoid bodily disasters and death, aliens have perpetrated an abominable way. Hunting people were specially equipped, stone blood was let into their veins and placed in dressed oak trunks, thrown to the bottom … And they lived there, not dying, not for days, but for years … and after resurrection they needed living flesh."
What the author meant by "stone blood" is unknown, but it seems that in the 17th century in Russia a method of immersing a person in a borderline state (suspended animation) without deep cooling of tissues becomes known. Uninvited guests from the past waited for their time for a long time - almost three and a half centuries - until a storm or a current carried the tree trunks petrified over the years to the shore.
However, it is possible that the mechanism of their return to life is different, but this does not change the situation as a whole. Who knows how many more black sarcophagi are hidden by the coastal waters? And are not many unexplained disappearances associated with them? After all, according to Ignatiy Kurlyatev, the undead need living flesh …
From the book "177 Secrets and Wonders of the World"
