There are many mysterious places in the world where people disappear inexplicably; such is, for example, the Valley of the Headless in Northern Canada. Today we will talk about another mysterious corner of the earth - the Valley of Shadows (Valley of the Gods), which is lost in the depths of the Himalayas (Indian state with the interesting name Himachal Pradesh - "Snowy Province"). In the very north of this state, there is a little-explored site called Kullu (Kulanthapita).
The word "kulanthapita" is translated into Russian as "the end of the inhabited world", and therefore the valley has been considered the abode of the gods since ancient times, the entrance to which is forbidden to mere mortals. According to legend, it was here that the god Shiva meditated for over a thousand years. Despite such a "reserve", the Valley of the Gods invariably attracted human attention: someone was looking for the legendary Shambhala here, someone tried to achieve nirvana on this sacred land, someone was simply attracted by the harsh beauty of these places.
Adventure seekers who come here not only mysteriously disappear without a trace. Some are attacked by unknown assailants at night, and the "gangsters" clearly have no intention of robbing tourists - only to kill or beat them well, which also seems rather strange. The family of Briton Martin Young was subjected to such an attack in 2000: he, his wife and their 14-year-old son were severely beaten by people who came from the darkness and at the same time did not take from their victims, as they say, even a half.
In all such cases, the police tried to find the perpetrators, but their efforts were in vain.
Traceless disappearances of people The disappearances of people without a trace are even more incomprehensible, and there are already several dozen such cases. For example, in 1996, a twenty-year-old student from the University of Bristol Ian Mogfor disappeared in the Valley of Shadows. When his friends started looking for him, they did not even find an entry in the registration book of the local hotel where Ian was staying, immediately informing his comrades about it.
In the same year, 32-year-old Italian Alexandra Verdi disappeared from the rented house. True, a little later, her body was found on the bank of the local river, but why the woman died, the doctors did not manage to find out, although they noted that an expression of horror froze in the eyes of the unfortunate woman. In 1997, a Canadian student Ardavan Taherzadeh disappeared in the Valley of Shadows, in 1999 - the son of the world famous Dutch banker Maarten de Bruyne, whose searches were organized at the highest level, but did not give any results.
In 2000, a three-day trek through the Valley of the Gods was carefully planned (up to the minute-long control of his movements by friends) by an experienced Russian traveler Alexei Ivanov. The man left - and soon disappeared from the air. A search squad with dogs, equipped with the latest technology, immediately followed him and did not find any traces, as if someone had erased Alexei from the "computer program" of our reality …
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The Amazing Case of Justin Shetler
Since 2013, American Justin Shetler has traveled around the world and talked about his adventures on his own blog, which is very popular on the Internet. In 2016, an adventurer rode a motorcycle to the state of Himachal Pradesh and decided to go with a local sadhu (ascetic) to the Valley of Shadows in order to pray and meditate in one of the high mountain caves. His blog entry on the Adventures of Justin blog did not generate excitement among fans, as Justin had not previously been distinguished by caution in choosing routes and extreme adventures. This time, the American promised his readers that he would return to the blog in mid-September, but he never returned. He never returned at all …
The police and volunteers were intensely looking for the traveler, the Shetler family joined them, a sadhu was even found and arrested, with whom Justin went to meditate. However, he could not really say anything about the disappearance: the next morning the sadhu was found dead in a cell in a local prison. The police announced that there was a suicide, but no one knows for certain whether it is true or not … There were other, no less mysterious cases of disappearances of people in the Valley of the Gods, for example, in 2015 something similar happened to the Pole Bruno Muschalik. The scenario is classic: the man was last seen getting on the bus, no more tracks …
Researchers of this Indian phenomenon put forward many versions about why and how people disappear in the Valley of Shadows. There are quite materialistic explanations, which, however, are hard to believe; there are also purely fantastic ones that cause, oddly enough, more confidence. We will not dwell on either one or the other, since versions are one thing, and truth is another. But nobody knows her yet and, as intuition suggests, he will never know …