July 3, 2025 • 30 mins
Second and final part of Season 08 Episode 33: After the Sun Comes Rain
Left alone, the only surviving member of Lyudmila's hiking team, Valentina begins the long arduous trek to safety - while the spectre of death haunts her every move....
But what an earth could possibly have wreaked such havoc?
Written by Emma Dibdin, Neil McRobert and Richard MacLean Smith.
Find us at youtube.com/@unexplainedpod, tiktok.com/@unexplainedpodcast, twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or www.unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Richard mccleinsmith here with a quick update before
we dive into today's episode. Unexplained is very excited to
be a part of Crime Wave at Sea this November,
joining forces with some of the eeriest voices in the
world of true crime and the paranormal four nights in
the Caribbean, with amazing podcasts like Last Podcast on the Left,
(00:20):
Scared to Death and many more live shows Meet and greets,
Creepy Stories under the Stars and you can be there too,
but don't wait. Rooms are nearly sold out. Head to
Crimewave Atsea dot com forward slash Unexplained to grab your
fan coat and lock in your cabin. We'd love to
see you on board. You're listening to the second and
(00:52):
final part of Unexplained, Season eight, episode thirty three. After
the Sun Comes Rain, No sooner had Denis's body gone still,
Valentina knew only that she had to get away, though
whatever had killed her friends was coming for her too.
(01:16):
What followed was a blur of exhaustion and panic. First,
in her confusion, she thinks she can't leave the bodies
on the mountain. With Timor being the smallest, she raced
over to him and did her best to pick him up,
but he was far too heavy to carry. Still, with
the heavy pack on her back, she stared down at
(01:38):
the barely visible tree line a mile or so below
and started to run, feeling the adrenaline surged through her body.
She can barely feel the backpack as she moves. With
every step, she expected to feel the metallic tang of
blood in her throat, expected her legs to buckle underneath her,
and for her body to be consumed by convolis. She
(02:01):
felt unreal, like she was floating somewhere above herself, waiting
for the end to come, but it never did. Instead,
Valentina ran until her lungs were burning so much that
she finally had to stop for air, and even then
she kept moving, walking as fast as she could manage.
(02:23):
She walked for hours, as if in a trance. Fueled
by pure adrenaline. She had no way to process the
horror that she just witnessed, but her gut was telling
her to get as far away from that place as possible. Eventually,
as night approached, exhaustion forced Valentina to stop. When she
(02:43):
looked around, she saw that she was in a dense woodland.
She walked over to the base of a huge ancient
tree and slumped down against it, letting her pack slide
off her shoulders and onto the ground. It was only
then that she stopped moving that she realized just how
exhausted she was. Tapping into the little energy she had left,
(03:06):
she unpacked her bag and set up her tent. She
was too tired to even think about trying to start
a fire. She ate the scant supplying she had on her,
a bag of nuts and two energy bars, and then
crawled into her sleeping bag before the sun had even set.
(03:27):
At first, she was afraid to close her eyes, afraid
that the horrific images of the day would be waiting
for her behind her eyelids, but in fact she fell
fast asleep within seconds. Her last conscious thought was the
desperate hope that she would wake up to discover this
had all been a dream. Valentina awoke early the following
(03:57):
morning with her heart pounding, heart, her chest tight, with
a terror that she couldn't immediately understand. Then the reality
of what had happened the day before hit her like
a freight train. Hideous images of her friends flooded into
her mind, The horror in their eyes as they'd collapsed
(04:17):
on by one, and the terror of being certain that
she was next. She forced herself to take deep breaths
as an eagle screeched overhead. She was all on her
own now, and she had to think rationally, one thing
at a time. Eventually, dawn broke and some of Valentina's
(04:39):
clarity returned with it. She dragged herself from her makeshift bed,
knowing only that she had to get out of the
mountains and find help. The Snezhnaya River was somewhere near.
If she could locate it, she thought she could follow
its fast flowing current towards civilization. Valentina un zipped her
(05:00):
tent and walked out into the chilly dawn. Looking at
her supplies laid out on the forest floor, she quickly
realized that she had a problem in her panic. The
day before, she'd brought only the supplies that she had
on her back. The group had divided up the communal
supplies among themselves, including the camping stove, spare clothes, and
(05:23):
most importantly, the food. As it happened, Valentina had very
little of the food and water in her own pack,
not even enough to get her through the day. Getting
back down to the base of the mountain would easily
take several days. She also felt the need to take
care of her friends in whatever way she could. She
(05:46):
began to realize that there was only one solution. At first,
it was unthinkable she couldn't do it, but the alternative
was certain death alone in the wilderness, and so, with
a pit in her stomach, Valentina set off back up
the mountain, back towards the place she'd just run so
(06:08):
desperately from. It's hard to imagine the fortitude that drives
her back up the slope to the site of the disaster,
tired and terrified, and aware that all that awaits her
is horror. As she neared the clearing where she knew
her friend's bodies lay, Valentina's chest began to tighten and
(06:30):
her palms began to sweat. Eventually, she reached what she
thought was the spot, but couldn't see anything. A small,
hopeful part of her wondered if they would still be
there at all. Perhaps whatever had happened to them was
some kind of temporary state, and they'd all recovered later
in the day. Maybe they were even looking for her
(06:53):
right now. But deep down she knew she was lying
to herself. Then she saw Denis to the rock he
tried to hide under his blood smeared face, lying up
in the snow. They were all exactly where she'd left them.
(07:15):
None of them had moved, the blood now dried on
their faces. Once again, she braced herself, fearing whatever had
killed them might still be present. But as the minutes
ticked by, nothing happened. She looked around and felt her
panic begin to fade. Strangely, for the first time since
(07:37):
this nightmare had started, she didn't feel afraid. She knew
what she had to do. First. Valentina collected a map, compass,
and some food from the various packs. Then she turned
her attention to the dead. Moving from one corpse to
the next, she palmed the lids down over their eyes.
(07:58):
She fetched our paullins from the group supplies, and tenderly
covered each of the bodies up. She didn't know how
long it would take for her to find help, and
she hated to think of her friends lying out there,
exposed to the elements and predators. Their deaths had been
anything but peaceful, but she felt some solace that at
(08:20):
least they were at rest now. Finding lud Miller's map
in the woman's pocket, Valentina poured over it, trying to
figure out the fastest route back down the mountain. Her
best chance was to try and make it to the
next stop off point, where they'd been due to meet
Ludmiller's daughter, Natalia the day before. Natalia and her group
(08:41):
would probably still be waiting for them, but leud Miller's
notes and drawings just seemed to swim in front of
her eyes. Valentina looked up and scanned the desolate mountain
slopes that stretched out for miles around. They hadn't seen
another tourist in days, so wait here in the hope
that somebody might find her was not an option. In truth,
(09:05):
her only hope was to head back into the wilderness
and try to make her way back to the bottom
of the mountain. Valentina took one last look around at
her fallen friends, then hoisted her stuffed backpack onto her
back and began to walk. The first time Valentina fled
(09:33):
down the mountain, she was operating in pure fight or
flight mode, almost blind with panic in the newly calmed weather.
Out of nowhere, Valentina spots a pair of power lines
in the distance. Knowing they must lead to human habitation,
she decides to follow them. It felt as though some
kind of guiding hand had revealed them to her. After
(09:57):
four days trekking under the power line, on August ninth,
Valentina found herself standing at the banks of the Schneschnaia River.
At first, this seemed like good news. The river was
one of the few landmarks she recognized from Ludmiller's maps,
and she knew that if she followed it, it would
eventually lead her back to the Marino village from where
(10:20):
they'd set out. But this wasn't an official hiking path,
and soon after she set out along it, the river
bank became too steep and treacherous to walk on. By then,
Valentina had also developed a painful cough and the beginnings
of a fever. She was weak and cold and dirty.
(10:42):
Valentina turned around and retraced her steps back to a
place where she could sit safely on the bank. She
slumped onto the ground, defeated. She couldn't follow the river
and it was too wide for her to get across.
Completely stuck, she began to accept that she would die
(11:02):
here alone, but she can't help thinking about her parents
and how she will look when she's found. Summoning her nerve,
she stripped off her clothes and entered the river, letting
the freezing water sleek the dirt from her skin. Finally cleansed,
she emerged from the river and got dressed. Reinvigorated by
(11:24):
the icy cold water, she once again picked up her
pack and continued along the river bank. Eventually, too tired
to go on, she sat down and fell into a
sleep of pure exhaustion. A few hours later, as she
drifted in and out of consciousness, she heard something in
the water. It sounded like laughter. At first, she thought
(11:48):
she was imagining it. After everything that had happened, she
was finally losing her mind out there in the wilderness alone.
But then she heard it again. She sat up sharply
and watched with amazement as a sequence of obscenely bright
catamaran rafts appeared from around the next bend of the Schnezhnaya.
(12:11):
At first, she tried to wave and shout, but no
sound would come out, as though she'd been drained of
all remaining energy. But as the faces of the rafters
came into focus and they appeared to be passing her by. Finally,
a great wail burst from her lips, and suddenly, without warning,
(12:32):
she was saved. The rafters secured Valentina on board one
of the catamarans, then pushed off from the shore as
fast as they could. They made their way down river
toward the town of Slutyanka, where they'd ultimately been heading. Valentina,
(12:56):
trembling throughout, seemed unable to speak, so they gave her
Valerian and courvalon herbal sedatives to help calm her nerves.
She explained that she'd been part of a group trekking
through the mountains, but all the others were dead. The
rest of the journey continued in a haunting silence. After
(13:18):
arriving in Sludyanka, Valentina was taken to the nearest police station.
But where before she was suffering from shock and exhaustion,
now the full force of everything that had happened came
rushing back to her. The magnitude of it all was
too much for her to process, rendering her semi catatonic
(13:39):
and mute for several more days. When Valentina finally began
to speak again, it said that she was barely coherent
and unable to articulate what she'd experienced. Her recall of
specific details was hazy, and she was unable to give
clear directions for where her friends had died. In any case,
(14:01):
the storm weather had continued to sweep across the region,
preventing any efforts to mount a search and rescue mission
to recover the bodies. Eleven days after Valentina was rescued,
a helicopter crew on the lookout for another group of
hikers who'd gone missing on the mountain spotted what looked
like an abandoned camp with six bodies scattered around it.
(14:25):
Another crew, led by much respected Russian search and rescuer
Eure Golias, was immediately dispatched to the location. Seeing the
bodies scattered beneath them as they came into land did
nothing to prepare them for the reality of what they
eventually found. The first to be examined was a semi
(14:47):
clothed temor lying exactly where he'd fallen. The rescue team
recoiled at the sight of him. Despite Valentina's best efforts,
he'd been exposed to the elements, not to mention all
manner of voracious insects and animals for nearly two weeks.
The eyes had long since disappeared, Worms crawled in the sockets,
(15:11):
Dried blood was still streaked across the gray, pallid skin,
his mouth still open in a spine chilling, silent scream.
It was the same for the other five. Each were
carefully wrapped up in body bags and packed onto the helicopter.
The bodies were flown back to nearby Siberian city ulan
(15:34):
Oot for further examination. Golias described the smell in the
chopper as unbearable. By now, Valentina had been able to
relay her full story to the police. She recounted everything
she'd witnessed in detail, how the group had all fallen
one by one, exhibiting the same bizarre and violent symptoms.
(16:04):
In ulan Ud, a pathologist carried out the autopsies despite
everything that Valentina had said. In the end, their conclusion,
perhaps somewhat surprisingly, was that all five students had simply
died from hypothermia, or, as they put it, froze to
death whilst hiking. Leud Miller is determined to have died
(16:27):
from heart failure, despite her being the fittest and most
hardy of the group, The only unusual finding, according to
the autopsy, was that all six victims had bruising on
their lungs and were suffering from protein deficiency or malnourishment,
which was assumed to have exacerbated the effects of cold,
(16:49):
and with that, there was nothing left to do but
buried the dead. A mass funeral was held in the
victim's hometown of Petra Pavel, where it said that almost
the entire city's two hundred thousand population turned out to
say their good byes. It wasn't long after news of
(17:10):
the tragedy broke in the press that people began to
question the official version of events. For one, the hike
took place in the height of Siberian summer. The mean
temperature in August is around fifteen degrees celsius at elevation.
In the rain, it would have been much colder, but
the group were well prepared and well dressed for the mountains.
(17:34):
After all, Ludemiler's daughter, Natalia's group were also in the
mountains at the same time and suffered no adverse effects.
When her mother failed to arrive at their designated meeting point,
Natalia didn't consider that the weather had played any part
in the delay. Valentina also stated clearly that the group
(17:57):
had plenty of food and had eaten break regularly through
the trip. Her friends had died two hours after they'd
eaten breakfast. The idea, as the autopsy claimed that they
were all severely malnourished, didn't make any sense. Hypothermia could
explain some of the bizarre behavior that the hikers showed
(18:19):
before dying. It's known to cause some victims to strip
off their clothes in what's called paradoxical undressing, and it
can cause convulsions and seizures, but it doesn't cause bleeding
from the eyes and ears, and it definitely doesn't make
a person bash their own head in against a rock,
as Valentina claimed to have seen Tatiana do. Pulmonary edema
(18:44):
can cause those things, a condition caused by the build
up of excess fluid in the lungs. It's a known
risk at altitude. Ordinarily, however, it's mostly only considered a
risk around thirteen thousand feet, not so and a half
thousand where lud Miller and her team were hiking. They
(19:05):
were seasoned hikers who had all climbed as high as
the Retranslator Mountain on several previous occasions without any issues.
One of the rescuer team, Valerie Tartanikov, was an expert
tour instructor in the area. He built a career guiding
tourists through the region. The death of the Corovinites, as
(19:27):
they became known, is a big mystery, he wrote. The
Tiger forest is not a desert, not polar ice. If
you're experienced like Ludmiller Coravin, if you're in the forest
in the summer, then it's impossible to die from the cold.
Twenty minutes to make a fire and you're saved. A
(19:57):
few days after the funeral, an article published in the
daily Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravada accused the group's leader, Ludmiller Coorvina,
of being responsible for the deaths. Celebrated Russian rescuer euy
Go Elias did the same. According to him, when they
arrived at the group's dilapidated camp, they found only one
(20:20):
can of stew that he surmised had been divided up
between the seven hikers. There were no snacks or quick
protein fixes that climbers usually took on such arduous journeys.
Ludmiller was apparently well known for encouraging survivalist instincts among
her students, meaning she preferred to keep rations to a
(20:43):
minimum to force them to find their own food while outdoors.
Valentina seemed to hint at this when she told investigators
that they'd stopped frequently to harvest the nutrient rich gold
root or rodeola rosea that grows abundant in the area. Ironically,
it's particularly prized for its ability to help control stress.
(21:09):
But even if that were all true, a small degree
of protein deficiency does not result in anything like what
Valentina apparently witnessed. She also continued to insist, with no
genuine reason to say otherwise, that they had more than
enough food to complete each day's hiking. When Galina Nikolayevna,
(21:32):
Timor's mother was contacted many years later by the same
Komsomolskaya Pravda who blamed Ludmiller for the deaths, she refused
to speak to them, saying only that she had complete
faith in Ludmiller to look after her son. In the
decades since the Khmad Duban incident, many explanations have been
(21:54):
put forward to explain the bizarre event. Because the Russian
military had been known to use the Siberian Mountains to
conduct testing. Some have speculated that the hikers stumbled onto
something they weren't supposed to see and were killed for it.
Others have pointed out that Leod Miller was an avid
(22:15):
forager who taught the craft to her students. Perhaps one
of the group gathered poisonous mushrooms by mistake then fed
them to the others, leading to the mania displayed in
their final moments. One rumor was that the group had
unwittingly stumbled onto an old Soviet Union chemical weapons test site,
(22:36):
and that Valentina had in fact been rescued by state
security officers and forced to sign a non disclosure agreement.
One possibility is that the group were poisoned by a
nerve agent like novi choc, but was somehow trapped in
the soil and vegetation, or carried unexpectedly through the air
(22:57):
by the storm. Novichok was developed by the Soviet Union
in the nineteen seventies and has been used against Russian
individuals in many high profile instances, perhaps most strikingly in
twenty eighteen, when it was used to assassinate Russian enemies
(23:20):
of Vladimir Putin in the United Kingdom. In March twenty eighteen,
former Russian spy Sergey Scripple and his daughter Julia were
found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury, South England, after
being exposed to novichok. The UK government accused Russian Military
Intelligence GRU of carrying out the poisoning, identifying two suspects,
(23:46):
Alexander Petrov and Russlin Boshirov, who were later revealed to
be GRU officers. The attack triggered a major international crisis,
leading to mass diplomatic expulsions and sanctions against Russia, but
several others were also unintentionally affected, including police officer Nick Bailey,
(24:08):
and months later, two civilians, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgis,
who had accidentally handled a discarded perfume bottle containing the novichoc.
Dawn Sturgis died from the exposure. The incident marked the
first known use of a chemical weapon on European soil
(24:28):
since World War II, and raised a global alarm about
state sponsored assassination attempts abroad. A potent nerve agent, novichoc
could account for many of the symptoms that the hikers exhibited,
including convulsions, foaming, at the mouth and cardiac arrest. They
(24:49):
might also have been paralyzed by the novichoc and then
later succumbed to hypothermia, which would explain the coroner's findings.
Others have theorized that infracy might be to blame a
super low frequency audio that can prompt terror and panic.
It's a theory often applied to the Diatlov past mystery.
(25:11):
Proponents of the idea in the Kama Daban case wonder
if the power lines that Valentina followed to the river
may have been omitting the requisite electronic frequency to cause chaos.
The truth is, it's unlikely we will ever know what
really happened on that horrifying morning high up in the
wilderness of the Kahma D'aban Mountains. As for Valentina, the
(25:36):
soul survivor, after her friends were brought down from the mountain,
she returned to her hometown of Petro Pavel without speaking
to the press. There, she remained silent even to her parents,
before revealing only minor snippets. Years later, after completing college,
she left Kazakhstan entirely looking for a fresh start where
(25:59):
nothing could remind her of the nightmare In the mountains.
She's only spoken to the press once since, back in
twenty eighteen, when a reporter from Komsomolskaya Pravda tracked her down.
He found her living in a dormitory for food industry workers.
It's a somewhat depressing place, with thirty eight rooms to
(26:22):
one bathroom that seems to encapsulate the haunted life that
Valentina has lived. Angered at having her privacy so rudely
invaded at first, she refused to speak to the reporter entirely.
When pressed to give her conclusions on the whole event,
she replied, simply, what's the point now? It's all useless.
(26:46):
We can't bring them back. This episode was written by
Emma Dibden, Neil McRobert and Richard McLean Smith. Thank you
as ever for listening. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions
podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of
(27:08):
the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me
Richard McLain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now
available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes
and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and
rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel
(27:28):
free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas
regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you
have an explanation or a story of your own you'd
like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained
podcast dot com and reach us online through X and
Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com,
Forward Slash, Unexplained Podcast, Bold Connold Down.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Down Down Down, Down Down Down.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Bold, boldn.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
No no no no
Hello, it's Richard mccleinsmith here with a quick update before
we dive into today's episode. Unexplained is very excited to
be a part of Crime Wave at Sea this November,
joining forces with some of the eeriest voices in the
world of true crime and the paranormal four nights in
the Caribbean, with amazing podcasts like Last Podcast on the Left,
(00:20):
Scared to Death and many more live shows Meet and greets,
Creepy Stories under the Stars and you can be there too,
but don't wait. Rooms are nearly sold out. Head to
Crimewave Atsea dot com forward slash Unexplained to grab your
fan coat and lock in your cabin. We'd love to
see you on board. You're listening to the second and
(00:52):
final part of Unexplained, Season eight, episode thirty three. After
the Sun Comes Rain, No sooner had Denis's body gone still,
Valentina knew only that she had to get away, though
whatever had killed her friends was coming for her too.
(01:16):
What followed was a blur of exhaustion and panic. First,
in her confusion, she thinks she can't leave the bodies
on the mountain. With Timor being the smallest, she raced
over to him and did her best to pick him up,
but he was far too heavy to carry. Still, with
the heavy pack on her back, she stared down at
(01:38):
the barely visible tree line a mile or so below
and started to run, feeling the adrenaline surged through her body.
She can barely feel the backpack as she moves. With
every step, she expected to feel the metallic tang of
blood in her throat, expected her legs to buckle underneath her,
and for her body to be consumed by convolis. She
(02:01):
felt unreal, like she was floating somewhere above herself, waiting
for the end to come, but it never did. Instead,
Valentina ran until her lungs were burning so much that
she finally had to stop for air, and even then
she kept moving, walking as fast as she could manage.
(02:23):
She walked for hours, as if in a trance. Fueled
by pure adrenaline. She had no way to process the
horror that she just witnessed, but her gut was telling
her to get as far away from that place as possible. Eventually,
as night approached, exhaustion forced Valentina to stop. When she
(02:43):
looked around, she saw that she was in a dense woodland.
She walked over to the base of a huge ancient
tree and slumped down against it, letting her pack slide
off her shoulders and onto the ground. It was only
then that she stopped moving that she realized just how
exhausted she was. Tapping into the little energy she had left,
(03:06):
she unpacked her bag and set up her tent. She
was too tired to even think about trying to start
a fire. She ate the scant supplying she had on her,
a bag of nuts and two energy bars, and then
crawled into her sleeping bag before the sun had even set.
(03:27):
At first, she was afraid to close her eyes, afraid
that the horrific images of the day would be waiting
for her behind her eyelids, but in fact she fell
fast asleep within seconds. Her last conscious thought was the
desperate hope that she would wake up to discover this
had all been a dream. Valentina awoke early the following
(03:57):
morning with her heart pounding, heart, her chest tight, with
a terror that she couldn't immediately understand. Then the reality
of what had happened the day before hit her like
a freight train. Hideous images of her friends flooded into
her mind, The horror in their eyes as they'd collapsed
(04:17):
on by one, and the terror of being certain that
she was next. She forced herself to take deep breaths
as an eagle screeched overhead. She was all on her
own now, and she had to think rationally, one thing
at a time. Eventually, dawn broke and some of Valentina's
(04:39):
clarity returned with it. She dragged herself from her makeshift bed,
knowing only that she had to get out of the
mountains and find help. The Snezhnaya River was somewhere near.
If she could locate it, she thought she could follow
its fast flowing current towards civilization. Valentina un zipped her
(05:00):
tent and walked out into the chilly dawn. Looking at
her supplies laid out on the forest floor, she quickly
realized that she had a problem in her panic. The
day before, she'd brought only the supplies that she had
on her back. The group had divided up the communal
supplies among themselves, including the camping stove, spare clothes, and
(05:23):
most importantly, the food. As it happened, Valentina had very
little of the food and water in her own pack,
not even enough to get her through the day. Getting
back down to the base of the mountain would easily
take several days. She also felt the need to take
care of her friends in whatever way she could. She
(05:46):
began to realize that there was only one solution. At first,
it was unthinkable she couldn't do it, but the alternative
was certain death alone in the wilderness, and so, with
a pit in her stomach, Valentina set off back up
the mountain, back towards the place she'd just run so
(06:08):
desperately from. It's hard to imagine the fortitude that drives
her back up the slope to the site of the disaster,
tired and terrified, and aware that all that awaits her
is horror. As she neared the clearing where she knew
her friend's bodies lay, Valentina's chest began to tighten and
(06:30):
her palms began to sweat. Eventually, she reached what she
thought was the spot, but couldn't see anything. A small,
hopeful part of her wondered if they would still be
there at all. Perhaps whatever had happened to them was
some kind of temporary state, and they'd all recovered later
in the day. Maybe they were even looking for her
(06:53):
right now. But deep down she knew she was lying
to herself. Then she saw Denis to the rock he
tried to hide under his blood smeared face, lying up
in the snow. They were all exactly where she'd left them.
(07:15):
None of them had moved, the blood now dried on
their faces. Once again, she braced herself, fearing whatever had
killed them might still be present. But as the minutes
ticked by, nothing happened. She looked around and felt her
panic begin to fade. Strangely, for the first time since
(07:37):
this nightmare had started, she didn't feel afraid. She knew
what she had to do. First. Valentina collected a map, compass,
and some food from the various packs. Then she turned
her attention to the dead. Moving from one corpse to
the next, she palmed the lids down over their eyes.
(07:58):
She fetched our paullins from the group supplies, and tenderly
covered each of the bodies up. She didn't know how
long it would take for her to find help, and
she hated to think of her friends lying out there,
exposed to the elements and predators. Their deaths had been
anything but peaceful, but she felt some solace that at
(08:20):
least they were at rest now. Finding lud Miller's map
in the woman's pocket, Valentina poured over it, trying to
figure out the fastest route back down the mountain. Her
best chance was to try and make it to the
next stop off point, where they'd been due to meet
Ludmiller's daughter, Natalia the day before. Natalia and her group
(08:41):
would probably still be waiting for them, but leud Miller's
notes and drawings just seemed to swim in front of
her eyes. Valentina looked up and scanned the desolate mountain
slopes that stretched out for miles around. They hadn't seen
another tourist in days, so wait here in the hope
that somebody might find her was not an option. In truth,
(09:05):
her only hope was to head back into the wilderness
and try to make her way back to the bottom
of the mountain. Valentina took one last look around at
her fallen friends, then hoisted her stuffed backpack onto her
back and began to walk. The first time Valentina fled
(09:33):
down the mountain, she was operating in pure fight or
flight mode, almost blind with panic in the newly calmed weather.
Out of nowhere, Valentina spots a pair of power lines
in the distance. Knowing they must lead to human habitation,
she decides to follow them. It felt as though some
kind of guiding hand had revealed them to her. After
(09:57):
four days trekking under the power line, on August ninth,
Valentina found herself standing at the banks of the Schneschnaia River.
At first, this seemed like good news. The river was
one of the few landmarks she recognized from Ludmiller's maps,
and she knew that if she followed it, it would
eventually lead her back to the Marino village from where
(10:20):
they'd set out. But this wasn't an official hiking path,
and soon after she set out along it, the river
bank became too steep and treacherous to walk on. By then,
Valentina had also developed a painful cough and the beginnings
of a fever. She was weak and cold and dirty.
(10:42):
Valentina turned around and retraced her steps back to a
place where she could sit safely on the bank. She
slumped onto the ground, defeated. She couldn't follow the river
and it was too wide for her to get across.
Completely stuck, she began to accept that she would die
(11:02):
here alone, but she can't help thinking about her parents
and how she will look when she's found. Summoning her nerve,
she stripped off her clothes and entered the river, letting
the freezing water sleek the dirt from her skin. Finally cleansed,
she emerged from the river and got dressed. Reinvigorated by
(11:24):
the icy cold water, she once again picked up her
pack and continued along the river bank. Eventually, too tired
to go on, she sat down and fell into a
sleep of pure exhaustion. A few hours later, as she
drifted in and out of consciousness, she heard something in
the water. It sounded like laughter. At first, she thought
(11:48):
she was imagining it. After everything that had happened, she
was finally losing her mind out there in the wilderness alone.
But then she heard it again. She sat up sharply
and watched with amazement as a sequence of obscenely bright
catamaran rafts appeared from around the next bend of the Schnezhnaya.
(12:11):
At first, she tried to wave and shout, but no
sound would come out, as though she'd been drained of
all remaining energy. But as the faces of the rafters
came into focus and they appeared to be passing her by. Finally,
a great wail burst from her lips, and suddenly, without warning,
(12:32):
she was saved. The rafters secured Valentina on board one
of the catamarans, then pushed off from the shore as
fast as they could. They made their way down river
toward the town of Slutyanka, where they'd ultimately been heading. Valentina,
(12:56):
trembling throughout, seemed unable to speak, so they gave her
Valerian and courvalon herbal sedatives to help calm her nerves.
She explained that she'd been part of a group trekking
through the mountains, but all the others were dead. The
rest of the journey continued in a haunting silence. After
(13:18):
arriving in Sludyanka, Valentina was taken to the nearest police station.
But where before she was suffering from shock and exhaustion,
now the full force of everything that had happened came
rushing back to her. The magnitude of it all was
too much for her to process, rendering her semi catatonic
(13:39):
and mute for several more days. When Valentina finally began
to speak again, it said that she was barely coherent
and unable to articulate what she'd experienced. Her recall of
specific details was hazy, and she was unable to give
clear directions for where her friends had died. In any case,
(14:01):
the storm weather had continued to sweep across the region,
preventing any efforts to mount a search and rescue mission
to recover the bodies. Eleven days after Valentina was rescued,
a helicopter crew on the lookout for another group of
hikers who'd gone missing on the mountain spotted what looked
like an abandoned camp with six bodies scattered around it.
(14:25):
Another crew, led by much respected Russian search and rescuer
Eure Golias, was immediately dispatched to the location. Seeing the
bodies scattered beneath them as they came into land did
nothing to prepare them for the reality of what they
eventually found. The first to be examined was a semi
(14:47):
clothed temor lying exactly where he'd fallen. The rescue team
recoiled at the sight of him. Despite Valentina's best efforts,
he'd been exposed to the elements, not to mention all
manner of voracious insects and animals for nearly two weeks.
The eyes had long since disappeared, Worms crawled in the sockets,
(15:11):
Dried blood was still streaked across the gray, pallid skin,
his mouth still open in a spine chilling, silent scream.
It was the same for the other five. Each were
carefully wrapped up in body bags and packed onto the helicopter.
The bodies were flown back to nearby Siberian city ulan
(15:34):
Oot for further examination. Golias described the smell in the
chopper as unbearable. By now, Valentina had been able to
relay her full story to the police. She recounted everything
she'd witnessed in detail, how the group had all fallen
one by one, exhibiting the same bizarre and violent symptoms.
(16:04):
In ulan Ud, a pathologist carried out the autopsies despite
everything that Valentina had said. In the end, their conclusion,
perhaps somewhat surprisingly, was that all five students had simply
died from hypothermia, or, as they put it, froze to
death whilst hiking. Leud Miller is determined to have died
(16:27):
from heart failure, despite her being the fittest and most
hardy of the group, The only unusual finding, according to
the autopsy, was that all six victims had bruising on
their lungs and were suffering from protein deficiency or malnourishment,
which was assumed to have exacerbated the effects of cold,
(16:49):
and with that, there was nothing left to do but
buried the dead. A mass funeral was held in the
victim's hometown of Petra Pavel, where it said that almost
the entire city's two hundred thousand population turned out to
say their good byes. It wasn't long after news of
(17:10):
the tragedy broke in the press that people began to
question the official version of events. For one, the hike
took place in the height of Siberian summer. The mean
temperature in August is around fifteen degrees celsius at elevation.
In the rain, it would have been much colder, but
the group were well prepared and well dressed for the mountains.
(17:34):
After all, Ludemiler's daughter, Natalia's group were also in the
mountains at the same time and suffered no adverse effects.
When her mother failed to arrive at their designated meeting point,
Natalia didn't consider that the weather had played any part
in the delay. Valentina also stated clearly that the group
(17:57):
had plenty of food and had eaten break regularly through
the trip. Her friends had died two hours after they'd
eaten breakfast. The idea, as the autopsy claimed that they
were all severely malnourished, didn't make any sense. Hypothermia could
explain some of the bizarre behavior that the hikers showed
(18:19):
before dying. It's known to cause some victims to strip
off their clothes in what's called paradoxical undressing, and it
can cause convulsions and seizures, but it doesn't cause bleeding
from the eyes and ears, and it definitely doesn't make
a person bash their own head in against a rock,
as Valentina claimed to have seen Tatiana do. Pulmonary edema
(18:44):
can cause those things, a condition caused by the build
up of excess fluid in the lungs. It's a known
risk at altitude. Ordinarily, however, it's mostly only considered a
risk around thirteen thousand feet, not so and a half
thousand where lud Miller and her team were hiking. They
(19:05):
were seasoned hikers who had all climbed as high as
the Retranslator Mountain on several previous occasions without any issues.
One of the rescuer team, Valerie Tartanikov, was an expert
tour instructor in the area. He built a career guiding
tourists through the region. The death of the Corovinites, as
(19:27):
they became known, is a big mystery, he wrote. The
Tiger forest is not a desert, not polar ice. If
you're experienced like Ludmiller Coravin, if you're in the forest
in the summer, then it's impossible to die from the cold.
Twenty minutes to make a fire and you're saved. A
(19:57):
few days after the funeral, an article published in the
daily Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravada accused the group's leader, Ludmiller Coorvina,
of being responsible for the deaths. Celebrated Russian rescuer euy
Go Elias did the same. According to him, when they
arrived at the group's dilapidated camp, they found only one
(20:20):
can of stew that he surmised had been divided up
between the seven hikers. There were no snacks or quick
protein fixes that climbers usually took on such arduous journeys.
Ludmiller was apparently well known for encouraging survivalist instincts among
her students, meaning she preferred to keep rations to a
(20:43):
minimum to force them to find their own food while outdoors.
Valentina seemed to hint at this when she told investigators
that they'd stopped frequently to harvest the nutrient rich gold
root or rodeola rosea that grows abundant in the area. Ironically,
it's particularly prized for its ability to help control stress.
(21:09):
But even if that were all true, a small degree
of protein deficiency does not result in anything like what
Valentina apparently witnessed. She also continued to insist, with no
genuine reason to say otherwise, that they had more than
enough food to complete each day's hiking. When Galina Nikolayevna,
(21:32):
Timor's mother was contacted many years later by the same
Komsomolskaya Pravda who blamed Ludmiller for the deaths, she refused
to speak to them, saying only that she had complete
faith in Ludmiller to look after her son. In the
decades since the Khmad Duban incident, many explanations have been
(21:54):
put forward to explain the bizarre event. Because the Russian
military had been known to use the Siberian Mountains to
conduct testing. Some have speculated that the hikers stumbled onto
something they weren't supposed to see and were killed for it.
Others have pointed out that Leod Miller was an avid
(22:15):
forager who taught the craft to her students. Perhaps one
of the group gathered poisonous mushrooms by mistake then fed
them to the others, leading to the mania displayed in
their final moments. One rumor was that the group had
unwittingly stumbled onto an old Soviet Union chemical weapons test site,
(22:36):
and that Valentina had in fact been rescued by state
security officers and forced to sign a non disclosure agreement.
One possibility is that the group were poisoned by a
nerve agent like novi choc, but was somehow trapped in
the soil and vegetation, or carried unexpectedly through the air
(22:57):
by the storm. Novichok was developed by the Soviet Union
in the nineteen seventies and has been used against Russian
individuals in many high profile instances, perhaps most strikingly in
twenty eighteen, when it was used to assassinate Russian enemies
(23:20):
of Vladimir Putin in the United Kingdom. In March twenty eighteen,
former Russian spy Sergey Scripple and his daughter Julia were
found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury, South England, after
being exposed to novichok. The UK government accused Russian Military
Intelligence GRU of carrying out the poisoning, identifying two suspects,
(23:46):
Alexander Petrov and Russlin Boshirov, who were later revealed to
be GRU officers. The attack triggered a major international crisis,
leading to mass diplomatic expulsions and sanctions against Russia, but
several others were also unintentionally affected, including police officer Nick Bailey,
(24:08):
and months later, two civilians, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgis,
who had accidentally handled a discarded perfume bottle containing the novichoc.
Dawn Sturgis died from the exposure. The incident marked the
first known use of a chemical weapon on European soil
(24:28):
since World War II, and raised a global alarm about
state sponsored assassination attempts abroad. A potent nerve agent, novichoc
could account for many of the symptoms that the hikers exhibited,
including convulsions, foaming, at the mouth and cardiac arrest. They
(24:49):
might also have been paralyzed by the novichoc and then
later succumbed to hypothermia, which would explain the coroner's findings.
Others have theorized that infracy might be to blame a
super low frequency audio that can prompt terror and panic.
It's a theory often applied to the Diatlov past mystery.
(25:11):
Proponents of the idea in the Kama Daban case wonder
if the power lines that Valentina followed to the river
may have been omitting the requisite electronic frequency to cause chaos.
The truth is, it's unlikely we will ever know what
really happened on that horrifying morning high up in the
wilderness of the Kahma D'aban Mountains. As for Valentina, the
(25:36):
soul survivor, after her friends were brought down from the mountain,
she returned to her hometown of Petro Pavel without speaking
to the press. There, she remained silent even to her parents,
before revealing only minor snippets. Years later, after completing college,
she left Kazakhstan entirely looking for a fresh start where
(25:59):
nothing could remind her of the nightmare In the mountains.
She's only spoken to the press once since, back in
twenty eighteen, when a reporter from Komsomolskaya Pravda tracked her down.
He found her living in a dormitory for food industry workers.
It's a somewhat depressing place, with thirty eight rooms to
(26:22):
one bathroom that seems to encapsulate the haunted life that
Valentina has lived. Angered at having her privacy so rudely
invaded at first, she refused to speak to the reporter entirely.
When pressed to give her conclusions on the whole event,
she replied, simply, what's the point now? It's all useless.
(26:46):
We can't bring them back. This episode was written by
Emma Dibden, Neil McRobert and Richard McLean Smith. Thank you
as ever for listening. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions
podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of
(27:08):
the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me
Richard McLain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now
available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes
and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and
rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel
(27:28):
free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas
regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you
have an explanation or a story of your own you'd
like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained
podcast dot com and reach us online through X and
Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com,
Forward Slash, Unexplained Podcast, Bold Connold Down.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Down Down Down, Down Down Down.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Bold, boldn.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
No no no no
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