Mysteries are intriguing, specially the unsolved ones. This post is about one of the creepy pastas- sleepy hollow of Kazakhstan.
Residents of a small village of northern Kazakhstan developed mystery illness which caused them to sleep for weeks. This started when a person named Viktor left to go nearest village but never reached there. He was later found sleeping near his motor cycle. This happened never to far ago, but last year only on 28th August. He woke up after a week and that’s what he said- “My brain switched off. That’s it. I don’t remember. I came round on 2 September. I understood [on waking up] in the hospital that I’d fallen asleep.”
After this, many people became victim of this mysterious disease. People just stop doing what ever they did and went into deep sleep. Media dubbed this village as- ‘sleepy hollow’. Many doctors and scientists tried to find out the reasons behind this but failed. They termed this phenomenon as the sleeping sickness.
Those who were affected woke up feeling confused and dizzy; they didn’t remember what all they saw in sleep or what happened to them suddenly. Those who did a bit, saw frightening hallucinations. Apparently, this had affect on people’s mental condition even after they woke up.
Theories suggested-
1. CO poisoning-
“Carbon monoxide is definitely a factor,” said Sergei Lukashenko, the director of Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Center’s Radiation Safety and Ecology Institute. “But I can’t tell you whether this is the main and vital factor.” His team suspects that the village is in a “peculiar” geographic location, where the weather frequently forces chimney smoke “to go down instead of up”.
However, this is discarded by some saying CO cannot just make one fall down and put into such deep sleep and also, illness can strike only when the person is out of home.
“You can have a big enough concentration at one spot [to knock someone out immediately],” Stolbach admits. “But
if it’s big enough to knock you out [that quickly], you’d be in a coma.”
2. Psychogenic-
Mass hysteria can be another reason. When something isn’t proven and has remained unknown, it is possible for people to develop something in the mind.
3. Radon gas-
Some claimed this is due radon gas emission from an old Soviet uranium mine. Though, this too was completely discarded saying that symptoms don’t match radon poisoning at all.
Creepy isn’t it? Do you know any other mystery apart from this? comment and tell us!