Пять мистических историй. Подкаст на английском с переводом №10.

© Georgy Panov, 2023
Five mystical stories. Educational podcast for the PTAFL program.

Podcast №10

00. There are mystical and mysterious places on our planet where inexplicable things have happened or are happening. People, planes or ships can disappear in these anomalous zones. Disasters occur more often than usual.

01. People may feel uncomfortable and worry a lot without reason. Scientists and the police can still find answers to some events over time, but this does not always happen. We will talk about five well-known stories now. A case in the village near Lake Anjikuni. A hundred years ago, a tribe of Indians lived near the Canadian Lake Anjikuni.

02. They lived in their village and were ordinary people. Suddenly, one winter day, all these people from the village disappeared somewhere. Nobody was left in the village. At the same time, there were no signs of a battle. There were not even traces of people leaving the village.

03. This strange disappearance of people was discovered by a hunter who was returning from hunting and going to rest in the village. But when he came to this village, he found only dead dogs. Moreover, as the police laterfound out, they had died of starvation, although the village was full of food. No one has still been able to clearly explain what happened there. Decades after that case, a version appeared that someone had made up this story.

04. However, not everyone agrees with it. Each side has strong arguments in this dispute. In any case, it is getting increasingly difficult to find out the truth now because all the witnesses of that tragedy have already died. Overton Bridge in Scotland. This bridge became notorious because dogs constantly jumped from its 15-meter height, hit the ground, and died.

05. Moreover, the dogs did not jump from just any place on the bridge but only from one point of this bridge. Hundreds of dogs have already died in such a way. All local dog owners are aware of this sad feature of this bridge and, therefore, always try to keep their dogs away from it. One day, the local society for the protection of animals decided to solve the mystery of this bridge finally and hired a specialist for this. This man discovered that many mice and minks lived under the bridge.

06. Therefore, he suggested that the smell of their urine makes dogs with good noses and strong hunting instincts lose their minds and madly jump from a great height towards the smell and death. This version soundsconvincing, but a question remains: why the dogs didn’t just go down under the bridge without any problems? It was quite possible. By the way, it is impossible not to remember another tragedy on this bridge. One man threw his son off this bridge and jumped after him himself.

07. The child died, but his father survived. After that, this man claimed that the bridge talked to him and asked him to kill the child. AmericanBigelow Farm. They say that the place where this farm is located has always had a bad reputation. But this was not known to the Sherman family, who were delighted with the low price of the farm that was for sale and happily bought it in 1994.

08. But one day, a big wolf came to the ranch and behaved in a very friendly way. They say he even wagged his tail like a pet dog. Then he suddenly attacked the calf. The head of the family managed to shoot the wolf six times, but it still managed to escape. After a few days, strange but unpleasant phenomena began to occur.

09. Large glowing unidentified objects began to appear above the house, which flew over the farm in the evenings and at night. After that, pets began to die. Cows could disappear into thin air. People found them a few kilometers away from the farm without a skeleton or brain. Moreover, their skin was completelyintact.

10. There was only a small hole in the skull. Sometimes, shadows appeared in the house, and unusual animals came from the forest. Objects were coming off the walls of the house and floating in the air. Therefore, when a ghost hunter, the millionaire Bigelow, offered to buy the farm from the Shermans, they quickly agreed. Bigelow decided to deal with everything thoroughly.

11. Scientists came to the farm with a lot of equipment. But everything was useless. They saw strange phenomena, but the equipment did not record anything. Neither scientists nor psychics could explain these phenomena. Bigelow eventually sold his farm to the US government, and it closed the farm and put the place under guard.

12. One of the versions suggests that this place has a gateway to another world, maybe even to Hell. Towns in the Chilean desert. In Chile in the nineteenth century, large reserves of saltpeter were found in some desert regions. Saltpeter was actively used as a fertilizer and for military needs, and there was a high demand for it in Chile and other countries. So, they began to build many mines there.

13. Many workers came there with their families. People needed housing and amenities. This is how the working towns of La Noria and Humberstone appeared. They had so many people that shops, workshops, and even theaters started to open there. For half a century, life was thriving in these towns.

14. It continued until 1930, when the global economic crisis came. But this was already not the first warning sign for this industry. Germans built a factory to produce saltpeter from ammonia in 1913. Gradually, it made the extraction of natural saltpeter a loss-making business. The mines began to close.

15. People began to leave these towns, simply leaving their houses because they couldn’t sell them. As a result, these towns were deserted, becoming ghost towns. But the government made them national monuments, and tourists started arriving in Humberstone and La Noria to see how the workers lived there. Soon, it turned out that some tourists heard human voices and people laughing there. Some people felt someone’s presence behind them, although no one was nearby.

16. It seemed to the tourists that life continued in the towns, although no one else was there except them. It turned out that many graves of miners were excavated. But it is not clarified why someone did it. The miners weren’t rich, and it’s unlikely that any jewels were buried with them. So, the main mystical version of these voices is associated with the vandals who didn’t let the souls of the dead people rest, and now they are rushing between this world and that one.

17. Ghosts of English castles. There are many old castles in England, and it is considered that ghosts live in almost all of them. The most mysterious of them is the Tower of London. It’s a pretty gloomy building, especially if you look at it at night. People have been executed there for centuries.

18. Countess Margaret Salisbury’s ghost is considered to be the most famous ghost of this castle. She was executed there in the middle of the 16th century. Since she asked to cut off her head not with an axe but with a sword, the executioner managed to cut off her head only on the third attempt. After a while, the castle guards began to claim that they saw the ghost of the countess without a head, but she held her head in her hands. The spirit of the executed queen, Anna Boleyn, who was the wife of the English king, also lives in this castle.

19. The spirit of the executed queen always appears in the company of other ghosts. Apparently, the lady did not like loneliness in her life. Children’s spirits were also seen in the Tower in the past centuries. According to some testimonies, after the death of one king, two of his sons disappeared from this castle. In 1674, workers found two children’s skeletons in the castle, which probably belonged to these princes.

20. In 2003, scientists decided to debunk all the myths about this castle and examined the castle with the help of modern equipment. They concluded that ghosts are the product of the imaginations of scared people caused by changes in illumination, infrasound, air flows that create whistling sounds, etc. Everyone calmed down and believed in this version. However, a surveillance camera recorded a strange person there in a coat in the same year, much like a ghost. 

21. The investigation of this case could not establish who it was. But history lovers claim that it was the ghost of Catherine Howard. She was also executed in this castle.