o you remember the famous fable of Rip Van Winkle written by celebrated author Washington Irving? It told the story of a man who slept continuously for 20 years, waking up to a very different world. While this work is fictional, would you believe it if we told you that there is a region in Kazakhstan where the common men all take a leaf out of the book by Rip Van Winkle?
Yes, people in the villages of Kalachi and Krasnogorsk in Kazakhstan have inhabitants who fall asleep just like that amid daily activities and sometimes do not wake up for days at a stretch. And when they wake up, they often complain of temporary memory loss, weakness and headaches.
The issue came to the fore in 2013 when more than 140 people in the two villages, having a total population of 810, fell asleep right in the middle of work, with some not waking up for a week straight. Children would fall asleep at school due to the illness, which would impact both young and old. Some people described having nightmares. Rudolf Boyarinos and Misha Plyukhin, two local kids, reported seeing winged horses, snakes in their beds and worms devouring their hands local newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
While this sounds like a magical spell or a scene ripped off A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, there is, in fact, a rational explanation to this, discovered by scientists a few years back. Many believed that the adjacent uranium mines, which were abandoned after the Soviet Union fell and left Krasnogorsk with only 130 of its 6,500 former population, were to blame.
In 2015, the late Berdibek Saparbaev, Kazakhstan’s then-deputy prime minister, confirmed that the uranium mines are the root of the problem. Researchers concluded that it was brought on by elevated levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons in the air after examining the findings of all the residents’ medical examinations.
Since 2015, large-scale evacuations of the villages of Kalachi and Krasnogorsk have been organised by the government of Kazakhstan but that was not before the two villages jointly came to be known as the Sleepy Hollow of the world.
Source: News18
