This is a story about a mysterious village where people slept even on the roads for weeks. It may surprise you, but it’s true. Kalachi is a village in Kazakhstan around 230 miles northwest of the capital where people do not sleep for a day or two but for several weeks at a time. This is why people in this village are called ‘Sleepy Hollows’. You often see them sleeping. Many studies have been conducted on these villagers because of their sleeping habits.
The onset of the phenomenon
Residents of the village of Kalachi in northern Kazakhstan began to fall asleep unexpectedly at the end of 2012. Residents could fall unconscious while fishing, in front of the stove, or at the wheel. This strange disease suddenly vanished in October 2015. At the beginning of 2010, Lyubov Belkova was the first victim of an attack. The incident occurred in April 2010 when she was working in a market when she became drowsy and blacked out. The doctor told her nearly four days later that she had suffered a stroke when she awoke in a hospital. A kid and five other women from the village were also struck by the strange disease at the same time. Several months later, 140 residents out of 810 became ill from the disease, indicating that it had already become an epidemic.
Upon waking, people forget everything
It is estimated that about 600 people live in this strange village, and about 160 of them spend time sleeping. But there is also a strange thing that after sleeping, villagers forget all the things that happened in the past, and men suddenly begin to demand sex. Most of the villagers in this village suffer from sleeping disorders. Whenever they are reminded of the past, they remember it. According to one woman in the village, when men awaken, they immediately require sex, which persists for a month or more.
Another resident reported: ‘A man wet himself on his way to the hospital. So the paramedics removed his pants, and there he was, not properly conscious yet in a state of sexual excitement’. No one understood at the time why this was happening. No one could explain why they were asleep. Many people assumed that the village was haunted by demons and that something bad was going to happen. Before the article appeared in the local magazine, no one had heard of this village. People began to wonder what was going on. The symptoms occurred in only 160 people.
Uranium-based gas was the culprit
Scientists say that the poisonous gas made from uranium in this village causes people to sleep more than usual as a result of its high toxicity. According to experts, the water in this village also contains poisonous uranium gas, which has made the water poisonous and contaminated as well. There is a high concentration of carbon monoxide gas in water, which is why people sleep for months at a time.
Anyone can fall asleep at any time
Another interesting thing about Kalachi village is they don’t even know when the people here will fall asleep. People can fall asleep at any time while eating, drinking, taking a bath, or walking. People in this strange village say they do not feel sleepy at all. The doctors were shocked as they didn’t know what was going on, and began to suspect the sky, the air, the water, and even the vodka they were drinking, thinking people were poisoned with fired vodka. The village is close to an ancient ghost town with uranium mines, so suspicions began to mount. The mystery that has been unraveled only now is that everything happens because there are hydrocarbon particles in the air that combine with carbon monoxide.
Ghost village Krasnogorsk
There was a long delay in discovering this disease because measurements of these components showed that the indices were always normal. It only occurred when there was very little oxygen combined with an excess of CO and CH. This only happened under certain atmospheric conditions because normally, these three components are always at normal levels of activity, so they would not have triggered suspicion.
Krasnogorsk, the ghost village, is the origin of this curious combination, but it is not directly related to the very Uranus it conceals. As it turns out, many wooden structures were used in these old mines. When the mine was closed, they filled them with water, and by keeping the wood in contact with the water, carbon monoxide was produced. Around 6,500 miners and their families died when Moscow refused to support Krasnogorsk and Kazakhstan declared a moratorium on uranium mining in 1991. Health officials found no levels of radiation or heavy metals in the area. People who are sleeping could not be explained by the amount of radio in some houses detected.
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Six-day sleep pattern
As well as the symptoms that the victims had, they also experienced severe hallucinations, nausea, and euphoria before going to sleep and after waking up. Many of those affected had significant memory loss when they regained consciousness, causing panic among residents, mainly because many of them acquired the disease several times and slept up to six days consecutively. The villagers of Kalachi were even more shaken when they found that even their pets were not immune from the condition. The doctors, after assessing the animals and noting that they were also suffering from the disease, diagnosed ‘encephalopathy of unknown origin’, a general term for brain diseases, without further explanation.
Problem solved
Professor Leonid Rikhvanov, a Russian scientist, was the first to suggest that the disease might be caused by exposure to radon gas, a substance normally found in mines. He explained that after the uranium mines were abandoned, they filled with groundwater.
The then Kazakhstani Minister of Labor and Social Protection of the Population, Berdibek Saparbaev, wrote in a report that carbon monoxide contamination, along with other hydrocarbons, resulted from the flooding of a Soviet uranium mine. Saparbaev explained that since uranium mines were closed at some point, carbon monoxide could accumulate inside. People who live in Kalachi are sleeping normally and haven’t been experiencing a strange disorder because the oxygen in the air has been reduced accordingly. At present, 120 families are living there and are sleeping normally.
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