In Old Norse they are an undead creature, the Old Norse meaning of the word is revenant. The creatures live in their graves, often guarding the treasure that was buried with them. They are not like ghosts, they have a physical body and abilities that they would have carried in life. There is a clear distinction for those that live in the sea or land as either Sea-draguar or landdraugar.
They possess superhuman strength and can, at will, increase their size. They bring with them the unmistakeable stench of death and they will look swollen, blackened and are generally revolting to look at. In mythology they also keep some semblance of their intelligence, perhaps to ensure they can do their best at guarding their treasure or optimise how they wreak havoc on the living, namely taking revenge on those that have wronged them in life.
According to folklore these beings have a variety of ways to despatch of their victims too, so they can crush them with their enlarged forms, devour the flesh or perhaps swallow them whole when they are large. Some will kill them via driving them mad or maybe even drink the victim’s blood.
They prefer to be active at night but are not restricted like many other revenant styles, but some are immune to weapons and only a hero with the right sort can take them down. Final despatch appears to be preferred by beheading the creature, burning it and then finally dumping the ashes in the sea.
After a person has died the most common indication they will become one is that the corpse is not in a horizontal position, it may be found sat upright indicating that they want to come back. Mean or nasty people are most likely to become one and those who have unfinished business, someone so evil they have a serious impact on those around them.
Preventions include grave binding, a stone with an inscription that will keep them in place or an open pair of iron scissors over the chest of the corpse. Some have tied big toes together, or driven needles through the soles to stop them being able to walk. The coffin should be rotated at least three times when carried to confuse their sense of direction. An effective method is also called the Corpse Door, a special door was built and the corpse carried through feet first, it was surrounded by people to stop it seeing where it was going. The door was then bricked up to prevent any return.
A variation to the creature is also the Haugbui, a mound dwelling creature, where the dead body lives on within its tomb. It cannot leave its burial place but those that enter are free game. The haugbui is usually found in the Norse saga’s and said to swim alongside boats to sail and pick off the men as the boats are semi-submerged.
The barrow-wights in Middle-Earth are based on the legend; they linger around their gold after death.
They are featured in the game The Elder Scrolls V, they are usually those from someone who is of legend and speak in an ancient dragon language.
You can find ‘Draug’ in the game The Secret World, they wander ashore in the fictional Solomon Island, New England.
For World of Warcraft players you can find the Vrykul Race around Northrend, they are heavily influenced by the draugr, and there are two sorts commonly seen. You can spot undead vargul or their blueskinned warriors.
norwayhertiage.com, https://www.thedarkpictures.com/, wikpedia (English and German versions), Fortean Times monthly magazine, Proceedings of the Merchant Maritime Council, The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena by Roy Bainton (2013), Ripleys.com, de173.com, strangeremains.com, skittishlibrary.co.uk
Back in 2014 I visited this mystery with a quick overview. This mystery ship was meant to have burnt down, a fire breaking out on board and the sole witness was there, he took photos and then he and his crew watched from their own ship as it burnt and sank, down into the bottom of the ocean. I thought it would be interesting to revisit this with a little more detail, and an interest revived having skimmed a recent copy of Fortean Times.
January 1948, ‘Mystery Demise of the Ourang Medan’ was an article in the Elseviers Weekblad, a Dutch Weekly newspaper. It had two photographs, a ship on its side and a crewman dead on the floor with no face showing, as the evidence, along with the witness report. The English report was in 1952 as a handed down rumour. The author has claimed, in the Dutch Paper, to have been 400 nautical miles southeast of the Marshall Islands, in mid Jine 1947. The author, Silvio Scherli, said their vessel got a radio message and an SOS Signal from Ourang Medan. The dramatic description says that the morse code seemed very confusing, but they managed to make out “I am dying” from the garbled words and letters.
The next day they got there and the ship was drifting with no signs of life on bard. A small group of sailors boarded and were confronted with dead corpses, fear on their faces from some terror they had witnessed as they died. There were no signs of blood, or any violence and then they located the radio operator, still wearing his headset, the wires moving along with the rocking ship and his fists clenched, all adding to the dramatic tale.
Suddenly, a fire broke out and the crew that had boarded were forced to abandon it. The author says that no one on their ship could sleep that night so they stood and watched the burning ship until it finally sank into the Pacific Ocean.
So after this, two more instalments came, it mentioned a survivor, a Franciscan missionary from Taongi Atoll, reported that a man had washed ashore, dying a few days later, he had apparently relayed to a clergyman his story about the events on the Ourang Medan. He told them about a dodgy port, about mystery cargo and about a Chinese Port. It was sounds very creepy doesn’t it as the monk says that 15 days into the journey the disaster struck and the crew dropped dead in terror.
In the third instalment they gave up more of this odd tale, with 15,000 cases of sulphuric acid, nitro-glycerine in liquid form and other chemicals that had all been stored onboard. The swaying of the vessel has caused ruptures and vapours around the ship. The author said they were not allowed to release the man’s real name, he was a German buried by the old palm in the cemetery at the mission.
After this the story got repeated around, and there were a lot of questions!
Silvio Scherli, in Trieste, persisted in the story’s validity. This seems such a fantastical tale, but the red flags didn’t deter reporters. An American publication “apparently told by an Italian officer, on a ship that had answered the Ourang Medan’s distress call,” said the editor couldn’t help any further, they had brought the story and that was the end of that.
In 1952 the US Coastguard visited the mystery and in 1954 German author, Otto Mielke, published a 32-page booklet on the matter, giving his own retelling of the version. Let’s look at “Das Totenschiff in der Südsee” – The Death Ship of the South Sea. The story as built up from the three-part series in the Dutch Easter Indian Daily, but it relays that the Ourang Medan sent an SOS call and a radio call to a doctor at the same time, the call was relayed by both the City of Baltimore and American steamer, Silver Star, giving co-ordinates and announced their position. The connection to the radio died, they reconnected and that’s where they got “I’m dying”, the City of Baltimore vessel had a doctor onboard and carried on that way also.
28th June 1947 the Ourang Medan was spotted, no flag set and no sign of smoke from her chimney. This is when the Silver Star crew go aboard, and find all the crew to be dead, in Mielke’s version all the bodies were of Asian people. It once again is about the terror of the deceased, visible on their faces and in this re-telling there are several explosives forcing the crew off their mystery find.
12th July, 1947 a lifeboat washed ashore on Taongi Island, where 6 of the 7 passengers had died. The survivor he calls Jerry Rabbit, who goes on to describe various transport information to various places for the dubious cargo. The chemical angle is used once again for the whole thing.
So the booklet became part of the ‘truth’ for information in retelling it all. UFO’s were then also brought forwards for explanation, and CH March Jnr wrote to the CIA in 1959, “something from the unknown” might be involved.
So what can be established?
Roy Banton (The Mammoth book of Unexplained Phenomena, 2013) searched through Llyod’s Shipping Register, he visited the shipping registers in Amsterdam and came up empty handed. He also came across a German researcher, Theodor Siersdorfer, who had found no mention of the vessel in 45 years. Also depending on the source it is either a steamer or a freighter, two very different uses.
This story has been used for varying fictional works, including a Russian version by Lev Skyragin called Voice of the Sea in 1973. So what else? 7 Jours, French magazine, made a conclusion of its own, the death ship was not from 1947 but from a decade before that. 13th November 1939 it was found by an American Destroyer but there seems to still be no mention of the ship’s name there to confirm this.
Another suggestion notes the vessel may have been registered in Sumatra as “man from Medan”, I found nothing concrete about that. The Silver Star is a registered vessel – Grace Line Ship List – Santa Cecilia #3, it was renamed Santa Juana in 1947, then scrapped later.
January 20th, 1855, SS City of Baltimore, Inman Line, was launched and was sold in 1874 and renamed “Fivaller” and scrapped in 1885. City of Baltimore ships after that? I found the SS City of Baltimore and she beached in the Upper Cheapsake Bay on 29th July 1937 but she was later broken up, she had been set on fire a decade before.
Theo Paijman’s, Dutch writer, summarised that it seems more likely Silvio Scherl-Scherli had a template to sell to various newspapers and magazines. The publications and submissions all lasted 8 years and if anyone sounded sceptical, he would just double down with his reassurances. As he rightfully points out the photograph of the dead man could have been easily staged and photos of a listing ship would not be that hard to get hold of during the period.
To support this theory I also think skittish library has found another great point about this, Yorkshire Evening Post 21st November 1940 and other newspapers. If it was 1947 when it happened either everyone was psychic or the original version just didn’t sell well enough? They also list it as Solomon Islands but the same ship name, and then in the newest version the same ship name but at Marshall Islands, quite a way off from one another and in both tales, both era’s the Trieste report came in. So there we have it?
“All officers including captain dead, lying in chartroom and on bridge, probably whole crew.”
Was it inspired by the Mary Celeste? It seems that Paijman’s visit into this matter and the skittish library finds, mean it really is a good and reasonable summary, but it’s a shame as I rather like the mystery going unsolved.
Moscow’s metro is one of the deepest in the world, but below it, if you believe the Soviet Legend, is a second even deeper metro system, Metro 2. This metro was purportedly built for Stalin as a private line for top party officials. One of the lines supposedly led from the Kremlin to the Lubyanka, the home of the feared KGB.
1933, summer, and two men found a centuries old tunnel within sight of the Kremlin, excited that they might find Ivan the Terrible’s gold-covered books they found 5 skeletons and a rusted door they could not open. They didn’t dare let on what they had found during Stalin’s reign but when Mikhail Gorbechav came to power surviving engineer, Apollos Ivanov, recalled the tale.
It’s a good old-fashioned conspiracy dive, Metro 2 is the informal name for the secret underground system which parallels the public metro system in Moscow. It is theorised that it was built, or at least started, during the era of Joseph Stalin and codenamed D6 (Д-6) by the KGB.
The KGB (Комите́т Госуда́рственной Безопа́сности (КГБ)) was the main security agency for the Soviet Union, 1954-1991 until the breakup of the union. D6 is still rumoured to be operated by the Main Directorate of Special Programmes and Ministry of Defence.
In 1992 a journalist magazine called Yunost published a novel by Vladimir Eonik. It was called Преисподняя (Preispodniaia or Abyss) and was sent in an Underground bunker in Moscow. The idea of the D6 project had been introduced to them via 20 years of collected papers and works on secret bunkers and an underground railway system that connected them.
Russian reporters have neither confirmed or denied the existence of D6, but there is supposedly evidence of it and when the Rossiya Hotel was demolished near the Kremlin a tunnel was found, providing another potential link into the conspiracy theory being more of a fact. Given that tunnels are all over major cities I’m not actually sure if this is to be counted as proof. So, let’s take a look into what we can find for further information.
1994, an exploration group “Diggers of the Underground Planet” claimed they’d found an entrance to the system, before that in 1991 the United States Department of Defence published a report ‘Military Forces in transition” that had a diagram of the system that was superimposed on a city map which was, it states, designed for 100,000 people.
Igor Maleshenko, the Deputy Director Broadcaster, gave an interview in 1992 with Time and discussed a similar project called Sofrino-2, he said that it has been built in case of a nuclear war but like many of the installations it was unusable. The age, deterioration and flooding had affected a great number of them.
2004, former advisor to Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Shevchenko confirmed that there was a secret in the Moscow Metro, however he said that the number of these things were greatly exaggerated. He then touched upon the subject again, “currently, the Kremlin subway cannot be called a transportation artery, and, as far as I know, for its continued operation it requires major repairs; for among other things there are a lot of underground utilities which will eventually decay.”
2008 – Mikhail Poltoranin, a minister under Boris Yelstin’s reign, confirmed an extensive network of tunnels for the purpose and mentioned Metro-2 directly.
Dimitry Gayev, ex-chief of the Moscow Metro felt that it would be of little surprise if it existed, in 2008 the head of the Moscow Metro, Svetlana Razina, also discussed that there had been recruiting for a service on secret routes and they required special clearance.
2007 ITAR-TASS stated “line of the Metro-2 has long been in the KGB office.”
Alexander Muzykantskiy was the former Head of Moscow’s Central Administrative District and spoke of a gigantic underground system. They had designed a place to ensure the stable operation of military and political operations during nuclear conflict, and for 91 years was kept as a highest state secret. I also think I will mention England tried to set up the same and I am sure it’s commonplace in many countries and not just Moscow.
Speaking of, the British Secret Intelligence Service also got a little information that was put out via defector. The former colonel of the KGB Oleeg Gordievsky said it was one of the main KGB secrets. The massive complex would likely never be shown to anyone, that huge underground city was not for the common eye.
A 2005 BBC article interviewed Eugine, who was 22 years old and a ‘digger’, they explore the underground spaces of Moscow and he relayed how a Russian reporter wrote about that secret network and was then questioned by the FSB (successor to the KGB). He was careful not to say how they got to their places and had a lot of images that they had collected as a group of diggers.
How has it been used in the media?
Well one of them favourite games uses it, I came across D6 in Metro 2033, a video game based on the series of books by Dimitry Glukhovsky. I’m 100% biased with my love of this nuclear survival and urban-ex nature of the game and in the book, it sends the main character, Artyom, to find the massive ‘bunker-like’ system. The existence is a legend amongst the underground dwellers of the Metro, and they reach one of the entrances located near Kievsaya Station. In the books D6 is only mentioned as Artyom does not go there himself.
Incidentally Metro, 2013, is a film set in the Moscow metro when a major leak sets off a pretty decent disaster movie. It has all the classic hallmarks of the type of film this genre holds and was fairly well received. My Russian understanding is minimal at best, but the plot was fairly simple to follow – spoiler alert below.
Rich man, c husband of wife and their daughter all end up trapped when the area floods. The old and busy tunnels become fatal for various reasons. Character (and a dog) all end up dying, trapped etc and you get some very good footage of the metro as this story goes on. It is clear that when travelling miles of these tunnels and seeing various entrances it would not be hard to believe that there is more than meets the eye, you get a similar feel when you go on the New York subway or the London Underground and so I think it is a subject for interested.
What do you think?
I have a copy of the first edition published of the game Wraith, it is battered and showing its age but it is still sat in my collection. It was published in 1994 by White Wolf and is part of the World of Darkness setting. The World of Darkness is an alternative world, a fictional setting using our world events and accepting that supernatural events and creatures like vampires, werewolves and mages exist.
I remember the rumours about this when I was more heavily into following the Role Play Gaming scene and thought I might do a tea break read on it.
So rumour had it that the game setting was being worked on and that play testing is a part of this, so during the first play test and in talks with the designers they all had instances where they were falling ill When they tried to prepare the book for its original publication the printing factory burnt down.
So this is really what seems to be nothing more than a rumour circulating at the time, there was no twitter to hashtag it out and a look online only had one other person that had posted about it. So it was a rumour mill that may well have not gone all that far outside of small circles or in chat rooms now very out of date or defunct. So was there any basis to this? Most likely not, it was more likely down to the fact that the game was just selling poorly.
The game itself meant that before you even started the game you had to conceive characters that had been traumatized enough to become these angry/tormented spirits. This was not just hard for players to work with but also the storyteller. I am quite sure the concept and development was hard work, the subject of things like murder, suicide and horrific accidents are going to drag the most positive of folk down over time.
Ultimately I don’t consider this a case of cursed gaming more a case of concept that didn’t sell well in reality. After two editions Wraith: The Oblivion was shelved and now appropriately haunted a space in my collection like it does many other people’s shelves.
So its that time! Time to look at communication, specifically an old over-the-horizon radar system called the Duga from the former Soviet Union (Russia/Ukraine for the purposes of this article.) Over The Horizon (OTH) or Beyond The Horizon (BTH) are radar systems for long range use. Most were used in the 1950’s and 1960’s because they were early warning systems, just think about the Cold War and the idea of it being a necessity; the ones I am looking at here are the Duga system but they were used all over the world and still are, if modern reports online are correct. I am no expert so correct me where you can if I get things wrong.
The system operated from July 1976 up until December 1989, there were two deployed in Chernobyl and Chernihiv. Chernobyl is in the Ukraine and Chernihiv is Siberian. They were powerful and appeared without warning, sounding like a repetitive tapping on 10Hz, they became nicknamed by the listeners as the Russian Woodpecker.
They seemed to pop up pretty randomly and could interrupt legitimate broadcasting and all variations of stations. Complaints were sent in about them but I can’t imagine it being easy to prevent them. Some of the radio and television users began including blockers in the circuit to try and filter out interruption.
The first type of Duga was built in the Ukraine and did successfully detect rocket launchers from 2,500 kilometres. With its success they worked on the larger project. The first signal was picked up in 1976 and amatuer radio users gave it the name woodpecker, some people had reported it as early as 1963. Regardless of the date the Russian Woodpecker was traced back to the Soviet Union. The sources were found in Kiev, Minsk, Chernobyl, Gomel and Chernihiv but eventually narrowed down through speculation has been made that there was more than one transmitter. Wireless World, 1977 muses that along with the OTH system the Russians might be trying to utilise radar returns or another source that worked along side it, or around two or more spots.
I wondered if this was plausible or were we just putting more technical knowledge to that in retrospect or are we accepting that NATO might not have been entirely accurate? The NATO name for DUGA-1 is quoted as STEEL YARD, some sources also use STEELWORK. It is officially recorded name may well be different but not disclosed for security purposes.
Some points of interest are that they realised when listening that it was not used as a form of jamming because Moscow and pro-Soviet Stations were also caught by it, so it couldn’t be reliable enough for that. The signal used three repetition rates of 10Hz, 16Hz and 20Hz, but the most common was 10. They used a fairly wide bandwidth, usually 40Khz.
An attempt to stop the signals causing interruptions came along, one of the ways was tor try and use signals at the same pulsing rate, people formed a club called The Russian Woodpecker Hunting Club. The transmissions slowed down in the 1980’s by 1989 they had disappeared. This slow down and eventual end does coincide with the Cold War closing down, the official end being 8th December 1971 when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Another factor in the close would be a further advancement in early warning systems, satellite systems are far more advanced and less likely to be affected by adverse weather.
The original Duga system was experimental and it lies outside of the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine. It was restored in 2002 after it was badly damaged by fire. As of October 2013 there is a possibility to visit the Ukrainian site via tour operators for Chernobyl who know how to get the correct paperwork.
For those who like modern reference here are some ways the Duga has been imported into modern media.
If, like me, you enjoy games like Metro Last Light or S.T.A.L.K.E.R then you may already know this… Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is a heavy feature in S.T.A.L.K.E.R and specifically around the nuclear accident. The Duga array is in Clear Sky after the main campaign game. It is in the fictional city of Limansk-13 you can see it and visit it in game. The ‘Brain Scorcher’, a military installation, is inspired by the idea that Duga-1 was used for mind-control.
Call of Duty:Black Ops the map ‘Grid’ is placed in Pripyat and the array can be seen in game there too.
A documentary by Chad Garcia looks into the Chernobyl disaster and the potential links to the structure. The documentary interviews people directly involved in the building and operation of the installation.
Investigations into the unknown and weird 
