Chernobyl is a lot more than just a perfect
source for scary stories.
It's a very real modern-day ghost town, haunted
by disaster and downright creepy sights.
Here are some of the weirdest things that
have been found in Chernobyl's vast exclusion
zone.
The town of Pripyat is just over a mile away
from the doomed Chernobyl power plant, and
was where many of the plant's workers lived
and raised their families before the city
was evacuated.
Today, the city's most predominant looming feature
is its abandoned amusement park, which looks
just like it did more than 30 years ago - except
a million times more creepy.
The amusement park was originally supposed
to open on May 1, 1986 - which would end up
being five days after the disaster at Chernobyl
took place.
But because the townspeople needed something
to do while the reactor was melting down,
Soviet officials were reportedly kind enough
to open the park early for a short while on
April 27, before the evacuation.
So while it may not look like it, in a way,
that makes that Ferris wheel one of the most
dangerous amusement park rides people have
ever gotten the chance to take a ride on.
"They were preparing for May Day, the celebration
of spring.
Never happened."
Pop culture would have you believe that nuclear
fallout plus wildlife equals… well, insane,
Silent Hill style monsters.
[MONSTERS]
Funny thing about that, though - many animals
living in the the 1,000-square-mile exclusion
zone around the Chernobyl plant don't have
physical abnormalities at all.
At least, not anymore.
Reportedly, mutations in animals were much
more commonplace in the early days of the
disaster, and animals that were affected by
it tended to neither live long nor reproduce.
Researchers have found examples of dwarfism,
gigantism, and glow-in-the-dark-ism in the
local ecosystem, but these attributes have
apparently been found only in plants - not
animals.
Most people try to get as far away as they
can from nuclear disasters.
Others think, "Cool, let's break in with a
can of spray paint."
On a number of occasions in the years since
Chernobyl's meltdown, graffiti artists have
snuck into the exclusion zone to make their
marks, leaving eerily beautiful works of art
on the abandoned buildings behind them.
Some of the most striking graffiti work can
be found in Pripyat, where artists painted
creepy silhouettes of the town's missing residents.
The effect is pretty striking.
It's probably not an accident that the silhouettes
are eerily similar to the "permanent shadows"
that were left on the walls of Hiroshima after
America attacked the city with a nuclear bomb
during World War II.
The Soviet government evacuated well over
100,000 people after the accident at Chernobyl,
eventually resettling many of them in new
homes outside of the exclusion zone.
But some residents of the smaller villages
just plain weren't interested in leaving,
radiation or no radiation.
Many of these older residents were set in
their ways, having previously lived through
the threats presented by Joseph Stalin and
the Nazis, and they weren't about to run away
from a danger they couldn't even see.
"So I should leave now, because of something
I cannot see at all?
No."
About 1,200 people, known as "self-settlers,"
moved back into the exclusion zone in the
months and years following the disaster.
Some returned to their homes within a few
years, while others only waited a few months.
The government objected to the peoples' presence,
but in the face of that kind of determination,
what could they really do to stop them?
It's not like they don't understand the risk.
They know the soil is contaminated, but they
grow food in it anyway.
They raise chickens and hogs, despite the
real dangers of eating meat that's been raised
in the exclusion zone.
Today, many of the people who remain are in
their 70s or 80s, and they're still mostly
healthy - and that's all the anecdotal evidence
they need.
The strangest creature found in the exclusion
zone is the common tourist.
According to Newsweek, as many as 12,000 tourists
visit the exclusion zone every year.
Is it really safe to do that?
Of course!
Sort of.
One popular tourism company promises its guests
hours of excitement in the shadow of Chernobyl,
providing adventurous travellers with their
own personal tours, dosimeters to check radiation
levels, and even respirators.
How comforting!
In a practice that may be done with tongue-in-cheek,
some hotels in the area even request that
visitors to Chernobyl leave their shoes outside
when they return to their lodgings for the
night, out of fear that guests may track in
radioactive contamination.
Despite Chernobyl's reputation, excursions
into the exclusion zone are apparently not
all that dangerous, provided you take the
proper precautions.
Dosimeters rarely read high during a tour;
according to Newsweek, the highest typical
reading is similar to what you might get on
a round trip flight from San Francisco to
Paris.
And if you didn't know flying exposes you
to low levels of radiation, well, you do now.
Through the ages, one fact has remained true:
in the right context, dolls can be really
creepy.
Especially when they're hanging around nuclear
ghost towns.
It almost feels fitting that Pripyat is full
of old, broken dolls - so many that there
almost seems to be some kind of weird spinoff
of The Conjuring being shot there.
Wherever you go in Pripyat, it seems like
creepy dolls are there to stare at you.
They sit on window sills, they're propped
up on skeletal bed frames, they're sprawled
out in piles of debris - some of them are
even wearing gas masks, to add that extra
layer of uncanny horror.
While it's certainly tempting to think that
everything you see in Pripyat is still in
pretty much the same spot where it was left
on the day of the evacuation, the truth is
that tourists looking for an awesomely creepy
keepsake rearranged most of them for the sake
of taking spooky photos.
It's suspected that many of the dolls may
not even be Pripyat originals - there are
plenty that look almost brand new, which suggests
that tourists are mostly just bringing them
along for Instagram's sake.
The scariest thing in the Chernobyl area is
obviously the plant itself.
Until recently, the only thing standing between
the failed fourth reactor and the rest of
the world was the massive structure known
as the sarcophagus, which was made from 14
million cubic feet of concrete and just over
8,000 tons of metal.
Soviet workers known as "liquidators" assembled
the original sarcophagus over the course of
206 days, in shifts lasting five to seven
minutes each, because any time longer than
that spent near the reactors might have just
killed them where they stood.
But it's not like the shorter shifts were
safe, though.
Thousands are suspected to have died during
the work, with many others being resigned
to long, painful, cancer-ridden deaths much
later on.
The original sarcophagus was built in a hurry
and structurally unsound, but it was also
the only thing keeping incredibly lethal amounts
of radiation from being released into the
environment.
It was a temporary fix in need of a more permanent
replacement.
It took years for engineers to come up with
another solution - a bigger, better sarcophagus,
built to surround the old one, known as the
New Safe Confinement.
The structure took 10,000 people to build,
weighing 35,000 tons and built to last for
at least 100 years.
When the new sarcophagus was finally complete,
the builders needed 18 ships and 2,500 trucks
to move it and all of its parts from Italy
to Chernobyl.
It was finally installed on November 29, 2016,
more than three decades after the Chernobyl
disaster took place.
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