Season 08 Episode 33: After the Sun Comes Rain (Pt.2 of2)
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It's Richard McLean-Smith here with a quick update before we dive into today's episode. Unexplained is very excited to be a part of Crime Wave at Sea this November, joining forces with some of the eeriest voices in the world of true crime and the paranormal. Four nights in the Caribbean with amazing podcasts like Last Podcast on the Left, Scared to Death and many more. Live shows, meet and greets, creepy stories under the stars and you can be there too.

But don't wait. Rooms are nearly sold out. Head to crimewaveatsea.com forward slash unexplained to grab your fan code and lock in your cabin. We'd love to see you on board. You're listening to the second and final part of Unexplained Season 8, Episode 33. After the sun comes rain.

No sooner had Dennis's body gone still, Valentina knew only that she had to get away. That whatever had killed her friends was coming for her too. What followed was a blur of exhaustion and panic. First, in her confusion, she thinks she can't leave the bodies on the mountain, with Timur being the smallest. She raced over to him and did her best to pick him up, but he was far too heavy to carry.

Still with the heavy pack on her back, she stared down at the barely visible treeline a mile or so below and started to run. Feeling the adrenaline surge through her body, she can barely feel the backpack as she moves. With every step, she expected to feel the metallic tang of blood in her throat, expected her legs to buckle underneath her and for her body to be consumed by convulsions.

She felt unreal, like she was floating somewhere above herself, waiting for the end to come. But it never did. Instead, Valentina ran until her lungs were burning so much that she finally had to stop for air. And even then, she kept moving, walking as fast as she could manage. She walked for hours, as if in a trance, fueled by pure adrenaline.

She had no way to process the horror that she'd just witnessed, but her gut was telling her to get as far away from that place as possible. Eventually, as night approached, exhaustion forced Valentina to stop. When she looked around, she saw that she was in a dense woodland. She walked over to the base of a huge ancient tree and slumped down against it.

letting her pack slide off her shoulders and onto the ground. It was only then that she'd stopped moving, that she realized just how exhausted she was. Tapping into the little energy she had left, she unpacked her bag and set up her tent. She was too tired to even think about trying to start a fire.

She ate the scant supplies she had on her, a bag of nuts and two energy bars, and then crawled into her sleeping bag before the sun had even set. At first, she was afraid to close her eyes, afraid that the horrific images of the day would be waiting for her behind her eyelids. But in fact, she fell fast asleep within seconds.

Her last conscious thought was the desperate hope that she would wake up to discover this had all been a dream. Valentina woke early the following morning with her heart pounding hard, her chest tight with a terror that she couldn't immediately understand. Then the reality of what had happened the day before hit her like a freight train. Hideous images of her friends flooded into her mind.

the horror in their eyes as they'd collapsed one by one, and the terror of being certain that she was next. She forced herself to take deep breaths as an eagle screeched overhead. She was all on her own now, and she had to think rationally, one thing at a time. Eventually dawn broke, and some of Valentina's clarity returned with it. She dragged herself from her makeshift bed, knowing only that she had to get out of the mountains and find help.

The Snezhnaya River was somewhere near. If she could locate it, she thought, she could follow its fast-flowing current towards civilization. Valentina unzipped her tent and walked out into the chilly dawn. Looking at her supplies laid out on the forest floor, she quickly realized that she had a problem. In her panic the day before, she'd brought only the supplies that she had on her back.

The group had divided up the communal supplies among themselves, including the camping stove, spare clothes and most importantly, the food. As it happened, Valentina had very little of the food and water in her own pack, not even enough to get her through the day. Getting back down to the base of the mountain would easily take several days. She also felt the need to take care of her friends in whatever way she could.

she began to realize that there was only one solution. At first, it was unthinkable. She couldn't do it, but the alternative was certain death alone in the wilderness. And so, with a pit in her stomach, Valentina set off back up the mountain, back towards the place she'd just run so desperately from. It's hard to imagine the fortitude that drives her back up the slope to the site of the disaster

Tired and terrified and aware that all that awaits her is horror. As she neared the clearing where she knew her friend's bodies lay, Valentina's chest began to tighten and her palms began to sweat. Eventually she reached what she thought was the spot but couldn't see anything. A small hopeful part of her wondered if they would still be there at all.

Perhaps whatever had happened to them was some kind of temporary state and they'd all recovered later in the day. Maybe they were even looking for her right now. But deep down, she knew she was lying to herself. Then she saw Dennis, close to the rock he'd tried to hide under. His blood-smeared face lying up in the snow. They were all exactly where she'd left them. None of them had moved. The blood now dried on their faces.

Once again, she braced herself, fearing whatever had killed them might still be present. But as the minutes ticked by, nothing happened. She looked around and felt her panic begin to fade. Strangely, for the first time since this nightmare had started, she didn't feel afraid. She knew what she had to do. First, Valentina collected a map, compass and some food from the various packs. Then, she turned her attention to the dead.

Moving from one corpse to the next, she palmed the lids down over their eyes. She fetched tarpaulins from the group supplies and tenderly covered each of the bodies up. She didn't know how long it would take for her to find help and she hated to think of her friends lying out there exposed to the elements and predators. Their deaths had been anything but peaceful but she felt some solace that at least they were at rest now.

Finding Lyudmila's map in the woman's pocket, Valentina poured over it, trying to figure out the fastest route back down the mountain. Her best chance was to try and make it to the next stop off point, where they'd been due to meet Lyudmila's daughter Natalia the day before. Natalia and her group would probably still be waiting for them, but Lyudmila's notes and drawings just seemed to swim in front of her eyes.

Valentina looked up and scanned the desolate mountain slopes that stretched out for miles around. They hadn't seen another tourist in days, so waiting here in the hope that somebody might find her was not an option. In truth, her only hope was to head back into the wilderness and try to make her way back to the bottom of the mountain.

Valentina took one last look around at her fallen friends, then hoisted her stuffed backpack onto her back and began to walk. We get it. There are too many car insurance companies trying to convince you that they have the best car insurance rates. We don't think we need to convince you. We're rude, and we do car insurance differently. We don't think it makes sense to only base your car insurance rate on things that have nothing to do with your driving, like your occupation or education.

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The first time Valentina fled down the mountain, she was operating in pure fight or flight mode, almost blind with panic.

In the newly calmed weather, out of nowhere, Valentina spots a pair of power lines in the distance. Knowing they must lead to human habitation, she decides to follow them. It felt as though some kind of guiding hand had revealed them to her. After four days trekking under the power lines, on August 9th, Valentina found herself standing at the banks of the Schnezhnaya River.

At first, this seemed like good news. The river was one of the few landmarks she recognized from Lyudmila's maps and she knew that if she followed it, it would eventually lead her back to the Marino village from where they'd set out. But this wasn't an official hiking path and soon after she set out along it, the riverbank became too steep and treacherous to walk on.

By then, Valentina had also developed a painful cough and the beginnings of a fever. She was weak and cold and dirty. Valentina turned around and retraced her steps back to a place where she could sit safely on the bank. She slumped onto the ground, defeated. She couldn't follow the river and it was too wide for her to get across. Completely stuck, she began to accept that she would die here alone.

But she can't help thinking about her parents and how she will look when she's found. Summoning her nerve, she stripped off her clothes and entered the river, letting the freezing water slake the dirt from her skin. Finally cleansed, she emerged from the river and got dressed. Reinvigorated by the icy cold water, she once again picked up her pack and continued along the riverbank.

Eventually, too tired to go on, she sat down and fell into a sleep of pure exhaustion. A few hours later, as she drifted in and out of consciousness, she heard something in the water. It sounded like laughter. At first she thought she was imagining it. After everything that had happened, she was finally losing her mind out there in the wilderness alone. But then she heard it again.

She sat up sharply and watched with amazement as a sequence of obscenely bright catamaran rafts appeared from around the next bend of the Shnezhnaya. At first, she tried to wave and shout but no sound would come out as though she had been drained of all remaining energy. But as the faces of the rafters came into focus and they appeared to be passing her by, finally, a great wail burst from her lips.

and suddenly, without warning, she was saved. The rafters secured Valentina on board one of the catamarans, then pushed off from the shore. As fast as they could, they made their way downriver toward the town of Shludyanka, where they'd ultimately been heading. Valentina, trembling throughout, seemed unable to speak, so they gave her valerian and corvalon, herbal sedatives, to help calm her nerves.

She explained that she'd been part of a group trekking through the mountains, but all the others were dead. The rest of the journey continued in a haunting silence. After arriving in Sludjanka, Valentina was taken to the nearest police station, but where before she was suffering from shock and exhaustion, now the full force of everything that had happened came rushing back to her.

The magnitude of it all was too much for her to process, rendering her semi-catatonic and mute for several more days. When Valentina finally began to speak again, it's said that she was barely coherent and unable to articulate what she'd experienced. Her recall of specific details was hazy and she was unable to give clear directions for where her friends had died.

In any case, the storm weather had continued to sweep across the region, preventing any efforts to mount a search and rescue mission to recover the bodies. Eleven days after Valentina was rescued, a helicopter crew, on the lookout for another group of hikers who'd gone missing on the mountain, spotted what looked like an abandoned camp, with six bodies scattered around it.

Another crew, led by much respected Russian search and rescuer Yuri Goliath, was immediately dispatched to the location. Seeing the bodies scattered beneath them as they came into land did nothing to prepare them for the reality of what they eventually found. The first to be examined was a semi-clothed Timur lying exactly where he'd fallen. The rescue team recoiled at the sight of him.

Despite Valentina's best efforts, he'd been exposed to the elements, not to mention all manner of voracious insects and animals, for nearly two weeks. The eyes had long since disappeared, worms crawled in the sockets, dried blood was still streaked across the grey pallid skin, his mouth still open, in a spine-chilling, silent scream. It was the same for the other five.

Each were carefully wrapped up in body bags and packed onto the helicopter. The bodies were flown back to nearby Siberian city Ulan-Ut for further examination. Goliath described the smell in the chopper as unbearable. By now, Valentina had been able to relay her full story to the police.

She recounted everything she'd witnessed in detail, how the group had all fallen one by one, exhibiting the same bizarre and violent symptoms. In Ulan Ud, a pathologist carried out the autopsies

Despite everything that Valentina had said, in the end their conclusion, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, was that all five students had simply died from hypothermia, or as they put it, froze to death whilst hiking. Lyudmila is determined to have died from heart failure, despite her being the fittest and most hardy of the group.

The only unusual finding, according to the autopsy, was that all six victims had bruising on their lungs and were suffering from protein deficiency or malnourishment, which was assumed to have exacerbated the effects of cold, and with that, there was nothing left to do but bury the dead.

A mass funeral was held in the victim's hometown of Petropavl, where it's said that almost the entire city's 200,000 population turned out to say their goodbyes. It wasn't long after news of the tragedy broke in the press that people began to question the official version of events. For one, the hike took place in the height of Siberian summer. The mean temperature in August is around 15 degrees Celsius

At elevation, in the rain, it would have been much colder, but the group were well prepared and well dressed for the mountains. After all, Lyudmila's daughter Natalia's group were also in the mountains at the same time and suffered no adverse effects. When her mother failed to arrive at their designated meeting point, Natalia didn't consider that the weather had played any part in the delay.

Valentina also stated clearly that the group had plenty of food and had eaten regularly through the trip. Her friends had died two hours after they'd eaten breakfast. The idea, as the autopsy claimed, that they were all severely malnourished didn't make any sense.

Hypothermia could explain some of the bizarre behaviour that the hikers showed before dying. It's known to cause some victims to strip off their clothes in what's called paradoxical undressing, and it can cause convulsions and seizures, but it doesn't cause bleeding from the eyes and ears, and it definitely doesn't make a person bash their own head in against a rock, as Valentina claimed to have seen Tatiana do.

Pulmonary edema can cause those things, a condition caused by the buildup of excess fluid in the lungs. It's a known risk at altitude. Ordinarily, however, it's mostly only considered a risk around 13,000 feet, not 7,500, where Lyudmila and her team were hiking.

They were seasoned hikers who had all climbed as high as the Re Translator mountain on several previous occasions without any issues. One of the rescuer team, Valery Tartanikov, was an expert tour instructor in the area. He built a career guiding tourists through the region. "The death of the Korovinites, as they became known, is a big mystery," he wrote. "The Tiger Forest is not a desert, not polar ice.

If you're experienced like Lyudmila Korovina, if you're in the forest in the summer, then it's impossible to die from the cold. 20 minutes to make a fire and you're saved.

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A few days after the funeral, an article published in the daily Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda accused the group's leader Lyudmila Korovina of being responsible for the deaths. Celebrated Russian rescuer Yuri Goliath did the same. According to him, when they arrived at the group's dilapidated camp, they found only one can of stew that he surmised had been divided up between the seven hikers.

There were no snacks or quick protein fixes that climbers usually took on such arduous journeys. Lyudmila was apparently well known for encouraging survivalist instincts among her students, meaning she preferred to keep rations to a minimum to force them to find their own food while outdoors.

Valentina seemed to hint at this when she told investigators that they'd stopped frequently to harvest the nutrient-rich gold root or Rhodiola rosea that grows abundantly in the area. Ironically, it's particularly prized for its ability to help control stress. But even if that were all true, a small degree of protein deficiency does not result in anything like what Valentina apparently witnessed.

She also continued to insist, with no genuine reason to say otherwise, that they had more than enough food to complete each day's hiking. When Galina Nikolaevna, Timur's mother, was contacted many years later by the same Komsomolskaya Pravda who'd blamed Lyudmila for the deaths, she refused to speak to them, saying only that she had complete faith in Lyudmila to look after her son.

In the decades since the Khmer Daban incident, many explanations have been put forward to explain the bizarre event. Because the Russian military had been known to use the Siberian mountains to conduct testing, some have speculated that the hikers stumbled onto something they weren't supposed to see and were killed for it. Others have pointed out that Lyudmila was an avid forager who taught the craft to her students.

Perhaps one of the group gathered poisonous mushrooms by mistake, then fed them to the others, leading to the mania displayed in their final moments. One rumour was that the group had unwittingly stumbled onto an old Soviet Union chemical weapons test site, and that Valentina had in fact been rescued by state security officers and forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

One possibility is that the group were poisoned by a nerve agent like Novichok that was somehow trapped in the soil and vegetation or carried unexpectedly through the air by the storm.

Novichok was developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and has been used against Russian individuals in many high-profile instances, perhaps most strikingly in 2018 when it was used to assassinate Russian enemies of Vladimir Putin in the United Kingdom.

In March 2018, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury, South England, after being exposed to Novichok. The UK government accused Russian military intelligence, GRU, of carrying out the poisoning, identifying two suspects, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, who were later revealed to be GRU officers.

The attack triggered a major international crisis, leading to mass diplomatic expulsions and sanctions against Russia, but several others were also unintentionally affected, including police officer Nick Bailey and months later two civilians, Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess, who had accidentally handled a discarded perfume bottle containing the Novichok. Dawn Sturgess died from the exposure.

The incident marked the first known use of a chemical weapon on European soil since World War II and raised a global alarm about state-sponsored assassination attempts abroad. A potent nerve agent, Novichok could account for many of the symptoms that the hikers exhibited, including convulsions, foaming at the mouth and cardiac arrest.

They might also have been paralysed by the Novichok and then later succumbed to hypothermia, which would explain the coroner's findings. Others have theorised that infrasound might be to blame, a super low frequency audio that can prompt terror and panic. It's a theory often applied to the Dyatlov Pass mystery.

Proponents of the idea in the Qamar Dabban case wonder if the power lines that Valentina followed to the river may have been emitting the requisite electronic frequency to cause chaos. The truth is, it's unlikely we will ever know what really happened on that horrifying morning high up in the wilderness of the Qamar Dabban mountains.

As for Valentina, the sole survivor, after her friends were brought down from the mountain, she returned to her hometown of Petropavl without speaking to the press. There, she remained silent even to her parents before revealing only minor snippets years later. After completing college, she left Kazakhstan entirely, looking for a fresh start where nothing could remind her of the nightmare in the mountains.

She's only spoken to the press once since. Back in 2018, when a reporter from Komsomolskaya Pravda tracked her down, he found her living in a dormitory for food industry workers. It's a somewhat depressing place, with 38 rooms to one bathroom, that seems to encapsulate the haunted life that Valentina has lived. Angered at having her privacy so rudely invaded,

At first, she refused to speak to the reporter entirely. When pressed to give her conclusions on the whole event, she replied simply, What's the point now? It's all useless. We can't bring them back. This episode was written by Emma Dibden, Neil McRobert and Richard McLean-Smith. Thank you as ever for listening. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLean-Smith.

All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me, Richard McLean-Smith. Unexplained the Book and Audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.

Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or a story of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at unexplainedpodcast.com and reach us online through X and Blue Sky at UnexplainedPod and Facebook at facebook.com forward slash unexplainedpodcast.

This is Doug Gottlieb for the Doug Gottlieb Show. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability. Get

Get in a Tundra with available I-Force Max hybrid engine delivering exceptional torque and towing capacity. Or check out a Tacoma with available off-road features like crawl control. It can take you beyond the trails. Toyota trucks are built to last year after year, mile after mile. So don't wait. Get yours today. Visit BuyAToyota.com for deals and more. Toyota, let's go places.

Wells Fargo seeks broad impact in their communities, focused on supporting customers and communities through housing affordability, small business growth, financial health, and more. Donated over $2 billion to strengthen local communities over the last five years. Wells Fargo, the bank of doing. Learn more at wellsfargo.com slash say do. Support includes contributions from Wells Fargo & Company, Wells Fargo Bank N.A., and the Wells Fargo Foundation.

Residents at Brightview Senior Living Communities enjoy enhanced possibilities, independence, and choice. Brightview Dulles Corner in Herndon and Brightview Great Falls offer vibrant senior independent living, assisted living, and memory care services through various daily programs and cultural events.

Chef-prepared meals, safety and security, transportation, resort-style amenities, and high-quality care. Everything you need is here. Discover more at brightviewseniorliving.com. Equal housing opportunity.

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