Then, for a brief period in her early 20s,
Gillian experienced a series of visions
of herself as a young child playing in
a sandbox surrounded by gardens
and an orchard. The Pollocks imme-
diately recognized that as their home
in Whickham, the village where they’d
lived with Joanna in the years before
Jacqueline had been born. The catch?
Gillian had never been to Whickham.mass murder
Missing on a Mountain
On January 23, 1959, nine college
students and their tour guide, Igor
Dyatlov, set out on what was to be a
21-day hiking excursion through the
Ural Mountains, in the former USSR.
On February 2, the group skied down
Mount Otorten—English translation:
Mount Don’t Go There. On February
12, when the group was scheduled
to return home, only one student,
21-year-old Yuri Yudin, had arrived,
and he had left the group early be-
cause of illness. When none of the
others came home, a search party was
organized. What the searchers found
would haunt them. On February 26,
they discovered the hikers’ tent. It
had been sliced open from the inside.
There were multiple pairs of snowy
footprints—some made with bare
feet—leading away from it.
The bodies of the first two hikers
were found wearing only underwear
beneath a tall cedar tree, the flesh
on their hands raw and pulpy fromattempting to scramble up the trunk.
The next two were found one day
later and another hiker six days later,
all showing signs of hypothermia.
One had a fractured skull.
It wasn’t until the spring thaw be-
gan in May that the remaining four
were discovered under 13 feet of snow
in a ravine 82 yards from the cedar
tree. Three had clearly died of severe
internal injuries consistent with a tre-
mendous physical impact comparable
to a car crash (including skull and rib
fractures), yet none bore visible exter-
nal injuries. It was as if a deadly force
had crushed them without having
actually touched them. They had all
apparently died on the eleventh day
of their trip, February 2, the last day
on which any of them had written in
their journals.
The investigation continued—and
in late May it took a shocking turn:
Some of the hikers’ clothing tested
positive for radioactivity. On May 28,
1959, one day after the Soviet military
got wind of the results of the radiation
testing, the investigation was sum-
marily closed. The official conclusion:
The hikers had met with an unnamed
“overwhelming force.”
Of course, that abrupt announce-
ment just intensified public specu-
lation. Theories have included an
explosion of a Soviet test missile, a
UFO attack, hallucinogenic drugs, and
even a Bigfoot-like monster.
“If I had a chance to ask God just
one question,” said Yudin, the one64 april 2019
Reader’s Digest
publicdomain(b+wphotos).^shutterstock(radioactive).^ c
ourtesy^ vladimir^ borzenkov(memorial)