THE MYSTERY LAKE

There lies a mysterious lake known as Roopkund. This remote body of water is nestled below a steep slope on one of India's tallest mountains, and its frigid waters harbour a dark secret that's haunted experts for decades.

Just below the surface are hundreds of human skeletons and how did they get there? What could have possibly caused the demise of all those people? I hope you're not easily spooked, because it's time to unravel the mystery of Roopkund Lake.

Our story begins back in 1942, whilst the world was at war; an Indian forest ranger named Hari Kishan Madhwal was enjoying some relative peace as he conducted a routine patrol of the Himalayan Mountains.

That is until he stumbled across a deep valley he'd never noticed before. Despite the heavy snow, he could make something out at the bottom of it. Intrigued, the lone wanderer fought through the storm and made his way down, as he got closer, he realized he was looking at a small glacial lake, upon reaching the edge, however,a chill ran up Madhwal's spine that he couldn't blame on the cold.

There, staring grimly back up at him through the icy waters, was a skeletal face his heart racing, Madhwal glanced awayat a different part of the lake and gasped no matter where he looked, he was greeted with more human skulls.

The skeletal fragments weren't confined to the water either as some lay scattered on the shore around it ,Madhwal didn't need any more evidence that something was horribly wrong about this place with a start, he sprinted back up the valley and down the mountain to tell anyone who'd listen. Since then, Roopkund Lake has been one of the most widely contested mysteries ever know, because it was discovered during World War II, the skeletons were initially feared to be the remains of enemy soldiers. People were worried that the Japanese were attempting an invasion through the mountains and that some infantry had got lost on the way and ended up in the lake and they were right.

It turns out the bones were far too old to be Axis forces hundreds of years too old though, some of them still had flesh and hair attached to them, even after all that time, they weren't zombies or anything either, but high altitude and freezing temperatures had just preserved them incredibly well. Indeed, Roopkund Lake is frozen most of the year, but when the ice thaws and the snow melt, the water's spooky secrets bubble to the surface, all 800 of them.

Seriously, that's how many bodies could be lying there, this place is so creepy. While obviously not Japanese soldiers, some people reckoned it could be the remains of a far older army, a group of Indian soldiers who tried to invade Tibet during the Dogra-Tibetan War in 1841 that they'd failed, and after being forced to retreat, had tried to cut through the icy mountains and back home.

Alone in the Himalayas, the unprepared soldiers quickly succumbed to the harsh conditions, their remains ultimately tumbling down the mountains and ending up in Roopkund, or at least that's how the theory went.

It too was quickly disproven, aside from a single spearhead, nobody could find evidence of any weapons on top of this, the bones belonged to both men and women and at the time, only men were allowed in the army to fight.

At this stage, I’m sure you can see why locals refer to Roopkund as the Mystery Lake, but what if all of those people didn't just end up in the lake? What if the lake itself was somehow responsible for their fate?

I don't mean it had a mind of its own or anything, but some lakes are unbelievably dangerous, say acidic ones, ordinary lakes can be transformed into these rare bodies of water by nearby volcanic activity.

When a volcano erupts, it releases corrosive gases, like hydrogen sulphide and if these spread through a lake, they can cause the pH levels to drop as low as .1, making the water stronger than battery acid.

If you dipped a toe in, it wouldn't immediately strip your flesh to the bone, but it'd severely burn you and if you were to fall all the way in, it could very easily spell bye-bye before you made it back to shore.

So could that explain the mystery of Roopkund? Well, think about it. If the water was so acidic, would all those skeletons have lasted hundreds of years in it? No.

No, they wouldn't have, while it wouldn't be safe at all to dive into acidic waters. As the years since Madhwal's grisly discovery grew longer,the list of possible explanations grew with them.

Some people thought the skeletons belonged to unfortunate foragers who've been trying to gather a special mushroom that grows in the area while others disregarded this and subscribed to a more brutal alternative, that Roopkund was the site of some sort of ritual sacrifice and shrines along a trail that leads to the lake have inscriptions on them that hint at this theory.

But aside from those, there isn't any other evidence and there's practically none to support the mushroom idea.

A more likely explanation is that the lake was a burial ground for victims of an epidemic. This makes more sense, in times of plague, people around the world used to dispose of bodies in a similar manner and Roopkund is so isolated that it'd be perfect. Even today, there are no roads that lead to it, and it's a gruelling three day hike to get there.

But just as people started to think they got the answer, a startling new twist threw yet another spanner in the works as more skulls were fished out of the lake, scientists noticed something very odd. Some of them had short, deep, rounded cracks in them, unlike those made by any known weapon or disease. What? At this point, I'd have been thinking it was aliens but the nearest villagers had their own explanation for the strange fractures; their people have been on Hindu pilgrimages around the area for centuries and one path takes them right past Roopkund and high above it, along treacherous terrain. The arduous pilgrimage is only undertaken once every 12 years and honours the goddess Nanda Devi.

As such, anyone that embarks on it, is expected to respect the rules. Locals believe a medieval king undertook this very journey with his wife to celebrate their child's coming birth but against the rules of the pilgrimage, the king refused to walk barefoot, and brought soldiers and dancers with him. On top of this, his wife had the cheek to give birth during the trek and that was the last straw for Nanda Devi.

Supposedly, the enraged deity struck down the pilgrims with great iron balls from the sky, leaving their lifeless bodies on the path above the lake, time passed, the bodies became bones, and the bones eventually slipped down into the water below.

Although this fanciful tale is probably heavily exaggerated, that doesn't mean it isn't based in truth as well as skeletons, parasols and bangles have also been found in the lake, both of which are traditional items taken by pilgrims honouring Nanda Devi and iron balls from the sky could refer to some kind of storm.

But what storm would rain iron balls? Well, what if they weren't really iron at all? What if they were ice? In other words, hail, golf ball-sized giant hail. It's not unheard of, even today, and it's super dangerous.

And whether the hail finished the pilgrims off or not, though the confusion and panic of the storm certainly would have just one slip and you could easily tumble down the valley into the freezing lake below, where hypothermia or starvation would do the rest.

Now, I don't know about you, but that all sounds very convincing to me.

Case closed. whilst it's generally accepted that giant hail is to blame for some of the skeletons in the lake, the idea that it's the reason for all of them just doesn't hold water. For starters, only a few out of the hundreds of skulls had the tell-tale circular cracks in them,and certainly not enough for them to all have been caught in a storm.But there's a bigger problem too, a much bigger problem, it turns out the remains in the lake aren't the result of just one incident, or two, or even three.

The bones are from different time periods, spanning a whopping thousand years. The oldest ones were carbon dated to around 800 AD and the most recent, at 1800 AD.What? So you're trying to tell me colossal hailstorms killed nearly a thousand people in the exact same spot over and over again for a thousand years then just stopped?

Hell No!.

Further studies of the bones revealed they didn't just belong to Indians. Instead, they're part of a diverse group of different ethnicities so they couldn't all have been going on Hindu pilgrimages. Strangest of all, some of them belonged to people from as far away as the Eastern Mediterranean, meaning they travelled to Roopkund all the way from Greece.

Now, back in the 17th to the 20th centuries, when these Mediterranean bones were dated from, there were no planes or cars, so this would've been a tremendously long and arduous journey for anybody to undertake. Why on earth would anyone travel almost 4,000 miles on foot to see a strange little secluded lake in the mountains? And how had they even heard about it to do so?

Well, it's possible that the site held significance for a lot more people than just the Hindus, after all, the lake does have a certain mystical aura about it, tucked away and frozen at the bottom of a mountainous valley.

If it really did hold that much significance though, I can't help but think that there'd be something written about it, as it stands, historians haven't found a single mention of the lake in any document before the skeletons' discovery. Sure, the records could have been lost to time. But if the lake was really famous enough to pull people from all around the world, wouldn't there at least be one mention of it somewhere?

It just doesn't add up.

A more likely explanation is that the Greeks didn't travel that far at all. they were already in the country. The Greeks actually had a kingdom in India for about 200 years, starting in 180 BC. Sure, that's way before our skeletal pals supposedly lived, but it's entirely possible that the ancient Indo-Greeks passed their DNA onto further generations, who outlived the fall of the kingdom. These people may have had Greek ancestry, but still practiced Hinduism, and so might have travelled past Roopkund on pilgrimage after all .Even if they weren't pilgrims, they could feasibly have still visited.

The mountains would've been an enticing source of adventure for those brave enough to scale them, but the unprepared may never have made it back down. Ultimately, as unsatisfying as it might be, we just don't know for sure. Roopkund remains a mystery to this very day.There's a running joke among those who make the trek that one wrong step could add another skeleton to the waters.

Even so, scientists continue to study the lake, hoping to figure out once and for all what the heck happened here. But there's still a long way to go, and tourists haven't exactly been helpful either. Though I doubt anyone swims in the freezing, eerie waters, visitors have been known to disturb the site and even take bones home with them.

As if figuring out this mystery wasn't hard enough, regardless, I'm confident we'll eventually get to the bottom of it. New discoveries are being made all the time. It was only as recently as 2019 that scientists realized that some of the bones were Mediterranean, and they only tested a few of the skeletons.

So with more in-depth research, who knows what revelations are waiting around the corner?