The Story Behind 'Kholat'

If you are anything like me, you love horror games. I personally think that they are great. The adrenaline rush that you feel, the thrills that you get and the perfectly orchestrated sounds—they are just so much fun. Also if you are anything like me, you have probably come across some mysteries while playing them. One of the biggest I have stumbled upon so far is the crazy story behind the game Kholat.

In Kholat, you play as a character who is retracing the steps of nine college students who went missing in 1959 on Kholat Syakhl, a mountain in Russia. Now the point of the game is to try and get to the bottom of what happened to these students.

Now to the real story. In 1958, a man named Igor Dyatlov started a skiing group that was going to ski all of the mountains within the Ural mountain range. On February 1, 1959 ten students started the climb to the top of another mountain near Kholat. However, one of the hikers got very ill and was forced to return to the town at the bottom of the mountain. The other nine then continued on. They had planned to get all the way up and over the mountain but due to worsening weather conditions, such as low visibility because of the storms, the group got turned around and then started to climb Kholat Syakhl. As soon as they realized that they had made a mistake, they decided to set up camp. They agreed that they would get back on track in the morning. However, for them, the morning would not come.

Late that night, after every one had settled in and fallen asleep, something peculiar happened. At around midnight, the students ripped through their tent very obviously not equipped for the subzero temperatures and ran away. Most of the students died from hypothermia. This is not strange. If you are in your underpants and say a tank top in subzero temperatures with no tent to go back to, it makes sense that you would die of hypothermia. However, this was not the case with a few of them. The students who did not die of hypothermia had other causes of death. One of them had severe physical trauma to the sternum and the chest area and the other had severe head wounds, almost like his head was bashed in with something. Even more bizarre, they did not look like they had these problems until after the autopsy.

There are so many theories behind what could have possibly happened. Some people think animals, some think the government, others think it was some sort of spirit or demon. The last of these seems to be what the game Kholat suggests.

Of course, there is another crazy thing about this "dead mountain." There are the mysterious ghost lights. These are lights that are on the top of the mountain but that no one has ever gotten close enough to to ever find out what they are. When someone gets within a certain proximity of the lights, they go out and then disappear, making it impossible to know what they are. Some people think that if these lights are made by the government the group could have been too close to them and then the government killed them to keep it all confidential. These ghost lights are also why some people think that there are demons and spirits on that mountain and that is why they disappear. However, since there were no survivors, we will never really know what happened and we other humans are left here to speculate.

Our speculation comes in many forms such as movies, games, and many many, many articles online about this crazy incident. However, what we have to remember is that this was a tragedy and that the real story of these people's deaths formed profit for others. Let us all remember to be respectful because they each had stories. This story is one that does not seem to have a clear answer and we will always wonder what REALLY happened that night.

Thank you for reading!