There are few words that evoke the same sense of horror as the name Chernobyl.  Many locations are associated with the massive loss of life, especially in wartime, but Chernobyl is unique.  Early in the morning of April 25, 1986, a small series of events started, ultimately leading to the worst-ever nuclear accident in history.  The name Chernobyl still elicits a sense of fear of the unknown, of the inevitability of death.

During a trip to the Ukraine several years ago, I considered joining a group to see the protected area of Pripyat, which contains the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.  If you follow the exploits of urban explorers, you know that accessing this abandoned city is possible.  But for me, without preparation and knowledge about the real risks, it wasn’t worth making an impulsive, last-minute excursion.  However, the Ukrainian National Chernobyl Museum was available and a reasonable first step to understand the disaster’s history in more detail.  While the exhibits shared the technical side of the disaster, it revealed the human element, highlighting the experiences of those caught up in the tragedy.

But beyond the well-known facts and timelines, here’s another side to the story, shrouded his mystery.  That story is of the Blackbird of Chernobyl, a creature whose appearance was an omen of death.  Like the story of the Mothman and the bridge collapse near Point pleasant West Virginia, the Blackbird is both terrifying and fascinating.  And while it’s easy to discount individual instances of the appearance of these omens, there are many instances in history where paranormal events either precede and follow other disasters world-wide.  Today, in this My Dark Path Plus episode, I’ll share the story of the Blackbird of Chernobyl and how the blackbird appears in the folklore of Ukrainian and Slavic cultures.

Hi, I’m MF Thomas, and this is the My Dark Path podcast with a special Plus episode.  In every episode, we explore the.  So, if you geek out over these subjects, you're among friends here at My Dark Path.  See our videos on YouTube, visit mydarkpath.com or find us on Twitter, Instagram and Tiktok.

Thank you for exploring the fringes of history, science, and the paranormal and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me.

Let's get started Plus Episode 6, The Blackbird of Chernobyl.

Part 1

The Ukrainian national Chernobyl museum was established in 1992, six years after the disaster, and is the largest museum in Ukraine dedicated to the event.

The museum features a range of exhibits and artifacts related to the disaster, including personal belongings of the victims and liquidators.  The latter being someone who worked to contain the effects of the accident.  The museum also boasts interactive displays and dioramas, each underscoring the scale and complexity of the disaster. 

Even several years later, two images are still fresh in my memory.  First is that of a suit that a liquidator wore, hanging like a specter over the exhibits.  Second is a recreation of an abandoned village near the Chernobyl exclusion zone, complete with dilapidated buildings, abandoned vehicles, and eerie mannequins depicting the former residents.  I’ve uploaded some images to Patreon.

Before delving into the Blackbird, it’s worthwhile to recap the timeline of the Chernobyl accident.  The death and destruction were too great, too immense to bury it somewhere after the speculative supernatural elements of the story.  So, here’s the timeline…

On September 26, 1977, the Chernobyl nuclear power station started providing electricity to the grid. The power plant was located about 65 miles north of Kiev, Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union.  Early in 1986, the year of the accident, a Soviet official stated that the possibility of a nuclear meltdown was "one in 10,000 years."

Almost a decade later, on April 25, 1986, at 1 a.m., the operators at Chernobyl's reactor No. 4 begin to decrease power in anticipation of a safety test.

By 2 p.m. later that day, workers disabled the emergency core cooling system of reactor No. 4 to prevent it from disrupting the test. This does not cause the accident, but it contributes to its severity. Meanwhile, the region's power requirements temporarily delay the test and maintenance shutdown.

Finally, at 11:10 p.m. that night, the operators are granted permission to proceed. However, the less-experienced night shift is now on duty and allegedly did not receive sufficient training on how to carry out the test.

Then, about 30 minutes after midnight on April 26, 1986, the reactor's power level drops significantly below the stable threshold. In response, the operators violate safety protocols and remove most of the control rods.

Shortly thereafter, at 1 a.m., the power stabilizes, but at a lower level than desired. The plant supervisors order the test to proceed. Still, the automatic emergency shutdown system and other safety features were switched off.

Then at 1:23 am, the safety test officially commences, and an unexpected power surge occurs. An operator presses the emergency shutdown button, but the control rods get stuck as they enter the core.

Eighteen seconds later, the first explosion occurs, sending the 1,000-ton roof of the reactor flying into the air and creating a massive fireball. The plant experiences a blackout, and the air fills with dust, graphite chunks, and radiation. Walls and equipment collapse, and fires break out, including one on top of the neighboring reactor. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the nuclear engineer in charge of the test insists that reactor No. 4 is still intact.

Within five minutes of the first explosion, the first firefighters arrive at the site, but they are unaware of the radiation and work without any protective clothing.

At 2:15 a.m. on April 26, local Soviet officials hold an emergency meeting and decide to block cars from entering or leaving Pripyat, a nearby city built to house Chernobyl's workers. Like the firefighters, the police assisting with the roadblock have no knowledge of the radiation and do not wear any protective clothing.

The next day, April 27, helicopters start dumping sand, clay, lead, and other materials into the burning core to try to slow down radioactive emissions.

Later that day, Soviet officials also start evacuating about 115,000 people from Pripyat and nearby towns, this after keeping them in the dark about the disaster for 36 hours. The residents are instructed to pack only essential documents, belongings, and some food.  They are told the evacuation will be temporary. However, the setup of an exclusion zone around Chernobyl soon after makes their return impossible.

The Soviet government also attempts to keep the event secret from the outside world.  But two days after the explosion, Swedish air monitors detect a significant amount of radiation in the atmosphere and trace it back to the USSR.  A day later, U.S. officials obtain satellite images revealing the extent of the destruction caused by the Chernobyl disaster.

Within a week, a more aggressive cleanup effort begins.  The containment includes workers pumping liquid nitrogen underneath the reactor to cool it, bulldozing contaminated villages, shooting contaminated pets and livestock, and burying large quantities of contaminated topsoil. The work swells, ultimately involving 800,000 workers.  A concrete sarcophagus is also started, an immense metal and concrete structure designed to contain the reactor.

And so, now 37 years after Chernobyl’s destruction, let us learn more about the citizens of Pripyat.

Part 2

On February 4, 1970, Soviet government established the city of Pripyat to support the construction and operation of the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant.  It was the ninth atomic city, or atomograd, built in the USSR, all for the same purpose.

The Soviets had many secret cities.  By definition a secret city was a closed, restricted-access area that was used for sensitive military or scientific purposes.  Others were built as development centers of of advanced military technology, such as nuclear weapons, missiles, and other defense systems.  They were typically located in remote areas and always shrouded in secrecy, with their existence and location hidden from the Soviet public and certainly from the west.  Access to these cities was strictly controlled, and residents were required to have special security clearance to enter and leave. The population of these cities included scientists, engineers, military personnel, and other professionals.  As you would imagine, secret cities benefited from access to consumer goods and infrastructure far beyond that allowed for common Soviet citizens. 

Pripyat was no different.  When it was designed in 1970, it showcased the concrete architectural style favored by USSR urban planners. All of Pripyat's significant buildings, such as the Palace of Culture, the hotel, and the headquarters of the local communist party leadership or ispolkom, were constructed using standardized blueprints originating in Moscow. These blueprints were intended to be replicated identically in every instance across the Soviet Union to reflect the state's emphasis on somber proletarian aesthetics and the rejection of decadent Western ideas of individuality.  Despite the cookie cutter designs, the city was adorned with colorful murals and Communist slogans urging residents to work hard, study, and remember the revolution.  Pripyat benefited from some of the natural beauty of the area.  The sandy bank of the nearby river, affectionately known as "The Beach," was a popular spot for sunbathing. The Palace of Culture featured a theater, and there were sports halls and an Olympic-sized swimming pool for residents to enjoy. The city was eagerly anticipating the opening of a new amusement park that would even boast a Ferris wheel.

According to the last census conducted before the evacuation in November 1985, Pripyat had a population of 47,500 people. The city was experiencing a high annual population growth rate of over 1,500 people, including approximately 800 newborns and 500-600 people who came to live there permanently from other regions of the Soviet Union. The population for Pripyat was projected to be between 75,000 to 85,000 people at its peak.

One of the people living in Pripyat in 1986 was Alexander Yuvchenko.  He was working at reactor number 4 on the night of the explosion and one of just a handful working there that night to survive. His description of the event was….

I was on the night shift. When I turned up I found out that the safety test that had been planned for the day had been put off until the evening.  I was in my office, talking to a colleague. The first thing I heard wasn't an explosion, it was a thud, a shaking. Then two or three seconds later came the explosion. The doors of my office were blown out. It was like when an old building is demolished, with clouds of dust, but combined with lots of steam. It was a very damp, dusty, powerful movement of air. There was a lot of shaking, a lot of things were falling. The lights went off. Our first thought was to find somewhere we could safely hide. We headed towards the transport corridor, where there was a small passage with a low ceiling. We were standing there and everything was falling around us.

I went back to my office and tried to ring the control room for reactor number 4 to find out what had happened, but there was no line. Suddenly the phone from control room number 3 rang. I got a command to bring stretchers. I grabbed the stretchers and ran. Outside the control room I met a friend who had been close to the centre of the explosion. I didn't recognise him. His clothes were black and his face was disfigured because he had been covered in scalding water. I only recognised him by his voice. He told me to go to the site of the explosion because there were others injured.

To get a clearer idea of what had happened we walked outside. What we saw was terrifying. Everything that could be destroyed had been. The right-hand side of the reactor hall had been completely destroyed, and on the left the pipes were just hanging.

From where I stood I could see a huge beam of projected light flooding up into infinity from the reactor. It was like a laser light, caused by the ionisation of the air. It was light-bluish, and it was very beautiful. I watched it for several seconds. If I'd stood there for just a few minutes I would probably have died on the spot because of gamma rays and neutrons and everything else that was spewing out.

As the sun rose on the morning of April 26, rumors started circulating among those who had friends and family working the night shift at the plant that something had gone wrong. However, nobody had any concrete information about the nature of the incident.

Around 7:00 a.m., Andrei Glukhov, an employee in the reactor physics laboratory at the plant, received a phone call in his apartment on Stroiteley Prospekt. The caller was a friend from the Instrumentation and Control Department who had also heard rumors of an incident at the station, but had no further details. As a member of the Nuclear Safety Department, Glukhov had the authority to make direct calls to the control rooms of every reactor at the plant, so he agreed to make some enquiries.

Glukhov first tried to contact his friend Leonid Toptunov, the senior reactor control engineer of Unit Four, but received no answer. He then called Control Room Number Two, where the senior reactor control engineer answered immediately. After some routine conversation, Glukhov asked about Unit Four, to which the engineer responded with a long silence before stating that they had been instructed not to discuss it and advised Glukhov to look out the window.

From his balcony on the fifth floor, Glukhov could see some smoke above Reactor Four but nothing else seemed out of the ordinary. He decided to go to Kurchatov Street to meet the bus carrying the night shift back from the plant, hoping they would be able to shed some light on the situation. Before leaving, he had a cup of coffee and informed his wife of his plans.

He waited at the bus stop, but the men from the shift never arrived. Instead, a truck filled with policemen pulled up. Glukhov asked what had happened. “It’s not clear,” the policeman said. “The wall of the reactor hall has collapsed.”

Glukhov’s experience reflects those who were at home when the accident took place.  The idea that the plant had literally blown up seemed unimaginable, at least until the dead and mortally irratiated started showing up at the Pripyat hospital which stood on the eastern edge of the city, enclosed by a low iron fence. The facility was well-equipped to cater to the growing town and its young populace, boasting over 400 beds, 1,200 staff, and a spacious maternity ward.

However, it was not designed to handle a catastrophic radiation incident, and when the first ambulances arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning, the overwhelmed staff struggled to cope. Being the weekend, it was difficult to locate doctors, and initially, no one comprehended the gravity of the situation. The uniformed young men who were brought in from the station had been battling a fire and were complaining of headaches, dry throats, and dizziness. Some of their faces were a ghastly purple, while others were deathly pale. Soon, they all began to retch and vomit uncontrollably, filling wash basins and buckets, yet still unable to cease. The triage nurse was in tears.

The hospital director had diagnosed radiation sickness and notified the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow by 6:00 a.m. When the men and women arrived from the plant, they were instructed to remove their clothes and personal belongings, including watches, money, and Party cards, which were all contaminated. Existing patients were sent home, some still in their pajamas, and the nurses opened emergency packages that contained drugs and disposable intravenous equipment intended for use in the event of a radiation accident. By morning, the hospital had admitted 90 patients.

What is surprising is that, amid the horrible personal stories, another rumor started to roil the city.  Starting earlier than spring, five members of the Chernobyl control room staff claimed to have seen a large, dark headless creature with gigantic wings and fire red eyes.  Other witnesses describe the Blackbird as a monstrous creature resembling a grotesque fusion of a raven and a vulture.

Reportedly, other employees of the nuclear power plant started to share similar encounters.  Some stated that the creature had been visible from the ground, flying overhead.  Some, even had alarming nightmares involving the Blackbird, while others reported receiving threatening phone calls.

Of course, it’s an unusual story and it’s not immediately clear why the phenomenon would include these phone calls.  But these stories are not just the fervid imaginations of the people on reddit or Wikipedia. 

Australian archeologist Robert Maxwell made two trips to the exclusion zone in 2010 and 2012 to study the area when he heard the rumors.  He noted “people in and around the power plant began to experience a series of strange events revolving around sightings of a mysterious creature — also described as a large dark and mutated creature with large wings and piercing red eyes.”

He went on to say that some of the plant workers reported their experiences to the management of the plant. True or not, it's hard to imagine the leaders even knowing what to do with such reports.

But the idea may not be that farfetched.  In Slavic cultures, the idea that blackbirds are bad omens goes back hundreds of years.  Perhaps, this helps us understand one potential source of the is the origin of the Blackbird sightings at Chernobyl.

Part 3

In folklore across the world, blackbirds, it seems, have a long history of being associated with death.

The raven, for example, is the title of one of Edgar Allen Poe’s most well-known poems.  It tells the haunting tale of a man visited by a mysterious talking raven. The poem follows the protagonist, who is grieving the loss of his beloved Lenore. As he sits alone in his chamber on a bleak December night, he is suddenly startled by a tapping at his chamber door.

When the man opens the door, he finds nothing but darkness and silence. Undeterred, he continues to hear the tapping, this time at his window. As he opens the window, in flies a talking raven that can speak a single word: "Nevermore."

The man begins to engage in a conversation with the raven, asking questions about his lost love, Lenore. The raven's response of "Nevermore" becomes increasingly ominous and forlorn, driving the man deeper into a state of despair and madness. The raven's monotonous repetition of this word seems to imply that the man will never find solace or be reunited with his beloved.

As the poem progresses, the man's grief intensifies, and he interprets the raven's presence as a manifestation of his own tortured soul. He believes the raven is a messenger from the underworld, sent to torment him for his past sins and his inability to move on from his loss.

Specifically in the Ukraine, Slavic folklore is replete with complex beliefs and omens that foretell an upcoming death.  People would pay attention to unique warnings like a knock at the window at night, a dog howling with its face down, and an icon falling off a wall.  Birdcalls also were paid particular attention, and for good reason.

The connection of birds and death go far back to the Slavic pagan belief that upon death, a person’s soul would stay on earth for 40 days.  Birds were often used as a symbol of the soul during this 40 day period.  These cultures also held mythology about two bird creatures, Alkonost and Sirin.  Both creatures had a head of a woman and would sing beautifully.  The Alkonost was believed to be sent by the gods and was always helpful and kind.  The Sirin, on the other hand, was sent from the underworld and was always malicious. 

In Slavic folklore, the black birds, including ravens, crows, jackdaws, and rooks, were regarded as "unholy" and associated with evil.  But among these birds, the raven was considered to be the wisest and, perhaps, the one to be most concerned about.  A perception placed ravens, along with crows, jackdaws, and rooks, in opposition to the "holy" and "meek" birds such as doves. They were considered to be a menace and symbolized grief, doom, and despair.

The Raven was believed to live for a hundred or even three hundred years. And, as a wise bird, it foretold of death and danger, sometimes offering guidance to the heroes of Slavic epics. In fairy tales, the Raven would direct characters to hidden treasures, grants them immortality, and perhaps most importantly to this story, even deliver news of a son's death to grieving mothers in folk songs.

Despite the challenges finding documentation about the story of the Blackbird, the phenomenon of omens appearing just before or after a catastrophe is not unusual.  After a disaster, people often report seeing spirits or experiencing other paranormal encounters. One such explanation is anthropomorphism, whereby people attribute human characteristics to animals or objects as a way to cope with the lack of control over an event. This can lead to beliefs in ghosts or other paranormal phenomena as a means of finding order in an unpredictable universe. However, such explanations may not account for collective experiences or sightings that involve multiple witnesses.  So rather than acknowledging that we have no control over an event, we create beliefs in ghosts, because we don’t like believe that the universe is random.

These are certainly reasonable approaches to characterizing the experiences at Chernobyl, but I am certainly open to the idea that mass killings could result in the spirits of the dead…lingering.  I have been researching the story of the mass sightings of ghosts in Japan after the Tsumani that brought such devastation to the country in 2011.  It’s both a frightening and comforting story and one I’ll share in the main feed this fall.

The Blackbird of Chernobyl is certainly not the only event of mass destruction that has resulted in hundreds of people seeing a birdlike creature.  One of the most famous is the story of the Mothman of West Virginia.  The origin of the Mothman sightings is a puzzling mystery that began in November 1967 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. More than a hundred local residents claimed to have seen a creature that stood at six feet tall, covered in hair or feathers, with a wingspan ranging from six to ten feet and had bright, glowing red eyes.

Then, in December of the same year, a suspension bridge connecting Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed into the Ohio River, resulting in the death of 46 people. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing the Mothman on the bridge just before the disaster occurred.

The Mothman and Blackbird sightings , the two incidents became intertwined and are often linked together in discussions of the Mothman legend.

Again, from Robert Maxwell, who said of the Blackbird:

“Now it’s become one of those fables that’s difficult to track because it relies on the accounts of people who died due to radioactive contamination.

“The Blackbird has also become one of those fairly safe legends where, if you try to look for proof, it might not be available because the workers are dead, or maybe the sightings were never officially recorded.

“So, for people trying to check the voracity of these claims, of course, you’ve got to take them on face value because there’s not a lot of history or archaeology to go on.

“But the stories persist, even to this day.”

Unfortunately, the evidence of the Blackbird of Chernobyl will likely always remain elusive.  Yet seeing apparitions may be a sure sign of our humanity, our desire to make some sense of a world that we do not and cannot control.  As I’ve shared before, I believe that this mortal life is just a moment in the immortal existence of our souls, a time to receive a mortal body and be challenged by the uncertainty, the difficulties of mortality.  I believe that the experience, designed by a loving God, is for our benefit, even if the horror seems unimaginable in the moment.  Perspective matters, just like a young child who howls in dismay when a knife they’ve acquired from the kitchen counter is taken away, we don’t know and can’t imagine the full purpose of this mortal experience….and the immortality of our souls.  And yet, we continue, walking in faith despite the darkness that seemingly surrounds us.

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path’s special episode for Patreon members. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with our creative director Dom Purdie. I researched and prepared this story.  Big thank yous to them and the entire My Dark Path team, as well as to you, our Pateron supporters and listeners.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night.