With the release of the new mini TV series Chernobyl, based on the true story of the events that happened at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 in Ukraine. It prompted me to delve into if the worker town and if it had any hauntings.
Chernobyl nuclear plant was the site of the biggest nuclear disaster that the world had ever encountered.
This led to thousands of people dying from radiation and the entire town being evacuated which today it still remains a ghost town to this day!
Strange Sightings
At the start of April 1986, before the power plant disaster, people living and working on the Chernobyl power plant started to report a strange sighting. Sightings of a creature, described as a large black, bird like creature or a headless man with a 20 foot wingspan, and red eyes began to be reported by workers of the power plant. The creature would later become known as the Black Bird of Chernobyl.
People who witnessed the Black Bird soon started to experience horrific nightmares, threatening phone calls and some had first hand encounters with the winged beast. Reports of these strange occurrences continued to increase until the morning of April 26th, 1986. On April 26th 1986 at 1:23am, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the former Soviet Union exploded!
Some think the black bird may have been a omen to the people of Chernobyl, many believe it may even be what is dubbed the Mothman (a creature believed to have terrorized the population of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, leading up to the collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 15, 1968). The describing similarities are very similar and the reports of nightmares and threatening phone calls leading up to these disasters are shared in both cases.
Both the Black Bird of Chernobyl and the Mothman have not been sighted since their respective disasters, even though Chernobyl now operates guided tours in some areas where lower radiation is recorded.
Pripyat, the nearby abandoned Chernobyl worker town, is believed to be haunted. People have had the feeling of being watched when walking past the city hospital. Apparitions and shadows are often seen. Some have even reported being touched.
I found one ghost story on Ranker,by Andrei Kharsukov, a nuclear physicist from New York, told one such story after visiting the area in 1997.
Kharsukov said he went to the power station at 7:30 a.m. and went to the No. 4 reactor sarcophagus, which is where the explosion occurred. He could not go inside due to radiation, but as he took radiation readings, he heard someone screaming for rescue from a fire inside:
I ran upstairs to tell someone, but they said that when I entered the reactor control room, I was the first person to open that door in three years, and the only way to get inside the old reactor is through the doors I came in through. If someone had gone inside the reactor when I was not looking, they would have tripped an alarm that goes off when the reactor door is opened mechanically.
The reactor door requires a password and a handprint, yet someone, or something, was inside. Later that evening, as we were eating dinner outside the building by the river next to the plant, a flood light turned on in the room of the installation. There was no way anyone could be inside. As we ate, we figured there was a power surge or something. Then just as my colleague said that, the light turned off.
Minimal teams have been in to investigate the haunting claims, the ones who have reported catching a thermal picture of a ghostly apparition and seeing ghostly apparition emerge to them at times.
Chernobyl’s Black Bird and the Mothman do sound alike, both terrifying creatures and yet possibly a helpful warning. I am old enough to remember Chernobyl. What a sad event.