![]() ![]() If it was too warm to freeze, and she was exerting herself trying to survive, dehydration would have become severe in perhaps only two days before the symptoms became debilitating. If she was lucky, she died quickly from the cold. Assuming Masha brought a battery-powered flashlight or lantern down into the depths, it would have died after a few hours, making it harder to continue the search for warmth and water. But even with a light and a map of the catacombs, it would have been hard for someone ill-prepared to make it out, because the maps that exist are a maddening, brain-like scrawl. There also would have been nowhere to stay warm, since that area is also not deep enough for it to have been much warmer than the chilly surface weather that night. If the area near School 56 had no groundwater-or clandestine wine or mushrooms-there would have been nothing for her to eat or drink. In 2011, a male murder victim was found by chance in the catacombs after he had been dead for three to six months.īut being murdered and having your body dumped in the catacombs is a vacation compared to what is rumored to have happened to Masha. Last month, a guy in his 20s was sentenced for reportedly murdering his teenage girlfriend in the catacombs with an ax. They're also a pretty good place to stage a murder. Some sections regularly flood with groundwater, others have ceilings precariously propped up with ad-hoc support beams, or they've had their ventilation systems completely dismantled. They're not the safest places to be either. The next-largest network of catacombs is in Paris, and that's only one-fifth the length of Odessa's. By some estimates, they span 1,550 miles, making the network a little longer than the whole Pacific coastline of the continuous United States. The catacombs are not easy to navigate, especially when you're drunk like Masha might have been that night. There's also evidence that they were used for the summary executions of Nazi soldiers.Īll photos by Wikimedia Commons user Полищук Денис Анатольевич There is a rumor that the catacombs contain the stacked corpses of murdered Jews from World War II. They could have been looking for treasures that night, considering there are rumors that somewhere below School 56 there's a solid gold replica of the Titanic a few inches long. We don't know for sure what Masha was looking for when she went into the catacombs with her friends. There are stories of industrious winemakers and mushroom growers who go down there regularly to leave their product to age or grow, confident no one will find it and interfere. However, that hasn't stopped many people from making the same trip Masha apparently made. The only Ukrainians who have any official business down there are workers in active mines who still dig for limestone. It's not known if they were former students of Odessa's School Number 56, but according to references to the story in Russian news, that's where they found the entrance to the mines.Ĭlearly, this was a bad idea. Masha went out with a large group of friends to celebrate and probably get drunk. It was a foggy night with temperatures hovering around freezing. According to the 2009 forum post on Urban Explorer's Resource (UER) by a catacombs explorer named Eugene Lata, who brought Masha's story to the English-speaking world, the tale begins late on New Year's Day (or possibly New Year's Eve) in 2005. ![]()
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