This video is sponsored by NordVPN.
When the lights go out down in the depths
of the Odessa Catacombs, they stay out.
For the last 200 years, a series of twisting tunnels has
meandered under a city marred by war, famine, and empire.
Mysterious disappearances are somewhat regular,
but none is more infamous and terrifying than
the vanishing of a woman known only as “Masha”.
With her friends in tow, she descended down into
the catacombs New Years Eve, 2005, but while her
companions reemerged into 2006 unscathed from that land
of twisting tunnels and total darkness, she did not.
While the rest of us were sitting around our TVs waiting
for the ball to drop in Times Square, counting down the
seconds to the new year, Masha stumbled around in the dark,
desperate for an exit that she would never live to see.
Does her body still lie dormant, slowly decaying
over the last 15 years, buried under a bed of stone?
Or can we count her among the bodies dredged out
of that labyrinthine maze just below our feet?
Today’s episode concerns spaces that are
dangerous, and most often illegal to access.
We ask you not to go to any of the places
mentioned in this story, unless accompanied
by professional guides at official entrances.
And with that out of the way,
Let’s get into it!
You might remember the catacombs below Paris from one of
our previous videos, but did you know that there is a set
of deeper and wider network of passageways in Ukraine?
The Odessa Catacombs, with over 2,500 kilometers,
or 1,500 miles, of tunnels, takes the cake.
If you laid out all of the tunnels out end to end, they would
be longer than the entire Pacific coast of the United States.
I would not want to be lost in there.
Yeah, but imagine if you were purposefully sealed in there...
*shudder*
I'd flip out, I would totally lose it.
You and me both, Quiz.
But some people don’t have to imagine, as the catacombs
have been used periodically since their construction
in the 17th and 18th centuries to hide anyone— from
criminals, political dissidents, to party animals.
No matter who you are, the catacombs below Odessa
can offer you a discreet space to lay your head.
Forever...
Stop!
The city of Odessa was founded at the end of the 18th
century, when Russian Empress Catherine the Great
ordered a fort and naval base built on a Black Sea
settlement just ceded to the Russian Empire by Poland.
It was named Odessa after the ancient Greek
colony of Odessos, thought to have existed nearby.
The city grew quickly over the course of the 19th century,
and soon became the second most important port in all of
the Russian Empire just behind St Petersburg, which has
been widely considered the cultural capital of Russia.
The catacombs were dug out as a result of this rapid growth.
Where else are you gonna find thousands
of tons of rock to build a city?
Exactly!
I must say though, that the tunnels under
Odessa aren’t technically catacombs.
Catacombs are underground spaces used to
store bodies, usually in a religious context.
The spaces under Odessa are just quarries, but everyone in
the city calls them catacombs, so I’ll let it slide this time.
A sedimentary rock called coquina was dredged up to construct
the majority of Odessa’s buildings, particularly its palaces.
If you were a rich Russian aristocrat, or any rich aristocrat
for that matter, the best way to build a palace was to set
up a quarry, and then dig up as much stone as possible.
As Odessa’s identity as a major port solidified, the city
experienced a financial boom, and many people across the
city were itching for extravagant mansions and palaces.
The only problem was that the quarry industry went a
long time entirely unregulated, meaning that anyone with
a pickaxe could dig pretty much anywhere they wanted.
Not to mention that coquina is a
relatively soft sedimentary rock.
No one was keeping track of where people were digging,
which is the most likely reason that the catacombs
below the city are so difficult to navigate today.
Odessa was also one of the major battlegrounds of the
Russian Revolution, and the catacombs below the city were
even the base of operations for Soviet partisan forces for
over 13 months after the city fell to German forces in 1941.
As the Soviet army retreated, they left dozens
of rebel cells in the tunnels, ordering them to
sabotage the enemy’s supply lines whenever possible.
In response, the Romanian-German forces defending the city
went to as many entrances to the underground as they could
find, and filled them with either concrete or poison gas.
Ok, that’s like some Watership Down style horror there.
Unfortunately, knowing that history might explain how
these places act like magnets for the supernatural.
Just like how your personal data is a magnet for
bad actors, like what a state of the art, self-aware
masterpiece of coffee brewing machinery dreams of.
That’s why I use NordVPN.
Its double data encryption keeps my information
secure, and its Cybersec suite doubles as an ad
blocker, so I get to browse without any annoying
ads yelling at me from the corner of a window.
Plus, with 24 hour, 7 days a week customer service, if
anything goes wrong I can get support within only a few
process cycles, and of course with over 5,300 servers in
59 countries, I can watch content from anywhere I want.
Save on your security with a staggering 73%
discount and an added gift of four free months at
NordVPN.com/Brew, or by signing up with our discount
code “Brew”, and enjoy a 30-day money back guarantee.
Do it.
Now.
Did we go to the digiverse there for a second?
I thought I saw my best friend Gabumon.
Um, let’s not think about it too hard.
Don’t worry Gabumon, I’ll be back.
Descending into an underground maze that used to be filled
with literal poison gas sounds like a terrible idea.
The authorities would likely agree with you, Quiz.
The Odessa Catacombs are infamous for their hand in many
disappearances, but the disappearance of a young woman known
only as “Masha” was the first to gain worldwide popularity.
According to a post on the Urban Explorer's Resource
by Eugene Lata in 2009, Masha and a large group of her
friends descended into the catacombs on New Years Eve 2005.
No one knows why they went down there.
They could have simply been partying, or they might
have even been searching for mass graves used by various
governments over the centuries, or maybe they were
searching for the mythical solid gold replica of the
Titanic thought to have been left in the catacombs.
Hey, what now?
Did you say, “SOLID GOLD”?
It’s all rumor, of course, but the story goes that a
wealthy aristocrat survived the Titanic, returned to
his native Ukraine, and wanted to make a gift for the
sailors who pulled him from the icy waters that night.
All didn’t go according to plan, as revolution shook Ukraine
and the rest of Eastern Europe, he needed a place to hide the
gift —a solid gold replica of the ship that nearly killed him.
The legend says that this aristocrat hid it deep in the
catacombs in order to keep it safe until he could come
back to retrieve it, but the best laid plans of mice
and men often go wrong, and he was summarily executed by
his government before he could return for his treasure.
Arrgh treasure!
Whether the replica is real or not, we cannot
say, but all we know of Masha is that she
entered the underground, to never return.
Imagine her last moments, as she makes that wrong turn.
She’s too far in, and the light is fading.
Her friends can’t hear her cries for help.
Please.
The Odessa catacombs don’t have insulation against the cold.
At the time of Masha’s alleged disappearance, the temperature
in the caves would remain similar to that on the surface,
and in the dead of winter, if she was lucky, she would have
fallen asleep, and drifted quietly into a frozen death.
If she was unlucky, her flashlight battery would
die within a few hours, and she’d be left in pitch
blackness with no food or water to sustain her.
Within two days she would start to suffer the effects
of dehydration, and slip into a coma by the third day.
The end of her life would have been an
inexorable descent into delirium, then silence.
Lata, the original poster, submitted another photo
in 2009 claiming to be of Masha’s decomposing body.
The image includes three teenagers staring at what
can only be identified as what used to be a human.
The body seems to be curled over in a sleeping position, which
is what drew people to conclude that this was indeed Masha.
Lata claimed that no one went to retrieve the body.
A friend he claimed was a “famous journalist”
personally delivered information to the authorities,
and within 24 hours, the body was removed.
Ukrainian ATO operative Kostya Pugovkin came forward
identifying himself as the person who lugged the body
out of the depths, though his story contradicts Lata’s.
Pugovkin alleges that another body belonging to Janis
Stendzenieks, the son of a newspaper magnate, was left
down in the catacombs, and that the elder Stendzenieks
offered a reward for the return of his son’s body, and
after the tip from Lata, he descended into the tunnels.
Pugovkin says that he had to wade
through “bone soup” to find the body.
When he did, he "wrapped it in a
bedsheet, and dragged it back".
He goes on to say that "It was hard to get to
the top of the shaft—it was like nine floors,
tiers with skinny ladders between them."
When he finally reached the top of the catacombs,
he delivered the body to the medical examiner to
run a DNA test to prove whether it was Stendzenieks.
The test came back negative.
Diggers who still quarry the Coquina to this day, and
know the underground best, said that they “determined
it was a Satanist who got lost”, but to complicate
matters, claimed the body belonged to a girl.
That being said, the DNA test did not determine
sex, only that it was not Janis Stendzenieks.
However, locals say that the story of Masha is a hoax, and
this body is not Masha’s but of a homeless man who went down
into the catacombs with a group of other homeless folks.
Reddit user Tarellka says that “His body was
first discovered by the teenagers who made the
photos, so the case gained some public attention”.
There are limited details but it’s suggested that
a group descended into the catacombs for warmth in
the winter, and a fight broke out after an argument.
It grew increasingly violent, and ended
after a man was stabbed several times.
Police were never able to convict anyone though,
since testimony remained contradictory and hazy.
Wait wait wait, so they thought the body was Masha’s,
but then the guy who went to go get that body thought it
was some other man’s, and then they thought it was Masha
again, but then it turns out it was just another man?
It’s a confusing mess.
We’ll likely never know the full truth.
Vice collaborator Mike Pearl writes that according to
the Odessa Catacombs website, the entire story is a hoax.
A post on the website says that “Besides the original
photographer, there isn't one person, civilian
or law enforcement, that can confirm the story.
We believe it is just a practical
joke and the corpse is fake”.
That being said, Lata claims that he cannot retrace
the origin of the photograph, and there were three
other people with him, who he’s lost touch with.
He also claims that the person who runs the Catacombs
website, the one calling him a liar, was “one of the most
experienced Odessa catacombs explorers and his best friend.”
Dramaaaaa
Yeah get Spill on this one.
Now whether the body was Masha’s, Stendzenieks’,
a rumoured satanist’s, or an unfortunate member of
Odessa’s homeless community, we might never know.
There’s a lot of information with little to no way to confirm
it, not to mention a lot of these claims are contradictory.
Eh, one way or another, someone died in there.
And that’s a whole different mystery to solve.
Sometimes it feels like there’s no
more adventure left in the world.
There’s that quote “We are the middle children of history.
Born too late to explore Earth, born too early
to explore space”, but I think that’s defeatist.
Just because there are no more tectonic plates to
discover floating around on this little blue marble,
doesn’t mean that we drew the historical short straw.
Adventure, like a mystery, isn’t so much about being
on top of the mountain, or knowing the answer, it’s the
trials and tribulations that you go through to get there.
The questions you ask to find that answer.
Where’s Wally books would be super
boring if they just circled where he is.
Waldo
Wally.