Chernobyl is a lot more than just a perfect source for scary stories.
It's a very real modern-day ghost town, haunted by disaster and downright creepy sights.
Here are some of the weirdest things that have been found in Chernobyl's vast exclusion
zone.
The town of Pripyat is just over a mile away from the doomed Chernobyl power plant, and
was where many of the plant's workers lived and raised their families before the city
was evacuated.
Today, the city's most predominant looming feature is its abandoned amusement park, which looks
just like it did more than 30 years ago - except a million times more creepy.
The amusement park was originally supposed to open on May 1, 1986 - which would end up
being five days after the disaster at Chernobyl took place.
But because the townspeople needed something to do while the reactor was melting down,
Soviet officials were reportedly kind enough to open the park early for a short while on
April 27, before the evacuation.
So while it may not look like it, in a way, that makes that Ferris wheel one of the most
dangerous amusement park rides people have ever gotten the chance to take a ride on.
"They were preparing for May Day, the celebration of spring.
Never happened."
Pop culture would have you believe that nuclear fallout plus wildlife equals… well, insane,
Silent Hill style monsters.
[MONSTERS]
Funny thing about that, though - many animals living in the the 1,000-square-mile exclusion
zone around the Chernobyl plant don't have physical abnormalities at all.
At least, not anymore.
Reportedly, mutations in animals were much more commonplace in the early days of the
disaster, and animals that were affected by it tended to neither live long nor reproduce.
Researchers have found examples of dwarfism, gigantism, and glow-in-the-dark-ism in the
local ecosystem, but these attributes have apparently been found only in plants - not
animals.
Most people try to get as far away as they can from nuclear disasters.
Others think, "Cool, let's break in with a can of spray paint."
On a number of occasions in the years since Chernobyl's meltdown, graffiti artists have
snuck into the exclusion zone to make their marks, leaving eerily beautiful works of art
on the abandoned buildings behind them.
Some of the most striking graffiti work can be found in Pripyat, where artists painted
creepy silhouettes of the town's missing residents.
The effect is pretty striking.
It's probably not an accident that the silhouettes are eerily similar to the "permanent shadows"
that were left on the walls of Hiroshima after America attacked the city with a nuclear bomb
during World War II.
The Soviet government evacuated well over 100,000 people after the accident at Chernobyl,
eventually resettling many of them in new homes outside of the exclusion zone.
But some residents of the smaller villages just plain weren't interested in leaving,
radiation or no radiation.
Many of these older residents were set in their ways, having previously lived through
the threats presented by Joseph Stalin and the Nazis, and they weren't about to run away
from a danger they couldn't even see.
"So I should leave now, because of something I cannot see at all?
No."
About 1,200 people, known as "self-settlers," moved back into the exclusion zone in the
months and years following the disaster.
Some returned to their homes within a few years, while others only waited a few months.
The government objected to the peoples' presence, but in the face of that kind of determination,
what could they really do to stop them?
It's not like they don't understand the risk.
They know the soil is contaminated, but they grow food in it anyway.
They raise chickens and hogs, despite the real dangers of eating meat that's been raised
in the exclusion zone.
Today, many of the people who remain are in their 70s or 80s, and they're still mostly
healthy - and that's all the anecdotal evidence they need.
The strangest creature found in the exclusion zone is the common tourist.
According to Newsweek, as many as 12,000 tourists visit the exclusion zone every year.
Is it really safe to do that?
Of course!
Sort of.
One popular tourism company promises its guests hours of excitement in the shadow of Chernobyl,
providing adventurous travellers with their own personal tours, dosimeters to check radiation
levels, and even respirators.
How comforting!
In a practice that may be done with tongue-in-cheek, some hotels in the area even request that
visitors to Chernobyl leave their shoes outside when they return to their lodgings for the
night, out of fear that guests may track in radioactive contamination.
Despite Chernobyl's reputation, excursions into the exclusion zone are apparently not
all that dangerous, provided you take the proper precautions.
Dosimeters rarely read high during a tour; according to Newsweek, the highest typical
reading is similar to what you might get on a round trip flight from San Francisco to
Paris.
And if you didn't know flying exposes you to low levels of radiation, well, you do now.
Through the ages, one fact has remained true: in the right context, dolls can be really
creepy.
Especially when they're hanging around nuclear ghost towns.
It almost feels fitting that Pripyat is full of old, broken dolls - so many that there
almost seems to be some kind of weird spinoff of The Conjuring being shot there.
Wherever you go in Pripyat, it seems like creepy dolls are there to stare at you.
They sit on window sills, they're propped up on skeletal bed frames, they're sprawled
out in piles of debris - some of them are even wearing gas masks, to add that extra
layer of uncanny horror.
While it's certainly tempting to think that everything you see in Pripyat is still in
pretty much the same spot where it was left on the day of the evacuation, the truth is
that tourists looking for an awesomely creepy keepsake rearranged most of them for the sake
of taking spooky photos.
It's suspected that many of the dolls may not even be Pripyat originals - there are
plenty that look almost brand new, which suggests that tourists are mostly just bringing them
along for Instagram's sake.
The scariest thing in the Chernobyl area is obviously the plant itself.
Until recently, the only thing standing between the failed fourth reactor and the rest of
the world was the massive structure known as the sarcophagus, which was made from 14
million cubic feet of concrete and just over 8,000 tons of metal.
Soviet workers known as "liquidators" assembled the original sarcophagus over the course of
206 days, in shifts lasting five to seven minutes each, because any time longer than
that spent near the reactors might have just killed them where they stood.
But it's not like the shorter shifts were safe, though.
Thousands are suspected to have died during the work, with many others being resigned
to long, painful, cancer-ridden deaths much later on.
The original sarcophagus was built in a hurry and structurally unsound, but it was also
the only thing keeping incredibly lethal amounts of radiation from being released into the
environment.
It was a temporary fix in need of a more permanent replacement.
It took years for engineers to come up with another solution - a bigger, better sarcophagus,
built to surround the old one, known as the New Safe Confinement.
The structure took 10,000 people to build, weighing 35,000 tons and built to last for
at least 100 years.
When the new sarcophagus was finally complete, the builders needed 18 ships and 2,500 trucks
to move it and all of its parts from Italy to Chernobyl.
It was finally installed on November 29, 2016, more than three decades after the Chernobyl
disaster took place.
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