Rastess is a missing village in the Sverdlovsk region. The mysterious disappearance of residents of the village of Rastes Disappeared villages of the Sverdlovsk region

A little over 60 years ago in the USSR, where there was no place for anything otherworldly, the events that took place in the Ural village of Rastess became a real sensation. Then, under unclear circumstances, all the residents disappeared without a trace. This anomaly was immediately marked “Top Secret”. And today, several decades later, the mysteries of this village have not been fully solved.

Lights in the sky

Two years ago, a group of young people, testing new ATVs on the Siberian off-road, stopped at a rather strange place. Here, 700 kilometers from Yekaterinburg, among fields overgrown with weeds and nettles, the remains of wooden buildings could be seen. This indicated that there had once been a settlement here. Of course, the youth wanted to explore the abandoned village, but one of them, who had been studying Siberian secrets for a long time, advised the “prospectors” to quickly leave this place. The well-read traveler easily guessed that he and his friends had come across the mystical village of Rastess, on the territory of which people were disappearing. However, at first, the comrade’s stories about the wonders of the “bad” village did not make much of an impression on his companions, and the company scattered along the former streets, photographing dilapidated buildings. But as soon as dusk began to fall, the guests began to feel uncomfortable. It seemed to each of the friends that someone invisible was boring into their backs with a gaze. And the youth were forced to quickly retreat by strange lights that began to flash in the sky above the forest and approach the remaining houses. And although the friends left Rastess without incident, none of them had a desire to return there again and investigate the anomalies of the village.

Babinovsky tract

This “bad” village, of which only ruins remain in dense weeds, has a rich history and made a significant contribution to the development of Siberia. At the end of the 16th century, soon after the famous campaign of Ermak, the famous Babinovsky tract ran here, connecting Solikamsk with Verkhoturye.
And the name of the village speaks of its prominent past. After all, Rastess comes from the word “cut”, or “clearing”. The first roads were laid through virgin forests, and to protect lumberjacks, service people settled in small villages along the highway. When the road was built, their care switched to trade convoys, which at that time were in for many unpleasant surprises along the way.
The Rastes guard was an important transit point in the 17th century. Messengers who delivered royal decrees and mail to Siberia, scientific expeditions sent to search for new mineral deposits, as well as Russian peasant settlers who were looking for free lands stopped here.
By the 18th century, the Rastessky guard had turned into a prosperous village, and even the closure of the Babinovsky tract, after the Siberian-Moscow road was built, did not affect its prosperity. The fact is that near Rastessa at that time deposits of gold and platinum were discovered, which significantly replenished the wallets of the men living here.

Do you know that…

In the Tonshaevsky district of the Nizhny Novgorod region there is the famous ghost village of Malaya Kuverba, which many mushroom pickers and hunters have seen from afar. But as soon as you get closer to this village, it disappears!

Ghouls or aliens?

Even after collectivization carried out in the 30s of the last century, the village of Rastess was able to stay afloat. Its residents worked at a neighboring mine and received good money for those times.
But then one day in the late 1950s the village was mysteriously deserted. Residents of the village of Kyltym, located 20 kilometers from Rastes, sounded the alarm. Realizing that they had not received news from their neighbors for a long time, they decided to go to the Rastes people. The village greeted them with frightening silence. There was not a single person on the streets and in the houses that stood with their doors and windows open, but all the things inside remained untouched. In addition, there were plates of half-eaten food on the tables, unfed cattle were braying in the barns, and on the bench of one of the dwellings lay an open book, as if its owner had been away for a minute.
A thorough search of the village left new mysteries for the residents of Kyltym. They did not find a single person, but came across dug up graves in the local cemetery. This circumstance made the Kyltym residents remember the strange things, bordering on mysticism, that had been happening in the vicinity of Rastes for several years.
Eyewitnesses told officers of the law who arrived from Sverdlovsk that the missing residents often mentioned in conversations how bright lights fly over the local forest at night and from time to time pillars of light flash. They also told about a mermaid who lived in the Kyrye River near Rastes, whose singing echoed over the village in the summer months. Well, the dug up graves, willy-nilly, bring to mind thoughts of ghouls who decided to feast on human flesh.
These “suspects” were immediately dismissed by the Investigative Committee, but the investigation soon reached a dead end, since the residents of Rastes or their corpses were not found either in the forest or in nearby settlements.

Things are becoming clearer

And yet, some mysteries were subsequently solved. During the investigation, it was found out that it was not ghouls who dug up the graves, but ordinary people. The fact is that then a settlement was founded near Rastess for former prisoners who had served their sentence. And so, when all the inhabitants of the village disappeared, the criminal element, knowing about the “rich” past of the village, decided to fill his pockets with gold by looting the local cemetery. As the inhabitants of the colony reasoned logically, gold miners had to put jewelry with precious stones on deceased relatives and friends.
It must be said that the former prisoners prepared thoroughly for the looting at the Rastessa cemetery. So, the grave of a local priest was blown up with a decent charge of TNT
These abandoned houses will never be habitable again and have turned into a deep pit. But whether this disgrace brought wealth and happiness to the gravediggers, we will never know.

Salvation singing

But another secret of the “bad” village remains unsolved to this day. A hundred years ago, there were rumors in this area about a mermaid who lived in the river near Rastess. Her singing always warned the inhabitants of the village about all sorts of misfortunes, and therefore the villagers treated their “neighbor” with great respect. The last time the Rastes people were notified by the mermaid was in May 1941. Then her singing echoed over the village for three whole days, but there were no daredevils in the village to go down to the river and meet the mysterious singer. And yet, several men heeded her warning. Having gutted the treasured egg capsules, the Rastes people thoroughly replenished their supplies of food, ammunition and medicine, which saved their families from hunger during the difficult war years.

"Bad" place

The mystery of the heavenly lights and light pillars above the deserted Rastess also remains unsolved. Perhaps the reason for the disappearance of the village residents and the bad reputation for it is connected with them. After all, after the events described, no one wanted to settle in the empty houses, despite the property that remained ownerless. And decades later, when all the buildings of Rastess were destroyed by time, and the village itself turned into a field overgrown with weeds, residents of nearby villages flatly refuse to escort curious tourists here, even for a generous reward. And even those, having been here once, do not dare to travel to this wasteland again.
There are rumors among researchers of the anomalous zones of Siberia that Rastess does not always allow guests to visit him. And the point here is not only in the banal off-road conditions, but in the fact that suddenly the terrain no longer corresponds to the maps. Thus, the road indicated on the plan leads travelers into a swamp or into a deep forest.
In 2005, one scientist and researcher of paranormal mysteries was unable to get to Rastess and wandered around the area in vain for about a week. But a few years later, jeep travelers, participants in the Eurasia Trophy, easily passed through the “bad” village and only then learned that they had been guests of an anomalous zone.
The village of Rastess still keeps its secrets, and they are unlikely to be solved in the near future.

In the Sverdlovsk region, on the banks of the small river Kyrya, there is an abandoned village of Rastess. No one has lived there for more than sixty years. The houses are dilapidated, and the yards and streets have long been overgrown with grass and weeds. However, hunters and travelers still cautiously try to avoid the village, because in the 1950s its entire population, amid the daily bustle, disappeared without a trace to an unknown location.

Settlement on the Babinovsky tract

Rastess was founded at the end of the 16th century, shortly after the fall of the Siberian Khanate. Boris Godunov, brother-in-law of the feeble-minded Tsar Fyodor I Ioannovich and the de facto ruler of the Russian state, understood well what benefits the country could receive from the development of new lands. Therefore, he achieved the signing of a royal decree, according to which the construction of a convenient road for travel from Europe to Asia began. This path, after the name of the person who proposed and then carried out its construction, was called the Babinovsky tract.

Posad man Artemy Safronovich Babinov, who brought his own project to life, not only paved a road 260 miles long, but also founded settlements along its entire length, which were supposed to serve the road and protect people traveling along it. One of these settlements became the Rastessky guard, later the village of Rastess. Its name goes back to the obsolete form of the word “clearing”, because the first inhabitants of the settlement were lumberjacks who felled the forest to lay the Babinovsky tract. In Rastessa, travelers stopped to rest, and the coachmen changed horses. In the village there was an Orthodox church, a volost government, a parish school, and later a weather station appeared.

For a century and a half, the Babinovsky tract was the only land route connecting the European part of Russia with the Asian part. Tsar's decrees, money, mail were delivered along this road; embassy delegations and scientific expeditions passed along it. In the middle of the 18th century, new roads were built to Siberia, south of Babinovskaya. Over time, it was completely closed. Rastess did not decay only due to the fact that gold and platinum mines began to be developed not far from it. On them, the residents noticeably improved their well-being, as eloquently evidenced by the not at all rustic marble tombstones in the local cemetery.

By the middle of the 20th century, Rastess was a village in which about 500 people lived. But the era of prosperity was left behind. Many residents were forced to go to work in neighboring settlements, from where they returned home only on weekends. A free settlement of prisoners appeared nearby, who repeatedly, in the hope of finding gold, dug up graves in the Rastessa cemetery and robbed the houses of local residents.

Book on the bench

One day, residents of the neighboring village of Kytlym, located about 20 kilometers from Rastes, noticed that their neighbors had not visited them for a long time, and for some reason they had not met them in the regional center lately. The Kytlym residents gathered a detachment of men who went in cars to the neighboring village to find out what had happened there. In Rastessa, the scouts were first of all struck by some special silence. All the houses stood still, poultry grazed in many courtyards, and livestock stood in barns. At the same time, they noticed that the cows and pigs were unkempt and somewhat thinner, as if they had not been fed for several days.

Not a single person could be found in the entire village. What was also striking was the state in which the houses were left. In many of them the windows were open and the entrance doors were not locked. The contents of the houses remained untouched. In some, dinner tables were still set. An open book remained on a bench near one of the houses, as if the person reading it had decided to get distracted literally for a minute. Everything spoke of mass disappearances of people under mysterious circumstances.

What frightened the scouts most of all was that all the graves in the village cemetery were dug up, as if the dead had decided to leave Rastess along with the living.

After returning, the scouts from Kytlym decided to contact law enforcement agencies. First of all, suspicions, of course, fell on Rastess's restless neighbors in the person of prisoners from a free settlement or some other fugitive criminals. However, this materialistic version was not confirmed by anything: no traces of blood, collisions, nothing at all hinting at such a thing. But the residents of Kytlym remembered that the Rastes people, when they last communicated with them, were concerned about some “strange light in the sky.” They also remembered about a certain family at which the inhabitants of Rastess laughed: they constantly imagined mermaids, then all kinds of evil spirits, or “flying saucers.” They laughed, but sometimes they themselves talked about whispers coming from nowhere at night, from which horror rolls in and freezes the blood in the veins. And the evil spirits seem to have been playing pranks in those places for a long time.

In a word, they began to say terrible things about Rastessa. At first, curious people still visited there. In a deserted village, they observed unusual lights several times and heard strange, inexplicable sounds. Information about this was preserved in old investigation documents. They began to bypass the deserted village, considering it cursed and dysfunctional. They even refused to take tourists, researchers, ufologists and other lovers of the paranormal there. Over the past 30 years, there have been repeated reports from those places of alleged UFO sightings and unexplained light rays. Among the population of nearby villages there are many legends and mythical stories about the evil spirits of the surrounding areas of Rastes.

Rastess does not allow strangers in

Today, little remains of the vanished village: three abandoned dilapidated houses in a field overgrown with weeds and grass, and logs scattered among them. On the outskirts there is one old burial, next to which there are two cast-iron slabs with epitaphs and one marble stone. All the graves in the cemetery were really dug, but now it is often believed that this was done by treasure hunters after the mysterious events. The surrounding area is a swampy field, riddled with holes and stream beds. The only thing that brings some life to this dull landscape is the partially preserved old road, which hunters and travelers avoid due to superstition.

Many researchers have tried to unravel the mystery of the missing village, but the vast majority of expeditions are still plagued by inexplicable failures. A chain of minor or major failures and circumstances forces even well-prepared people to turn back. Rastess doesn't let strangers in. Perm researcher Alexey Fatkulin is one of the few who managed to reach the lost village with an expedition. He believes that nothing should be taken from such places - after all, no one knows what kind of energy objects thrown in such areas may have. In Rastessa, according to Fatkulin, he had a strange feeling that besides his group there was someone else nearby.

Fatkulin shared his impressions with television crews from REN-TV: “You never manage to get there the first time. No matter how many times we try, some problem always occurs: either the car breaks down, or the weather suddenly turns bad, a thunderstorm begins all night, and we get stuck. One day two cars broke down and a terrible thunderstorm began; from two to six in the morning there was lightning and lightning. There are mountains nearby and it turns out that lightning strikes as if next to you... The place itself is such that when you walk along it, you feel as if someone is constantly looking at you, although you understand that there is no one there, that there everything has been abandoned a long time ago.”

The history of the Ural village is not unique. Under equally mysterious circumstances, back in the 16th century, the English colony of Roanoke in North America similarly disappeared. And the houses there also looked as if people had gone away for a minute and never returned. In 1930, a village of the Eskimo tribe, located on the shores of Lake Anjikuni, perished in Canada. Neither the country's authorities nor experts in the field of anomalous phenomena have yet solved this mystery. And in India, once the inhabitants of 85 small villages located in the Thar Desert completely disappeared. First, those who lived in a settlement called Kuldhara on the border with Pakistan disappeared, and then another 84 nearby villages. Indians believe that this place is forever cursed.

The Sverdlovsk village of Rastess has been terrifying the residents of the Urals for fifty years. According to legend, the village disappeared in one moment. The neighbors had not seen anyone from Rastes for a long time and sent several strong men there to check if everything was okay. The villagers returned pale and frightened. “There is not a single inhabitant left in the village,” they said. - At the same time, all things are in their places. The furniture and icons were untouched, there were dishes on the tables, and on one porch there was a book, open as if its owner had gone away and was about to return.”

Another shock awaited the neighboring men at the village cemetery: the graves were excavated... Half a century later, KP journalists conducted their investigation and found out what really happened in the mysterious village...

“THE WIZARDS ARE BLAME FOR EVERYTHING!”

Sorcerers have always lived near Rastess. They say they settled there in the 15th century, even before they built the Babinovsky tract, which led from central Russia to Siberia. The village of Rastess arose on this tract. But sorcerers have always disliked the newcomers who settled on their territory...

We are sitting in the cozy kitchen of a resident of the village of Pavda, Vladimir Ilyichenko. From the ruins of Rastessa to Pavda 25 kilometers. We stopped here to ask the locals about the best way to get to the ruins.

“We want to solve the mystery of the disappearance,” we chatted amiably to the natives. But they just waved it off and twirled their finger at their temple. Like, I'm tired of living. Only Vladimir Petrovich showed hospitality. He invited me to warm up at his home. But as soon as we took a sip of hot tea with fragrant raspberry jam, the old man began to use “tales from the crypt.”

Some resident of Rastess will go into the forest, come across this witch tribe, they will cloud his thoughts. The man will return to his house, but he cannot go inside, he walks around, but does not seem to see the door. Apparently they were hypnotized. My grandmother told me this! It seems to me that the sorcerers stole all of Rastess for their rituals.

We thank you for the afternoon snack and quickly get ready for the road. Well, what kind of sorcerers? The 21st century is upon us. And the “unpublished fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm” continue to rush after us:

If you suddenly hear mournful singing, close your ears. It's the mermaids who can sing from the river. Sometimes they sing for several days, calling out trouble...

WE HAVE ARRIVED

So why are we sitting? We take our backpacks and forward on foot. “We definitely won’t go any further,” our driver smiles gloomily as our Skoda got stuck in the muddy mess.

We are 500 kilometers from Yekaterinburg. The very outskirts of the Sverdlovsk region. There is an unfriendly forest all around, a snowy swamp underfoot, through which it is difficult to move, and not a soul around. Here you involuntarily begin to believe in the stories of the old man from Pavda. We listen and shudder. Someone is singing nearby... It's gone! It was our driver who pulled in the “Birches” of the “Lube” group.

Shuddering at every rustle, we still managed to cover the required kilometers. It seems like we should already be in abandoned Rastess. But we are standing in the middle of a field! And no sorcerers or mermaids around. Although at minus five the latter are probably incapacitated.

Or maybe grandfather Vladimir was telling the truth,” the driver crosses himself in fear. – Maybe it was the sorcerers who made us get lost?!

Suddenly a loud voice is heard from behind: “Hey you.” “As if the sorcerers found it!” we look at each other in horror.

Guys, why are you hanging around here? - a man approaches us, dressed from head to toe in camouflage. - I'm Sergei. Forester.

When we share our editorial assignment with a new acquaintance, he smiles sympathetically:

Here is your Rastess. We are now standing right on the site of the village. For half a century, no stone has been left unturned. Although what kind of stones are there? All buildings were wooden.

Well, what do you think – where have all the locals gone? Have they really disappeared? - we are interested.

Who told you that everyone disappeared? I personally know one woman from Rastessa. Alive and well. Lives in the town of Kytlym. It's not far from here. 20 kilometers. Visit her!

“THE GRAVES WERE DIGED BY FUGITIVE CONVICTS”

Guys, you can’t even imagine how upset I am for Rastess,” 65-year-old Lyudmila Polovnikova greets us. – Oh, these tales of tourists. No one in our village disappeared.

And sorcerers didn’t live in the forests? – we sigh in disappointment.

“I beg you,” the old woman laughs. – Although the “devils” sometimes visited us. That's what we called runaway prisoners. A colony was built near the village after the communists came to power. And it happened that all sorts of bandits ran away from there. But here we mined gold in Rastessa. The first thing the fugitives came to us was to rob for a new life.

Many families left because of the prisoners. For some reason, a rumor spread among the prisoners: there is so much gold in Rastessa that when the locals bury people, they even put gold in the coffin. These hiding thugs once dug through the entire cemetery. Of course, this scared the locals and they left.

Of the former residents of Rastes, Lyudmila Anatolyevna maintains relations only with her childhood friend Vera Popova. We meet her in her current small homeland, in Krasnoturinsk.

I remember the times when there were more than thirty houses in Rastessa,” Vera Mikhailovna sighs. - We lived with large families, everything was always lively and fun. Problems began to arise gradually. The school, which previously taught up to the seventh grade, switched to elementary mode. The parents, understandably, were not satisfied with this, and they began to take their children to the neighboring village of Tylay. When children began to be taken away to study in other villages, the village became noticeably deserted. And then troubles began to fall: the school was closed completely, then the club and the first-aid post disappeared... The boiling point for the Rastesovites was the closure of the only store. It contained all the essentials: sugar, flour, and sometimes sweets. When the store closed, everyone began to leave en masse. What to do there? Judge for yourself: no hospital, no store, no school, just prisoners wandering around to their own homes.

- Why didn’t the residents of Rastess take things with them during the resettlement? - we are perplexed.

Think for yourself, who would carry furniture with them off-road? - Vera Mikhailovna chuckles. - Here are the icons, yes, it’s a pity: someone had a lot of images, and they couldn’t take them all.

- Who could come up with the legend about the missing Rastessa?

Anyone! The men from the neighboring village could well be real: for example, they saw the village still blooming, and then they came and stumbled upon empty houses. If there was an expert in local folklore among them, he could easily imagine that all the inhabitants had disappeared. Rumors spread instantly in villages. And then, probably, some tourists came in. And the bad reputation about the village spread throughout Russia. Our ancestors named Rastess in honor of the Babinovsky tract. People then said that they were “cutting away the forests,” that is, paving a road. So this legend paved the way for itself for many years to come.

IN Sverdlovsk region on the shore Kyrya River located Rastess village, once created to serve Babinovsky tract. At one time, the village was considered one of the largest villages in the region in terms of population. Now you can’t find a single living soul here - the residents Rastessa they simply disappeared overnight, leaving behind only a heap of mysteries and questions that researchers puzzled over for a long time.

The mystery of the disappearance of the inhabitants of an entire village, and such a rapid one at that, attracted the attention of ufologists and other researchers of everything unusual, as a result of which the village became overgrown with motley myths and legends. Among them you can hear stories about the bright glow of lights above the village, and about traces of the Yeti, and even about the appearance of the living dead in these places. But first things first.

History of the village

The history of the ghost village begins with the development Ural And Siberian lands, which, due to the lack of roads, was, if not impossible, then quite problematic. Then, it was decided to build a direct road from European parts of the country with Tobolsk region- became this road. Gradually, settlements began to form along the entire section of the transport line, the main task of which was to maintain the highway and provide services to coachmen and other people passing through here.

Among these settlements was Rastess village. It was first mentioned in 1621 as an inn, and 30 years later the settlement was already considered a village with all the accompanying infrastructure. According to the census, by 1680 a church had already been built here, there were 39 households, with a total number of residents of 88 people.

For about 150 years it was the main and only section connecting the Ural and Siberian lands. Naturally, the road was quite popular - royal decrees were delivered along it, researchers and local historians passed through here, aiming to study new lands, peasants moved in search of better conditions.

Kyrya River. Ford on the Rastess tract. Author of the photo: Lyokha Bezdoroff

Today, in the place where an entire village used to stand, there is an empty field - not even the ruins of former dwellings remain.