The existence ’s tallest mountains , admit Mount Everest and K2 , are associated with heavy mountaineering exploit , a love of nature , and story of escapade . These 8000 - meter peaks also hold a dark side for climbers , however , and there are just as many tale of hardship , licking , and death on the summits . Among these tales are a surprising telephone number of account of the strange , ghostly , and supernatural .
To begin with , the ambiance on the tallest apex can be middling black . Death is a ceaseless possibility to be reckoned with for climber on the high heyday of the Himalayas and the Karakoram image , which sweep Pakistan , India , and China . Over 220 citizenry have died climbing Everest , and due to the impossibility of retrieving the fallen , the legal age of bodies are exit frigid on the slopes indefinitely , turning the lot into ahigh - height cemetery .
Some of the bodies stay on seeable , lying tightlipped enough to the main routes that climbers are obliged to step over them . The colorful geartrain worn by the dead has earned Everest ’s Northeast Ridge route the nickname “ Rainbow Valley . ” Everest , however , is not the deadly 8000 - er in terms of pct . Since the first successful rise of K2 in 1954 , over 25 percent of those who have attempted the top have died , while Annapurna I ’s death toll iscloser to 33 percent . It ’s no marvel that the area between around 8000 metre and the upside of these mountains is ominously referred to as the “ Death Zone . ”
give this macabre climate , it ’s inevitable that some uncanny stories have emerge . Some of these nervous tales are informed by the mountains ’ ethnical and phantasmal significance , and some can be explain by science , while others remain incomprehensible .
The Sherpas , without whose help so many ascents of Himalayan mountains would be impossible , view the Himalayas as both the embodiment and the kingdom of deity . Some experience that discourtesy for their sacred mountain has led to both speculative karma and to unsatisfied spirits . In May 2004 , Pemba Dorji Sherpa was climbing Everest , a misstep during which he earned a challenge claim to the world ’s fast rise , when he encounter what he trace asblack shapes near the peak . Pemba say that the shapes were the ghosts of crampoon who died on the mass , and that as the condition come near him they held out their hand , begging for something to run through . Pemba and other Sherpas conceive the ghosts will continue to frequent the mountain until a right funeral rite can be performed for their soul .
The scientifically minded feel that ghostly sighting above 8000 meter have a much more logical account . The prejudicial essence of time pass in the Death Zone are well - known . At gamey altitude , temperatures far below freezing inflict frostbite , sleep becomes difficult , and reflect faint cause snow - cecity . Perhaps worst of all , though , the want of atmospheric imperativeness and concomitant low-pitched oxygen concentration ( about 30 per centum of that at ocean level ) can cause altitude sickness and High Altitude Cerebral Edema , or HACE . In the latter condition , the brainpower swells , leading to hampered speech and genial function , inadequate decision - fashioning , afflicted coordination , delusion , and departure of touch with reality .
EL ’s effects on the psyche can explain a particularly persistent moment described in Jon Krakauer’sInto Thin Air , a first - person fictionalize of a 1996 Everest expedition during which a severe storm killed eight climbers on the mountain and strand several others . The incident is consider one of the worst - ever mountaineering disasters . Krakauer , descending in the thick of the mounting violent storm , at one power point thought he chance his teammate Andy Harris , only to discover by and by that he had seen an entirely different person , and that Harris had died up on the mountain .
down in the mouth oxygen and other physical stresses can also account for a uncouth phenomenon in which mountaineers describe the sense of an additional , phantom person . Dougal Haston and Doug Scott , members of a1975 British expeditionup Everest , delineate a dreadful night spend just below the summit with no food and problems with their atomic number 8 supplying . The men are said to have sensed a third climbing iron with them in their coke hole , a consoling comportment that talked them through their trial by ordeal . Climber Hermann Buhl experience something like on his first - ever climb of Nanga Parbat in 1953 , as did Joe Simpson , whose trial by ordeal run away death in the Andes is delineate inTouching the Void .
British climberFrank Smythe , who attempted Everest several times in the 1930s , may have the most colorful story , however . He trace encountering two presence , the first being a benign one that seemed so real he offer up it some of his sight patty . Later , he encountered strange hovering objects , one of which had " what looked like diddlysquat , developing wings , whilst the other had a snoot - similar protuberance like the spout of a teakettle . They distinctly pulsated … as though they possessed some horrible quality of aliveness . "
Michael Shermer ’s bookThe Believing Brainreports that the so - calledsensed - front effect(referred to elsewhere as “ Feelings of Presence , ” or FOPs ) is common to masses under forcible and genial duress , include mountain climber , polar adventurer , endurance jock , and apart sailor . Anexperimentconducted by a Swiss team in 2014 and reported inCurrent Biologyseems to confirm this . Researchers managed to induce in volunteer the experience of nearby apparitional presence by make a gulf in motor - sensory signal received by the brain , causing the brain ’s sense of the body in distance to malfunction . Researchers suggest that FOPs , or ghostwriter , may be an fancy created by the mind when it temporarily lose cartroad of the body ’s location due to genial illness , stress , or extreme physical travail or duress .
Not all mountaineering ghost stories can be explain away so easily , however . Jennifer Jordan ’s bookSavage summit meeting , which details the life and feats of the first five fair sex to climb K2 , also presents a few account that would not be out of place in a Bible of ghostwriter chronicle . Wanda Rutkiewicz , an accomplished Polish mountaineer who in 1986 became the first woman ever to climb K2 , survived the descent and went on to climb several other 8000 - foot mountains before dying in her dictation to climb Kanchenjunga in 1992 . After Rutkiewicz ’s demise , Jordan drop a line , her friend Ewa Matuszewska was awake in the middle of the dark by a telephone call , and upon answering discover Rutkiewicz ’s vocalism on the other end of the line . Delighted to hear her friend ’s vocalism , Matuszewska plead , “ We are all in desperation . Where are you ? ”
The voice responded,“I am cold , I am very cold , but do n’t cry . Everything will be okay . ”
“ But why are n’t you come back ? ” Matuszewska persisted .
“ I can not now , ” Wanda ’s part said , before the phone move stagnant .
Equally chilling is a story from Jordan ’s al-Qur’an involving Julie Tullis , a British crampon and the third adult female to summit K2 . Tullis ’s accomplishment took place in July of 1986 . The calendar month skirt her climb see 13 dying on K2 , which came to be recognize as the Black Summer . During her descent with her partner Kurt Diemberger , Tullis suffered a bad downfall , severe frostbite to one deal , and blur imagination likely stemming from HACE . She died while entrap at Camp IV with several other crampoon , and her soundbox was bequeath on the mountain .
long time later , in 1992 , Thor Kieser and Scott Fisher , extremity of an American - Russian team , were jolted out of an unusual quiet at base bivouac by the sound of a voice amount over the communications receiving set . “ Camp IV to Base Camp , do you read , over ? ” the vocalism said . Both Kieser and Fisher knew that no one was on the mountain at that time . And the interpreter was that of a British woman .
