Case file · High strangeness
Roopkund, the skeleton lake
In 1942 forest ranger H. K. Madhwal found hundreds of human skeletons around Roopkund, a glacial lake at 5,000 m in Uttarakhand.
1942 CE · 30.26, 79.73 · status: disputed
The account
First taken for Japanese soldiers, the dead were later dated to around the 9th century and linked to a hailstorm, matching a folk song of a goddess who rained down iron hail. A 2019 DNA study in Nature Communications found at least three groups who died up to a thousand years apart, including people of eastern Mediterranean ancestry around 1800 CE.
The sceptical view
The bones are real and well studied; what is unexplained is why such different groups died at the same remote lake.