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Speaker 1: me Richard McClean smith. For the weeks in between episodes,
Speaker 1: we look at the stories that, for one reason or other,
Speaker 1: didn't make it into the show. In last week's episode, Bangorng,
Speaker 1: we traveled to the town of hump de Doo in
Speaker 1: Usustralia's Northern Territory, where in nineteen ninety eight, five of
Speaker 1: its residents was seemingly terrorized by what some have claimed
Speaker 1: to have been a poltergeist. Many of the journalists and
Speaker 1: researchers who also witnessed the bizarre series of strange events
Speaker 1: came to the conclusion that they centered on one person
Speaker 1: in particular, either as the perpetrator of a hoax, or
Speaker 1: perhaps for reasons a little more fantastical. In the world
Speaker 1: of parapsychology, it has long been supposed that apparent poltergeist activity,
Speaker 1: if it were to exist at all, is not the
Speaker 1: malevolent workings of the deceased, but rather the result of telekinesis,
Speaker 1: the potential ability of an individual to manipulate material things
Speaker 1: without physical contact. I find this notion particularly alluring, not
Speaker 1: least because it has featured in many of my favorite films,
Speaker 1: such as Bryant de Palmer's nineteen seventy eight classic The Fury,
Speaker 1: as well as David Kroniberg's equally intense take on a
Speaker 1: similar theme, Scanners, and also in perhaps the most affecting
Speaker 1: and enigmatic of ways, in the nineteen seventy nine masterpiece
Speaker 1: Stalker Andrey Tarkovski's adaptation of Boris and Archidis Drugatsky's short
Speaker 1: story Roadside Picnic. Often, those who believe in the potential
Speaker 1: for humans to wield such power have tended to link
Speaker 1: the phenomena to the hormonal roller coaster of adolescence or
Speaker 1: the consequence of a profound trauma, the suggestion being that
Speaker 1: something in the untethered emotions, particularly of teenagers, could be
Speaker 1: unwittingly unleashing some as yet unknown faculties of the mind.
Speaker 1: The notion of influential forces such as gravity or electromagnetism,
Speaker 1: essentially invisible to the human eye, is well accepted, yet
Speaker 1: despite years of scientific research, there remains no widely accepted
Speaker 1: evidence that we can manipulate them with our minds alone.
Speaker 1: There is one individual, however, that some belief came closer
Speaker 1: than most to suggesting otherwise. Her story begins almost a
Speaker 1: century ago in the ruins of a city, where once
Speaker 1: majestic buildings have been reduced to stilted husks. They're pretty facades,
Speaker 1: replaced by gaping holes, mangled iron and shattered concrete. Emaciated
Speaker 1: faces peek out from behind the rubble. On the streets,
Speaker 1: people drift like ghosts, neither men nor women, but mere skeletons,
Speaker 1: their chests sunken and stomachs perversely swollen from severe malnutrition.
Speaker 1: Others life frozen to death on the pavement, their bodies
Speaker 1: still wrapped in their thick clothes. On one street corner,
Speaker 1: the remains of a frozen horse are gathered up by
Speaker 1: desperate frost bitten hands and piled onto a sledge. Elsewhere,
Speaker 1: from out of a dark alleyway, the smell of cooking
Speaker 1: flesh rises into the air. Only it is no horsemeat
Speaker 1: that cooks here, but rather something a little closer to home.
Speaker 1: On the outskirts of the city, a line of Soviet
Speaker 1: T thirty four tanks roll out towards the front. Small
Speaker 1: blank faces watched them silently from the edge of the
Speaker 1: road as they pass, and staring back at them. Standing
Speaker 1: up through an opened turret is a young radio operator.
Speaker 1: As she takes in the image of their lifeless, sunken eyes,
Speaker 1: she is reminded just what she is fighting for, before
Speaker 1: dropping down back into the tank and closing the hatch
Speaker 1: behind her. The radio operator is Nina Mikhailova. She is
Speaker 1: fifteen years old and already a veteran of war. In
Speaker 1: June nineteen forty one, the German Reich's Army had begun
Speaker 1: Operation Barbarossa, an attempt by Adolf Hitler to capture the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union and secure Leban's Round for the people of Germany,
Speaker 1: a chance to build a new nation free from the
Speaker 1: non orion Slavic subhumans and Jewish Bolshevik conspirators, as he
Speaker 1: called them. The battle would be swift, beginning with the
Speaker 1: taking of Leningrad, the cultural capital of the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: and its beating heart. By the first week of September,
Speaker 1: German forces had reached the shores of Lake Ladoga, barely
Speaker 1: twenty kilometers from the city, and together with the Army
Speaker 1: of Finland to the north, they had it surrounded. Deciding
Speaker 1: it too complicated to invade, German high command took the
Speaker 1: decision instead to starve them mount severing all road and
Speaker 1: rail links to the city. Together with a relentless campaign
Speaker 1: of aerial bombardment, they hoped to wipe Leningrad from the
Speaker 1: face of the earth. Only they hadn't quite counted on
Speaker 1: the strength of those non orion, Slavic subhumans and Jewish
Speaker 1: Bolshevik conspirators. The Siege of Leningrad has since become known
Speaker 1: by some margin as the deadliest in human history. For
Speaker 1: seventeen months after the air raids began, no civilian could
Speaker 1: leave the city, nor any food enter it without making
Speaker 1: the treacherous journey through air or across Lake Ladiga. For
Speaker 1: eight hundred and seventy two days, with virtually no food,
Speaker 1: running water, or fuel, with temperatures sometimes dropping to forty
Speaker 1: degrees celsius below zero, The Soviet army held out against
Speaker 1: the assault. By the time it was over, roughly two
Speaker 1: million lives had been lost, including eight hundred thousand citizens
Speaker 1: of Leningrad, forty percent of its entire population, most of
Speaker 1: whom had staved to death. In January nineteen forty four,
Speaker 1: but by then, seventeen year old Nina Makhailova, who had
Speaker 1: risen to the rank of senior sergeant, was badly wounded
Speaker 1: when her tank was hit by artillery fire. Although she
Speaker 1: would survive her injuries, the young soldiers fight was over.
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Speaker 1: often take care of others and not yourself? Now it's
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Speaker 1: slash Unexplained Podcast. Within a year, the war had ended,
Speaker 1: and to physically and psychologically shattered, Nina did what she
Speaker 1: could to forget the horrors of the past. After marrying
Speaker 1: naval engineer Victor Koulagina, Mikhailova adopted his name, becoming Nina Koulagina,
Speaker 1: and together the couple would go on to have three children.
Speaker 1: But like many of her countrywomen and men, the war
Speaker 1: had never truly left Nina, and in nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: she suffered a nervous breakdown. Having been swiftly admitted to
Speaker 1: Leningrad hospital, she was encouraged to take up knitting to
Speaker 1: help aid her recovery. It was only a short time
Speaker 1: later that a nurse noticed something peculiar one morning about
Speaker 1: Nina's knitting technique, the funny way in which she seemed
Speaker 1: able to select the correct color thread from her basket
Speaker 1: of wool without looking at it. When she asked Nina
Speaker 1: how she knew which color to choose, she replied that
Speaker 1: it was simple, she saw it with her fingers. Nina's
Speaker 1: peculiar ability was quickly brought to the attention of doctor
Speaker 1: Leonid Vasiliev, professor of physiology at Leningrad University. A number
Speaker 1: of years, for Siliev had been developing a parapsychology lab
Speaker 1: at the university based on the model first introduced in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties by Joseph Banks Ryde and his colleagues
Speaker 1: at North Carolina's Duke University in the United States. After
Speaker 1: Kulagoner's release from hospital, for Siliev arranged to meet with
Speaker 1: her to discuss her apparent extrasensory perception, only to discover
Speaker 1: something far more extraordinary in the process. When she gets angry,
Speaker 1: things move or break themselves, said her husband Victor, shortly
Speaker 1: after the three of them had sat down together in
Speaker 1: the Kolagoner's living room. How do you mean, inquired for Siliev.
Speaker 1: It had started soon after returning from war objects seemed
Speaker 1: to move around Nina whenever she became frustrated, as if
Speaker 1: drawn to her like a magnet. At one time, a
Speaker 1: jug had apparently slid from a table and smashed onto
Speaker 1: the floor. Lights would flicker off and on whenever she
Speaker 1: drew near to the bulb. Sensing the esteemed doctor's incredulity,
Speaker 1: Victor proceeded to show him a series of homemade films
Speaker 1: he had shot of Nina's apparent telekinetic abilities. The doctor
Speaker 1: watched in amazement as the grainy, black and white footage
Speaker 1: played out before him. Images of Nina sat huddled over
Speaker 1: various objects, a look of intense concentration on her face
Speaker 1: as she moved her hand over the top of them,
Speaker 1: until finally they began to move unaided across the surface.
Speaker 1: Cautious that he wasn't being taken for a ride, Forsiliev
Speaker 1: arranged for Nina to replicate the feet under laboratory conditions
Speaker 1: at the University of Leningrad, which she apparently did successfully,
Speaker 1: prompting for Siliev to proclaim that he had seen nothing
Speaker 1: like it in over thirty years of paranormal research. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight, Koulagina was introduced to the rest of
Speaker 1: the world at the first Moscow International Conference on Parapsychology.
Speaker 1: Over the course of the next twenty five years, Nina
Speaker 1: continued to amaze countless scientists, keen to put her abilities
Speaker 1: to the test. Doctor Ganadi Sagayev, a neurophysiologist attached to
Speaker 1: Leningrad's Military Institute, described one experiment where Koulagina, again sat
Speaker 1: at a table, was apparently able to influence a compass needle,
Speaker 1: a box of matches, and a number of loose cigarettes
Speaker 1: with nothing but her mind. Nina had been heavily scrutinized
Speaker 1: by Sergeyev and a number of his colleagues, while also
Speaker 1: being requested to change positions at the table throughout the experiment.
Speaker 1: In another, again under laboratory conditions and supervised by Sergeyev,
Speaker 1: Kulaganer was invited to stop a frog's heart from beating.
Speaker 1: The heart had been removed and placed in a solution
Speaker 1: where it was kept animated by an electrical current. Nina
Speaker 1: is said to have first made the heart beat faster,
Speaker 1: then slower, before making it stop entirely. It was also
Speaker 1: said that Kolagoner's own heart rate would rise to as
Speaker 1: much as two hundred and forty beats per minute when
Speaker 1: in the process of utilizing her apparent powers, also that
Speaker 1: she would lose up to two elos in a single session,
Speaker 1: which would routinely leave her with blurred vision, dizziness, and
Speaker 1: terrible pains in her spine. After almost three decades of experiments,
Speaker 1: Nina Kolagner eventually died at the age of sixty four
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety, apparently due in part to the strain
Speaker 1: the performing of her abilities had placed on her body.
Speaker 1: Koulagener was understandably the subject of much skepticism within the
Speaker 1: scientific community, with many suggesting her powers to be nothing
Speaker 1: more than common parla tricks using magnets and invisible threads
Speaker 1: to pull and manipulate the objects in front of her.
Speaker 1: Others were quick to suggest that she had merely been
Speaker 1: a pawn of a Cold War era Soviet Union who
Speaker 1: had fabricated her powers in an attempt to intimidate the
Speaker 1: United States government. Those who claimed to have witnessed her
Speaker 1: separating the yoke from the white of an egg when
Speaker 1: standing two meters away from it would beg to differ.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy listening to unexplained and would like to
Speaker 1: help support us. You can now go to Unexplained Podcast
Speaker 1: dot com Forward Slash support. All donations, no matter how
Speaker 1: large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements of Unexplained
Speaker 1: are produced by me, Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and
Speaker 1: rate the show on iTunes, or feel free to get
Speaker 1: in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories
Speaker 1: you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation
Speaker 1: of your own you'd like to share. You can reach
Speaker 1: us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Unexplained Pod Now. It's time to take care of yourself.
Speaker 1: To make time for you. Teledoc gives you access to
Speaker 1: a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling
Speaker 1: your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or
Speaker 1: video any time between seven am to nine pm local time,
Speaker 1: seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available through most
Speaker 1: insurance or employers. Download the app or visit teledoc dot com,
Speaker 1: Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get started. That's t
Speaker 1: e LA DC dot com Slash Unexplained Podcast