Kashkulak Cave

In the spurs of the Kuznetsk Alatau, in Khakassia, on the southeastern slope of the mountain Our kulan ("khos khulakh" in Khakass - "two ears") there is a cave, which the locals called the Cave of the Black Devil. Some encyclopedias call it one of the scariest places on earth. And there are good reasons for this.

For the first time, the anomalies of the Kashkulak cave were widely talked about after a group of Moscow geologists accidentally stumbled upon this natural object in 1959. According to the memoirs of one of the participants of that expedition, Egor Barkovsky, who two decades later organized a new expedition to Kashkulak. geologists managed to stay in the mysterious cave for no more than ten minutes. 
 
Seized by an inexplicable fear, they were literally pushed out by some unknown force. When the expedition returned to the nearby village of Shira, local residents explained to geologists that it was the spirits of the cave who did not want to see people in their stone sanctuary.

The legend of the Black Shaman belongs to the most common among the locals and guests of the Kashkulak cave.

One of the Khakass legends tells that at the beginning of the XX century, an old shaman lived near the Cave of the Black Devil, whom the locals greatly respected and feared. It was said that this shaman was so powerful that he could animate animals, move giant boulders with the power of his gaze and turn stones into gold bars. In the early 1920s, when there was a Civil War in Eastern Siberia, a gang under the command of ataman Solovyov appeared in those places. One day a cruel "father" grabbed an old shaman and demanded gold from him, which, according to rumors, was stored in countless quantities in secret places of the Kashkulak cave. The shaman not only did not reveal to the chieftain where the treasures were stored, but also predicted his imminent death. By order of Solovyov, the old shaman was thrown off a cliff into a deep abyss. And soon the ataman's detachment was ambushed by the Uzhur chonovtsy (in whose ranks the future writer Arkady Gaidar served), and was completely destroyed.

Since that time, according to local legends, the shaman's ghost has always appeared to uninvited guests of the cave, terrifying them, depriving them of reason, and sometimes even life.