We all heard the stories of evil, malignant places. Places that kill their inhabitants or at least make their lives miserable. It is a common trope throughout human cultures, a way to formalize fears and real data gathered by the experience of generations into a simple and powerful commandment. It does not always make sense today, but at the time when the place was considered abandoned by gods or infested by nefarious forces, it generally had some rationale behind it. Some places were deemed cursed because their owner was a vile man, others had a couple of people die there due to unrelated causes and just earned this reputation by accident, but there are places that are really cursed. And not in any magical or supernatural way. This story is about such a place.
The year is 1981. Behold, it is a typical Soviet Plattenbau in Ukrainian SSR, the city of Kramatorsk on the Gvareytsiv-Kantemyrivtsiv Street. It hosts around 50 families, mostly married couples with children and maybe a grandma or a grandpa. Apartments are almost identical in their planning, being different only in contents, but even then much more homogenous compared to what you could have seen at the same time in the US, as USSR furniture and other consumer house items didn’t vary too much in their appearances or product lines. Children are going to school from September to May, parents work as doctors, factory workers, engineers, or teachers. Life is stable and predictable. Even a bit too stable at times.
Suddenly, an 18-year old girl dies of leukemia. That’s a huge loss for her family, but nothing to bring suspicion about the livelihood of others in the building, her family, or neighbors. A sad story of a young person dying before seeing more in their life which unfortunately happens sometimes. Certainly not a curse yet. What followed looks more like it. In half a year, her 16-year old brother dies, then her mom. Both are due to the same illness. Probably, this is something that runs in their genes, right?
A new family moves in. They have two boys, strong and happy youngsters. Five years pass and leukemia strikes again. The older son is dead, the younger one is seriously ill. Now that’s a curse. People start talking and rumors spread. What is happening?
The father of the family is worried sick and goes beyond his way to find the reason why his offspring is tattered and torn by the mysterious sickness that killed the previous inhabitants of their flat. He searches for clues as to what could cause such a strange succession of human suffering and finds an odd detail. Not long before his older son died, he had put a carpet on the wall in his room. Now there is a small burnt-out spot on the carpet, unlike anything they’ve ever seen.
He calls the authorities trying to get someone to look at it and help. Finally, there is a check by the sanitary-epidemiological inspection service. They check the radiation levels in the flat and see ridiculously high readings. Not good, just terrible. Hundreds of times more than normal. Frighteningly, the highest level of radiation was found in the kids’ room.
Experts located the source of the radiation pretty quickly. It happened to be a small capsule with Caesium-137, a radioactive isotope used for calibration of radiation-detection equipment, radiotherapy and a variety of industrial detectors and meters. The mystery of the curse was solved. But where did the capsule come from?
The investigation has shown that a similar radioactive capsule was lost in the late 1970s in the Karan granite quarry, in the Telmanovsky district of the Kramatorsk region. This quarry supplied construction materials for the construction of new buildings in Kramatorsk, including the apartment building on the Gvareytsiv Kantemyrivtsiv Street.
Probably, the capsule accidentally fell into the stones from which the house was built and stayed there due to negligence. According to the charter of their organization, the quarry workers had to search the entire area of the quarry and stop any work until the dangerous instrument was found. Unofficially, such actions were frowned upon and could result in career issues and penalties both due to dangerous parts being lost and stalling the production, so no one did the search and the loss was swept under the rug.
The experts removed the capsule and the radiation levels dropped shortly. The curse was broken, but the damage was already done and the lives were lost.
In the period between 1981 and 1989, 6 people living in this building died from the causes that can be traced back to radiation. 4 of them were kids. 17 others became disabled over time due to the long-term effects of living in an irradiated place. No one was ever convicted or even under investigation for the criminal negligence that caused them so much harm and suffering.