Topic Research: Russian Legends and the Dyatlov Pass Incident

Russian Mountains: Nicolas J. Leclercq

I'm super interested in mixing Russian legends with the famous story of the Dyatlov Pass incident. The Dyatlov Pass incident was an event in which nine Russian hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains in February 1959, in uncertain circumstances that were never explained. 

For my storybook, I'd love to do something interactive, almost like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on Netflix. I got this idea after exploring different storybooks during week one of this class! My storybook inspiration came from Mythical Monsters of the New World. 

1. I'd like to do an interactive storybook where the hikers encounter Two Zombie-like corpses that attack them, and the reader will get to pick the paths the hikers take, determining their fates.
   
   
2. Another option would be to stay with my idea above, on number 1, but make it multiple creatures. So they would encounter the corpses, a Russian vampire, and even a ghost. 
   
   
3. My last idea would be to keep the storybook interactive, where the hikers encounter a few creatures from Russian folklore and the reader still chooses the path they take, but then the hikers find out the Russin government is behind it. They find out the Soviet Government is using the mountain as a test site for testing new government weapons, and those weapons turn out to be creatures of legend the world thought didn't exist. Many people actually speculate that the Soviet government was involved with the hiker's deaths in the real Dyatlov Pass incident story. People thought the government was doing weapons tests and the hikers accidentally found themselves in the middle of it. So I thought putting legend with real-life would give a twist to the story and give an explanation to the hiker's very unusual deaths. 

Source: Vampire and Ghost Stories from Russia