Signal Lost

The notification pinged across nine different phones simultaneously: Weather window confirmed. Departure 0600 tomorrow. Don't forget the drone batteries. —Derek

Leia Fong double-tapped to heart the message in their group chat before switching to her Instagram stories. The Ring light cast perfect illumination across her packed gear as she filmed herself doing final equipment checks. "Day zero of the Kholat Syakhl expedition," she announced to her 50k followers, using the mountain's indigenous name that most people couldn't pronounce. "Nine friends, ten days, zero cell service. This is going to be the ultimate digital detox."

The irony wasn't lost on her that she was documenting her digital detox online.

Derek Rao had been planning this trip for two years, ever since he'd started his true crime podcast. The 1959 Dyatlov Pass incident had become his white whale—nine experienced hikers found dead under impossible circumstances in the Ural Mountains. Local authorities had classified it as "death by unknown compelling force," which was bureaucratic speak for "we have no idea what happened."

Now Derek had assembled his own group of nine: three content creators, two software developers, a wilderness survival instructor, a meteorologist, a historian, and himself. All millennials and Gen Z, all equipped with the latest gear and satellite communicators that the original Dyatlov group never had.

"We're going to solve this," he'd told them during their virtual planning session. "We have technology they couldn't dream of. GPS, weather apps, satellite phones, portable weather stations, and drones. If something weird happens, we'll document it properly."

The first four days went exactly according to plan. Their social media blackout was broken only by scheduled check-ins via satellite messenger, updating their emergency contacts that all was well. Jess, the meteorologist, took detailed readings. Nate flew the drone for aerial shots that Marcus planned to use in his documentary. Emma, their survival instructor, kept everyone safe and on schedule.

They reached the slope below Kholat Syakhl—"Dead Mountain" in the Mansi language—on day five, just as the original group had. The wind was picking up, but nothing their four-season tents couldn't handle. They pitched camp in the same general area where the 1959 expedition had made their final camp.

"Okay, this is genuinely creepy," said Keenan, one of the developers, as he scrolled through the historical photos on his tablet. "We're literally sleeping where nine people died."

"That's the point," Derek replied, adjusting his tripod to film a piece to the camera. "We're going to experience exactly what they experienced, but with modern equipment and communication. We'll prove there was nothing supernatural about it."

The satellite messenger blinked green on Derek’s tent pole, showing full signal strength.

Shauna woke to her phone buzzing against her sleeping pad. The screen showed 2:14 AM and a notification she'd never seen before: EMERGENCY FREQUENCY DETECTED - UNKNOWN SOURCE. Her phone's emergency radio function, which she'd forgotten she'd even enabled, was picking up some kind of signal.

The sound coming through her earbuds was wrong. It wasn't quite music, wasn't quite voices, but something in between. Like a radio station from another dimension bleeding through. She pulled out one earbud and listened to the tent around her.

The wind had stopped.

That was the first sign something was off. Jess had predicted sustained 40mph winds all night. But now there was complete silence except for... was that humming? A low, mechanical hum that seemed to come from underground.

Shauna grabbed her phone to text the group chat, but her screen showed no signal bars. That was impossible—the satellite messenger had been showing a full signal when she'd checked before bed.

She unzipped her sleeping bag and crawled to the tent entrance. The zipper on the outer fly was stuck. No, not stuck—frozen. The metal was so cold it burned her fingers to touch.

"Guys?" she called out softly. No response from the other tents.

"Guys!" Louder now.

Silence.

Shauna forced the zipper down, tearing her gloves on the frozen metal. The night outside was wrong. The snow glowed with a pale blue light that didn't come from the moon or stars. The light seemed to pulse in rhythm with that underground humming.

That's when she saw them—the others, standing outside their tents in their underwear and socks, staring up at the sky. None of them were moving. They looked like they were sleepwalking.

"Leia? Derek?" She stepped outside, immediately feeling the cold bite through her thermal layer. It was at least -20°F, cold enough to kill in minutes if you weren't properly dressed.

Her friends didn't respond. They were all looking up at the same point in the sky, where the stars seemed to be... rotating? Swirling? Shauna's eyes couldn't quite process what she was seeing.

Her phone buzzed again. The same notification: EMERGENCY FREQUENCY DETECTED. But now the sound had changed. Now it sounded like voices. Nine voices, speaking in unison in a language she didn't recognize.

One by one, her friends began walking up the slope toward the summit. They moved in perfect synchronization, like a choreographed dance. Shauna tried to follow them, tried to call out, but her voice seemed to be absorbed by the snow before it could travel.

The last thing she remembered clearly was looking back at their camp and seeing all nine tent doors had been sliced open from the inside, hanging like dead mouths against the strange blue light.

URAL MOUNTAINS SEARCH AND RESCUE REPORT

Date: March 15, 2018

Incident: Missing Persons - 9 American Hikers

Search teams located the expedition's base camp on March 12, three days after the group's last satellite check-in. All tents were found damaged, with systematic cuts made from the interior. Personal effects were scattered in approximately 50-meter radius from the camp center.

Notable findings: - All satellite communication devices found at camp, no distress signals sent - Personal electronics showed evidence of severe electromagnetic interference

- Weather data inconsistent with recorded conditions - No evidence of avalanche, animal attack, or human intrusion

Five bodies were located 1.2km northeast of the camp, inadequately clothed for the conditions. Four remain missing. Cause of death consistent with hypothermia, but circumstances remain unexplained.

Several electronic devices recovered contained identical audio recordings of approximately 3 minutes duration. Audio analysis pending.

As with the 1959 incident in the same location, this case is classified as "death by unknown compelling force" pending further investigation.

The video files were corrupted on most of the devices, but Leia's phone had been recording when she died. The forensics team managed to recover three minutes of footage.

The video shows Leia walking through the snow in her underwear, her breath forming clouds in the freezing air. She appears calm, almost serene. She's filming herself, speaking directly to the camera, but her words don't match the movement of her lips—as if the audio and video are from different moments entirely.

"If you're watching this," the Leia in the video says, while her lips appear to be saying something else entirely, "then you already know how this ends. We didn't solve anything. We just became part of it."

The camera pans up to show the other hikers standing in a circle around something in the snow. The video quality becomes increasingly distorted as it tries to focus on what they're looking at. The footage ends abruptly with a sound that audio analysts described as "nine voices harmonizing at frequencies that shouldn't be audible to human ears."

The case remains open. The local authorities have now permanently closed Kholat Syakhl to hikers, citing "recurring safety incidents of unknown origin."

Derek's podcast was never completed.

Leia's final video was never posted.

The mountain keeps its secrets.