There Are Hundreds Of Skeletons In This Lake. I Think I Know Why.

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:02]There's a lot of interesting lakes in the world. There's Lake Ball in Russia.

[00:00:05]That's the world's deepest lake and holds over 20% of the world's fresh water. There's Lake Manakugan in Quebec that was formed by a meteor impact.

[00:00:12]There's a lake on an island in a lake on an island. But high in the mountains of the Himalayas in northern India, there's skeleton lake, which by the way was not named for the skeleton that they found there. Uh it was named for the hundreds of skeletons that were found there.

[00:00:28]Yeah. For some reason, this extremely remote lake that's a 5-day walk from the nearest village is littered with between 300 and 800 human remains.

[00:00:38]And nobody knows why. Archaeologists and internet slleuth have been pondering this mystery for decades. And thanks to some recent DNA testing, we finally have some answers, but a lot more questions. Was it a ritual sacrifice? Was it an invading army? Was it a vengeful god? Was it just a cemetery? My team and I have dug into this topic. We've examined all the theories and I've got a a bit of a theory of my own uh for some of it. Some of it's just incomprehensible and it just keeps getting weirder the more you look into it. So stick around and maybe you can help solve the mystery of Lake Rupkin, the skeleton lake.

[00:01:18]HK Mudwell was walking around Lake Rupkin in 1942 when he came upon something disturbing. So much so that he ran away shrieking, raising an alarm to anybody who'd hear him. Lake Rupkin is about 16,500 feet above sea level in the Himalayas in India. The nearest town is literally 5 days away. The trek to this lake is dangerous and ill advised. By the way, it's a beautiful lake. Uh it's usually frozen, but when Mudwell was walking by it, it wasn't revealing what had been trapped under the ice for most of the year. And what he saw were the skeletal remains of anywhere from 300 to 800 bodies. All adults, no children. No wonder he ran away screaming. But it wasn't until 1950 that his discovery was made public. And that's when all the investigations began. It wasn't just skeletons that were found. There were rings that were found, leather shoes, iron spearheads, and even more creepy because it was so cold, some of the skeletons still had flesh attached to them. So, who were these people? Why were there so many of them in one place?

[00:02:13]And how did they die?

[00:02:16]Nope, not this time, sir.

[00:02:21]So over the years a lot of theories have come up around Lake Rupkund. We're just going to kind of go through them real quick. One of the first theories was that these were Japanese soldiers who tried to enter British India during World War II. That's a reasonable explanation. The Imperial Japanese Army launched Operation Yugo across the border from Burma into Northeast India in March 1944. Their goal was to capture the cities of Kohima and Infall, but that theory was quickly dismissed uh because the bones were just way too old.

[00:02:46]Also, no weapons or military equipment was found there. So maybe not modern soldiers, but what about older soldiers?

[00:02:53]One theory was that the bodies belonged to General Zoroir Singh of Kashmir and his men. It was rumored that they died in the middle of the Himalayas region um after being caught in a in bad weather.

[00:03:02]They were returning from the battle of Tibet in 1841. But still no weapons from that time period were found either. And even if they were like ancient warriors, uh still no weapons, no horses, uh no beast of burden, nothing. Another theory sounds pretty simple. Like what if it was just a massive graveyard that a lake formed on top of? Possible, but if it was a graveyard, there would be a lot of older people there, but most of the skeletons were of young and healthy people uh when they died. So, that kind of rules that one out. Some thought it might have been from like a ritual sacrifice or it was a place for people to unal alive themselves. Interesting theory. Totally plausible, but there's just no traditions like that in that area. There was a theory for a while that maybe all the skeletons were the result of an epidemic that occurred around there. But again, all the skeletons looked healthy. Um, and that would also suggest that people lived there. Um, but there was no evidence of any kind of town or village around that area. Now, one interesting thing, and this uh changes a lot, is that several of the skeletons had cracked skulls like a like a blunt force had been applied to them. And this led to a theory that caught on in a really big way. So, this is the Himalayas. It's an extreme place.

[00:04:12]And the weather in this area can turn quickly violent. For example, there was this guy named William Saxs who u traveled and lived among the locals there doing research um about 50 years ago or so. And at one point he visited the lake and he got caught in a blizzard. So he got to experience that violent change of weather firsthand and he almost died. Uh but that caused him to kind of land on a theory about what may have killed those people. Hail.

[00:04:35]A massive hail storm may have just murdered all of them in one instance.

[00:04:39]But then you have to ask the question of why were they there in the first place?

[00:04:42]Like why would large groups of people risk their lives to be in an area that's known for violent weather? Like why why trek through a place so far from civilization?

[00:04:51]No, dude. Stop. Please. Just not this time. Nunda Davy is a local goddess who resides in the region's highest mountain. There are many shrines and temples dedicated to her in the area. While she's primarily a benevolent deity, she can take the form of Durga, a wrathful goddess. So villagers treat her with great respect. They often sacrifice buffalo and goats to her during certain festivals or whenever they may have offended her. One festival is called the Nandanda Davi Yajat Yatra and it still happens today. In fact, there's one happening this year in 2026. It's a 3-week pilgrimage that happens every 12 years over a 5100 meter pass which happens to go by Lake Rupkin. Thousands of barefoot devotees walk to the mountain bearing her name. I they carry images of the goddess and gifts to honor her. And this has been going on for a long time. They think it maybe started somewhere between the 7th and 11th centuries. But one of these tres according to legend anyway uh ended in disaster supposedly because the goddess became angry. So yeah, as a legend goes a prince in a neighboring country uh fell in love with a princess in the area but they consummated their marriage without performing the proper ceremonies at the time. Nunda Davy got offended and bad times fell on the kingdom. So the people of the kingdom took this trick in order to you know plate her. But the prince, who is now a king, didn't take the pilgrimage seriously. He actually brought dancing girls for his entertainment. And none of Davey didn't like this either and destroyed the pilgrims with bad weather. So the hail stom theory is that a massive people were caught in a hail stom on their way to a shrine and died at Lake Rukand.

[00:06:19]Since there were a ton of skeletons, it kind of looks like it was a massive event that happened all at once. So maybe this legend kind of proves out the hellstone theory. Sometimes legends come from things that actually happened. In fact, in 2004, researchers found musical instruments among the bodies, which kind of lines up with the Nund Devi truck theory. Much later, a DNA analysis also revealed that the remains belong to both males and females across a wide age range. This also kind of lines up with the pilgrimage hailstone theory. But that's one hellacious hailtorm. I live in Texas. I've seen hail storms. And the idea of a hailtorm killing 500 people all in one spot is bonkers. And also, it only makes sense if they all died at the same time.

[00:07:01]about that something remarkable happened in 2010. That's when the Neanderthal genome was first sequenced. This was a huge advancement in ancient DNA sequencing and it helped us to better understand how humans, you know, spread throughout the world. It also opened up new research into Lake Rupund. At some point, 38 powdered bone samples uh from skeletal remains have been collected from the lake and they'd been stored at the anthropological survey of India and Kolkata. After the Neanderthal genome thing happened and there was this advancement, they were sent to 16 labs around the world for uh genetic and biomolelecular analysis. And after a 5-year study, a paper published in nature communications in 2019 stunned the world, at least the people who followed the story, because what the researchers found was even weirder than a random lake full of bones. So, at Harvard's Reich Laboratory, they led the research and they looked at the ancient DNA, stable isotope, dietary reconstruction, radiocarbon dating, and bone analysis. What they found was that the skeletons came from three genetically distinct groups from three different events separated by around a thousand years.

[00:08:02]The analysis showed again that included almost an even proportion of males and females. Uh that ruled out any military expedition. There were also no relative pairs, meaning they weren't remains of the same family groups. Also no bacterial pathogens. So that kind of crosses out the epidemic theory. But yeah, the main discovery was that the 38 Rupin remains kind of fell into three groups. 23 of them were South Asians, 14 were West Eurasians, and one person was from East Asian related ancestry. The South Asian group makes sense. That falls in line with the local population.

[00:08:32]That's that's India. Those are South Asians. But the West Eurasians, they primarily match people who originally came from Cree and Greece.

[00:08:40]This went way beyond the DNA analysis, by the way. They also did dietary analysis. Okay, so bear with me for just a second. So depending on how carbon is fixed during photosynthesis in plants, one of two chemical signatures emerges, C3 or C4. So if you eat a diet of C3 plants like barley, rice or wheat, you'll have an isotopic ratio of of that in your bones. So C3 means you're eating barley, rice, or wheat. C4, however, is found in millets, which is an ancient grain that was popular in South Asia. So if you eat a diet high in millets, you'll have C4 stored in your bones. So, it turns out the South Asian group had a variety of C3 and C4 in their bones, which is typical of much of India's diet. They ate a combination of rice, wheat, barley, and millet. The West Eurasian group had a mostly C3 isotope, meaning there wasn't any millet, which perfectly lines up with the Mediterranean diet. So, both DNA and dietary isotope tests point to one of these groups being from the Mediterranean.

[00:09:37]This is weird. The lab used accelerator mass spectromedy radiocarbon dating to find the age of the remains. And they found that the South Asian and West Eurasian groups were separated by yeah about a thousand years. Like the South Asian group fell into the like 7th to 10th century uh CE range whereas the West Eurasian group and the lone East Asian individual uh were in the 17th to 20th century range. So fairly recent.

[00:09:59]But even in the South Asian group, they found evidence of like non-over overlapping deaths. Like one person's death may have occurred between 675 and 769 CE. and another iss between 894 and 985 CE. But they think the West Eurasian group and the East Asian individuals deaths may have happened probably at the same time. Now, the mass death during a pilgrimage thing, uh, it makes sense to explain the South Asian group, they were on a religious trek and got taken down by bad weather. Totally plausible. But the Greek and Cree West Eurasian group, one theory that came around was that maybe they're descended from Alexander the Great. This is a thing. He and his army traveled to the area obviously way back when and there's thought to be ancestors in some present day groups like the Kalash, but that's considered unlikely because that group over time would have mixed more with those typical South Asian ancestry like the Kalash do.

[00:10:46]Also, that doesn't explain the dietary analysis that shows them to have eaten a Mediterranean diet. And they were able to even like narrow it down even further to say that this group was of unrelated men and women born in the Eastern Mediterranean during the Ottoman rule.

[00:10:59]And they pinpointed that they lived in an island location. uh before they traveled to the Himalayas where they died island. The mystery is of course like what were they doing there? Were they going on this pilgrimage? One of the researchers wrote quote it would be surprising for a Hindu pilgrimage to be practiced by a large group of travelers from the Eastern Mediterranean where Hindu practices have not been common.

[00:11:19]Hindu practice in this time might have been more plausible for a Southeast Asian individual. Though there were some that speculated that maybe these powdered bones were contaminated, but that's considered unlikely. They were kept in in storage that whole time. But yeah, the lab scientists suggested that maybe more research needs to go into like finding records that might point to any foreign groups that traveled to the region during that time. But yeah, so far nothing's been found. And this may be the biggest mystery of all from this research that actually happened after they started looking into it that for some reason a bunch of Greek travelers made their way into the Himalayas to this super remote lake and died. There's no records of their existence, no local stories or folklore to back it up. It is a complete mystery what these people were doing there. And on top of all that, there's still the mystery of how they died. Was it all hail storms? I mean, really, the best reason anybody would be walking through that area would be the Nunda Davyy pilgrimage. Like, there's just there's no other reason to go there. But still, the Nund Davyy pilgrimage is like 280 km long. So, why did they all die here multiple times? Is there just like a permanent hailstone cloud hanging over Lake Rupkin? No, but there is a mountain hanging over it.

[00:12:29]Lake Gupkin is surrounded by tall mountains. It's sort of in a depression between high peaks and right along the top of one of those peaks is a sharp wedge-shaped ridge. Provides a nice 360°ree view of the Himalayas and the the glacial landscape. And over that ridge is a pass that's part of the Nund Davyy pilgrimage. The drop from this ridge to Lake Rupken is 200 meters down.

[00:12:51]That's 656 feet just right above the lake. So, here's my opinion. A combination of a high treacherous pass in an area prone to extreme weather events, a multi-day trek, and hundreds of people passing through every 12 years.

[00:13:08]Well, it's easy to imagine how a handful of events might lead to hundreds of people dying. Many of their remains had skull fractures. Maybe giant hail caused that. Or maybe these people fell. Maybe there were a few instances when travelers, you know, met bad weather in just the wrong spot and were swept down the mountain ending up in the lake. Or or maybe they they fell earlier but then were like shifted down to the lake over the time by by rockfalls and whatnot. In other words, it might just be an especially dangerous place and given enough opportunity, disaster was destined to occur. Keep in mind, only a small fraction of the bones have been tested, so there's still a lot more to know. And research is ongoing.

[00:13:44]Unfortunately, uh, the word of the place has gotten around and tourists have disturbed the site over the years, which complicates finding a definitive answer.

[00:13:51]But maybe someday a more thorough survey could, you know, retrieve more bones, get a more accurate answer about who the people were, and give us a clearer picture of what happened. The problem is, it's just it's so high up and remote that a full excavation is kind of unlikely. So, for now, what happened at Lake Rupen remains a mystery. Or no, I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it.

[00:14:12]I'm not doing that. Lake Rupkin is definitely an interesting place. Uh I doubt I'll ever go there. But somebody else who goes to a lot of interesting places uh is my buddy Tom Scott who is back. He's back from his hiatus. He's making videos only this time he's premiering them on Nebula. Nebula is of course a streaming platform that I'm a part of as well as hundreds of other thoughtful creators where you can see our content early and adree and often with stuff you can't find here on YouTube. I mean for example I always include a little Nebula extra fact in my videos uh right here actually in place of the ad read. So, if you were watching this on Nebula, you'd be seeing that extra content right now. Uh, anyway, back to Tom. He took a he took a nice well-deserved break for a while, but he just got back to releasing new videos.

[00:14:52]Uh, and he's doing a brand new project called England, where he's basically doing a tour of England. He's visiting every county in England and and making a video about an interesting place or experience you can have there. He's already done one where he helped make church bells. Uh, he did one where he he parasailed like a bird. And he's basically releasing all these videos a week early on Nebula, so you can see him before everybody else. And before anybody asks, no, we're not related and no, we've never done a video together.

[00:15:15]Uh we've actually decided it's it's kind of a bad idea for us to ever collaborate because uh most camera sensors aren't equipped to handle that much Scott in one frame.

[00:15:26]It's it's just too risky. Maybe it's also the only place you can see my feature documentary, Oldest and Newest Places on Earth, as well as other original and exclusive series from the likes of Real Engineering, Bobby Broccoli, and Real Life Laura, as well as some other new and exciting creators that have been joining the fold lately.

[00:15:40]There there's a lot happening on Nebula right now. It's a good time to check it out. Nebula's annual membership usually costs $60 a year, but if you click the link down below or scan the QR code on screen, you can get all of that for half off. That's $30 for a whole year or just $ 250 a month. And that money supports a thriving independent creator community that's that's paving its own way and enabling us to stretch out and try bigger and better things. And if you really like that idea, uh, but you don't like the idea of having another subscription, they do have a lifetime membership. It's $300 with my discount and then it's just it's free Nebula for life. And who knows, in all that time, maybe a camera will be invented that can handle the two Scots and the dream of a Scott Squared collaboration could happen. It's possible. So, if you're interested, go click the link down below and check out Nebula. I think you'll like it. I'll see you over there. All right, thanks for watching. Please like and share this video if you liked it.

[00:16:27]And if this is your first time here, I'll put a video up here about some other mystery topic. Uh they're pretty popular on the channel. By the way, I have a whole book called The Book of Mysteries. It's available on my website, lassmarter.com. Uh, Lake Rrookand isn't in it because I'm covering it just now, but there's a lot of other great mysteries that are in there. Uh, definitely go check it out. But yeah, if you're not familiar with my channel, I would invite you to look at some of the other videos that I've done and uh, and if you enjoy them, I invite you to subscribe because I come back with videos every Monday. But that's it for today. You guys go out there, have an eye opening rest of the week. Uh, stay away from Lake Rupund and I'll see you next Monday. Love you guys. Take care.