Residents of the almost abandoned Soviet town of Krasnogorsk and the areas around Kalachi village, in Kazakhstan, are prone to a mysterious ‘sleeping beauty’ syndrome.

The bizarre condition has people suddenly dozing off for as long as six days at a time. It’s like a bad horror film – the illness has gripped these regions and no one knows the reason behind it. In most of the cases, the sleep is accompanied by temporary memory loss.

One of the first victims of the syndrome was Maria Felk, a 50-year-old milkmaid from Kalachi. “I was milking cows, as usual, early in the morning, and fell asleep,” she said. “I remember nothing at all. Only that when I came around, I was in the hospital ward.

The nurses smiled at me and said, ‘Welcome back sleeping princess, you’ve finally woken up.’ What else do I remember? Nothing. I slept for two days and two nights. The women in my ward said that I tried to wake up several times, saying I urgently needed to milk my cows.”

Interestingly, the strange disease is not limited to locals. It extends to visitors as well, like 30-year-old Alexey Gom, who was visiting his mother-in-law in Kalachi. “I came with my wife to visit my mother-in-law,” he said. “In the morning I wanted to finish my work. I switched on my laptop, opened the pages that I needed to finish reading and that was it. It felt like somebody pressed a button to switch me off.”

“I woke up in the hospital, with my wife and mother-in-law by my bedside. The doctor found nothing wrong with me after a series of tests he performed. I slept for more than 30 hours. But it never happened to me before, never in my life, or to anyone from my family,” said Alexey.

And it is rumoured that one man might have been mistaken to be dead and buried alive! Some people have had repeated episodes, like Lyubov Belkova, a clothes seller at the local market. She has been a victim of sleep no less than seven times. Her daughter suffered twice, and her 15-year-old granddaughter, once. And her co-workers at the market have all fallen asleep at different times as well.

It’s quite baffling that some families are repeatedly affected, while others seem completely immune to the illness. The only common factor – it seems to happen mainly to ethnic Russians and Germans. There’s no knowing when the disease will strike, so the villagers always have a packed bag at hand, in case they need to be rushed to the hospital.

When the first epidemic occurred in 2013, doctors thought it was a case of bad quality vodka. But it turned out that none of the six people who fell asleep back then had consumed any alcohol. Some locals believe that the problem crops up after a sudden rise in the atmospheric temperature. Another theory suggests that water from a nearby unused Uranium mine is seeping into the local rivers, and being consumed by locals.

Several scientists have visited the remote backwater region, seeking explanations for the sleep epidemic. They conducted about 7,000 experiments on the area’s soil and water, on the victims’ blood samples, hair and nails. All the tests proved inconclusive.

Adapted from Oddity Central