Yankylma (Yankylma: Mysticism of the Ural Villages)

Silent, dead-of-night taiga villages—ghosts you can’t find on any map. Creatures that can look like people. Ancient menkvs and kuli that lead travelers away forever. These are not just scary stories—this is ethnographic horror infused with Ural legends and the chill of a primal forest.

In this book, you’ll find stories that are hard to let go of: about strange settlements lost in impenetrable wilderness. Who lives in places as if erased from the world—ordinary people, or those only pretending to be them? Could it be that deep in the thicket hide menkvs and kuli that lure random travelers to a place from which no one returns? And what lies behind the astonishing longevity of the locals?

The stories intertwine in a strange way, echoing Ural legends. The text is permeated with mystery, and at times it carries a truly unsettling atmosphere. The heroes’ fates converge where you’d least expect it. What if it’s precisely this way—unnoticed—that the threads connecting us to a long-forgotten past are drawn out?

This is not just a collection—it’s an ethnographic horror that leads you into the depths of the Ural taiga and to its owners, whose voices beneath ancient trees still speak to their descendants.