Here in Current Year +N, it’s hard to remember that Afghanistan wasn’t always the preferred destination for soft serve ice cream, bumper car rides, and plucky British vloggers.
If you’re a member of Generation Y, your young adulthood was dominated by the Global War on Terror. Perhaps you even served – or lost friends in – that international outburst of military-industrial hubris.
But the US is far from the only empire to have spent its fighting-age men in remote desolations like Afghanistan. Great powers from the Soviet Union to Alexander the Great have fed the rocky soil with the blood of young men called away from their homes to die in the middle of nowhere.
But just because they died, that doesn’t necessarily mean they left.
In Helmand, Observation Point Rock, or “OP Rock” as the soldiers stationed there called it, is indistinguishable from the countless abandoned NATO or Afghan National Army bases or outposts. The odd string of barbed wire, packaging from rations, discarded sandbags, these are the only indications that anyone was ever there. The rock that gives it that name is a nondescript, 100-foot-tall mound with a small collapsed tunnel system underneath, apparently built by the Taliban as a defensive position. When the U.S. Marines and British soldiers occupied the area and started digging to find or create defensive positions, they made a frightening discovery.
“As we were digging, we started to find bones. Not one bone, not two bones, tons of bones, there were bones for days,” wrote the marine who posted his account online. “We could have built our whole Observation Point out of bones.” Locals say that the area had been used as a gravesite for centuries, and that it had also been the site of several massacres committed by both sides during the Afghan-Soviet War of the 1980s.
Editor’s note: An OP made of bones would have been totally metal. Ponder that seeming paradox.
British and American soldiers who occupied the post thereafter reported eerie experiences, some of which were reported in The New York Times.
“I swear there were muzzle flashes. I saw the dim flares again, it seemed like the entire position was being lit up,” the marine wrote. “At first, I ducked for cover, but there was no physical or auditory evidence, just the lights. Then, almost as abruptly as it started it ended, and I was back to looking at the land through a fuzzy green lens. A whisper in my ear: ’Brozay oruziye.’ This, loosely translated from Russian, means ‘Drop your weapon.’”
Others swore they saw and heard figures in the distance that no one else could see, experienced mysterious radio static, or felt drastic changes in temperature. They also reported distressing psychological events—not unusual in a conflict zone—such as constant nightmares, episodes of sleep paralysis, and a constant feeling of being watched. They had adopted a local dog they called Ugly Betty, who barked loudly and unpredictably when there was no one there.
When one group of marines passed control of OP Rock to British soldiers, they said that they believed the place to be haunted. One marine told The New York Times that he believed it was a conduit for “paranormal activity.“
Obligatory skeptical line of inquiry: It would be interesting to know if the US, British, or Taliban forces had any hardware near OP Rock capable of producing infrasound (waves under 19 hz).
Failing that, you could see if there are any natural infrasound sources in the area.
That stuff can exert weird effects on your nervous system. In my wide and deep paranormal research, I once came upon the story of a graveyard shift factory security guard who experienced chills, feelings of being watched, heard phantom sounds, and even glimpsed fleeting shadowy figures.
Then he found out that they had a bank of machinery that produced a standing wave of sound at 18 hz.
They switched the equipment off, and the spooky phenomena stopped.
And before we go full deboonker, infrasound itself has been attributed to highly strange causes. Bigfoot expert Bob Gymlan makes a compelling case that sasquatch use infrasound frequencies to elicit the sense of dread and pseudo-hallucinatory effects reported by many witnesses.
The one sticking point is that Afghanistan isn’t sasquatch territory to my knowledge (giants are another story), and the factory in the account above wasn’t built on a millennia-old mass grave.
Though it turns out that much of the local paranormal activity might be traceable to one grave in particular.
The experience of the supernatural was not limited to the invading forces. Locals believe that the area is both sacred and cursed, owing to the presence of a shrine in the nearby village of Amir Agha.
You know your village is in for some high strangeness when it sounds like it was named after a Robert E. Howard villain.
The small, single-room shrine in the town remains, though it is clearly neglected. Graffiti in Pashto, the most common local language, is scribbled over many of the walls, and chunks of paint are missing from the ceiling. In the center is a tall marble tablet with verses from the Quran scribbled around it. It is enclosed in a green metal cage to deter would-be thieves. The shrine is dedicated to Amir Hamza, supposedly the uncle of Muhammad and one of his most trusted commanders. Locals revere him and one of his descendants, Amir Agha, as guardians. His grave is said to lie beneath the shrine, and the town is named in their honor.
Juma Gull, a 35-year-old from the local district, Garmsir, heard many stories from his father, a local mullah, about the powers associated with the area. “We heard many stories about the U.S. and British Marines who were scared of hearing voices and noises or felt the presence of someone near them. But this isn’t the first time this has happened,” he says through a translator. “When the Russians attacked Amir Agha, we remember that the tanks that came to attack the shrine got stuck in the mud,” where they could be quickly destroyed by mujahideen fighters. “To this day, they are stuck, and no one can get them out. This is because of the power of Amir Hamza, and the holy land of Amir Agha.”
Scoff if you want.
But whether it’s the spirit of an early Muslim prince, the tenacity of the local people, or the treacherousness of the terrain, whatever has been protecting Afghanistan from outside forces these many centuries is working.
Gull says that his father also told him how, in 1982, “The Russians launched two rockets at the shrine, but the people claim that despite going through a hole in the roof, it disappeared before it hit the grave, and also because of the power of Amir Agha, it went out through a window.”
Now that would’ve been something to get on tape!
That is some X-Men level stuff right there.
As always, the final word goes to Vizzini.
Demonstrating yet again that reality and fiction are about even when it comes to strangeness.
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