The TV show True Detective has always had spooky stuff. But in the latest season, which started on January 14, 2024, it’s diving deep into the supernatural.
This season, called True Detective: Night Country, is set in a made-up town in Alaska called Ennis. In this place, it stays dark for a whole month. While Ennis isn’t real, there are parts of Alaska near the North Pole where it gets dark for weeks. That’s a perfect setting for scary stories, like the comic book series and movie 30 Days of Night.
The season starts with cops like Chief Liz Danvers (played by Jodie Foster) and Trooper Evangeline Navarro (played by Kali Reiss) looking into the disappearance of eight men from the Tsalal Arctic Research Station. The name Tsalal comes from a book by Edgar Allan Poe called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In the story, the main character ends up near the South Pole on an island called Tsalal, where the friendly natives turn unfriendly. The island shows up again in a book by Jules Verne, who was a fan of Poe.
But this season of True Detective isn’t just based on fiction. Issa López, the show’s creator, says she was into spooky true stories when she was younger.
“Some mysteries that I was really interested in as a kid were the Dyatlov Pass incident and the Mary Celeste,” López told Den of Geek.
Resurrecting the Mary Celeste
The Mary Celeste is still a big mystery in the world of ships. It left New York on November 7, 1872, headed for Genoa, Italy, with Captain Benjamin Briggs and eight crew members, including his wife Sarah and their 2-year-old daughter, Sophia. (Their 7-year-old son Arthur didn’t come along.)
Less than a month later, on December 5, another ship called the Dei Gratia spotted the Mary Celeste sailing by itself, about 400 miles from the Azores. The Dei Gratia had left New York just five days after the Mary Celeste. They went on board and found everything pretty normal. The cargo, which was 1700 barrels of raw alcohol, was still there. There was enough food and water for six more months. But the lifeboat was missing, and there wasn’t a single person on the ship.
The Mary Celeste story also inspired another writer, even before he became famous. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a version of the story for a magazine called Cornhill Magazine. In his version, he called the ship the Marie Celeste, and he made up a story about a former enslaved person who took over the ship and killed the crew. This story became really popular, and Conan Doyle, who was a doctor at the time, decided to become a full-time writer. He wrote his first Sherlock Holmes story three years later.
The Mary Celeste was fixed up and sailed for another twelve years, even though people thought it was unlucky. But in 1885, it was sunk near Haiti in an attempt to cheat the insurance company.
Revisiting the Dyatlov Pass
The Dyatlov Pass incident got its name from Igor Dyatlov, a student at Ural Polytechnic Institute. In 1959, he planned a hiking trip with eight other experienced skiers and campers through the Ural Mountains. They set out on February 2, but after ten days, they didn’t receive an expected message. A week later, a search party, including classmates, teachers from UPI, and the military, was sent out to find them.
On February 25, 1959, the hikers’ tent was found empty on a mountain called “Dead Mountain” by the Indigenous Mansi people. Similar to the Mary Celeste, the tent still had food and supplies, but it had been cut open from the inside.
The next day, two members of the group were found dead near a fire in a nearby forest. They were only wearing their underwear, and the fire had gone out. Shortly after, two more bodies, including Dyatlov’s, were found. They seemed to be heading back to the tent. Another body was found a few days later, and the remaining four were discovered in the spring.
All of the bodies showed signs of severe injuries, including bruises, broken bones, and, in one case, a heart hemorrhage. The injuries were similar to those from high-speed car crashes. Some of the bodies had radiation exposure.
A homicide investigation began but was quickly closed. Prosecutor Lev Ivanov stated that the hikers likely faced an unstoppable force that caused their deaths.
Aliens and Other Explanations
It was a general explanation, and many theories circulated for years. Ivanov later suggested it could have been aliens. During the Cold War, another theory was that the hikers accidentally found a secret weapons test and were killed to keep it quiet. Some even thought they were attacked by a Yeti.
But recent evidence suggests that the most probable cause was a slab avalanche. This is when a big chunk of tightly packed snow falls on the tent, causing the people inside to flee quickly and get caught in a blizzard.
As for the Mary Celeste, there have been many theories about what happened to the ship’s crew. In 2006, Dr. Andrea Sella, a chemistry professor at University College London, suggested that a “pressure-wave type of explosion” could have happened on board.
“The explosion would have been powerful enough to blast open the hatches and would have been extremely frightening for everyone on board,” said Sella. He called it “the most convincing explanation. Out of all the suggestions, it matches the facts the best and explains why they were so eager to leave the ship.” However, other scientists have since rejected the idea.
Although there are no definite answers in either case, it’s the uncertainty of these mysteries that captivates Lopez and influences her creativity.
“I think there’s a fascination with puzzles that are still missing a few pieces, and they obsess us, make us frustrated, and keep us thinking about them,” she said. How these two real-life events will shape the conclusion of True Detective: Night Country remains to be seen.
