10 Creepy Historical Vampires You’ve Never Heard Of

When people think of vampires, they usually think of famous fictional bloodsuckers like Dracula or his historical counterpart, Vlad the Impaler. Perhaps younger people will think of True Blood, The Lost Boys or the sparkly vampires of Twilight. But there have been plenty of vampire tales that stemmed from real events or people, like . . . 

Peter Plogojowitz

Peter Plogojowitz was a man from 1700s Serbia who died (don’t we all?). Except—according to some—he didn’t really stay dead. Within 10 weeks of his death, nine people died suddenly from a mystery illness, and prior to their deaths they all accused Peter Plogojowitz of throttling them in their dreams. Peter’s own son reported seeing him in the kitchen three days after his death, demanding food—before he also died mysteriously. Peter’s wife fled town after she alleged he’d shown up late one night to demand a pair of shoes.The army was called in, and Peter’s body was exhumed. It was reported that he was breathing and that his open eyes were moving. A stake was put through his heart, resulting in a Tarantino-esque gushing of blood, and his body burned. The deaths and dreams all ended abruptly.

The Alnwick Castle Vampire

The Alnwick Castle vampire actually predates the term “vampire.” The events were recorded by an English chronicler named William of Newburgh. He reported the story of a man who returned from the dead after he died while spying on his cheating wife—he was crouched on the roof and fell. He then returned as a revenant—a walking, rotting corpse—spreading plague in his wake. Eventually, a priest gathered some of his parishioners and found the vampire’s grave. They opened it and stabbed the corpse with a shovel. Warm blood ran from the body and confirmed their suspicions that it had been drinking the blood of the living (remember this was almost 800 years before Bram Stoker’s Dracula). They burned the body, and the attacks ceased.

Highgate Vampire

In 1969, dead animals—completely drained of blood and sporting neck wounds—began to appear in Highgate Cemetery in London. Then witnesses reported a tall, dark figure that emitted an evil aura and had a hypnotic stare. One man reported that he became confused and totally lost when trying to leave the cemetery. Suddenly, he found himself facing the Highgate Vampire—which transfixed him, gluing him to the spot. After a while, it disappeared.Reports in the press led to the graveyard being trampled by an army of self-proclaimed vampire hunters. They dug up several graves, leading conservationists to lobby for the graveyard to be closed nights. Eventually, sightings and reports of the vampire decreased.

Sava Savanovic

The only thing scarier than vampires is ghosts. But imagine something scarier still: a ghost vampire. Say hello to Sava Savanovic. Sava was a Serbian vampire who lived in an old mill and fed on unwary travelers and millers who approached the mill after dark. Savanovic wasn’t killed or driven off like most of the other bloodsuckers on this list. According to locals, he simply stopped attacking villagers. Meanwhile, the mill where he lived was passed down generation after generation, each new owner too scared to repair the building until it eventually collapsed. Now locals report that he’s awoken from his long slumber and roams the Serbian countryside—looking for a new home. And it’s not just superstitious locals making these claims. The actual council themselves are the ones who put out the warning. Of course it’s probably a publicity stunt by the area’s tourist board—we hope.

The Vampire Of Croglin Grange

This event began in the 1800s when the Cranwell Family took up residence in Groglin Range in Cumbria. Lady Cranwell noticed strange lights in the garden below, but thought nothing of it until she woke to find the lights at her window—but they weren’t lights. They were eyes. Lady Cranwell was frozen in terror as she saw the thing outside her window remove the panes one by one before reaching a rotten hand through and opening the latch. Her brothers heard her screaming and ran in to help her, arriving just in time to see her bleeding profusely from the neck as a catlike figure darted out into the darkness.The brothers decided to slay the vampire. Some time later, they returned to the estate and set a trap. Lady Cranwell pretended to sleep in the same room the original attack happened in. When the vampire tried to come through the window again, the brothers jumped out with pistols and shot at it. It screamed and ran off into the night. The next day, the brothers gathered an angry mob and searched the graveyard until they found an open crypt. Inside were gnawed bones and an open coffin containing a rotten corpse with a recent bullet wound. Needless to say, they burned it.

Jure Grando

Jure Grando was a peasant from Istria, Croatia who died in 1656. He allegedly terrorized villagers in the area for 16 years after his death. Official documents from that time name him a “strigon,” the local name for “vampire.”Jure Grando’s case is important in vampire folklore as it was the first time in history that the word “vampire” was officially applied to a person. According to locals, he would wander the village by night and knock people’s doors. Whoever’s door he knocked would die. When he wasn’t doing that, he was bothering his widow for sex. Eventually, people got tired of being terrorized by an undead monster, so a local priest took a stand and went out to face him. Grando was no match for the priest, who warded him off with a cross. The priest and some of the villagers chased him back to his grave, dug him up, and decapitated his corpse.

The Hunderprest Of Melrose Abbey

The “Hunderprest” was a nickname given to an 11th-century priest of Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders. He was given the nickname because of his favorite pastime: hunting on horseback with a pack of hunting dogs. (“Hunderprest” means “dog priest.”)The story of the vampire of Melrose Abbey is based sometime around the year 1138. In life, the Hunderprest was a bit of a bad man, so when he died, he returned as a revenant. He was forced to drink the blood of innocents and change into a bat. It’s said that the monks of the abbey, displaying some impressive turn-the-other-cheekery, were content to let him run around being all undead and stuff—until he began to bother his mistress for sex. Eventually, the frightened monks and priests banded together in order to bring him down. They laid out a watch at the Hunderprest’s grave where he rose at nightfall. The monks, showing a rather un-monkish capacity for kicking butt, took him down with a well-timed blow to the head from an axe. They cremated the vampire’s body and spread his ashes, ending his reign of terror. But some legends say that he still haunts the area.

The Vampires Of New England

There weren’t many tales of vampires in America—until the dark discovery of a grave in Griswold, Connecticut in 1990. The grave contained the bodies of farmers from the 1700s. All were normal except for one. One body had been beheaded, and its skeleton was rearranged into the shape of a jolly roger. It was decided that this wasn’t just a simple grave robbery, as it had been done 10 years after death no valuables were removed. It mirrored a case in neighboring Jewett City where, around the same time, 29 bodies were exhumed postmortem and burned. This was something of a vampire epidemic. The most famous case from this time is that of Mercy Brown, a girl who died from tuberculosis. Some time later, the rest of her family started to fall ill and die one by one until Mercy’s body was dug up, found to be remarkably un-corpsefied, and burned.

The Gorbals Vampire

This tale started with the rumor that a vampire with iron teeth was at Gorbals graveyard in Glasgow, Scotland. The vampire had apparently taken two children. Within a few hours, the graveyard was full of children with makeshift weapons like sticks and knives, hunting for the vampire. Authorities blamed the occurrence on hysteria and the influence of American comics like Tales From The Crypt. But it’s since been pointed out that there were no comics from this period featuring vampires with iron teeth. Was there some truth to the iron-toothed vampire prowling the graveyard at night and feeding on children? Was the vampire imaginary? Or had it just been scared off by the sight of dozens of armed Glaswegians excited by the prospect of beating and stabbing it back to hell?

Elizabeth Bathory: The Blood Countess

Elizabeth Bathory is perhaps the most famous vampire in history after Vlad the Impaler. But while Vlad wasn’t really a blood-sucking vampire—merely the inspiration for one—Elizabeth Bathory may have actually fed on and bathed in blood. She was a Romanian Countess in the 16th century who found joy in torturing peasants. The torture ranged from simple beatings and stabbings to piercing fingers and lips with iron nails or dousing them in freezing cold water and letting them die in the snow. Rumors that Elizabeth was a vampire began when it was alleged that she bathed in the blood of young maidens. It’s reported that she began this to reduce the effects of aging, though some historians refute this claim as being added to the story after the fact. Eventually Bathory was walled inside her castle alive, with only enough space for her to receive air and food until she died years later.

Sources:  

https://listverse.com/2013/08/11/10-vampires-from-history-youve-never-heard-of/

Why The Mercy Brown Case Remains One Of History’s Craziest “Vampire” Incidents

When Mercy Brown's family started dying off one by one, they blamed her — even though she'd been dead for months.

In 1892, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the United States and was thus one of the era’s most feared diseases. Then known as “consumption,” its symptoms were fatigue, night sweats, and the coughing up of white phlegm or even foamy blood.

There was no cure or reliable treatment for it. Physicians often recommended that a patient affected by tuberculosis needed to “rest, eat well, and exercise outdoors.” This treatment was often met with little success as those with active tuberculosis had an 80 percent chance of dying from the disease.

The terror surrounding this deadly disease helps explain the madness that befell the small town of Exeter, Rhode Island at the end of the 19th century after a family was killed in quick succession by tuberculosis. A farmer named George Brown lost his wife, Mary Eliza, to this disease in 1884. Two years after the death of his wife, his oldest daughter died of the same illness.

The rest of the family appeared to be in good health until his son, Edwin, became seriously ill in 1891 and retreated to Colorado Springs in the hopes that he would recover in the better climate. However, he returned to Exeter in 1892 in an even worse state. Within the same year, his sister, Mercy Lena, died from tuberculosis.

With Edwin deteriorating rapidly, his father began to grow increasingly desperate and so George Brown turned to an old folk tale. The superstition claims in “…some unexplained and unreasonable way in some part of the deceased relative’s body live flesh and blood might be found, which is supposed to feed on the living who are in feeble health.”

What this means is when members of the same family waste away from consumption, it could be because one of the deceased is draining the life force of their living relatives.


On the morning of March 17, 1892, a doctor and some locals exhumed the bodies of each family member who had died of the illness. They found skeletons in the graves of Brown’s wife and eldest daughter.



However, the doctor found that the nine-week-old remains of Mercy Brown looked startlingly normal and undecayed. Furthermore, blood was found in Mercy Brown’s heart and liver. This seemed to confirm local fears that Mercy Brown was some kind of vampire who had been sucking the life from her living relatives.

Even though the doctor assured those present that Mercy Brown’s preserved state was not unusual, particularly because she’d been buried in the cold winter months, her heart and liver were removed and ritualistically burned by superstitious locals before she was reburied.


The ashes were then mixed with water and fed to Edwin. Unfortunately, this supernatural concoction did not cure Edwin as people had hoped and he died a mere two months later.


Such practices of digging up and burning the deceased over fears of vampire-like creatures were not uncommon in many Western countries until the early 20th century. But while the Mercy Brown case was far from an isolated incident, her exhumation came at the end of an era for these vampire-inspired rituals.

Even though German scientist Robert Koch had discovered the bacteria that caused tuberculosis in 1882, germ theory only began to take hold a decade later as the contagion was better understood. Infection rates then began to go down as hygiene and nutrition improved.


Until then, people sometimes resorted to tactics like attacking alleged vampires.

Sources:  

https://allthatsinteresting.com/mercy-brown-vampire

Vampire History

Vampires are evil mythological beings who roam the world at night searching for people whose blood they feed upon. They may be the best-known classic monsters of all. Most people associate vampires with Count Dracula, the legendary, blood-sucking subject of Bram Stoker’s epic novel, Dracula, which was published in 1897. But the history of vampires began long before Stoker was born.

What Is a Vampire?

There are almost as many different characteristics of vampires as there are vampire legends. But the main characteristic of vampires (or vampyres) is they drink human blood. They typically drain their victim’s blood using their sharp fangs, killing them and turning them into vampires.

In general, vampires hunt at night since sunlight weakens their powers. Some may have the ability to morph into a bat or a wolf. Vampires have super strength and often have a hypnotic, sensual effect on their victims. They can’t see their image in a mirror and cast no shadows.

Vampires in Greek Mythology

The first vampire may be traced to Greek mythology in the story of a young Italian man named Ambrogio and love of his life, Selena. The story includes many features of mainstream vampire tales such as passion, blood-sucking and extreme sun sensitivity.

According to the myth, Ambrogio fell in love with Selena after visiting the legendary Oracle in the temple of Apollo, the sun god. He asked her to marry him, but little did he know the jealous Apollo wanted her for his own. Apollo cursed Ambrogio by causing his skin to burn whenever it was exposed to sunlight.


In desperation, Ambrogio turned to Hades, the god of the underworld, and then Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, for help. After stealing Artemis’s silver bow to fulfill a deal made with Hades, Artemis cursed Ambrogio so silver would burn his skin. She later took pity on him, though, and gave him super strength, immortality, and fangs to kill beasts to use their blood to write love poems to Selena.

Eventually, the mortal Selena escaped Apollo’s grasp and reunited with the immortal Ambrogio. Artemis told Ambrogio he could make Selena immortal by drinking her blood which would kill her body but make her spirit live on. Their combined blood could then turn anyone who drank it into a vampire.

Vlad the Impaler

It’s thought Bram Stoker named Count Dracula after Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad Dracula was born in Transylvania, Romania. He ruled Walachia, Romania, off and on from 1456-1462.

Some historians describe him as a just—yet brutally cruel—ruler who valiantly fought off the Ottoman Empire. He earned his nickname because his favorite way to kill his enemies was to impale them on a wooden stake.

According to legend, Vlad Dracula enjoyed dining amidst his dying victims and dipping his bread in their blood. Whether those gory tales are true is unknown. Many people believe these stories sparked Stoker’s imagination to create Count Dracula, who was also from Transylvania, sucked his victim’s blood and could be killed by impaling a stake through his heart.

But, according to Dracula expert Elizabeth Miller, Stoker didn’t base Count Dracula’s life on Vlad Dracula. Nonetheless, the similarities between the two Draculas are intriguing.

Are Vampires Real?

Vampire superstition thrived in the Middle Ages, especially as the plague decimated entire towns. The disease often left behind bleeding mouth lesions on its victims, which to the uneducated was a sure sign of vampirism.

It wasn’t uncommon for anyone with an unfamiliar physical or emotional illness to be labeled a vampire. Many researchers have pointed to porphyria, a blood disorder that can cause severe blisters on skin that’s exposed to sunlight, as a disease that may have been linked to the vampire legend.

Some symptoms of porphyria can be temporarily relieved by ingesting blood. Other diseases blamed for promoting the vampire myth include rabies or goiter.

When a suspected vampire died, their bodies were often disinterred to search for signs of vampirism. In some cases, a stake was thrust through the corpse’s heart to make sure they stayed dead. Other accounts describe the decapitation and burning of the corpses of suspected vampires well into the nineteenth century.

Mercy Brown

Mercy Brown may rival Count Dracula as the most notorious vampire. Unlike Count Dracula, however, Mercy was a real person. She lived in Exeter, Rhode Island and was the daughter of George Brown, a farmer.

After George lost many family members, including Mercy, in the late 1800s to tuberculosis, his community used Mercy as a scapegoat to explain their deaths. It was common at that time to blame several deaths in one family on the “undead.” The bodies of each dead family member were often exhumed and searched for signs of vampirism.

When Mercy’s body was exhumed and didn’t display severe decay (not surprising, since her body was placed in an above-ground vault during a New England winter), the townspeople accused her of being a vampire and making her family sick from her icy grave. They cut out her heart, burned it, then fed the ashes to her sick brother. Perhaps not surprisingly, he died shortly thereafter.

Real Vampires

Although modern science has silenced the vampire fears of the past, people who call themselves vampires do exist. They’re normal-seeming people who drink small amounts of blood in a (perhaps misguided) effort to stay healthy.

Communities of self-identified vampires can be found on the Internet and in cities and towns around the world.To avoid rekindling vampire superstitions, most modern vampires keep to themselves and typically conduct their “feeding” rituals—which include drinking the blood of willing donors—in private.

Some vampires don’t ingest human blood but claim to feed off the energy of others. Many state that if they don’t feed regularly, they become agitated or depressed.

Vampires became mainstream after Dracula was published. Since then, Count Dracula’s legendary persona has been the topic of many films, books and television shows. Given the fascination people have with all things horror, vampires—real or imagined—are likely to continue to inhabit the earth for years to come.


Sources:  
https://www.history.com/topics/folklore/vampire-history

Shangri-La

The perpetual search for a place free from suffering, and that is home to wisdom, kindness and harmony with nature and other humans, has captured the minds of philosophers, mystics, travelers and spiritualists for hundreds of years.

What Is Shangri-La?

Shangri-La is a mythical utopian village located deep in the unexplored regions of the Himalayan Mountains. Though the term originated in the 1930s, the concept is very similar to ancient paradises such as Shambhala and the Garden of Eden. The inhabitants are said to practice traditional Buddhist ways, free of materialism and other Western influences, live for hundreds of years, and exist in harmony with nature. Within the range of high peaks, the well-hidden village has a sacred palace and lake, according to sources.

Source

The term Shangri-La is based on the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton, published in 1933. The story is perhaps drawn from the ancient Tibetan myth of Shambhala. It was in the 1580s, however, that the Western world first heard mention of the Shambhala or Shangri-La type paradise. European travelers at the time were received at the court of Emperor Akbar and heard all about the mythical utopia.

Location

Sources reveal the paradise may be located in the Kunlun Mountains, one of the longest mountain ranges in Asia. In the Jin Dynasty, 265 to 420 BC, the Chinese poet Tao Yuanming mentions a place similar to Shangri-La. In his story, a fisherman accidently discovers a group of people living in an isolated, lush area after his boat passes under a mysterious grotto. The villagers were kind, and welcomed the fisherman into their blissful home. In 2001, the area was even renamed Shangri-La to draw more tourists to the location.

Authors also purport the Hunza Valley as being another possible site of the paradise. It was allegedly the basis for Hilton’s book, but since there is no Tibetan influence in the area, it is a less likely candidate. In the 1920s and 30s, a National Geographic journalist lived in the Yunman Province region in China and submitted articles and photographs of the lush valley. This may also have been another potential Shangri-La, according to some sources.

 

Lost Horizon

In Hilton’s novel, the hidden Shangri-La is a lamasery headed by a 200-year-old monk, and is allegedly situated in the Kunlun Mountains. The inhabitants lived a peaceful life, free of money or greed, and held the secrets to their ancient culture. The novel may have become popular due to the effects of the Great Depression, by providing a means of hope and escape to its readers. A copy of the book could even be found at Camp David at the time, according to some insiders.

Shambhala

Stories of lost, mythical kingdoms have been around since long before Lost Horizon. For hundreds of years, tales have existed in the Buddhist teachings of a place in the Himalayas where the most sacred teachings of the Buddhists are preserved. It is believed to be more a spiritual, rather than physical, location and is known as Shambhala.

Agharti

Agharti, or Agharta, is a legend, similar to the hollow earth theory, of a hidden underground city situated in the Himalayas. Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, a French occultist, wrote about Agharta. The mythical kingdom was believed to have very advanced technology. Madame Blavatsky, a renowned Theosophist, then took the story further, claiming one could reach Shambhala through the Agharta tunnels.

Modern References

Shangri-La is the name of a dark section of Saturn’s moon, Titan, which is filled with liquid hydrocarbons. It is said to be another sign of the similarity of Titan and Earth and perhaps provides hope of a Shangri-La outside of our own planet!


After the acclaim of Hilton’s novel, a movie was made with the same name, and was a major hit in 1937. In recent movies, the theme has also been utilized; for instance, in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow the characters awaken to find themselves in Shangri-La. Numerous TV series have utilized the concept of the hidden paradise, as well as various books and songs.

The word utopia is derived from Latin and means no place. This is an essential element of a utopia, Shambhala, Eden or Shangri-La. If it could be found, it would likely be flooded with visitors and lose its essential utopian qualities. Perhaps, as many eastern philosophies purport, we can only truly find these idyllic places within ourselves.

Sources:  

https://mythology.net/others/concepts/shangri-la/

The Legend of Shangri-La

A utopia is a perfect world.  People living in utopias are immortal, and possess supernatural powers.  They are forever happy, and worry free.  Sickness, suffering, and desire have never been spoken of in utopias.  There are many different known stories of utopias, such as: Shangri-la, Atlantis, and Xanadu. Utopias are said to be myths, but could it be possible they are real?  Could the great legend of Shangri-La be all myth, or could it actually be true?  Over the years many explorers have gathered new information on Shangri-La, justifying that which could in fact; make this fantasy world 100% real!

The legend starts way back in Ancient India, around 4oo BC.   At the time the legend was known as the legend of Mahabharata.  In the legend of Mahabharata there is a place referred to as Northern Kuru (Kalmiya).   In Northern Kuru everything is perfect (Kalmiya).  This place is considered to also be a utopia.  “The people here are happy and free from illness” (Kalmiya).  In Northern Kuru there are fruit trees that give off immortal nectar, so people may live “ten thousand ten hundred years” (Kalmiya).  After many years the legend of Mahabharata was translated into Tibetan, and now this legend is referred to as Shangri-La (Kalmiya).  

There are lot of place on earth where there is no wind yes you heard it right no wind that means normal human cant live in such places.Today will talk about Shangrila the place where any person who visits this place is technically not on this earth and many researchers had explained that this place doesn’t exists on earth as its in 4th Dimension.

Our brains aren’t trained to see anything other than our world, and it will likely take something from another dimension to make us understand.Mystics used to see it as a place where spirits lived, since they weren’t bound by our earthly rules. In his theory of special relativity, Einstein called the fourth dimension time, but noted that time is inseparable from space.


Shangrila place is situated near the border of Arunachal Pradesh and Tibet. As this is in 4th dimension there are many mysteries exists with this place. Researchers also say that this has connection with a different world. In case any one wants to know more about the place you can read Kaal Vigyan an ancient book which is still there in Tawang Matke library in Tibet and its written in Tibetan language.

In this book its written that everything in 3rd Dimension everything like time,river or an object has been bounded with some principles that means everything will work according to some rules.But this is not the case in Shangrila there are no boundation of principles. Time doesn’t exists on this place we can understand this as two decades on earth is 1 second of Shangrila. If any person or animal enters in this place by mistakenly and returns back by that time decades must have passed on earth but the person will look same.Also no body can depict that the person will come back from the place or not because when he will return to earth until that time decades must have passed on earth. As I mentioned that there is no time on this place so lets assume if a person enters in this place at the age of 28 for 1 second he will remain 28 years as there is no time and nothing changes there so when he will come back on earth he will remain of same age 28 however on earth however decades must have been passed but the age of the person who entered here will remains the same ie.28

Shangrila is an unknown place for everyone but for spiritual people its not an unknown place.Only one thing which is important is that only superior spiritual person can visit this place. Shangrila is a hub of spirituality not only for India but for the world.Normal people cant see this with there eyes only a spiritual person can see this.No one can see this place nor enter in this place unless the superior spiritual people of Shangrila wants to.

It is believe that whole Chinese soldiers had tried searching this place but till date they haven’t found this place.



People who knows this place they stated that famous Shyamacharan Lahiri’s guru Avatari Baba who gave dikhsha to Adi Shankaracharya stays in some Ashram of Shangrila and often comes to give darshan to there followers.

In Shangrila there are 3 places present and they are Gyanganj Mat,Sidh Vigyan Ashram and Yog Sidh ashram. I will talk about Gyanganj in details my coming posts. In all the above spiritual place you will get many superior spiritual people who are between Life and Death.There are burden of proofs which confirms that death is not the end. One of the person who went in that place mentioned that there is no sun or moon present in Shangrila there is just one milky light coming from the sky and no one knows its actual origin that from where its coming. It is also said that no one can see this place unless and until the superior spiritual person from the place wants it. China has searched it many times but they are failed till date. In 1950 china started war against India and acquired Tibet in there control just to search the place but they failed Dalai Lama Budh guru denied the fact that there is no such place present on earth. Well known writer James Hilton wrote a book called The Lost Horizon in 1933 and Hollywood even made one movie on this with the name Lost Horizon in year 1937.

I don’t know whether this place actually exists or not but till date no body knows that why China invaded war against India in 1950 and its a matter of thinking that what was Chinese people were actually searching on Himalayan Mountains. China would have easily defeated India in 1950 and could have acquired Arunachal Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh but they only acquired the place where there was possibility of existence of Shangrila present.

It is also said that Mou Zadong also known as Chairman Mao who was communist leader of China wanted to live long and young that’s the reason invaded war against India for Shangrila. Chinese soldier followed a Lama in that area whom they had doubt that he knows each and every place of Shangrila but the lama disappeared and they started searching the lama in that place but with no luck. Till date that place is still acquired by China where the Lama disappeared. As they didn’t found the place yet they now have a doubt that the place is in Sikkim or in Aurnachal Pradesh and that’s the main reason China still attacks to these place and confronts India that its their place.


Often we have heard that a person went to Himalayas for tough sadhna but the person never found.Just think where the person disappeared in Himalayans snow. He must have acquired the spirituality and called off in Shangrila for future sadhna by the superior spiritual people of Shangrila. It is also said that the place is somewhere near Kailash Mansorvar which is home of Lord Shiva but due to some magic its not visible.After Mahabharata Pandavs also came in this place possibility is there that they must have gone to Shangrila as this is the place where without any interruption spiritual person can do his sadhanas.


Sources:  http://canofmystery.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-legend-of-shangri-la.html

https://strangestuffs.com/mystery-of-shangrila/

Kingdom of Shambhala - The Most Mysterious Land Of Wonders in the Himalaya

• Mysteries of the Kingdom of Shambhala.
• Kingdom of Shambhala - The Most Mysterious Land Of Wonders in the Himalayas.
• Shambhala, which is a Sanskrit word meaning “place of peace” or “place of silence”, is a mythical paradise spoken of in ancient texts, including the Kalachakra Tantra and the ancient scriptures of the Zhang Zhung culture which predated Tibetan Buddhism in western Tibet. 
• According to legend, it is a land where only the pure of heart can live, a place where love and wisdom reigns and where people are immune to suffering, want or old age.

Shambhala is said to be the land of a thousand names. It has been called the Forbidden Land, the Land of White Waters, Land of Radiant Spirits, Land of Living Fire, Land of the Living Gods and Land of Wonders. The Hindus call it Aryavartha (‘The Land of the Worthy Ones); the Chinese know it as Hsi Tien, the Western Paradise of Hsi Wang Mu; and to the Russian Old Believers, it is known as Beloved.  But throughout Asia, it is best known by its Sanskrit name, Shambhala, Shamballa, or Shangri-la.

The legend of Shambhala is said to date back thousands of years, and reference to the mythical land can be found in various ancient texts. The Bön scriptures speak of a closely related land called Olmolungring. Hindu texts such as Vishnu Purana mention Shambhala as the birth place of Kalki, the final incarnation of Vishnu who will usher in a new Golden Age. The Buddhist myth of Shambhala is an adaptation of the earlier Hindu myth. However, the text in which Shambhala is first discussed extensively is the Kalachakra.

The Kalachakra refers to a complex and advanced esoteric teaching and practice in Tibetan Buddhism. Shakyamuni Buddha is said to have taught the Kalachakra on request of King Suchandra of Shambhala.

As with many concepts in the Kalachakra, the idea of Shambhala is said to have outer, inner, and alternative meanings. The outer meaning understands Shambhala to exist as a physical place, although only individuals with the appropriate karma can reach it and experience it as such. The inner and alternative meanings refer to more subtle understandings of what Shambhala represents in terms of one's own body and mind (inner), and during meditative practice (alternative). These two types of symbolic explanations are generally passed on orally from teacher to student.

As the 14th Dalai Lama noted during the 1985 Kalachakra initiation in Bodhgaya, Shambhala is not an ordinary country:

Although those with special affiliation may actually be able to go there through their karmic connection, nevertheless it is not a physical place that we can actually find. We can only say that it is a pure land, a pure land in the human realm. And unless one has the merit and the actual karmic association, one cannot actually arrive there.

A Buddhist depiction of Shambhala from Sera Monastery 

The Prophecy of Shambhala

The concept of Shambhala plays an important role in Tibetan religious teachings, and has particular relevance in Tibetan mythology about the future.  The Kalachakra prophesies the gradual deterioration of mankind as the ideology of materialism spreads over the earth. When the “barbarians” who follow this ideology are united under an evil king and think there is nothing left to conquer, the mists will lift to reveal the snowy mountains of Shambhala. The barbarians will attack Shambhala with a huge army equipped with terrible weapons. Then the king of Shambhala will emerge from Shambhala with a huge army to vanquish "dark forces" and usher in a worldwide Golden Age.

Though the Kālachakra prophesies a future war, this appears in conflict with the vows of Buddhist teachings that prohibit violence. This has led some theologians to interpret the war symbolically – the Kālachakra is not advocating violence against people but rather refers to the inner battle of the religious practitioner against inner demonic tendencies.

Shambhala’s hidden location

Over many centuries, numerous explorers and seekers of spiritual wisdom have embarked on expeditions and quests in search of the mythical paradise of Shambhala, and while many have claimed to have been there, no one has yet provided any evidence of its existence or been able to pinpoint its physical location on a map, however most references place Shambhala in the mountainous regions of Eurasia. 

Ancient Zhang Zhung texts identify Shambhala with the Sutlej Valley in Punjab or Himachal Pradesh, India. Mongolians identify Shambhala with certain valleys of southern Siberia. In Altai folklore, Mount Belukha is believed to be the gateway to Shambhala. Modern Buddhist scholars seem to conclude that Shambhala is located in the higher reaches of the Himalayas in what is now called the Dhauladhar Mountains around Mcleodganj.  Some legends say that the entrance to Shambhala is hidden inside a remote, abandoned monastery in Tibet, and guarded by beings known as the Shambhala Guardians.

According to Buddhist traditions, Shambhala is located in the Himalayan Mountains. 

For some, the fact that Shambhala has never been found has a very simple explanation – many believe that Shambhala lies on the very edge of physical reality, as a bridge connecting this world to one beyond it.

While many disregard Shambhala as the fanciful subject of myth and legend, for others, a belief in Shambhala stirs an inner yearning to one day find this utopian kingdom.

DK, Kalachakra, and Shambhala - Talk by David Reigle at the University of the Seven Rays

Scholar David Reigle focuses on Kalachakra and shows the connection between the teachings of Djwhal Khul, known as the Tibetan Master DK, and his teachings in the Alice Bailey books and how they are connected to Kalachakra and Shambhala. David states that approximately three-fifths of the Kalachakra system's subject matter are presented by the Tibetan Master DK in his esoteric books for Westerners with Alice Bailey. DK said that the teachings on Shambhala found in his books are the most important of all the truths he transmitted. Kalachakra, as the teaching coming from Shambhala, is historically considered to be some of the deepest of Buddhism's esoteric teaching. His Holiness the Dalai Lama is giving the Kalachakra for World Peace Initiation in Washington, DC, July 6-16, 2011.

The Kalachakra Tantra is one of the most esoteric Tibetan teachings, associated both with successive 

Dalai Lamas and with the Panchen Lamas. The version of the Tantra as we have it is usually ascribed to Lobsang Palden Yeshe (1738-1780) who is called by Europeans the third Panchen Lama and by Tibetans the sixth. He was so fascinated by the search for Shambhala himself that he asked George Bogle, the British envoy who visited him from India on behalf of the British Governor, Warren Hastings, to find out on his return to Bengal what the pundits there knew about Shambhala. However, the Kalachakra Tantra is much older than the 18th Century. That remarkable Hungarian scholar, Alexander Csoma de Koros, who traveled from Hungary on foot to Tibet early in the 19th century to study the origins of his people, reports that he was told the Kalachakra Tantra had been transmitted from Shambhala to Tibet and to India about 965 A.D.

The message of the Kalachakra Tantra cannot, however, be dated. It is, in essence, time-less and the whole teaching is about how to use a knowledge of the wheel of time (chakra means "wheel" and Kala "time") to get out of time, and thus escape decay and death which are the inevitable lots of all creatures caught in time. The way out lies through the centre, in the timeless hub which is totally empty and still, and around which everything in manifestation and time moves. It moves more and more violently as we leave the centre and are thrown to the circumference of the wheel of life, just as the wheel of the cart moves, the axle alone remaining still. All beings and all life can be placed somewhere on the wheel. All traditions are its converging spokes. At the centre there are no more labels, no more words, only stillness and silence; but this is not emptiness as those on the rim imagine the void to be. At the centre (and only there) is the plenitude of being and joy we can call life.

Shambhala then can be seen from the Kalachakra Tantra teaching as the abode of those who have found their way to the centre. It is quite literally a time-less place and, since space-time is a continuum, must therefore also be a place-less place. It stands above history because it stands out of time. We have already seen that it is associated with the beginnings of Tibetan history so we should not be surprised to find that it also has a role at the end of history - alpha and omega. For at the end of this cycle of time the great Tibetan warrior-hero King Gesar (Kaiser, Caesar) of Ling is due to ride forth again with all his troops from Kalapa, the capital of Shambhala, to re-establish, in all its original purity and force, the reign of Dharma, that is, of the Buddha's primal teaching which has through the course of history become tarnished and distorted.

The capital city of the country called Shambhala is here given as Kalapa. This is an interesting Sanskrit term meaning "that which holds single parts together," like a "bundle or quiver of arrows," or "the bells strung around a woman's waist." Yes, indeed; that is what it means to have a center, a point of reference to which everything is related, the glue without which all the little fragments of understanding we have gathered remain fragmentary, not a hole, not holy. Therein lies the difference between information and knowledge, between a string of facts and the understanding to hold them together.

Source:  https://funalive.com/articles/kingdom-of-shambhala-the-most-mysterious-land-of-wonders-in-the-himalayas_vjG.html?

Top 10 Most Mysterious Lost Lands

Mayda



Also known as Maida or the Isle of Mam, Mayda is a phantom island in the Atlantic Ocean located southwest of Ireland. Sailors in the Age of Exploration considered Mayda very unsafe — a 1397 map showed it surrounded by dragons and sea monsters, and it included a warning in Latin about the dangers waiting for anyone who sailed too close. The mysterious island first showed up on maps in the Middle Ages and continued to appear throughout the centuries, always as a crescent-shaped island. Its final appearance was on a 1906 map published by Rand McNally, a surprisingly recent appearance considering there’s nothing to be found to the southwest of Ireland.


Cantref Gwaelod

According to legend, this beautiful Welsh kingdom was found in what is now Cardigan Bay. Because it was below sea level, a sluiced dike protected it from the water. The kingdom stayed safe until a visiting king seduced the maiden responsible for closing the gates at night. They were left open, and the kingdom was flooded by the rising seas.


In February 2014, storms in Cardigan Bay stripped away layers of sand to reveal a forest of petrified stumps, as well as ancient timber walkways. Further out to sea, a pile of stones and boulders resembling a ruined building became visible. But whether these are the remains of Cantref Gwaelod or simply prehistoric artifacts that gave rise to the legend may never be known.


Lyonesse

Lyonesse is a lost island off the coast of Cornwall in England. It’s famous both as the home of Sir Tristan in Arthurian legends and for its mysterious disappearance. According to folk stories, the land was drowned in a single night as punishment for the sins of its inhabitants. Only one man escaped, racing ahead of the flood on a white horse.


Modern archeologists speculate that the legend refers to several of the Isles of Scilly. These were above sea level at the time of the Roman conquest of Britain but were later covered by water due to changing currents and ice melt. Diving expeditions have found the remains of many settlements on the submerged islands. In spite of various scientific explanations, the legend remains. Locals will tell visitors to listen for the bells of drowned Lyonesse, which can be hearing ringing under the water on stormy nights.


Mu

Much larger than a single island, Mu was an entire drowned continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Mu was supposedly inhabited by members of an ancient civilization that dispersed to places in Eurasia, Northern Africa and the Americas. This explains, believers claim, how ancient cultures like the Mayans, Japanese, and Egyptians became so advanced.


The possibility of an entire continent disappearing without leaving a trace has been generally debunked by scientists. However, underwater mysteries keep the story alive. One of the most controversial is the Yonaguni monument. Beneath the Yaeyama Islands of Japan, divers have found ruins of what appears to be an temple on the ocean floor. Skeptics claim these giant, step-like structures are natural formations. Others say that they are physical evidence of sunken continent that could be Mu. Whatever the truth of this underwater riddle, the site is a popular destination for divers and believers alike.


Kumari Kandam

The legend of Kumari Kandam comes from the Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. According to written and oral tradition, Kumari Kandam was the birthplace of the Tamil nation. Kumari Kandam was believed to stretch across the Indian Ocean, connecting Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka and Australia. It was a thriving, peaceful civilization where the Tamil poets created their greatest works. According to legend, Kumari Kandam was lost to kadatkol — the ancient Tamil word for “the sea devours the land.”


The Silappathikaram, one of the most famous Tamil literary works, describes hills and kingdoms that were “submerged by the raging seas.” Whether these passages refer to an entire continent lost beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean or to islands covered by rising sea levels is unknown. However, many Tamil scholars agree that their ancestors were displaced by some cataclysmic event.


Mauritia

It turns out that a drowned continent linking India and Madagascar isn’t impossible. In 2013, scientists found evidence of one off the coast of Mauritius. Called Mauritia, the microcontinent is thought to have once been part of the land mass that joined India, Madagascar, Australia and Antarctica. It now lies below sea level, buried under masses of volcanic crust.


Of course, the lost continent of Mauritia differs from lands like Atlantis and Kumari Kandam in one crucial respect: scientists believe it drowned due to plate tectonics and the breakup of supercontinents about 85 million years ago. But where one drowned continent exists, there could always be another…


Hy-Brasil

Hy-Brasil was a small island off the coast of Ireland that appeared on maps during the Age of Exploration. Sound familiar? It was sometimes confused with the island of Mayda, but in most instances it has its own distinctive circular shape.

For centuries, many mariners returned to their homes with tales of landing on Hy-Brasil. These visitors described a mysterious island appearing out of the mist, and peaceful island inhabitants who gave them gifts of silver and gold. After the nineteenth century Hy-Brasil no longer appeared on official maps, since its location couldn’t be verified. Anthropologists suspect that Hy-Brasil came from the Irish myth of Bresal, a mysterious island of fairies and kings that appeared once every seven years.


But underwater islands have been discovered off the coast of Ireland, especially in the shoal area known as Porcupine Bank. Although scientists say these islands were covered before humans settled there, believers claim they’re proof that ancient mariners may have stumbled upon a mysterious island after all.


Thule

Thule was first identified by the writer Pytheas in the fourth century BC, who described it as an icy, misty land somewhere north of Europe. Because the original account of his journey was lost the exact location he traveled through is unknown, leaving the identity of Thule a lingering mystery.


References to Thule appear everywhere from the writings of Virgil to the explorations of Columbus, who claimed to have reached Thule on his way to America. Sometimes Thule is a mysterious land all its own, and other times it’s identified with real places. The fifth century AD poet Claudian described it as “ice-bound beneath the pole-star,” leading some historians to suspect that Pytheas traveled to Scandinavia or Iceland. Others speculate that he was referring to Britain or Scotland. Whatever the truth of its location, Thule is unique among the lost lands in that many historians believe it hasn’t been lost at all, but perhaps merely mislaid.


Iram

Iram, also known as Iram of the Pillars or Ubar, is another unique lost land. It wasn’t drowned by water, but by sand. It’s first referenced in chapter 89 of the Quran as “Iram who had lofty pillars.” According to Islamic texts, it was a rich kingdom built at the command of King Shaddad, who wanted it to be the most magnificent land on earth. But Shaddad’s vanity drew the wrath of Allah, who sent a sandstorm to cover Iram as punishment.


For centuries, scholars believed Iram was only a legend. But in 1992, an archeological expedition to Oman discovered the ruins of a giant city buried beneath thousands of tons of desert sand. The team that unearthed it discovered artifacts dating back as far as 2000 BC, and a pattern of destruction that seemed to match the cataclysmic account of the “Atlantis of the Sands.”



Shambhala

Shambhala first appeared in the Hindu text Mahabharata, then later in the Buddhist Kalachakra texts. In both traditions, the hidden kingdom is a beautiful, peaceful valley whose wise inhabitants lived for thousands of years, never growing sick or old.

Shambala was introduced to the Western world by Lost Horizon, James Hilton’s 1933 novel about Shangri-La, a fictional paradise based on the myth of Shambala. While spiritualists believed it was a real location, most scientists and historians doubted that it was anything more than a myth. However, in 2007 a team of archaeologists exploring the ancient kingdom of Mustang in Nepal found a series of caves and valleys that contained a treasure trove of ancient religious texts and art. These artifacts were centuries old, dating from before the Tibetan conversion to Buddhism. The team speculated that these hidden sanctuaries could have been the original spiritual paradise of Shambala.




Source:  https://www.toptenz.net/10-mysterious-lost-lands.php

ALIENS MAY HAVE VISITED EARTH, NASA SCIENTIST SAYS

A Nasa scientist says Earth may have already been visited by extraterrestrials – but that humans may not have noticed.

In a research paper, Silvano P Colombano, a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Centre and a professor, suggests that aliens may look vastly different than the expectations that humans have of them – such as being carbon-based organisms – which would allow them to remain undetected.

“I simply want to point out the fact that the intelligence we might find and that might choose to find us (if it hasn’t already) might not be at all produced by carbon-based organisms like us,” Colombano wrote in the paper.

According to Colombano, to advance in the search for extraterrestrial life, scientists must “revisit our most cherished assumptions” and consider the idea of different characteristics - as well as the possibility that interstellar travel is already feasible for extraterrestrials.

“The size of the ‘explorer’ might be that of an extremely tiny super-intelligent entity,” he hypothesised. “If we adopt a new set of assumptions about what forms of higher intelligence and technology we might find, some of those phenomena might fit specific hypotheses, and we could start some serious enquiry.”

Colombano also suggests that it is worth re-considering what civilisation may actually look like when scanning the universe and “considering further that technological development in our civilisation started only about 10,000 years ago and has seen the rise of scientific methodologies only in the past 500 years” when doing so - as humans may have a “real problem predicting technological evolution even for the next thousand years, let alone six million times that amount.”

Additionally, Colombano suggests the reasons UFO phenomena may have gone unnoticed or overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are because, in addition to assuming a low likelihood of extraterrestrial travel and a high likelihood of hoaxes, the subject is generally avoided by the scientific community.

The paper, which was submitted as part of SETI’s Decoding Alien Intelligence workshop, concludes by proposing a “more aggressive” approach to future SETI exploration by considering such things as a “willingness to stretch possibilities as to the nature of space-time and energy” and speculation about “what kinds of societies we might expect to find.”


Source:  https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/aliens-earth-nasa-scientist-space-extraterrestrial-travel-seti-a8667506.html

Here's the Truth Behind a NASA Document on Aliens Visiting Earth

Fox News published a startling article Monday (Dec. 3) with the headline "NASA scientist says Earth may have been visited by aliens." Unsurprisingly, that news rocketed around the web, with similar articles soon turning up in the New York Post, Russia Today and The Daily Wire. (Fox appears to have been the first major U.S. news source to run with the story.)

These articles are based on a document on NASA's website by Silvano Colombano, a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. It really does argue that scientists should at least take seriously the notion that aliens may have visited planet Earth. But Colombano told Live Science that the coverage on Fox News and elsewhere misrepresented what he was trying to say when he wrote it.

"It is not accurately represented," he said. "My perspective was simply that reports of unidentified aerial phenomena should be the object of serious study, even if the chance of identification of some alien technology is very small." 

There's some nuance here. Colombano really does believe, as Fox News wrote, that aliens "may" have visited planet Earth. As in, it's theoretically possible that this has happened, not entirely impossible, and worth looking for evidence that it has. But that's not the same as expecting to actually find any such evidence, or believing that there's a good chance aliens are scuttling around under our noses — an impression you might get if you read Fox News's article.

Though Colombano's name and email address appear right on top of the document, he said Fox News did not contact him before publishing their story. (Live Science has reached out to Fox News to confirm this, but has not yet heard back.) Fox described the document as a "new research paper" — a term usually used to describe formal articles intended for publication in research journals and making conclusions based on evidence and the scientific method.

But that's not what this document is.

"The context was a presentation delivered last spring at a meeting of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute," he said.

SETI is an organization devoted to the hunt for alien life, mostly by scanning radio signals from space for evidence of biological origin.

"The meeting was to get feedback from scientists as to future directions for the Institute's research program," Colombano said.

The document accompanied a talk he gave in which he suggested that perhaps the notion of aliens visiting Earth isn't quite as ridiculous as most scientists believe, and that SETI might devote some resources to systematically hunting through UFO reports and other data for evidence that this has happened — to hunt for a faint, unlikely signal in a lot of messy noise.

In other words, it was a speculative piece of writing intended to persuade other scientists to spend their resources on a long-shot project — not an argument about whether or not aliens have actually visited Earth. Colombano's position is that it's possible, but not necessarily likely.



Source: https://www.livescience.com/64237-nasa-aliens-fox-news.html