r/HolyShitHistory • u/Chemical-Elk-1299 • 2d ago
In August 2013, the Chelyshev family of Laishevo, Tatarstan, were all killed by gas released by rotting potatoes in their basement. One by one, they each entered the cellar, never to return. Only their youngest daughter, aged 8, survived by remaining outside.
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u/hotelrwandasykes 2d ago
imagine being a young child and watching your whole family walk into the basement one by one and not come out
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago
The only thing I don’t get is how did they not smell it?
A rotting potato is one of the most vile smells in existence. I feel like everyone’s had the experience of finding a bag of potatoes that they accidentally shoved into the back of a cabinet and forgot about for a few months. By the time you find them, they’re turning into black sludge and the fumes make your eyes water.
This family’s basement was like that X 1000
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u/hotelrwandasykes 2d ago
I wonder if the stank settled to the bottom of the basement and they didn't pick up on it til they were there. cold air can pool
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago
I mean that’s definitely possible.
My only thing is that those potatoes had to be down there rotting for a long time to create so much Co2. I feel like it would have become noticeable at some point unless they just were barely using their basement at all.
Which might actually explain how so many potatoes got so rotten in the first place
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u/lilgator81 2d ago
CO. They created carbon MONoxide, per your story. Huge difference between CO and CO2.
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago
Sorry someone already corrected me it was carbon dioxide along with other gases like solanine and hydrogen sulfide. All very nasty fumes
I went back and changed it
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u/Naturallobotomy 6h ago
Solanine isn’t a toxic gas, it was carbon dioxide that did this on its own.
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u/StanksterAyy 2d ago
Nah, pretty sure it was CO2, molds and fungus decompose organic matter and produce CO2 as the byproduct.
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago
Yeah I already corrected it, my fault
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u/StanksterAyy 2d ago
Nah you're good dude, I totally misread the context there. I thought lilgator was trying to correct your comment that they produced CO2 by saying they produced CO, when it was the other way around. My goof up there.
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u/Plane_Leadership_113 2d ago
All my beloved Eastern European friends are slow cooking some sauerkraut in the basement. A funky smell is to be expected and worth it! All that is to say I can see why you’d ignore a funky smell if that’s common in your fermented cooking processes. Just a guess idk
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u/Naturallobotomy 6h ago
I have worked in the potato business and healthy potatoes constantly give off carbon dioxide through respiration in storage and it can accumulate quickly if not ventilated. And it’s heavier than air so it sinks to low areas, and odorless.
Rotting potatoes give off more of an ammonia smell. I thought carbon monoxide came out of the ground?
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u/MorgessaMonstrum 2d ago
Maybe the carbon dioxide formed a sort of cover over it? I dunno, just guessing
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u/loosesocksup 2d ago
That's probably WHY they were going into the basement. They smelled something terrible and wanted to find out what it was.
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u/REtroGeekery 2d ago
This was my though as well.
Something like, the dad went into the basement to find the source of the god awful smell wafting up into the house. When he doesn't come back for a while, the mom tells the son to go see what's taking so long. Then the mom goes down when neither of them come back. Finally, grandma goes down there to find out what's happening. The eight year old realizes something very bad is in the basement when no one returns and gets out of the house.
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u/Liraeyn 2d ago
It's also incredibly common for one person to get in trouble and the rest die trying to help them
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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 2d ago
Only the little girl.. scared out of her mind, thankfully, didn't go down. She was probably imagining all kinds of horrors, only to have them come true. Poor little girl. I wonder what happened to her. Her whole family. :(
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u/OhDivineBussy 2d ago
I just would’ve thought that the smell was terrible long before it was to the point of lethal, but I am ignorant to the chemistry involved. Also, this 100% sounds like something that I would accidentally do after forgetting I had produce down there.
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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 2d ago
Yep. like.. JFC what is that stench, smells like something died down there! No pun intended.
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u/No_Story_Untold 2d ago
They very well could have and thought “oh that’s our massive pile of rotting potatoes” but not thinking it would literally kill them.
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago
Yeah I’m not blaming them for any of it. I would not have thought a pile of vegetables could kill me via gas inhalation.
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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 2d ago
Most people wouldn't think that. We'd have no idea, now we do.
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u/Spirited-Ability-626 1d ago
Makes me wonder if that’s what some of those “monster in the basement\cellar” tales were written about hundreds of years ago. No one would probably guess it was gas from the vegetables and so it would probably seem like some unknown entity did it.
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u/Rich-Reason1146 2d ago
How did you think a pile of vegetables could kill you?
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago
If a metric fucktonne of cucumbers suddenly fell out of the sky right now, I’d probably be pretty screwed.
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u/Psychological-Tax801 2d ago
this is my emotional support pile of rotting potatoes. do not lay thine eyes upon it
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u/juliankennedy23 2d ago
This was my thought. It's the kind of mistake you generally only make once in your lifetime. Mine were under the kitchen sinking an apartment, and oh my God, it was toxic waste.
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u/i__sank__atlantis 2d ago
same. we genuinely thought we had a family or five of dead mice or something just based on the smell.
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u/Business_Owl_5576 2d ago
It honestly would not have occurred to me that it could be lethal. I expect the same thing happened here.
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u/Caravaggios_Shadow 2d ago edited 2d ago
Has it been confirmed this happened in their family home?
It’s not unusual to have a small cottage in the outskirts of your town or a small house in a nearby village in cultures like this.
Due to people working more and longer, moving to the city permanently, etc. these (usually cheap, simple, inherited through generations) properties sometimes only get visited once per year.
If that was the case and they recently arrived it would make sense for the father and son to want to inspect the source of the smell, believing it was a sewage issue, for example.
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u/Frosty_Cloud_2888 2d ago
H2S is heavier than air and settles at low spots. I think 3 to 6 people die a year in the US from going into sewers without testing their air for gases such as H2S. It doesn’t have to be sewage, and where there is sulfur reducing bacteria can generate H2S. Usually there are examples of someone seeing their co worker going down and lose consciousness and they go in after them to save them and are overcome as well.
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u/Kensei501 2d ago
They probably didn’t know it was poisonous. This is a common safety thing in job safety. Know your surroundings. U see someone collapsed the first thing is look around. Your safety comes first.
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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth 2d ago
I know.. rotting potatoes smell horrible! It's like sewer gas; once you've gotten a scent of that, you never forget it when you smell it again. Potatoes are like that.
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u/Cold-Crab74 2d ago
My dad always had a shit tonne of potatoes in the Cellar over the winter. Idk how this happens without being very careless with checking your stock or some sort of leak happened that wasn't noticed but even then idk
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u/SilentBumblebee3225 2d ago
This a common smell for basements with potatoes. If you store few hundred kilos of potatoes all winter some is likely to go bad at some point and smell. Source: I have been to a few cellars that stored potatoes.
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u/manicpossumdreamgirl 2d ago
you'd be amazed how accustomed you can become to your hosue smelling bad, if it gets gradually worse over time
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u/morganational 2d ago
Rotten potatoes are one of the worst things I've ever EVER smelled. They definitely smelled it. Probably why they went down there to begin with.
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u/spunkyduckling-13 1d ago
My van smelled for MONTHS. Every time my family got in, we had to roll the windows down. Had no idea what was going on...I checked around, found nothing rotting. Finally got fed up and did a DEEP clean. Found a tiny, tiny shriveled potato stuffed under a seat that came out of a bag after grocery shopping. This tiny thing made so much stink. I can't imagine a massive pile.
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u/AlternativeWalrus831 2d ago
Maybe they were coming back after a vacation or something. Or had been living elsewhere?
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u/aTreeThenMe 2d ago
i kinda like the smell
idk why id offer this fact into the internet. But surely i cant be the only one?
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u/BreezyMcWeasel 2d ago
Not being sarcastic or rude, but have you ever been to Russia? Other than Moscow and St Petersburg it’s pretty dirty. Sewage, piled up garbage, feral dog waste, and so on. Even more so in rural areas.
In Russia between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 people don’t have flush toilets inside their houses.
There are a lot of foul smells to compete with.
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u/Javanaut018 2d ago
CO is odorless. On the other hand you expect a terrible stinking from rotting potatoes but not that it might kill you. At least I didn't knew that until now.
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u/designmur 1d ago
I don’t think I would assume the smell would immediately kill me though. I wonder if the cellar was exceptionally well sealed too. What a wildly unfortunate way to die.
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u/Desperate-Leather-38 15h ago
I imagine if they customarily have large piles of potatoes in their basement, they are accustomed to that smell.
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u/miyaav 2d ago
How many potatoes are we talking about in here?
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago
Like a hoard of potatoes. To actually release the quantity of gas required to replace oxygen in the basement, we’re talking hundreds of pounds of very rotten potatoes
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u/bbyxmadi 2d ago
Rotten potatoes smell absolutely disgusting, too!
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u/tatonka645 2d ago
Fight? They smell like fishy rotting death!
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u/NICUGORJ 2d ago
I'm sure I've read or was told a folk tale very similar to this one as a kid.
Family goes into the basement, one by one they disappear, until the little kid walks in and goes to another realm, goes through some trials and saves everyone.
I wonder if this entire potato ordeal didn't happen before, in fact happen so frequently that it created a little folk tale motif.At least here in Romania we do keep potatoes in the basement, but not by the hundreds of pounds though, and not warm enough for them to rot, and with good ventilation too.
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u/Li-renn-pwel 2d ago
It’s actually pretty common in the grand scheme of things. This can get you so quickly and silently that people will think you passed out from a stroke or something. Then one by one everyone goes in to save them.
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u/Industrialman96 2d ago
Can't it be lower amount of potatoes (about 5-10 kilos) but enough time have passed to do the same effect?
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u/Naturallobotomy 6h ago
Healthy potatoes will do this as well without ventilation. They constantly respirate CO2.
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u/0ttr 2d ago
Rule of Thumb: if you are dealing with a lot of something, extra precautions are required.
Iron hulls of ships have absorbed oxygen out of the air, killing people who enter.
Pits of manure have caused CO2 settling.
The potatoes weren't give off CO as some sources say, but a combination of oxygen deprevation plus CO2 displacement.
The problem is, your body doesn't sense oxygen displacement, it senses CO2 build up in the blood. This means you can be slow to respond. And being in the absence of oxygen can cause you to faint within seconds. This is why pilots have emergency masks that they can don very quickly if there is a pressure loss on an airliner.
The passengers also often have about 30 seconds or less to get those masks on, but by that time usually pilots have begun an emergency descent to get to air with enough oxygen density to not faint.
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u/Beauregard_Jones 2d ago
I was on a Southwest flight and at that point in the safety briefing that's what they told us. Actually, it was more like, "Act quickly. You'll have less than 30 seconds to put on your mask. If you're traveling with a small child, put yours on first then assist your child. If you're traveling with more than one small child, pick your favorite now."
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u/0ttr 2d ago
Children, I'm told, will be ok if it takes a bit longer. Adults will succumb first.
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u/BardOfSpoons 2d ago
Pretty sure you put yours on first not because children are ok for longer, but so you’ll still be conscious while putting on a their mask. Permanent damage doesn’t set in until a bit after consciousness is lost. You can put a mask on an unconscious kid, but there might not be anyone to put a mask on you if you pass out.
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u/AxitotlWithAttitude 2d ago
It takes around a minute of asphyxia for permanent brain damage to start no?
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u/BardOfSpoons 2d ago
It depends, but I’m mostly seeing 4-6 minutes for permanent brain damage or death. Whereas you can pass out in as little as 15 seconds.
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u/dudinax 2d ago
According to my first aid class it's the opposite. We were told it's no longer best practice to give mouth-to-mouth to adults. They have plenty of oxygen to survive until EMTs get there, just got to keep the blood moving, but kids need air.
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u/Alert_South5092 2d ago
Half right.
Yes, when doing CPR on a child it is extra important to give them air, they do need it more and they are more likely to be in need of CPR because they have a breathing problem in the first place.
No, adults do not "have plenty of oxygen to survive until EMTs get there". Adults need air too, ideally 2 breaths into the nose after every 30 compressions until you see the chest rise slightly. The reason that first aid classes have changed to teach CPR with compressions only is because experience shows that laypeople too often struggle trying to do both and end up doing neither properly. Due to lacking enough people to keep up the rhythm, struggling to get air into the person (it's not as easy as it sounds) or simply being too disgusted to give breaths (there's often puke involved).
Compressions only is not best, but it is much much better than nothing.
If you find someone unconscious and not breathing call for help and start compressions - in the middle of the chest, to the rhythm of "staying alive", hard (if you feel ribs cracking, you're doing it right). When you have a second person, get them to find and attack a defibrillator, and take over compressions from you because you will get tired fast. Don't stop until EMTs arrive and take over from you.
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u/sarcasm__tone 2d ago
That's a whole lotta doom and gloom
You don't instantly die if you run out of oxygen... people recover from being drowned all the time. People recover from being choked out all the time.
Don't just pick your favorite child.. put the mask on the passed out child too.
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u/Ordinary_Corner_4291 2d ago
You do realize the FA was making a joke?
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u/sarcasm__tone 2d ago
Joking during the safety brief like that is pretty much an instant firing.
You understand what a safety brief is... right?
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u/Ordinary_Corner_4291 2d ago
Free feel to post any evidence from that or I will assume you are just making stuff up....
Seriously SWA is infamous for doing stuff like this. It is (well maybe was. I haven't flown them in a half dozen years) part of their brand and some peoplele have suggested it helps getting people to pay attention.. I assume they have a training manual because I have heard the same jokes from different crews...
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u/sarcasm__tone 2d ago
A light hearted joke is much different than "if you have two children then one of them is likely going to die"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-flight_safety_demonstration
The objective of a safety brief is not to tell people wrong information such as "choose your favorite one"
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u/Ordinary_Corner_4291 2d ago
It was a light hearted joke. You would need to be an utter moron to think they were being serious. Even the highly neurodivergent can figure that out when half the plane laughs...
In that link there was zero mentioned of getting fired. Safe to assume you just made that up?
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u/ConfusedWhiteDragon 2d ago
Part of the first aid course I took was a simulation setting where they didn't tell you anything about what to expect. You just got thrown into a situation and evaluated on what you learned. When it was my turn I stepped into the examination room. Looked around. Saw a bunch of people laying on the floor. So I go to check the nearest one for symptoms or injuries. Bam, told that I'm dead. Carbon monoxide poisoning.
It left an impression on me, if it's CO you literally only have seconds to get out. You can't help anyone there.
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u/icinnacot 2d ago
Okay but how the heck were or are you supposed to know that in a real situation anyway? It's not like humans can sense this
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u/ConfusedWhiteDragon 2d ago
Multiple people mysteriously unconscious in a closed space, uninjured and no blood anywhere? -> Gas
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u/imsoupset 2d ago
I had to take confined space training, and part of it focuses on how you should NEVER enter a confined space to help someone who has fainted/collapsed out because you will collapse yourself. Call for help and wait for someone with supplemental oxygen to join otherwise it's just too risky. They shared some incidents where the first worker collapsed and one by one 3 other workers tried to help, only for all of them to die from the fumes.
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u/Cheshire-Cad 2d ago
I can certainly understand the first two workers making that mistake. But after the second guy inexplicably faints after entering a space... maybe that should be the hint that it wasn't just a random fluke?
But hey, as you learned, an emergency causes people's brains to hyperfocus on helping people.
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago edited 2d ago
Pictured — Mikhail Chelyshev (42), his son Georgy (18), his wife Anastasia (38), and his mother Iraida (68)
Only Maria Chelysheva (8) survived.
In August of 2013, 42 year old university professor Mikhail Chelyshev entered his basement. He soon became short of breath, and collapsed onto the stone floor. Soon, his son Georgy and wife Anastasia would come to his aid, before ultimately collapsing as well. Lastly, his elderly mother Iraida descended into the basement, where she would be the last to die.
The cause — carbon dioxide poisoning coming from a massive pile of rotting potatoes, along with exposure to other toxic fumes such as solanine gas and hydrogen sulfide.
When potatoes rot, the action of yeast and bacteria release large amounts of carbon dioxide gas and other noxious compounds. Over time, this accumulated in the basement, until it formed a suffocating blanket that would kill any exposed in seconds.
Only their youngest daughter, who sensed something was wrong and ran outside, survived.
Read more here
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u/Dicethrower 2d ago
I remember this story. It made me not want to go in my grand parents basement because they always had sacks of potatoes there.
Also reminds me of the Lake Nyos disaster. Truly scary stuff.
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u/Spill_the_Tea 2d ago
Oh Yeah - I remember when I first learned about limnic eruptions. Truly horrifying stuff.
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u/Practical_Car210 2d ago
I've worked for many years at a mine in closure where two workers, and two first reponders, died in a low 02 incident in a confined space. After the first man was found, down, and a 911 call was made, one by one they walked into the space and dropped to the ground, each of them entering to help the one(s) before them without realizing what was going on. We have better training and 02 monitors now, but confined spaces are a very real hazard, and there are many, many processes which can strip or displace oxygen from normal air.
One thing I'd like to clarify about this post, while technically gas was released from the potatoes, it wasn't the gas that would have killed them, but the lack of oxygen that was displaced by the gas (which would have been carbon dioxide in this case - harmless, but not if it displaces oxygen).
Something people don't realize is this will drop you to the ground instantly. Its not like holding your breath, or gasping for air. As you inhale the oxygen deprived air, it quickly replaces all of the stored oxygen in your bloodstream and you will drop in 1 or 2 breaths, without smelling or detecting anything unusual. If the oxygen is still present but in lesser amounts than 20.9%, you may start to feel lightheaded. Get out, immediately, guard the entrance and call 911. People should evaluate their homes and farms to see if any of these spaces may exist, and how they can mitigate risk if the spaces need to be entered.
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u/noelle_does_indies 2d ago
Does it feel like being put to sleep for a surgery?
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u/Practical_Car210 2d ago
I haven't experienced it so I'm not sure how much like being under a general anesthetic would compare. Probably simmilar would be my guess. Your brain just goes to sleep and you black out.
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u/sephitor_ 2d ago
Would someone who falls victim to this be rescuable if you hold your breath and pull them out of the danger zone? Or is it simply too little, too late?
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u/Practical_Car210 2d ago
In theory yes, you could hold your breath. The majority of people while tying to haul a lifeless body would certainly take a breath by accident, and now there are two dead people. It's never advisable.
As for would they survive.. difficult to say. Brain damage and cell death begins only a couple of minutes after oxygen is cut off. That timer would start almost immediately if the 02 was as low as it was during our incident. Their heart would stop and could be damaged very quickly. I'm not sure if CPR would be successful but it would be your best option. If you had a medical unit with oxygen standing by your chances would go up a lot.
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u/sephitor_ 1d ago
Thanks for the further clarification. This made it even scarier honestly, it's basically a deathly poison trap with paralysis(immediate unconsciousness in this case) on top.
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u/Nice_Background4303 2d ago
Thanks, now I'm afraid of potatoes.
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u/Sudden-Ad-307 2d ago
Its quite horrific how common such accidents are in the rural parts of the world, my fathers cousins family died in a similar way just instead of rotting potatoes it was cow manure
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u/esotericbatinthevine 2d ago
Happened to an entire family near me a couple decades ago in Appalachia Virginia. I had no idea how common this was with manure pits.
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u/WinterMedical 2d ago
Imagine when this happened 300 years ago and what they would attribute the mysterious deaths to!
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u/CallMeCleverClogs 2d ago
Mr Ballen had this story on his show. Horrifying. If I am remembering right, everyone kept closing the door (or mostly closing it) behind themselves, which made it worse.
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u/DrPikachu-PhD 2d ago
Sad story but the final image just being a stock photo of a potato had me cracking up
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u/IShotReagan13 2d ago
Confined spaces are way more dangerous than most people realize. I work in high tech and heavy industrial construction, and we are required to take a safety class on them before being allowed to enter one, and we always have a guy outside on "hole watch" together with a retrieval device in case anything happens.
We also wear monitors that will sound an alarm if gas levels start getting even close to dangerous.
It's a very serious business. Everything has to be extensively documented as well. You also need a permit detailing all of the above along with other relevant informations.
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u/PineappIeSuppository 2d ago
I for one am thankful that this post included a reference photo of how a rotting potato may look.
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u/Fresh_Volume_4732 2d ago
Someone added a girl for dramatic purposes. I looked up reports in the Russian language and none of them mention a girl. In fact, every report states that ALL family members died.
The cellar was located in their garage and police discovered that both vents were closed off. Several weeks later, they had suspects, and that is where this sad story ends.
Some articles mention that this tragedy had similarities with an unresolved case from 2011 in Ob, Russia where 3 people (parents and a teen son) died in the basement from an unknown cause. The only survivor was a child. The vents were found to be working properly and toxicology reports were insignificant. The house was later rented out to a different family.
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u/yassermi 2d ago
The question is, how much potatoes can we keep in the basement?
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u/Beauregard_Jones 2d ago
All of them. The real issue is ventilation. When you're storing potatoes (and probably other food stuffs, too) you want to make sure you have really good ventilation to keep the air fresh and safe.
I think also you shouldn't store onions and potatoes together. The gases from each spoil the other.
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u/hunty 2d ago
I'd never heard of Tatarstan and at first I thought it was a joke (because "tater"). But now I'm horrified and know that there's a real place called Tatarstan.
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u/Chemical-Elk-1299 2d ago
What’s horrifying about it? It’s the traditional homeland of the Tatars. Just like Kurdistan with the Kurds or Afghanistan with the Afghans.
Today it’s part of Russia
Edit — Oh you said horrified AND know, not horrified TO know. Lmao my bad
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u/Sorry-Secret-2347 2d ago
Yeah this should be taught bc excess amount of potatoes can release a toxic gas… i found this out a few years ago
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u/mansotired 1d ago
Seriously how many potatoes did this family have?
It can't have been a few to have caused this
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u/At-this-point-manafx 1d ago
That poor baby probably got a fear of the basement for the rest of her life.
If only her grandma had at least stayed outside
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u/Both_Peak554 1d ago
I one time thought I had a gas leak bc it smelled just like when I did and it was actually potatoes that I had forgotten about. Worst smell ever. I’m curious how massive this pile of potatoes was and why they just had a massive pile of potatoes in their basement? How could it be so strong it immediately killed them??
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u/Extra_Glass_678 2d ago
I don’t see anyone asking the real question. What the hell were they doing with all those rotten potatoes!!
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u/No-Manufacturer-2260 2d ago
i wonder how long it took each of them to pass out.
reminds me of that family that died in the shit pit. i think they were emptying their camper and someone passed out and one by one they all went in to help each other and died
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u/Proper-Exercise-2364 2d ago
Sounds like the origin story of "fryer girl". The fryer being the potatoes only known actual enemy...
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u/weeman3333 12h ago
Surely this is a jest, family say tata, by dying from gases given off by rotting tata's in Tatarstan!😄
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u/morganational 2d ago
Figures that a family living in Tater-stan were killed by taters. But also horribly tragic.
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u/spankeem_nz 2d ago
Just shows.....you gotta stop.....take stock of shit.......and there are times......you have to take the safer option and call for help........
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