Lake Nyos - The Night 1,746 People Died in Their Sleep
On the night of August 21st, 1986, a small crater lake in northwestern Cameroon took a breath — and let it out.
There was no fire. No flood. No wound on a single body. By morning, 1,746 people and 3,500 head of livestock were dead across the valley below Lake Nyos, lying in their doorways and their beds with the cooking pots still stacked beside them and the houses still standing. The survivors woke into a landscape with nothing left to point at.
What came out of that lake was invisible, silent, and heavier than air — and it had been building in the black water for four hundred years.
But the…
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