Skeleton Lake

Roopkund Lake, the so-called Skeleton Lake, sits more than 16,000 feet up in India’s Himalayas, and every summer the melting ice reveals the bones of hundreds of people. When a forest ranger stumbled onto them in 1942, British officials feared a secret Japanese invasion, and local legend blamed a goddess and a storm of deadly hail. Then a DNA study turned up something no one saw coming: people who should never have been on that mountain at all.