It is a pretty disturbing thing to wake up and discover the river you have been living beside all your life has turned blood-red overnight. It is difficult to say which would be a more disturbing hypothesis: that the river has been turned red due to massive bloodshed or due to massive chemical dumping.

Both scenarios are terrible, and it seems unlikely that there would be bloodshed massive enough so sudden that it would cause the river to turn THIS red…

So while we wait for test results to come back from water samples taken by experts, we can only hypothesise that chemical waste has been dumped somewhere upstream.

According to China Radio International, the river began to redden at 6 a.m. local time, baffling residents who have spent their entire lives in the town of Wenzhou in east China’s Zhejiang Province.

Locals complained that they could no longer fish in the river, though, even if they could, it’s hard to imagine eating the catch.

“The river’s color [sic] was normal yesterday,” another resident told Shanghaiist. “It’s really scary to see the clear river turned into ‘blood water’ in only a night.”

China Radio International reported that officers from the Wenzhou Environmental Protection Bureau took samples to determine the cause of the alarming color shift. It’s suspected that people dumped red pollutants into the water somewhere upstream, according to Shanghaiist.

According to ABC, Jianfeng Xiao, chief of the Wenzhou bureau, told China News, “We suspect that somebody dumped artificial coloring in the water because he thought the typhoon yesterday would cause heavy rain, and nobody would notice [the color].” He added, “It turned out there wasn’t heavy rainfall yesterday, so the evidence is left behind.”

Full story and more pics available from Mashable.