PHOTOS: River In China Mysteriously Turns Bloody Red Overnight

 A waterway in eastern China has mysteriously turned a blood red color.

 A city woke up this morning to find its river running blood red... and no-one knows why.

Locals say at 4am the water flow was normal but by 6am it had turned a frightening shade of crimson.

An elderly resident who has lived by the river all his life says it has never happened before.

Industrial contamination has been ruled out because there are no chemical plants along it length.

Residents in Zhejiang province said the river looked normal at 5 a.m. Beijing time on Thursday morning.

Within an hour, the entire river turned crimson. Residents also said a strange smell wafted through the air.

“The really weird thing is that we have been able to catch fish because the water is normally so clear,” one local villager commented on China’s microblogging site Weibo.

 Inspectors from the Wenzhou Environmental Protection Bureau said they have not found the cause of the incident, although water samples seem to indicate the suspicious color was a result of illegal dumping in the river.

PHOTO: The river in Xinmeizhou village in eastern China's Zhejiang province quickly filled up with the red colored liquid which had a strange smell, according to villagers, July 25, 2014.

“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],” Jianfeng Xiao, Chief of the bureau told China News.  but sceptics were not convinced and social media sites were full of bizarre theories including one that it was the start of The Apocalypse.

 See more photos below