In the nineties, my young colleagues and I used to go to Baikal every year on vacation.
The years were hungry, harsh, and we, young teachers, had no money for resorts, so we camped out savagely.
Once again we went out in a small group, we were seven people, and we had two tents, a guitar, some food, and a good mood.
When we arrived at Baikalsky Surf, we set up our tents, cooked a cheap dinner, sat around the fire and sang songs.
Our guys were playing guitar very well, the instrument changed hands, and we sang as a choir or individually. The mood was lyrical, utter romance: Baikal, buzzing nearby, the glow of the fire, the sound of the guitar, friends singing your favorite songs, the forthcoming vacation!
Eh, I even envy myself, a young educator from the nineties with her friends, ah, how sincere and pure we were then!
We had sat around the fire until two in the morning, and then we decided that we would meet the sunrise at Baikal!
We had two more hours to endure. Those were difficult two hours, we felt sleepy and it was getting cold.
And then the unstable began to run away quietly into the tent. I personally decided that it was not my first sunrise, nor would it be my last, so I better go to sleep!
curled up snugly in the tent, I fell asleep, waking up because the tent, where three people were already sleeping, was impudently wriggling like a snake, Katya was crawling into it. And it climbed in the middle. I pretended to be asleep, spread my elbows and did not let her in, thinking:
- What more, to give their heated, cozy place!
But then I literally felt the waves of fear that came from her friend, she was not seriously frightened and I put up with her, letting her in the middle.
I also sensed that her feet were wet. But it was too late. There was no way to get Katerina out of the middle, she was "lying to death"! After talking to her, my neighbor and I fell asleep. In the morning we interrogated Katya with extreme vigilance:
- Where were you? What was she so scared of?
We laughed at her story, we either believed her or not, but joked about it until lunch.
And Katya told us that she stayed alone near the fire and decided to meet the sunrise on Baikal to the detriment of everybody. She went to the shore, which was 15 meters away from the tent, stood, thoughtfully looking into the distance.
Suddenly she saw a woman in a red raincoat nearby and decided to get acquainted and meet the sunrise with her.
Apparently, she lost control of herself for a while, because she came to her senses because her legs were cramping and she was knee-deep in Baikal! And the woman in red was as far away from her as she had been in the first moment, and she also beckoned Katya to her with her hand.
As if hypnotized, Katerina followed her into the water. Suddenly she was horrified to realize that the woman was floating above the water, and instead of her face, she had a white circle, like a plate or pancake, and a hood over her head. Terrified, Katya realized that she was being lured into the water, and with a tremendous effort she turned away from the woman.
When she stopped seeing her in front of her eyes, she felt a slight relief and ran toward the shore.
You understand that running in cold water, being knee-deep in it, and when your legs cramp up, is very difficult.
When she ran out of the water to the shore, she heard laughter and exclamation behind her:
- Naive!
We were taken aback by her story, but then a local grandfather came to us and offered to buy fresh fish.
When he heard Katya's story, he said:
- The girl is spoiling again, she hasn't drowned anyone yet this year, we'll soon be looking for a drowned woman.
It turned out, that several years ago a young girl had died in this place. She drowned in shallow water. A lot of gossip in the village, whether she drowned her unfaithful lover, or she herself drowned, being pregnant from him, or whether it was a tragic set of circumstances.
But since then, every year in June, a young girl dies in this place, the body of the drowned, as a rule, are found a month and a half later.
It is said that this is how the first girl takes revenge for her unhappy love for someone: she lures the girls into the water, takes over their astral body and lives in that body for a month or so, then leaves it and looks for a new victim a year later.
Needless to say, we ran from there so hard that our heels sparkled! We even folded our tents into tubes without taking them apart, threw things into bags without distinguishing where - whose, we poured soup out to the dogs, and ran at a sprint speed to the electric train!
Next time I went to Baikalskoye Priboy only when I realized that I - not a thin and ringing girl, but a respectable lady, and hardly anyone will be interested in my frail body.
Believe it or not, it happens sometimes in Buryatia...
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