It so happened that I spent this summer in the country house as a patient in a free-regime rehabilitation clinic. To put it simply, I had surgery on the ligaments in my shoulder joint and practically spent two months as a greenhouse cucumber. Of course I was not allowed to do anything active, but to walk, sit and talk slowly.
That's when my long-forgotten idea of shaking up the locals for anything mysterious and mystical surfaced. Starting with my peers, I almost instantly heard about my psychological instability and where I was supposed to be with such questions.
But you can't stop us that easily! And I, as a Russian somewhere on the approach to Berlin, out of the last adequate forces went to one of the local oldaaaarenkii (well, ohooooo old grannies).
Yes, I know it's not nice to torment the elderly. But in my defense, I can say that I went to that conversation with a cake and a bottle of port (grandmother was a survivor - in World War II was running through the local forests guerrilla). So she told me (to her credit - she broke down for a long time, but I am also the daughter of an investigator) this story.
Our village is at the junction of Smolensk and Moscow regions. Nearby are the Bryansk and Tula forests. In these places during the Great Patriotic War there were very fierce and bloody battles. And to this day in the woods are found a large number of graves, equipment and abandoned dugouts.
At the very edge of the village stands the house of one of the local foresters, and this grandmother was his wife. They have lived in the village all their lives and remember everything about the war. As he and his family recounted, the Germans had set up a camp in the woods behind his house in those days, and his house was used as a communications post and housing for the commanders.
It all started, she said, with a knocking in the basement. It was as if someone had been walking around in there. At first they blamed it on a cat and stopped letting him in the house. But the knocking still didn't stop. Then they came up with the idea that it was the wind. And then they settled down. In time, the banging stopped. For about two weeks. After a while they began to hear knocking and creaking again, but this time from the window in the hall (yes, that's how their house was set up). According to Lena's grandmother (that's her name), the creaking and tapping was like when a person slowly walks on old planks. Almost every night either she or her husband went out to see who was walking around. And in the end, after a week of such night vigils, they just burned church candles in the house and sprinkled holy water on the corners.
It helped. True only for a while.
The events described above lasted throughout the summer.
With the advent of fall, sometime in October, according to my grandmother's words, some very strange things began to happen. Through the windows they observed lights coming out of the woods, several times they saw a man's figure in their house, and yes - there were constant creaks, rustles, and footsteps. Eventually - they moved to live at her family's house, just to be away, as the woodsman (her husband) had begun to get very sick since these events began.
And things developed very quickly from there. After a few days in the new place, her husband had a dream. In it, they saw a young guy in a Soviet military uniform standing over him, whispering something, pointing to the corner of their old house. They repeated the ritual with the holy water again and the dreams stopped. After a while they returned to the old house. And exactly on the first night, the forester saw the guy again. Only now not in a dream. And he didn't see him alone.
As Grandma Lena tells us, they woke up to all the pots falling off the stove. When they jumped up, they noticed a man's silhouette in the corner of the house. They could see very well, everything but his face. The guy was standing there pointing to the corner of the house.
It was hard not to believe.
First thing the next morning, they went to the cellar. The forester dug out that corner and found a pile of bones and half-rotten clothes. When the district officer came, he had already dug out six skulls, a pile of bones and clothes with dog tags. The people from the patriotic organization were summoned, and the fate of the bones was on their conscience.
The only thing this story so undermined Lena's grandmother's husband that he died two months later of severe heart failure. Stress and fear undermined a perfectly healthy and strong man of 55 years.
Grandma Lena returned to her family home and has been living with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren for 30 years.
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