It was the 1950s. I got a job as a teacher in a new, literally recently opened kindergarten. The kindergarten was not ordinary, but specialized - for children with developmental delay. There were four groups in total, each with 12 children. The children were in the garden 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, and only went home on weekends. Therefore, sometimes I had to work at night. Usually six people remained on duty - two nannies, two educators, a watchman and a nurse.
As I remember now, it happened in early October. After putting the children to bed, we went to have some tea at the nurse's. The time was approaching midnight. We chatted about this and that. Suddenly there was a roar of such intensity that it seemed like a couple more seconds - and I would go deaf. Then the hum slowly began to fade, but did not disappear completely, but seemed to recede into the background, creating a kind of background. In less than a second, all the doors in the building began to shake. The closed ones were shaking - it seemed that they were now flying off their hinges - and the open doors closed abruptly. With fright, we could not even move.
When the numbness subsided, and everything around had calmed down a little, I and two nannies rushed to check the children. To our surprise, no one even woke up, everyone was snoring peacefully. The nightmare seemed to be over. But that was not the end - in a few minutes everything resumed with renewed vigor. In addition, we heard wild laughter, which was gradually replaced by crying and screaming. It seemed that a crowd of people were running along the corridors, howling and making inarticulate, heartbreaking sounds. All voices merged into a single cacophony, making the hair stand on end. It was unbearably scary …
We huddled together, hiding behind each other. Some were crying, some were praying. Our only man, a security guard, overcame the fear, called the police. I don't know how he explained what was happening to them, but they arrived surprisingly quickly. The law enforcement officers could not get inside, as the doors refused to open at all. The service dog whined and, tail between his legs, hid behind the employees' legs. The doors were still pounding furiously, and the voices did not stop. The police were powerless to do anything.
It seemed to me that it took an eternity before everything stopped. All the doors swung open in one fell swoop, the voices and the hum disappeared. For a long time, the stunned policemen did not dare to cross the threshold of the ill-fated kindergarten. A little later, we walked around the whole building, examined every corner of it. They found nothing, of course. The police threw up their hands and left, and we stayed to solder each other with valerian. Probably, due to our youth, we quickly came to our senses and soon remembered what had happened with smiles.
To tell the truth, it was far from the last such night in this garden. I soon quit, but then former colleagues told me that they suffered for a long time, even somehow started to get used to it. Rumors spread throughout the area, parents began to take their children. It all ended thanks to the priest from the local church (when he found out about everything, he immediately volunteered to help). As soon as he consecrated the garden, everything stopped.
As it turned out later, the area where the garden was built was a kind of cemetery. During wartime, the Germans buried the bodies of Soviet soldiers in this place, and not all of these graves were discovered.