There is a small mansion near Baumanskaya street. Its red-brick walls now house a police stronghold and catering establishments, and once within its walls students trained to become engineers worked on drawings.
The building at different times belonged to different institutions, but if students happened to stay in it for the night, they would tell the same story that the watchmen sometimes dared to tell. When the clock was one minute before twelve o'clock in the morning, footsteps were heard in the long corridor. An unbearably bright glow appeared under the doors. The students, prepared to sacrifice their lives dearly, using paper knives and compasses as weapons, listened in horror as the footsteps stopped at the door. Then the lights went out, and there was no more sound.
One girl dared to look out into the corridor right after everything had calmed down and lost consciousness, and when she regained consciousness, she saw nothing for fifteen minutes.
They say that in the 19th century the house belonged to a certain barber, who was also a famous person in the underworld. He loved his beautiful wife with a morbid passion and was jealous accordingly. Once, in a fit of jealousy, he killed her with a straight razor. It was her ghost who allegedly appeared in this house.
Where Manezhnaya Square is located today, there was once a Moiseevsky women's monastery. It ceased to exist even during the reign of Empress Catherine II. The underground archaeological museum, which is located nearby and reopened its doors to visitors after renovation, stores some of the items found during the excavations of this monastery. Museum employees said they saw strange ghostly figures in the halls where these things were kept.
During archaeological excavations, which were carried out in 1995 at Manezhnaya Square, many graves of both nuns and women who lived in the almshouse at the monastery were discovered. Some bodies were found untouched by decay. Rumors immediately spread about both the holiness and the obsession of those women. An aspen stake was stuck in the stomach of one of them, who lived in an almshouse.
KUZNETSOV KONSTANTIN