A. Slepnev reports from the city of Kirov:
A nightmarish story about which I want to tell you happened in the village of Sadyganovo, Kirov region. My relatives live there. It is from their words that I know about all the details of the incredible incident. Let me emphasize that my relatives are the most ordinary and at the same time very modest people, peasants and farmers. They cannot be attributed to that breed of people who love to lie in order to attract attention to themselves at least for a short time - so that everyone around them gasped and groaned, marveling at their amazing news, stories … If my relatives say - they say, it was really, so it really was. And the point
And there was this.
A. Slepnev's relatives lived and still live on the outskirts of the village. In the neighboring
I lived in a hut, but now one friendly family no longer lives there. The oldest in that family was an eighty-year-old man - short, thin, with a short gray beard. Everyone in the village knew he was a sorcerer. If someone fell ill in Sadyganovo, they first turned to him, a sorcerer, for help, and only then to a doctor. Yes, in fact, it only came to the doctor in rare cases. The old man whispered some conspiracies, gave the patient herbal infusions to drink, and the man, as a rule, soon recovered. The sorcerer knew how to do many other things. For example, make it rain. Or, another example, he always pointed out exactly the place in the forest where a cow is located, strayed from the herd, lost. Following his prompts, people went to the forest and found cattle at the indicated place … Well, and so on.
In other words, he was, apparently, a real sorcerer. A person endowed by nature with unique abilities - formidable in their mystery, absolutely, of course, incomprehensible.
And now the sorcerer died.
Well, they buried the old man, cried, as usual, at the commemoration and began to live on.
A few days after the funeral, the deceased returned to his house at midnight. The people in the house were awakened by a loud knock on the front door. None of them had yet even managed to get out of bed in order to go to the door and open it, when the door suddenly opened itself. An English lock, locked from the inside, clicked on it by itself. At the same time - also by itself - the bolt, located on the inside of the door, which immediately opened, slid off to the side with a characteristic creak. Yes, so abruptly, as if she was kicked.
And a dead man entered the house.
It was not some kind of hazy, vague ghost through which one could
see what was found behind him. A very real
person entered the hut in all respects. In very real clothes - in the same one in which he was put in the fob.
The only thing in his appearance that decisively distinguished him from living people was his face. It was yellow-waxy in color, that is, the way the deceased should have. And on his face, wide-open eyes shone like two bulbs. They were as if illuminated from the inside.
Seeing the dead man, the women and children in the house screamed wildly.
Not paying any attention to heart-rending screams, the native of the other world took several steps forward and froze in place. With a fixed gaze, he stared at one point in front of him. He stood for half a minute, grunted. Then he unhurriedly turned around and stomped back to the door, continuing to grunt in old age.
The door behind him - again by itself - slammed shut. The English lock clicked on it, closing. And the bolt, as if moved by an invisible hand, moved from its place and carefully drove into a metal hinge on the doorframe.
The witnesses of the incident examined all this with irrevocable clarity. Behind the walls of the hut, an almost full moon hung in the cloudless sky, and its bright light fell into the windows of the house.
Two young children, who watched this devilry as natural as possible with adults, started hysterical …
Exactly a day passed.
It was midnight again. And again the front door opened by itself - the dead sorcerer for the second time crossed the threshold of his former home. As before, his eyes glowed like lanterns, and his gaze was detached, meaningless, rested somewhere in space. The pupils in the eyes did not move.
This time, however, the deceased did not enter the house for half a minute, as it happened last night.
Grunting incessantly, he began to wander back and forth around the hut. It seemed that he did not see the people who were in it, and did not hear the crying and lamentations of children, who were completely dazed with horror. It is interesting to note that at the same time he either saw or somehow sensed household items in the room.
Wandering aimlessly around the house in the middle of the night, every time he carefully rounded the stool, when he approached her. Then he went around another stool. He walked around the table without touching
it. I never once touched my elbow to a wardrobe that stood against the wall. I never stumbled over the
boxes with all kinds of junk, which stood in chaotic disorder near the other wall.
In a word, the deceased was perfectly oriented in space, but at the same time, I repeat, he did not notice people. For him, they did not seem to exist at all.
However, this was not the most surprising. The most striking nuance of the second
visit of the dead man to his former earthly abode turned out to be an incomprehensible shift in the psyche of all the witnesses of the visit.
There are five witnesses. Two women, a man and two children.
How would you, the reader, act in their place? I think I will not be mistaken with the forecast if I say that you would, without hesitation for a second, rush at full speed out of the house - away from the nightmarish place along which the stranger runs back and forth from behind the grave board.
All five witnesses to his return to the world of living people behaved differently. All of them … unanimously forgot that there is a door in the hut through which one can hastily retreat from the house. During the second terrible night, none of them had the idea of running away. The thought, you see, is obvious, suggests itself, obviously arising from the circumstances that have arisen.
Instead of headlong rushing away from the revived deceased without looking back, the owners of the house climbed onto the Russian stove with the whole family - both adults and children … There is an impression that some unknown mysterious force has blocked the thought of running away from the house in their minds, brought up the idea of running away for brackets of their behavioral reactions to what is happening. Hence the conclusion is obvious: for some reason the dead man or the forces that controlled him needed people to stay in the house throughout the night.
Reader-city dweller, can you imagine the size of the floors of the village Russian stove? If not, then I bring to your attention that the length of this stove bench on any Russian stove never exceeds two meters, and the width is one and a half meters. It was on such a tiny site that five people sat all night in terrible cramped quarters, gripping with horror, pouring cold sweat.
And the dead man wandered and wandered around the hut - senselessly, haphazardly.
Dawn has begun. There was a crowing, as they say in villages, of the first
roosters - that is, the roosters, waking up, clearing their sleepy throats, gave a voice, notified
everyone and everyone around that it was already dawn, that a new day was approaching. Barely heard the
very, very first crowing of one of the first roosters, like a dead sorcerer, staggering tirelessly hour after hour around the hut, froze in place as if rooted to the spot. And then with a
decisive quick step he went to the door leading out of the hut. The door
opened by itself, the dead man stepped through the threshold, and the door slammed shut behind him …
- We need to seek help from the priest! cried the owner of the house, the sorcerer's son.
A few hours later, hand in hand with his worried wife, he arrived on a regular bus to the district center, where there was a working church.
- Father, help.
- And what, in fact, is the matter? the priest inquired in a businesslike manner.
“The dead man wanders around the hut at night,” the man said in response, frowning in annoyance, and turned to his wife: “Tell me everything yourself.
The woman, wringing her hands, burst into a stream of words. Having listened to her confession to the end, the priest changed his face and fervently crossed himself three times.
- The power of the cross is with us! - he announced in a hot whisper. - Here, good people, a bottle of holy water. Sprinkle it on all the corners and all the windows in the house, and most importantly, the door. And - goodbye. Go, go! I have a lot of things to do today.
No persuasion helped. The father categorically refused to visit the creepy house in which the dead man wanders at night, and read there any "cleansing prayers."
You have to understand that, I got scared.
The husband and wife returned home in frustrated feelings. And there, sighing, they did everything as they were ordered.
The next - the third - night has come. Exactly at midnight the lock on the door clicked. I drove off on it towards the bolt. The dead sorcerer entered the house again.
The children, of course, immediately howled with fear, and the women began to lament. And all the household members, pushing and pushing, climbed in a crowd on the Russian stove. This time, too, they completely "forgot" about the possibility of an alternative solution, much more effective from a psychological point of view - about the possibility of escape from public.
I will not repeat myself here. In short, the deceased behaved exactly the same as the
last time. And in the same way, as soon as the first roosters began to talk, he hastily left the house.
On the fourth night he did not enter the house. Again, strictly at midnight, a dead man appeared in
the courtyard in front of one of the windows of the hut - appeared suddenly, as if it had risen there from the ground.
The children who suddenly and amicably woke up at midnight were the first to notice him. Well, they
reacted accordingly. The dead man leaned his yellow-wax face to the
window pane, stood for a while as if in thought, and then recoiled from the window and
went to the shed, which was visible in the courtyard at some distance from the house.
People, who crouched in fear at the windows, saw - the dead sorcerer brought out the horse from the barn, which, by the way, he loved very much during his lifetime, cared for and cherished her. And he began to drive the horse
back and forth around the yard, patting the withers with his palm, stroking its sides. The horse, as they
say, did not lead the ear! I walked around the yard quietly and calmly, as if nothing had happened.
Dawn broke. The cock crowed. The dead man, startled, recoiled from the horse and
rushed away from the yard. As he walked away, he walked along the village street with a very hurried step, almost ran. And the horse remained standing between the barn and the hut …
On the fifth night the dead man entered the house again. And the familiar parsley was repeated: people are on the stove, the dead man dominates the house.
On the sixth night - the same thing.
On the seventh …
On the eighth …
On the ninth …
The owners of the house did not make a secret of the horror that was happening at night in their hut. The story
got publicized in the village. For a while, she became the main subject of gossip in
her.
The collective farm's administrative leaders took the owner of the house into a sharp turn. They say, immediately stop engaging in religious propaganda.
This whole chain of events has an extremely amusing ending, the background of
which is shrouded in darkness. We do not know how the owner of the house managed to convince the
angry bosses of the veracity of his words. Here, for example, we can assume that one of those bosses went to spend the night in a "house with a ghost." And there, to his own horror, he was personally convinced on the spot in the reliability of the testimony of his subordinate … Suddenly, the relatives of the late sorcerer were given a new house, where they hastily moved.
And the doors in the old one were boarded up with boards.
So that “haunted house” still stands with a boarded-up door, empty, uninhabited. His yard was densely overgrown with weeds.