In folk stories (stories about a real incident), incidents with evil spirits in the Rosstan are often mentioned. The archaic word "grow" means an intersection of paths, a crossroads of roads.
According to the folklorist Pomerantseva: "The meeting takes place there at midnight." Maximov reports: "The crossroads is a favorite place of evil spirits." One of the informants of the folklorist Zinoviev warned: "You can't go to bed at the Rosstan!" And then he brought a terrible incident from his own sad practice of spending the night at intersections.
In another Siberian bylich it is said: “If you lie down on the roads of the Rosstan, he will drive him out, will not let you sleep.
The theme of miracles at the intersections of forest or steppe roads is one of the most popular themes of bylich folklore.
In the Rosstan, if you believe the popular rumor, you can supposedly improve your shaky health on another good day. According to legends, the crossroads - the habitat of evil spirits - has around it, in modern terms, a certain specific energy background.
"Another growth at midnight, sometimes, attracts." Translating this statement into modern language, she radiates something from herself in the middle of the night, "attracting".
It is from this mysterious "power" emanating from the crossroads at night that one can, say bylichs, benefit for oneself: "recharge" with that "power".
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Afanasyev reports about Russian peasants suffering from night blindness, who went out at midnight to grow up and sat down there in the hope of seeing.
Over the centuries, Russian peasants have repeatedly tried to identify, to discover some kind of system in the "healing work" of the Rosstan. Alas, the system was not detected; it has not been found to this day. Rosstan "works" according to the roulette principle.
Sometimes she cures night blindness in the blink of an eye. Or, another example, infertility in a woman on the night of her first visit to the "inviting crossroads." And it happens that the cure for a particular disease occurs only after the tenth or even one hundred and tenth visit to the Rosstan.
But more often the “sitting on the Rosstani” ends in nothing - they have no effect on the well-being of those sitting. Is it because not everyone has the patience to come here night after night, week after week, month after month in the hope that one of the nights will suddenly grow up and "work"?
Maksimov described a way of joking mockery of evil spirits. "All you have to do is go out with an Easter egg at the crossroads and roll the egg along the road at midnight."
Devils out of the ground with fright and jump out. They will start to writhe. Stand silently in place and watch their cramps; the devils will not notice you, having rolled the egg, if you will not move.
Maksimov also has another description of the contact experiments of rural youth in the Rosstan. On New Year's Eve, guys and girls gather at the crossroads for fortune telling. “They sit down,” writes Maksimov, “here in a circle, outline themselves in a circle, cover themselves with a white linen tablecloth and listen intently to the silence of a frosty winter night”.
This type of fortune-telling has long been denoted in Russian bylichki by the term “listen to grow”. Boys and girls - here's another old idiom - "go to listen."
From century to century, there was a belief among the Russian people that in the Rosstan - especially if it "attracts"! - you can hear a voice coming directly from the ground. This voice will tell the fortuneteller about his future. The whole essence of fortune-telling at the Rosstan, in fact, boiled down to attempts to obtain futurological information.
There are a wide variety of divination methods. Among them there are those from which the hair stands on end. For example, messages about fortune telling by the "lying cross" method at midnight at the intersection of forest roads in a circle outlined with a wooden stick. Well, try to lie all night on damp earth in the night darkness in a deep forest, every minute expecting something out of the ordinary to happen …
By the way, “lying with the cross” is not just lying, but a procedure during which one should “call out the unclean one”. Historical precedents are known when people who went to spend the night at the Rosstan by the method of "lying on the cross" were found dead there in the morning.
To consider the stories about “lying on the cross” as an idle invention of the mind, human fantasies, is to look past the main thing in them - the striking similarity of the reference signals of such stories told in rural areas practically throughout Russia, from the White Sea to the Far East.
The circumstances of coming into contact with the growth are different. The essence of the contact, its technology, is the same. And here's an important detail. Every time in the story it is emphasized: “It was with me. It was there and then,”that is, the dependence on real life here, in my opinion, is elementary direct.
Therefore, real everyday experience was imprinted in the stories.