Somehow it has already become a tradition that all the noisy spirits and, of course, brownies are usually called barabashki. This name has already become a household name. But it once belonged to a specific spirit. Or a brownie. Or it is still unclear to whom, because this phenomenon has not yet been discovered and understood.
This name-term entered our life and became part of public consciousness in the middle of perestroika - in 1988-1989. The word "poltergeist", which is alien to the Russian language, is less popular and when asked what it means, many will answer without hesitation: a poltergeist is Barabashka's tricks.
And immediately everything becomes clear, because Barabashka's pranks were written a lot in the perestroika media. Through the efforts of journalists, the sensational news about the tricks of this character entered every house, into every apartment.
Having unexpectedly appeared, Barabashka became a truly all-Union celebrity in the fall of 1988. The action took place in a dormitory for young builders in Likhobory, Moscow. The hostel was located in an old four-storey brick house of solid construction. The "bad" apartment was located on the first floor, had three rooms and an extensive kitchen.
Three friends lived in it: twenty-year-old Tanya from Krasnodar, twenty-year-old Fluza from the town of Minyar, Chelyabinsk region, and eighteen-year-old Feruza from Kokand. It was her that Barabashka chose for contact.
The girls lived in the smallest cozy room. The other two rooms were empty.
On the evening of September 10, 1988, someone knocked on the door of their room. There was no one else in the apartment except them. The girls went out into the corridor, went to the door to the staircase, and examined the entire apartment. There was no one anywhere.
After a while, the knock was repeated, the door of the room began to open and close. The kettle whistled in the kitchen, although the girls turned it off. We ran to the kitchen, and the kettle was on.
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That evening, the poltergeist showed itself for the first time. But the conditions conducive to the outbreak developed much earlier. Feruza with her friends in Kokand was engaged in evoking spirits. She wondered, was interested in the future, asked the spirits questions, received answers. She did not know then that practicing spiritualism sometimes provokes a poltergeist. But this is not always enough, additional conditions are required.
Feruza faced difficulties with a change of place of residence, then failure in the entrance exams, work as a painter in a "surprisingly nasty" brigade, and other problems. In general, there was something to be discouraged from. Fortunately, there were reliable friends around all the time, who withstood the same difficulties. In addition, shortly before September 10, Galya, a countrywoman from Kokand, with whom they once summoned spirits, came to visit Feruza for several days. Did old memories awaken them?
Perhaps there was another reason that also contributed to the onset of the poltergeist: sometimes it is triggered, as it were, by the combined efforts of a person marked with a special seal and some unusual properties of the place or house where he found himself. After all, the strangeness began soon after the girls moved into the hostel of young builders.
Be that as it may, the next day in the evening again knocked on the door, the cursed door began to open by itself. The neighbor Yura, who was called to help, took a towel, twisted it with a tourniquet, put it on the jamb, and closed the door tightly. And then she literally raged, as if a hefty man was pounding on her from the other side! He wanted to blow the door to smithereens. When they took out the towel and opened the door, the rumble stopped.
The invisible guest did not break in the door, making it clear that he was correctly understood. The girls decided to talk to him, but how? Feruza read historical novels and knew that just like this, by tapping, the revolutionaries, imprisoned in different cells, talked among themselves. We decided to come to an agreement with the spirit like this: "We will ask you questions, and you, if the answer is yes, knock once, and negative - twice." The spirit knocked once - like he understood them and agreed.
Growing up in the "dead" Soviet years, when no one spoke or wrote about the poltergeist, the girls had never heard of anything like it. But maybe it turned out for the best: ignorance and freed them from fear of the supernatural and the inexplicable. They simply took what was happening for granted: in the apartment where the three of them had lived before, a fourth appeared. And the fact that this fourth one is invisible and incomprehensible is all the more interesting!
That is why, instead of trying to “study”, “analyze” him, as a mind infected with analytical reflection would do, they tried to simply make friends with this fourth person and live in peace with him.
And communication began. What the girls with the spirit talked about, what answers they received - information about this is fragmentary and sparse. It is only known that he answered quite reasonably, and, most importantly, even when they asked him about something that none of those present knew, his answers, as it turned out later, were accurate. By tapping, he even predicted the victory of the USSR Olympic football team and the future score of the match. It was possible to learn about the spirit itself, as far as possible, based only on the answers "yes" and "no", that it is a certain entity, a being, but not an adult, but, according to our standards, something like a teenager. He lives in a certain world where all others are like him, but he kind of “fell out” from there, “got lost” and does not know how to return.
Isn't this world, so different from ours and located somewhere "nearby", the world of the same parallel Universe about which theorists-physicists and mathematicians write?
The fact that he was a teenager was understandable: he was naughty like a child, threw slippers, rolled on the door, loved to turn on electrical appliances. When the music played, he pounded to the beat like a professional drummer. He was nicknamed - Barabashka.
Having become, as it were, the fourth inhabitant of the apartment, Barabashka began to take an active part in the common life. According to Feruza, more than once, at her request, he turned off and on the iron, inserting and pulling the plug from the socket. If the kettle was boiling in the kitchen, and the friends forgot about it, Barabashka would certainly remind them with a knock. And several times in the mornings, they even found clumsily prepared sandwiches in the kitchen - this was also Barabashka.
The girls told their foreman N. Yu. Bukanov, deputy of the regional council. At first he did not believe: “They’re lying, eh ?!”, and then, after talking to Barabashka and receiving answers from him to the questions “How old is my daughter?”, “How many years have I been working as a foreman?”, The man contacted the TV program “Obvious - incredible. The girls and the foreman decided that scientists, journalists would come, sort out the situation, explain to everyone from the TV screen what was actually happening here.
Of course, for the TV journalists the call of the foreman sounded like a gift of fate. The film crew of "Obvious - Incredible" arrived at lightning speed. (Then in this program was shown the story about Barabashka, which caused an incredible stir.)
From the very first speeches with stories about the mysterious phenomenon in the press and on the radio, it led to the smell of sensation. Control over the situation was lost.
From the beginning of October, the life of the girls turned into a nightmare: there was no end of visitors. After all, Barabashkin's knocks were heard not only by dozens of witnesses, but also by millions of TV viewers.
In the evening on September 28, Candidate of Technical Sciences Valentin Fomenko, Chairman of the Commission for Poltergeist Research of the Bioenergoinformatics Committee of the Union of Scientific and Engineering Societies of the country, and Igor Vinokurov, co-chairman of this commission and writer, were in the hostel. (Later, V. T. Isakov, an employee of the USSR Academy of Sciences, was also involved in the phenomenon, who was charged with studying the phenomenon in his service, which, however, completely coincided with his intentions.)
At about eight, knocks were heard on the floor, they came from under Feruza's feet. I. Vinokurov asked Feruza, Barabashka's friend, to take her legs off the floor in order to eliminate the suspicion that she was clicking the joints of her legs. But the knocking did not stop. And now they heard from the mattress of the bed on which Feruza was sitting. Vinokurov also sat down on the bed and felt distinct point-like touches inside the mattress. Fomenko, sitting on the bed, felt the same. Looking under the bed, they made sure that there was nobody and nothing there.
Monitors were installed in the apartment, which actually recorded the movement of objects, knocking and responses received by knocking. True, Barabashka himself could not be recorded with an ordinary TV monitor. When a monitor operating in the range of night vision was installed, it seemed to receive an image (or outline) of a certain creature resembling a person, about a meter tall.
After that, a volunteer, a researcher, who wished to personally observe the phenomenon, was placed in the apartment where Barabashka lived for one night. He enjoyed it. In the morning, the linen in which he slept was cut like a razor, from the sides from top to bottom. The cut line was then studied in detail under an electron microscope. The results are unknown.
This story ended with the fact that in addition to the researchers, the curious rushed into the hostel, some wanted to arrange an excursion to the evil spirits. Crowds of people, including journalists, rushed to the meeting with the ghost at the entrance to the hostel. Several articles were published almost immediately: in the newspaper Trud, Moskovskoy Komsomolets, Stroitelnaya Gazeta, etc. It was not easy to work in such conditions, and the researchers, convinced that really "someone" was knocking, left.
The crowds did not thin out, it became absolutely impossible to live. In the end, someone, apparently from dissatisfied that they were not allowed in the night, broke the windows in the hostel.
But here's what's interesting. Nothing has passed since those events - a little over twenty-five years, but further details of this story are practically unknown. It is only known that in order to continue monitoring it was decided to move the girls to a specially equipped room. True, this was done only after Barabashka himself tapped in response that he agreed to move with them. When the “Volga”, which took away her friends, was driving through the streets of Moscow, Feruza asked: “Barabashka, are you with us?” A blow of such force followed in the bottom that, according to the driver, the car jumped and he himself almost released the steering wheel.
As a result, documentaries were made about this story, tons of articles were written, but the mystery of knocking remains the same mystery. And this is provided that witnesses and scientists have been meeting with poltergeist knocks for hundreds of years. Researchers have not yet been able to tell about the nature and causes of knocking almost nothing sensible.
A lot of hypotheses were put forward. According to one of them, Feruza is to blame for everything: she allegedly cracks and clicks the joints of the foot or toes, and the floor amplifies the sound. But the knocks were recorded on the street near the hostel, and Feruza and her friends were in the room at that time.
Where the girls were taken, where did Barabashka go with them, who is studying him and what they managed to learn from him about the world, where he supposedly came from - today there is no answer to any of these questions. As there is no answer, what is a poltergeist and is it possible to classify the Barabashka (and other barabashka of which there are a huge number of them today) as a poltergeist?
Or are they the same brownies? Or are they creatures from parallel worlds? Or is it perfume? Or is it some kind of entity from our world, its original inhabitants?