The ghosts of St. Petersburg are not a topic for an article, but for a horror novel. Here, they say, they saw the strict Nicholas I in the Hermitage, and the shy Nicholas II in the Winter Palace, and Catherine the Great and her wife Peter III - in the Chinese Palace, but in different rooms.
But still, the two "main" ghosts of the City on the Neva are the Emperor Paul, killed by the conspirators, and, of course, Peter the Great himself.
Pavel Petrovich, paranoidly afraid of an attempt on his life, built a real citadel - the Mikhailovsky Castle. In just four years, he built a fortress, which was completely impossible to enter unnoticed.
But trouble lay in wait for the autocrat inside. Twelve officers, led by Nikolai Zubov and Leonty Benningsen, burst into the emperor's bedroom. Pavel was beaten, hit in the temple with a gold snuffbox and strangled with a scarf - it's hard to say what caused his death.
The conspiracy was inspired by Nikita Panin and Peter Palen, who were suspected of being bribed by Great Britain. Since then, the ghost of Paul the First allegedly wanders the Mikhailovsky Castle.
Anna Dolgareva / Ridus.ru
- Pavel does not walk in Mikhailovsky. I work at the castle. Everyone is talking about this, except for the workers of our museum, - the guide Roman Vezenin, who works in the Mikhailovsky Castle, says with annoyance.
However, it would be interesting to listen to an alternative version too? I turned to the guide Victoria Mikhailovna Musatova to hear more about Pavel.
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“Let's agree: we talk as if all these ghosts are reality,” I asked.
Victoria Mikhailovna agreed. And she told what she knows about the legends of the Mikhailovsky Castle.
- The ghost wandering around the Mikhailovsky Castle portrays the emperor. But it depicts exactly - after all, this cannot be the ghost of Pavel Petrovich himself! The emperor was a deeply devout man. Nobody questioned his religiosity. In the Gatchina Palace, where he prayed, kneeling for hours, there were even notches from his knees. Such a believer, even with a violent death, could not turn into a ghost, all the legends about otherworldly entities speak about this.
They say that four ghosts live in the Mikhailovsky Castle. And seventeen more come to visit. They arrange balls, dance until the morning, - said the guide.
But what about the abundant evidence? After all, more than one book describes how the emperor with a candle approached the window in the corner room of Mikhailovsky …
- Reliably, however, it is known about one "ghost" of this castle, - says Victoria Mikhailovna. - There were many eyewitnesses who swore: in front of their eyes, a candle floated through the air to the window, burned for a while, then moved away again.
But this "ghost" was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, who was then studying at the Engineering School, which was then located in the castle. There was a strong blow from the window and he, wrapped in a blanket and holding a candle, came to close it. In those years he had to work at night: during the day he wandered around St. Petersburg and collected human stories, and at night he wrote. The study, of course, suffered from this: somehow he drew a fortress for offset, in which there was not a single entrance.
However, the legends of St. Petersburg are not filled with Paul alone. The main pillar of mystical beliefs is the founding king himself, the great emperor Peter.
They say that Paul himself saw Peter's shadow shortly before his death, and the shadow addresses his great-grandson with a warning. But even such a titan as dead Peter cannot change predestination. Paul is killed. And Peter continues to appear now in one, now in another corner of the city, which he fed with his own blood and the blood of the murdered Swedes.
There are legends that during the Great Patriotic War, the Bronze Horseman monument was covered with forests, covered with sandbags, and already freeing, they saw the Star of the Hero, drawn in chalk on Peter's chest. This is due to the belief: they say, as long as Peter is in his place, the city has nothing to fear.
Anna Dolgareva / Ridus.ru
However, not all beliefs about the tsar-autocrat are so life-affirming. Victoria Musatova says: in her youth, she had to get to know this legend very closely:
- The ghost of Peter is an integral part of the legends about St. Petersburg. She even touched me in due time. It was a long time ago, my friend and I were not even eighteen then. She was very beautiful, feminine, lived with a boy from the age of sixteen, if not earlier … And so she began to tell me about strange dreams. As if the ghost of Tsar Peter flew into her window. And at first he invited her to play cards. She lost.
She told me this like a fairy tale, and, of course, she could not really believe in anything like that. But about a year later, she came out of the twenty-third floor window.
Well, in the works of the great poet Alexander Pushkin, the shadow of Peter also appears as an ambiguous character.
But without this shadow, the image of a city that grew up on human bones among swamps and water would be incomplete.
Anna Dolgareva