It is always very interesting for me to listen to people with whom, according to them, strange, even a little creepy stories happen. Constantly trying to understand what is true or fiction or a figment of imagination and fantasy. With one of my acquaintances, various mystical stories have always happened and are happening, as it sounds from his lips, listen:
Mother's father, after being dispossessed by the Soviet regime, flatly refused to work for the offenders on the collective farm. With a sewing machine in his arsenal, he decided to feed his family through it. Thus, he traveled from village to village and sewed rather simple clothes for people from sheepskin and cloth. Sheepskin coats, Armenian women, short fur coats all came out from under his skillful hands. He spent all his time mostly not at home, traveling from village to village, in order to earn his daily bread.
The grandfather came to the village, and in one house he could stay for a week, or even longer, until it was possible to sheathe all family members. He received money for his work, and people fed him all the time, then he lived with them, doing his job. The downside of making such money was the long absence of the owner's home. Often he had to return home late evenings, nights and even in the morning, if the road was long.
In bad weather, he spent the night in a haystack, then in the forest, under some kind of sprawling tree. In a word, anything happened. Arriving home, he told what kind of people he had to meet and what houses he visited. I really liked his stories at that time, but one of them especially struck me. Although I heard it as a small child, it is still fresh in my memory.
One day, in late autumn, my grandfather was hunting in the Mari villages and villages far from us. The way from there was not small. Having done his job, he decided to go home, and did not listen to the owners of the house, so as not to go into the night, but to spend the night with them. Hoping only for himself, and terribly missing his home, the grandfather dined with the customers, thanked them for their concern about him and went home in the evening, hoping to be there by nightfall.
It was not the first time he walked these paths, he knew, one might say, those places like the back of his hand. Therefore, I went with optimism to be home by night. But when twilight fell on the earth, the grandfather began to wander in seemingly familiar places.
And after some time of such useless wanderings, I finally realized that I got lost. He bustly began to look for landmarks familiar to him during the long years of hiking in those places, but all his searches did not end with anything, and the business did not bode well. Traces to the native village, as if someone covered it up.
Thus he wandered for a long time, it was already quite dark. He did not have a watch with him; it was clear from everything that it was somewhere around midnight. Then he noticed, near his feet, some kind of railway passes. I could not believe my eyes, as there was nothing like this in the vicinity for many miles in different directions. He did not have to think about this for a long time, since some strange light appeared in the distance that attracted his attention.
Promotional video:
And in the next split second, a steam locomotive with a small train, consisting of several cars, rushed past him. My grandfather knew from experience that after the train passed, the rails remained hot and could tremble for some time.
Leaning over, he decided to check whether this was so, but in the dark he could not find anything in the grass, at the place where the train was passing, the rails seemed to evaporate. “What kind of strange hallucinations?”, The grandfather thought, he felt really creepy from this, because he saw with his own eyes, and was completely sober. He began to pray to the Lord to find his way home as soon as possible.
After some more time, wandering in a similar way in the forest, he finally came out onto a well-rolled wide road. The grandfather was very happy about this, since that is a sure sign that such a road should lead him out of the forest. He stopped and wondered which side of this road should he go, where, in his opinion, his village could be?
Pondering this, he heard in the distance the clatter of hooves and the creak of an approaching cart, peering a little, saw that the truth was approaching him a horse-drawn carriage. The old man crossed himself, since he had not yet departed from the railway in the forest that he had dreamed of. With gestures and shouts he asked the carriage to stop, but she rushed past him without even noticing. I could not see the faces of the people sitting in it in the dark. Then he began to fear the truth, what the hell was going on in this forest? What is the place where continuous visual hallucinations occur?
Then the grandfather remembered how old beliefs say to behave in the forest in such situations: you need to take off your outerwear and hat, and put it all on the wrong side. I did so, and, as it turned out, very in time, as I was already standing on the edge of a huge ravine. A few more steps or careless movements and would have rolled into the abyss in the depths of the forest, and there, remember what they called, I would have broken my arms and legs and would not have been able to get out of it at all.
Thus, that night, there was no railway, and no horse-drawn carriage, all this was dreamed of by my grandfather, as if fornication in the forest had brought him to such a strange place. Grandfather quietly, backing away, descended from the edge of the ravine, and went on, having prayed, on his way. He came to the village as early as morning, and it's good that he is so alive and well. The whole day after that he talked about his nocturnal adventures, bewitching, and he himself did not completely believe in what was happening that night.