Legends say that witches and sorcerers, even after death, often do not find peace and can return to the world of the living.
Perhaps such stories took place in reality, as they were reflected in the tales of different peoples, surprisingly similar to one another.
Gogol created his "Evenings on a Farm Near Dykanka" not only with the help of his own imagination, but also on the basis of old Ukrainian folklore, filled with superstitious fear of otherworldly forces that sometimes can take on a human form.
One of the most famous stories of the writer is Viy. Few of us in childhood did not shake with horror when we read about how the deceased witch rises from the coffin to destroy the unfortunate student Homu Brut!
I remember that we had such a game in childhood, apparently based on the same "Viy". Several children gathered, some (usually girls) lay motionless on the bed, and the rest, standing around, began to read in grave voices over the "deceased" a conspiracy: "Pannochka washed … Who will bury?" "Let the devils bury!" someone cried out. And then "the deceased came to life", briskly jumping out of bed and frightening the players. Although it was all for fun, the very atmosphere of the game seemed somewhat irrational, not conducive to fun.
Meanwhile, the Russian folklorist A. N. Afanasyev tells a folk tale about a priest's son, who accidentally watched as the royal witch daughter took off her head and then put it back on. The boy told everyone about what he had seen, and the princess soon died of an unknown illness, before her death she ordered that the priest read the psalter over her coffin.
Further, the plot unfolds exactly as in Gogol: the reader outlines himself in a circle, the corpse rises from the coffin at midnight, etc. True, everything ends happily thanks to a certain old woman who taught the boy how to behave in this situation. The princess is found overturned in a coffin and an aspen stake is hammered into her chest (as should be done with black sorcerers).
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A similar episode can be found in the "Golden Book of Fairy Tales" by the Czech writer Bozena Nemcova.
The king and queen had no children. In despair, they turned to the devil for help. Daughter Lyudmila was born. At the age of 17, she died unexpectedly, becoming before this black as coal. A guard of soldiers was posted at the coffin, but every night the guard was found torn to pieces.
Only the shepherd's son Bohumil managed to cope with the princess-witch, who, on the advice of an unknown elder, performed a ritual with a magic circle. Like Gogol's, candles go out here, all kinds of evil spirits rush around the coffin, the deceased comes to life, and all this continues for exactly three nights. But the end is good: Bogumil marries Lyudmila, who, it turns out, is not dead, just an evil spirit has entered her.
Why not assume that there is some truth in this tradition, transmitted with various variations? Somewhere, once upon a time, a certain young man or teenager (possibly studying in a clerical institution) accidentally discovered the secret of the daughter of a high-ranking person (lady, princess), who was engaged in witchcraft, and somehow became the cause of her physical death.
Further - an attempt at posthumous revenge: she tries to torture him with the methods of black magic, he, possessing primitive spiritual knowledge or taught by someone, uses white magic.
The extinguished candles and the appearance of horrors can be explained using the laws of bioenergetics - the witch uses the radiation of the lower astral and dark astral entities for her own purposes. Thus, the narrative is by no means devoid of logic. But what kind of ending awaited the protagonist in fact is unknown.
But fiction is fiction, and there are quite real examples of "return" from the other world. So, in 1898 a strange story happened to a teacher from the village of Zaroshchi, Tula province. The teacher fell ill, and the doctors could not help him.
Despite the fact that he considered himself a rather enlightened person, our hero nevertheless decided to turn to a medicine man who lived in the neighboring village of Protasovo. He, after listening to the patient's complaints, handed him two bags of dried herb and a bottle with some kind of medicine, and did not even take payment.
On the way back, the teacher met a neighbor and told him about his visit to the healer. The man looked at him in surprise and crossed himself: "Did you go to the cemetery to see him, or what, to remember?" "How? - the interlocutor was taken aback. - I was at his house! “Why, he died a week ago! I myself saw how they carried him to the churchyard …”.
Not believing the peasant, the teacher decided to return just in case and find out everything. However, the hut, where he had been just a couple of hours ago, was boarded up. Nobody seems to have lived here. The medicine man's neighbors confirmed that he had died. But if the teacher was visited by a hallucination, then where did the bags and the bottle of "medicine" come from?
The Slavic peoples had a belief that if, after the death of a sorcerer or a vampire, someone from his family mentioned his name, he could return to his home. This belief formed the basis of Alexei Tolstoy's story "The Family of a Ghoul", based on which a feature film with modern realities was staged in 1990.
But fiction is one thing, and reality is another. Here is what a terrible case that allegedly took place in reality is described by the famous researcher of the paranormal, Aleksey Priyma.
It happened several decades ago in the village of Sadyganovo, Kirov region. There lived a family whose head was known as a sorcerer. When he died, he was properly buried and remembered. And a few days later, exactly at midnight, all the locks in the house opened by themselves, and the dead man entered with a yellow-wax face and eyes sparkling like red-hot coals. In appearance, he seemed to be a very real person.
The women and children screamed, and the dead man stood there, staring straight ahead, and headed for the exit. The locks and bolts behind it closed themselves again.
The next night, the sorcerer reappeared and paced the house, and has returned every night since.
There were five people in the house: two women, one man and two children. And they behaved in such a situation more than strange. Shaking with fear, the whole family, instead of leaving the house or at least calling for help, climbed onto the stove and there, in cramped quarters, waited for the visits of a native from the other world.
This went on for many nights in a row. Everything stopped only when the management of the collective farm provided the family with new housing, and the old hut was nailed down with boards.
Irina Shlionskaya
