Folk tales may have a very real basis. At least, if you believe the stories of some eyewitnesses, then literally next to us there is a strange world where "unknown animals" roam, there is a "hut on chicken legs" in which "Baba Yaga" lives …
“Lightning struck the trees that surrounded the road in a dense formation, reflected in the asphalt, wet from the rain. One of the flashes was so close and strong that Volzhanin, who was driving, went blind for a moment. This moment almost became fatal for friends. The car lost control, left the highway and hit the right rear door on a thick century-old pine tree …
Together with two comrades who work with him in the same design bureau, Alexey Ivanovich Volzhanin went on a traditional fishing trip. On Friday they loaded into an old Muscovite and hit the road. The road from St. Petersburg to the Karelian Isthmus takes only a few hours. And there is a real paradise for a fisherman. They were already approaching the coveted place when a thunderstorm broke out …"
That's when the accident happened.
True, Aleksey Ivanovich himself (an experienced, by the way, driver, with a great accident-free experience) later claimed that he left the road not because of lightning, but because a silhouette of some monster appeared in front of the hood of the car - a furry monster with burning eyes … (But since none of the friends saw the unknown creature anymore, we will forget about its existence. As they say, due to "lack of material evidence".)
Volzhanin and Sigalev, sitting in the front seats, escaped with a slight fright. Worse was the design engineer Semyon Yakovlevich Elbman. He was injured - fragments of the side glass cut his skin on his forehead. In addition, apparently, he also received a concussion, because when his friends pulled him out of the car, he could not resist on his limp legs.
What were the unlucky travelers to do? The nearest station is several tens of kilometers away. With a wounded comrade, it is not easy to defeat them. And here, as luck would have it, not a single car on the highway. It is good that Sigalev noticed a light nearby - it was the window of a small house glowing.
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Leaving the car, the friends grabbed Elbman's armpits and led him to a hut, which rose on stilts over a small stream.
"Hut, hut, stand in front of me, back to the forest, I joked even then," recalls Volzhanin. - Climbed the slippery steps of the high porch. An old woman opened the door at a knock. And again I got the feeling that we were in a fairy tale - well, sheer Baba Yaga …"
Without asking about anything, without saying anything, she stepped back, letting the men into the house.
“It is now, in hindsight, I understand that everything in this story is a heap of absurdities,” Volzhanin admits. - Where did the house come from where we have never seen it, although we know those places "inside and out"? But at that moment we were as bewitched - we were not surprised at anything. A hut on chicken legs? Very handy! A candle on a table in an antique candlestick? So the electricity was cut off from the thunderstorm! A strange hostess who didn't say a word during the whole meeting? Maybe she's dumb!.."
The woman fed them with hot soup, washed Elbman's wound with some kind of decoction, and made a compress on his forehead. Exhausted, they lay down on the blankets laid on the floor and fell fast asleep. And in the morning we woke up in the open air!
“It was like an obsession,” their friends say. - The hospitable home has disappeared. Instead, there were half-collapsed walls made of granite boulders. We carefully examined these ruins with empty openings instead of doors and windows - no signs of life … It was an old mill that remained in these places since the Finnish war. There are many such ruins in those places, and there is nothing surprising in them.
But where did the house where we spent the night disappeared? Have not taken us sleepy to a new place? And there are no houses there. Later we checked - no housing in the vicinity. And one more oddity: in the morning it turned out that only a thin brown stripe remained from the wound on Semyon Yakovlevich's forehead, and even that soon turned pale and disappeared."
This story took place near St. Petersburg near the Sosnovo station. Fishing friends say this is all true. At the same time, they refer to the employees of the local traffic police, who helped them to tow the car and said that something similar happened to some other person in 1982, who got into a night accident in the same place. He claimed that, while awaiting help, he spent the night with some witch at the mill …
“What could it be? A. Volzhanin asks. - Maybe we have been in the past, before the war, when people still lived in these places? Or have you visited Baba Yaga in a fairy tale? Or is it all just a dream to us?"
In general, this story echoes with other incredible cases. You can compare yourself.
In the book "Spirits and Legends of the Wiltshire Land" the following fact is stated. In 1973, a certain Edna Hadges rode a bicycle along Ermine Street (old Roman road), which runs in the vicinity of Swindon (England). Thunderstorm began. Edna got off her bike and, noticing a small house by the side of the road, decided to wait out the bad weather there. A stern old man lived in the house, who let the girl sit out the rain, but did not utter a single word.
Then Edna found herself cycling down the road again. How and under what circumstances she left the house, she could not remember, no matter how hard she tried. And the house, as it turned out later, never happened in those places …
Among other things, the friends who were waiting for Edna noticed that her clothes were completely dry, although they themselves were soaked through in the rain while waiting for the girl.
It is tempting, of course, to combine all these stories, to assume that from time to time in our space doors open to "fairy worlds". But … According to psychologists, the solution to this phenomenon lies in something completely different: houses-mirages do not arise in reality, but only in our mental perception as a result of hypnotic trance.
A person can fall into this state even without the participation of a hypnotist, but spontaneously - under the influence of a monotonous road, or from the uniform noise of rain, or from a sudden flash of lightning … Remember that in the case of A. Volzhanin, and in the story that happened to Edna Hedges, there was both, and the third.
Experiments show that the sensations of a person during a trance in their brightness and naturalness practically do not differ from real impressions. The deceived senses, driven by the fantasies of the brain, give out such detailed pictures that they are then almost impossible to distinguish from real memories.
Doctor of medical spider V. Faivishevsky, analyzing such cases, draws attention to the fact that when people exit the trance state, vegetative disorders are often observed - dizzy, coordination of movements is slightly disturbed, a person often does not remember the transition from a hypnotic state to a real one.
All these signs, we recall, are present in the stories of the same Volzhanin and Edna Hedgis, which indirectly confirms: they did not experience their adventures in reality, but in a state of altered consciousness.
However, this version, although it looks quite convincing and authoritative, is just a "armchair hypothesis", that is, it was put forward without studying the details of each specific incident on the spot. In addition, it is embarrassing that in the case of Volzhanin, the senses of all the participants in the adventure were deceived by fantasies that coincided even in details.
And therefore, there remains at least a tiny, but a chance that the events described could take place in reality. After all, some scientists believe that "parallel worlds can exist" and the passages in them open during powerful energy emissions.
So lightning may well serve as a "key" to the doors to such a world. Indeed, it would seem that such a familiar phenomenon as a thunderstorm is actually still little studied and often presents surprises. And it is quite possible that some fairy tales known to us from childhood are in fact real memories of eyewitnesses who have been in a parallel space.
Nobody on earth knows the real answer yet.