On July 14, 1911, a small train consisting of three carriages departed from the Roma railway station. He was taking the public to explore the kilometer-long tunnel in the mountains of Lombardy, a unique building by the standards of the early 20th century, organized by Sanetti for representatives of wealthy and noble Italian families. 106 passengers watched with interest the sights surrounding the new section of the road. A few hours later the train was already in Lombardy. The same tunnel appeared ahead. The composition entered it. But on the other hand, it never appeared…
Police and railroad workers carefully examined the tunnel, but found no signs of a crash, not even traces of soot from steam locomotive smoke on the stone vaults.
But two passengers from the disappeared train were found in a state of shock. Only after a while they came to their senses and were able to tell what happened.
According to them, the area around the train was suddenly covered with a milky white fog. As it approached the tunnel, it thickened and turned into a viscous liquid. The passengers were seized by a wild fear, and they jumped out on the move - fortunately, they were in the vestibule of the car. The rest of the passengers clearly did not have time to follow their example.
The victims suffered for a long time from mental disorders caused by severe stress, but gradually returned to normal. The train never appeared anywhere …
Frightened by the precedent, the Italian railway services chose to close the tunnel to traffic and even blocked the entrances with stones. And during the war the arches of the tunnel were dropped by an aerial bomb, burying this mystery forever …
An incredible story. However, even the most inveterate skeptics do not doubt its reliability, since everything that happened has documentary evidence, including the testimony of witnesses.
And in the storerooms of the railway museum in Milan, there is still a model that resembles a children's railway: a clockwork locomotive with three carriages, rails, and a miniature tunnel.
At one time, using this toy, engineers tried to simulate the circumstances under which the composition disappeared. However, they failed to find out anything concrete …
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It would seem that the disappearance of an entire train and more than a hundred rich and influential Italians without a trace could not but cause a strong public outcry. However, contrary to expectations, the story was not widely disseminated.
Local newspapers published a couple of vague articles. The world press devoted a couple more lines to the incident. And that's all. The police hastily handed over the case to the archive and did not remember it again. But why?
Some thoughts, experiences or memories can traumatize the human psyche so badly that they are pushed out by the protective mechanisms of consciousness into the subconscious. We can say that a "blind spot" is formed in the consciousness in this place.
It seems that the story with the missing train became such a "spot". The shock from what had happened was too great. Here is the tunnel. Here is the train. Dozens of witnesses saw the train enter the tunnel, but did not appear at the exit. It is not inside the tunnel … A blind spot of consciousness …
MOVING IN THE BUNKS
This case was forgotten for a long time - for 80 years. And, perhaps, they would never have remembered it again, if not for a coincidence …
In the issue of the newspaper "Glory of Sevastopol" dated August 12, 1992, an article was published "A ghost train on the roads of Ukraine." It dealt with a mysterious train that from time to time, as if out of nowhere, appeared at a railway crossing near the village of Zavalichi, Poltava region.
"A three-car ghost appeared at the crossing of the duty officer Elena Spiri-donovna Chebrets … The train with tightly closed curtains, open doors and an empty driver's cab moved absolutely silently, crushing chickens walking on the canvas."
The study of this phenomenon was carried out by the chairman of the commission for the study of anomalous phenomena at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Vasily Leshchaty. It was he who put forward the version that the ghost train is a train that disappeared in 1911 in Italy and "somehow passed through time."
Working with documents, Bream discovered an interesting fact.
In the 1840s, 104 Italians appeared in Mexico City. Within a week, they all ended up in a psychiatric hospital, as they claimed to have arrived in Mexico City from Rome by train.
This case was described by the famous Mexican psychiatrist of the time, Jose Saxino.
On September 25, 1991, “Breamy waited for the next train to appear at the crossing near the village of Zavalichi and, in front of several witnesses, managed to jump onto the platform of the last carriage. No one saw him again. No other willing to investigate this phenomenon has yet been found”…
EXPLOSION FROM THE PAST
Writer Nikolai Cherkashin is known to the Russian reader as the author of books about the sea and sailors. The choice of the topic can be explained: Captain First Rank Cherkashin is a submariner who served in the Northern Fleet.
Having retired, he graduated with honors from the Faculty of Philosophy, and then graduate school at Moscow State University.
For his books Cherkashin was awarded prizes of the Lenin Komsomol and the USSR Ministry of Defense …
In 1988, the writer worked in Sevastopol - collecting information about the sinking of the battleship Novorossiysk. This is one of the worst disasters in the history of the Russian navy, killing more than 600 people.
On the night of October 29, 1955, the battleship Novorossiysk, the former Italian ship Julius Caesar, which the Soviet Union inherited in 1949 as a war trophy, exploded in the Northern Bay of Sevastopol. What caused the explosion is still unknown.
The battleship capsized and sank in front of thousands of townspeople. Cherkashin asked everyone who was somehow involved in this disaster - the surviving sailors, and those who rescued them, and those who watched the tragedy from the shore.
Among hundreds of entries in Cherkashin's notebooks, the story of Pyotr Ustimenko is preserved.
On that October night in 1955, Ustimenko was on duty at a railway crossing in the Baraklava area. And suddenly I saw a train. "Both the locomotive and the entire train are not from ours, like pre-war ones, or maybe even earlier."
The train appeared from the direction of Gasfort Mountain, passed along the old embankment, from which the rails had long been removed, and disappeared in the direction of Sevastopol. “How did he walk without rails? I even ran out onto the old canvas - no traces, no grass-bumps crumpled. Some devilry. Even then I thought: not good, to be in trouble. And sure enough, in the morning the whole Balaklava began to rustle - "Novorossiysk" exploded "…
Cherkashin remembered this case four years later, when he came across the same issue of the newspaper "Glory of Sevastopol" with a note about a ghost train.
Cherkashin suggested: was it not this train that Ustimenko had seen at the Balaklava crossing? Much similar: a foreign-made steam locomotive, three carriages …
If a ghost train was discovered in 1991 near Poltava, why couldn't it have appeared in 1955 near Balaklava?
WALK IN THE OLD CEMETERY
But what did the Italian ghost train need in Ukraine? Nikolai Cherkashin expressed an unexpected version about this.
Together with the local historian Yevgeny Venikeev, the writer visited the Gasfort Mountain. Here in 1855 were buried Italian soldiers who died during the storming of Sevastopol in the Crimean War. A hundred years later, by order of the Soviet authorities, the cemetery was razed to the ground, and the beautiful chapel was blown up.
“Whoever shoots at the past with a gun will shoot the future out of the gun,” says Cherkashin. - And the stick of dynamite, laid under the old chapel, turned into a monstrous explosion under the bottom of "Novorossiysk". I am completely convinced of the karmic connection between these two events”…
They wandered along the flat summit of Gasforta between the fragments of marble slabs. On the site of the former flower beds, prickly pear cacti grew, which many years ago were brought from Italy to this remote corner of Crimea by the relatives of the dead soldiers.
Venikeev said: “Here, to the Italian camp on Gasfort, the British built a railway from Balaklava. Then they took it off. But the embankment remained. The branch from Balaklava to Sevastopol runs along the route outlined by the British”.
So, the ghost train was following the tracks of the removed sleepers … But why?
“Take the souls of Italian soldiers, disturbed by the explosion of their last refuge? Or did some of the 106 passengers have relatives buried here, and they came to pay them their last debt? Or maybe they, these lost passengers, avenged the desecrated cemetery from their temporary captivity, intervened in the earthly causal relationship, and "Julius Caesar" - "Novorossiysk" flew into the air? " - suggested Cherka-shin …
GONE BY TIME More
than once a mysterious object resembling a train, which in 1911 disappeared in a tunnel in the mountains of Lombardy, appeared in other countries. We saw him in Russia too. The last appearance of the phantom was noted in 1986 in a tunnel under the English Channel.
It is interesting that all eyewitnesses describe it in almost the same way: an old steam locomotive, an empty driver's cabin, three carriages, all windows are tightly closed with curtains, and the doors are open in some places …
Apparently, the ghost composition moves not only in space, but also in time, since in some cases it was seen much earlier than it disappeared. Take, for example, the appearance of 104 "crazy" Italians in Mexico City in the 1840s …
How does this happen?
The assumption that, along with the law of conservation of matter and energy, there is also a law of conservation of time, was made by Albert Einstein. However, no one has managed to prove it - with formulas and equations - until now. But there are interesting versions about this.
One of them, for example, was put forward by Nikolai Cherkashin and Associate Professor of Moscow State University, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Ivan Patsey. In simplified form, the version looks like this.
Time does not flow in a straight line. It is "wound" in turns, like a cable on a coil, so that the past exists parallel to the future. But sometimes “breakdowns” occur between the “turns”, as in electrical engineering - interturn short circuits. And then “black holes” appear in the geochronal field of the Earth.
They, like funnels of tornadoes, wander, move according to their own laws, draw in people, objects, animals.
Powerful emissions of energy - earthquakes, impacts of large meteorites, nuclear explosions …
According to Cherkashin and Pacey, it is with the help of "wandering black holes" that the appearance of snowmen and Loch Ness monsters can be explained. They were sucked in by the "tornado of time" in their prehistoric eras and thrown out today.
The appearance of a UFO also fits into this version. UFO Navts are our distant descendants. Their quite man-made devices come to us through "black holes", intentionally or accidentally, caught by the same "temporary tornado."
Perhaps our contemporaries also fall into the "holes". They do not always perish in other people's ages, but, having adapted to the life there, become geniuses and fortune-tellers. Aren't da Vinci and Nostradamus among them?..
IN THE STEEL WEB
But - back to the ghost train. Cherkashin and Patsey were convinced that any significant transformation of space entails temporary anomalies. Simply put, super-long tunnels, super-deep mines, super-tall towers change the movement of time - just as dams and canals change the course of rivers.
Railways are the largest building in the history of human civilization. A gigantic metal net, densely and whimsically entwining the globe, affects the natural geophysical field of the Earth, and hence its chronal processes, that is, the passage of time …
Now let's remember that three years before the disappearance of the train in Italy, there was a powerful earthquake with the epicenter in Messina. Monstrous cracks and gaps appeared not only in the earth's crust, but also in the chronal field.
It can be assumed that the "wandering black hole" was concentrated over a giant mountain tunnel, and it was through it that the train "fell out" of the usual vector time. He began to move freely from the present to the past, from the past to the future …
However, here, the researchers say, you need to take into account the following moment: rails, arrows, crossings are tied to some specific place. This means that the movement of a ghost train is determined by rigid spatial coordinates - in other words, a rail track. That is, it can only appear where the rails once lay, or where they will be laid in the future.
So, near Balaklava, the ghost train was on the 1855 track, laid by the British troops.
And he could arrive in Mexico via the railway, which, apparently, will nevertheless be built in the 21st century, connecting Asia and America with a great rail route through Chukotka and Alaska.
Such a project was considered at the beginning of the century. It has not lost its relevance today.
So, following the Chukotka-Alaska mainline, the train could emerge on suburban tracks near Mexico City, and the passengers, for whatever reason, could leave it.
According to their subjective feelings, this happened immediately after the train left the tunnel.
Thus, the passengers ended up in a mental hospital. And the composition rushed away. And now it rushes across continents and eras, frightening those on duty at railway crossings and bystanders …
THE STAPPED SKULL
And another curious legend is connected with the Italian phantom. Allegedly, a rosewood case travels in one of the carriages of the ghost train. And inside it, on a black morocco upholstery, rests Gogol's skull …
What is the truth in this legend, two researchers tried to find out at once. From the Russian side - the same Nikolai Cherkashin, from the Italian - journalist Carlo Vizintini. And this is what happened …
In 1931, in Moscow, the remains of famous Russians were transferred from the necropolis of St. Danilov Monastery to the Novodevichy Cemetery. At the same time, it was discovered that Gogol's skull had been stolen from the coffin.
The writer Vladimir Lydia, who was then at the cemetery, said: “The skull was not in the tomb. The skeleton was enclosed in a well-preserved tobacco-colored frock coat, from which the cervical vertebrae protruded. Under the frock coat there is linen with bone buttons. On the feet are shoes, which are also completely preserved. Only the dratva that connects the sole to the upper is rotten on the toes, and the skin is wrapped upward, exposing the bones of the foot”…
But who and why needed Gogol's skull?
According to rumors, he was stolen back in 1909 by order of the merchant Alexei Bakhrushin, a fanatic of the Russian theater. He allegedly incited two watchmen of the monastery necropolis to this blasphemous deed.
Gogol's skull was given proper honors: it was adorned with a laurel crown of silver and placed in a glazed rosewood case lined with black morocco on the inside …
TWO CARTRIDGES
Rumors of an incredible bakhrushinsky relic crept across Moscow and reached the ears of the imperial grandchild, the nephew of the Russian naval lieutenant … This naval officer, a very exalted man, came to Bakhrushin and, putting his revolver on the table, said: “There are two cartridges here. One in the trunk. the other is in the drum. The one in the barrel is for you if you refuse to give me the skull of Nikolai Vasilyevich. The one in the drum is for me …
Bakhrushin was not a timid man. But nevertheless, he considered it for the good to part with a dangerous relic.
Lieutenant Yanovsky took the rosewood chest to Sevastopol, to the ship where he served …
In 1910, the Italians invited Russian sailors to the anniversary of the events of the Messes. In 1908, during an earthquake, our compatriots rescued the inhabitants of Messina from the rubble of collapsed houses, provided medical assistance.
Lieutenant Yanovsky hoped to visit the Russian embassy and betray Gogol's skull to the land of Italy, which he loved, considering Rome his second homeland. However, for a number of reasons, the campaign to Italy did not take place..
THE JOKE WAS NOT SUCCESSFUL
And soon Italian destroyers came to Sevastopol to pick up the ashes of Sardinian generals who died during the siege of the city in 1854-1855 and were buried on Mount Gasfort.
Lieutenant Yanovsky handed the commander of one of the destroyers, Captain Borghese, a rosewood chest and asked to give it to the Russian consul.
He promised to do it at the first opportunity. But due to circumstances, he could not keep his promise. This is what he informed Yanovsky in a letter.
Incredibly, journalist Carlo Vizintini managed to locate this letter.
The Italian sailor apologized and explained why he had not complied with Yanovsky's request. The letter contained a strange phrase: "A person's destiny does not end with his life" …
In the spring of 1911, Captain Borghese went to sea for a long time. And his younger brother, a student at the University of Rome, went with a group of friends on a pleasure train trip - on the same train that departed on July 14, 1911 from the station in Rome.
It seemed boring to the young man to admire the beauty outside the window, and he decided to arrange a surprise: take with him a rosewood case from his brother's office, wait for the right moment and demonstrate its contents.
Borghese Jr. was already anticipating the impression the yellowed, grinning skull would make in the dark compartment. Squeals, horror … However, the plan was not destined to come true.
Before entering the tunnel, panic seized the passengers for some unknown reason. Borghese Jr. managed to jump off the footboard. It was he who later told about the strange white cloud that swallowed up the ill-fated train, and about the unaccountable horror that announced the tourists, and about the rosewood case …
So, Gogol's skull wanders around the world in a ghost train. Perhaps this is another version explaining the appearance of the composition in the Poltava region. After all, it was in the Poltava province, in the village of Bolshiye Sorochytsy, that Gogol was born and spent his childhood …
"Secret materials of the 20th century" No. 22 2008.