The first district prison in Balakhna was built in 1867, although, as they say, there was also a prison here earlier. But over the years, crime grew, and more cells were needed to isolate villains and those who disagreed with the ruling regime. And in 1898 a new prison castle was erected in Balakhna, and with it - the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Joy of All Who Sorrow.
The temple is long gone, but the former prison has survived. It stands to itself, as if nothing had happened. True, she has long since changed her orientation. The last prisoner left it soon after the death of his father of all times and peoples, and the building on Ryazanov Street was occupied by archivists. First, the documents of the border troops of the USSR were kept here, and then - the documentation of all the northern regions of the Gorky region.
In 1966, when the premises were being handed over from one department to another, together with two two-story buildings, a carpentry workshop, a garage, a warehouse, a stoker and a smithy, all the property inherited from tsarist times was at the disposal of the branch of the state archive of the Gorky region. As, incidentally, and cadres listed as serving in a military unit. Among them was Taisiya Ivanovna Shpak (the surname was changed at her request).
The smell of the prison does not disappear even after the major renovation of the building, even after a thorough reconstruction. Nothing can bring him out, like the cobwebs in the corners. Pain and suffering remember dead stones, any objects that were nearby. And Taisiya Ivanovna was convinced of this almost immediately, as soon as she came to work in the archive.
“It was very hard at first,” she recalls. - Some squeaks, tapping, rustles … There were groans, sobs, groans, even someone's distant cry. And then I saw him. No eyes, no hair. Some time later, I found out that it was Mishka German.
Bear German
The ghost began to appear more and more often. When we met, he kept silent with hostility, looked dull and tired, and Taisiya Ivanovna ceased to be afraid of him and even regretted a little. We are all mortal, she thought, and ghosts live for centuries, even millennia. You can go crazy from such longevity."
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She suddenly wanted to learn as much as possible about Mishka Germanets. Who is he anyway? Why did he, and not other deserved prisoners of the tsarist time, become a ghost?
The documents were, as they say, at hand. And here's what we found out. Criminal Mishka Germanets, who was born in 1857 (he was actually called Mikhail Gershhorn, and he appeared in the Nizhny Novgorod police files as "Herman"), was a recruited agent. With four convictions and twenty years behind him, he enjoyed authority among criminals, but reported to the police about all the alleged actions of the criminal community.
But, receiving a reward for denunciation, he did not forget about himself, he continued to steal. Taking advantage of the fact that they stopped monitoring him, he entered the house of one of the richest people in Nizhny Novgorod - Nikolai Bugrov. Opening his chest, he stole a large amount of money and jewelry.
He, of course, was figured out, and Mishka Germanets, redeeming his guilt, helped to capture the serial killer Zhidelev, and then the big swindler Funin. With his help, the police got on the trail of the kidnapper of two church bells, the peasant Ryadkov …
The thieves' world was lost in conjectures, calculating the traitor. Mishka Germanets got a hole in September 1905 when he personally took part in the arrest of a gang of robbers at the Pokhvalinsky Congress. And he was declared a real war.
The German understood well that this would not end well, and he was hiding somewhere for a very long time. As many as 12 years. He went to jail after the Bolsheviks came to power. For what - it is unclear. In 1919, Germanets and another former police informant, Poimenov, filed a petition to change the preventive measure and speedy consideration of the case, but nothing is known about what happened next. Apparently, German was killed in prison. Only in which, it is not clear.
Nizhny Novgorod prison
Mishka Germanets was also noted in the Nizhny Novgorod prison. Both himself and his ghost. And this is already, as they say, into any gate.
But here again an excursion into history is needed. The first prison appeared in Nizhny in the year the city was founded, in 1221. Only six centuries later (!), In 1823, under the leadership of the famous architect Betancourt, the construction of a stone prison on Ovrazhnaya Street was completed - now it is Freedom Square. And the prisoners, like the prison governors, were very pleased: the conditions of detention and work here were much better than before. The prison resembled a medieval fortress.
The square courtyard was outlined by a high stone fence, inside which stood a two-story prison building with a round tower at each corner. Inside the buildings there were cells for men, women and minors (this division did not happen immediately), as well as a prison infirmary and a hospital. In the center there was a prisoner church, and in its basement there were single casemates for especially dangerous "murderers". However, there were the same loners in every corner tower.
When Mishka Germanets was here, it is no longer possible to establish. In 1914, when the First World War began, all the inhabitants of the prison were hastily relocated to the new prison building on the Arzamas highway. Consequently, the double agent visited here until 1914. However, is it really so important? More important, perhaps, is that his ghost appeared here in the 50s of the last century.
Here is the testimony of Valentina O -skaya, an employee of the Gorky Pharmacy Administration (after the workshop of the Nizhny Novgorod rifle division in 1929, the complex of structures of the Nizhny Novgorod prison was transferred to the pharmacy administration):
“All the time it seemed to me that someone was watching me. Maybe because there are still the outlines of tops in the doorway, through which the warders watched the prisoners. But this was not an overseer, but a real ghost. He was watching me. This, as my colleagues later explained to me (they also saw him), was a certain Mishka Germanets, a thief and a major swindler."
But how could the ghost of Mishka Germanets split into two, appearing now in Nizhny Novgorod, now in Balakhna? This is, as they say, a filling question.
Reference. Prison ghosts
* The former military prison of Liepaja port in Latvia was built in 1900. Sailors and officers of the tsarist army were imprisoned here, then deserters of the German Wehrmacht and enemies of the Stalinist regime. The so-called White Lady is often seen in this prison. According to legend, in 1944, during a document check, German soldiers detained and put in one of the cells of the prison a young man who was suspected of desertion. His fiancé found out about this and somehow got into the prison, but it turned out that the guy had already been shot. From grief, the girl laid hands on herself right here. “To this day, she is in white clothes, with a red braid up to the waist, wandering around the prison casemates,” says the head of the Liepaja regional tourist information office, Monte Krafte.
* One of the most haunted prisons in England is the former prison in the center of Derby. From here, from 1756 to 1828, inveterate criminals were taken to the backyard, where they were hanged and even quartered on a special machine, which is now in the prison passage. In the back of the room, there is also a gallows, on which those sentenced to death breathed their last. There are many documented reports of ghosts in Derby Prison, strange noises, and strange smells and sensations.
* In the spring of 1992, the newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda reported that the leadership of the Matrosskaya Tishina prison turned to the Museum of Anomalous Phenomena for help. The note went on to say: “As it became known from informed sources, the reason for this unexpected cooperation was complaints from prisoners who said that at night they could clearly hear someone's voices, and some even saw some obscure figures.
* Ghosts of former prisoners have been spotted in US prisons. So, from 1829 to 1971, 75 thousand prisoners, including the famous Al Capone, were in the now abandoned prison in Pennsylvania. Now the chambers are empty, but when you enter them, eyewitnesses say, there is a feeling that someone is there. Paranormal researcher Laura Hladik believes the prison is overrun with ghosts. And the locksmith Gary Johnson working here even saw one of them and felt his icy breath.
* Ghosts were also observed in the building of the former prison in Varnavino, where the bone-cutting factory is now located, in the buildings of the former county prisons of Semyonov and Lukoyanov.
Talking to a ghost
“In the end, I realized that the prison, even the former one, is unbearable for the perception of a normal person,” says Taisia Ivanovna. - Such rooms where negative energy is concentrated are a kind of clock with a reverse motion. The person who is here, as it were, is mixed into the past and experiences what the prisoners experienced. And it turned out that I - the same prisoner, only came here voluntarily.
Earlier, even before I met Taisia Ivanovna, I had the opportunity to visit the branch of the regional archive on Ryazanov Street. Yes, indeed, the atmosphere here is very heavy. Psychotherapists claim that it can contribute to the onset and progression of mental illness, and I believe them. True, I have not seen the ghost of Mishka Germanets, to be honest. But, probably, I was there too shortly.
A comment
“The concept of“ghost”generalizes a whole class of phenomena that seem to have different origins,” says Evgeny Vysheslavtsev, Doctor of Physics and Mathematics. - Among other things, evidence of strange sounds and the phenomenon of poltergeist are associated with ghosts. Multiple ghost appearances have been described for the same person, but the appearance of the same ghost in different places is something new. This does not meet any of the "rules of conduct" for ghosts.
These "rules" are as follows: ghosts appear on the eve of certain events, in order to inform the living about the coming misfortune, calm the mourners, warn of danger. However, the ghost of Mishka Germanets does not follow these rules. Maybe because he is the ghost of a criminal for whom ordinary morality and logic simply have no power?
And here we see that this ghost is subordinated to some completely unclear goal, and if he nevertheless fulfills it, no one will be good. Therefore, the version that such ghosts are sent to us from some other world, in general, is quite difficult to refute.
Sergey Stepanov